Egyptian doctor to stand trial for female genital mutilation in landmark case

A doctor is to stand trial in Egypt on charges of female genital mutilation on Thursday, the first case of its kind in a country where FGM is illegal but widely accepted.

Activists warned this week that the landmark case was just one small step towards eradicating the practice, as villagers openly promised to uphold the tradition and a local police chief said it was near-impossible to stamp out.

Raslan Fadl, a doctor in a Nile delta village, is accused of killing 13-year-old schoolgirl Sohair al-Bata’a in a botched FGM operation last June. Sohair’s father, Mohamed al-Bata’a, will also be charged with complicity in her death.

Fadl denies the charges, and claims Sohair died due to an allergic reaction to penicillin she took during a procedure to remove genital warts.

“What circumcision? There was no circumcision,” Fadl shouted on Tuesday evening, sitting outside his home where Sohair died last summer. “It’s all made up by these dogs’ rights people [human rights activists].”

In the next village along, Sohair’s parents had gone into hiding, according to their family. Her grandmother – after whom Sohair was named – admitted an FGM operation had taken place, but disapproved of the court case.

“This is her destiny,” said the elder Sohair. “What can we do? It’s what God ordered. Nothing will help now.”

According to Unicef, 91% of married Egyptian women aged between 15 and 49 have been subjected to FGM, 72% of them by doctors, even though the practice was made illegal in 2008. Unicef’s research suggests that support for the practice is gradually falling: 63% of women in the same age bracket supported it in 2008, compared with 82% in 1995.

But in rural areas where there is a low standard of education – like Sohair’s village of Diyarb Bektaris – FGM still attracts instinctive support from the local population, who believe it decreases women’s appetite for adultery.

Sister Joanna, head of the Coptic Centre for Training and Development, an NGO based in Beni Sueif, a town 130km south of Cairo, participates in a lecture on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) attended by Christian and Muslim women in a nearby village. (Pic: AFP)

‘The law won’t stop anything’
“We circumcise all our children – they say it’s good for our girls,” Naga Shawky, a 40-year-old housewife, told the Guardian as she walked along streets near Sohair’s home. “The law won’t stop anything – the villagers will carry on. Our grandfathers did it and so shall we.”

Nearby, Mostafa, a 65-year-old farmer, did not realise that genital mutilation had been banned. “All the girls get circumcised. Is that not what’s supposed to happen?” said Mostafa. “Our two daughters are circumcised. They’re married and when they have daughters we will have them circumcised as well.”

Local support for Fadl, who is also a sheikh [elder] in his village mosque, remains high. “Most people will tell you he is a very good man: don’t harm him,” said Reda el-Danbouki, the founder of the Women’s Centre for Guidance and Legal Awareness, a local rights group that was the first to take up Sohair’s case. “If you asked people about who is the best person to do this operation, they would still say: Dr Raslan [Fadl].”

Most villagers said they thought the practice was prescribed by Islamic law. But female genital mutilation is not mentioned in the Qur’an and has been outlawed by Egypt’s grand mufti, one of the country’s most senior Islamic clerics. It is also practised in Egypt’s Christian communities – leading activists to stress that it is a social problem rather than a religious one.

“It’s not an Islamic issue – it’s cultural,” said Suad Abu-Dayyeh, regional representative for Equality Now, a rights group that lobbied Egypt to follow through with Fadl’s prosecution. “In Sudan and Egypt the practice is widespread. But in most of the other Arab countries – which are mostly Muslim countries – people don’t think of it as a Muslim issue. In fact, there has been a fatwa that bans FGM.”

Doctors
Campaigners hope Sohair’s case would discourage other doctors from continuing the practice. But villagers in Diyarb Bektaris said they could still easily find doctors willing to do it in the nearby town of Agga, where practitioners could earn up to 200 Egyptian pounds (roughly £16.70) an operation. “If you want to ban it properly,” said Mostafa, the farmer, “you’d have to ban doctors as well.”

Up the road in Agga, no doctor would publicly admit to carrying out FGM operations, and said the law acted as a deterrent. But one claimed FGM could be morally justified even if it caused girls physical or psychological discomfort.

“It gives the girl more dignity to remove [her clitoris],” said Dr Ahmed al-Mashady, who stressed that he had never carried out the operation but claimed it was necessary to cleanse women of a dirty body part.

“If your nails are dirty,” he said in comparison, “don’t you cut them?”

A few hundred metres away, sitting in his heavily fortified barracks, the local police chief agreed the practice needed to end. But Colonel Ahmed el-Dahaby claimed police could not work proactively on the issue because FGM happened in secret. He also said they were held back by the nuances of the Egyptian legal system – something that would surprise those who argue police officers have readily contravened due process in other more politicised cases.

“It’s very hard to arrest a doctor,” said Dahaby. “Why? You don’t know when exactly he is going to do this operation. In order to arrest him legally you have to have the papers from the prosecutor, and only then can you go. But you don’t know when the operations will take place, so you have to catch them in the act or it has to be reported by the father. And that’s difficult because the father will deny what happened.”

Sohair’s case
In Sohair’s case, her family did initially testify that she died after an FGM operation but then changed their testimony a few days later, leading the case to be closed. It was only reopened following a triple-pronged pressure campaign led by Reda el-Danbouki, Equality Now and Egypt’s state-run National Population Council.

Thursday’s hearing will likely be short and procedural. In subsequent sessions, Sohair’s family is expected to waive the manslaughter charges against Fadl, after Dahaby said the two sides reached a substantial out-of-court compensation agreement.

But the family has no say over the FGM charges levelled at both Fadl and Sohair’s father – and the state will continue to seek a conviction against them both. But whether such a result will serve as a major deterrent against FGM remains to be seen.

For Equality Now’s Suad Abu-Dayyeh, the answer is a systematic educational programme that would see campaigners frequently visit Egypt’s countryside to start a conversation about a topic that has previously never been questioned. “You need to go continuously into the communities. We need to find a way of really debating these issues with the villagers, the doctors and the midwives.”

And for the victims themselves, says Abu-Dayyeh, this process cannot start soon enough. “They should enjoy their sexual relations with their future husbands. They are human beings.”

Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian

10 years ago

Race and racism in the Republic of Cape Town

(Pic: Gallo)

Cape Town is so conservative. It’s not surprising then that the rest of the country calls it “The Republic” – a country not quite a part of the so-called new South Africa. You don’t have to look far to see whom Cape Town caters for. Just take a short drive from Vredehoek to Khayelitsha, as a start. If you’re not the driving type, take one of those cute red tour buses, plug in those nifty little earphones and learn the unpalatable history of this city, said with such timid self-awareness so as not to give away what nearly every Capetonian knows – that Cape Town is still divided along racial lines.

Anyone who lives in the city centre will vehemently deny this although it’s evidently clear, from the racial makeup of boardrooms and suburbs to those who are left to enjoy the city after 5pm. It is an awkward contradiction for a city that desperately wants to be seen as a progressive “World Design Capital”. Unless by design it means the invisible lines that run across the city, dividing it into specific racial areas: the whites in affluent suburbs and the CBD, the blacks and the coloureds in the townships; a spatial arrangement akin to that of a chest drawer with distinct shelves and compartments that contain each puzzle piece of Cape Town in its place – except for the bergies and buskers who seem intolerable nuisances. (Remember the assault of a blind busker by police last year?)

The other not-so-famous incidents include a “private function” policy at certain bars, such as Asoka, where black people have the unfortunate position of being turned away at the door once the colour quota has been reached. There was also that interesting piece of journalism by the Cape Argus, last year, which uncovered what was evidently a stated preference for white tenants by property owners in suburbs around the City Bowl. The city has vehemently refuted claims that it’s racist. Here, I must concede that Cape Town isn’t racist – at least not in the classical sense of what we see in documentaries and exhibitions about apartheid. There are no “Whites Only” signs around the city. It must be an unfortunate coincidence then that there are hardly any black people who live in the affluent parts of Cape Town. It must also be an unfortunate coincidence that novelist Teju Cole, in his interview with City Press about the Open Book Fair, stated: “[Cape Town] is a divided society where privilege accrues very much to people who are white and who have money.”

A woman carrying a child walks down an alleyway in Blikkiesdorp (“Tin Can Town” in Afrikaans), a settlement of corrugated iron houses about 25km east of Cape Town. (Pic: AFP)

When I went to the Open Book Fair in Cape Town last September, I nearly tripped over myself when I realised how homogenous the audience was – a pale sea of whiteness jostling around brilliant black writers. I distinctly remember thinking: don’t these white folk find it strange that there are no black people at this event, except for a negligible number of tokens, myself included? Contrast that to the Jozi Book Fair or any art opening showcasing a black artist’s work. Johannesburg, as far as art is concerned, has a more diverse audience; a more informed audience than Cape Town, and a notably larger black middle class. Some attribute this to the economic status of the city but the alternative answers avail themselves easily when you speak to black professionals who are about to relocate to the City Of Gold. Often you’ll hear that there is little or no transformation within the organisations and companies situated in Cape Town. The bosses are white, the tea lady is black, Jabu answers to Chris. In a nutshell, Cape Town companies are run by white males.

As if this wasn’t enough, even the visual arts crowd is predominantly white despite the fact that “nearly two thirds of emerging visual artists under the age of 40, in South Africa, are black” according to Joost Bosland, one of the directors of the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town . The very people, I presume, these emerging black artists would love to have a conversation with through their work never get to see the work, at all. And the art industry seems perfectly fine with this. Typically, you’ll find a group of black artists doing work that concerns something about them being black but it’s shown in spaces and to people who aren’t quite engaged with the stories being told by the artists; people who appreciate the work from a distance. Some artists struggle with this. I chatted to Mohau Modisakeng, a visual artist, about how race plays out in the arts: “I look at art as a language, a language that functions like any other – using pictures and symbols. And my language is informed by my mother’s story and my father’s story, and how I grew up. I’d say my audience is people who share the similar circumstances in life, whether it’s social, political or economic. They are my ideal audience, but I can’t get to them because of these frameworks that are in place.”

These frameworks are a historical fact that persists to this day. A present reality that is burdened by our history of deliberate social exclusion, which makes for very specific demarcation of the various groups who are in or out, or comfortable or not comfortable in a space; a fact currently at play in this city, sans the apartheid signage. The white man who recently told my friend at the Harley’s Liquor store that he wished “he’d gotten rid of all of you when we had a chance” simply because he thought she was jumping the queue to pay for a bottle of red wasn’t racist – he was being conservative, by Cape Town standards. He just wanted her to know her historic place and to remain in it – and that place is nowhere near him and his lily-white Cape Town CBD.

L.L. Fikeni lives, writes and works in Cape Town.

10 years ago

FiSahara – The world’s most remote film festival

As the great and the good of the world’s film industry prepared to descend on Cannes last week, a very different film festival was coming to a climax deep in the Sahara desert. Far from the red-carpeted Mediterranean opulence of the Croisette, the Sahara International Film Festival – known as FiSahara – took place in a sun-baked refugee camp deep in the Algerian desert. What it may have lacked in glittering VIP premieres and champagne-fuelled yacht parties, FiSahara made up for in spades with dune parties, camel races and multiplex-sized screenings beneath the stars.

Now in its 11th year, the FiSahara film festival attracted over 300 international actors, screenwriters and cinephiles, alongside thousands of Saharawi refugees exiled from their native Western Sahara for nearly four decades. Festival guests flew by chartered plane to the remote desert outpost of Tindouf where they boarded a convoy of buses and 4x4s and drove the dusty 100m to Dakhla refugee camp, in an area known locally as the Devil’s Garden.

The Sahara International Film Festival. (Carlos Cazurro)

There they were met by refugee families, with whom they lived for five days, sleeping in their stucco-and-tented homes and sharing their simple couscous meals and copious glasses of sweet tea. With midday temperatures topping 100 degrees, most activities were scheduled for mornings and late afternoons with screenings taking place after dusk, in makeshift cinemas or projected onto a giant screen attached to the side of an articulated lorry.

Experience of Saharawi students
The festival programme included over 30 films from around the world including documentaries, animations, short films and blockbusters as well as several made by refugees themselves in the newly established refugee camp film school. While some films such as the Oscar-nominated Egyptian film The Square, reflected stories of hope and struggle, others were purely intended to entertain offering the refugees a glimpse of what lies beyond their desiccated desert horizons.

“The cartoon about the boy who plays table football was so funny,” said 12-year old Liman Mohamed referring to the Argentinian 3-D comedy-animation Foosball by Oscar-winning director Juan Jose Campanella, which had filled the desert night with laughter.

The documentary Raíces y Clamor (Roots and Noise), which premiered at the festival explores the heart-wrenching experience of the Saharawi students who move to Spain to get an education. Fati Khadad, a 27-year-old Masters student who appears in the film was at the festival and explained how she was “adopted” by a Spanish family aged 10.

“I am slowly coming to terms with life in exile” she tells me. “Some people say I am lucky to have escaped the refugee camp and got an education but the reality is that I have spent my life apart from the people I love. We all suffer whether in the camps, whether in the occupied territories or whether in exile.”

The festival’s first prize – an actual white camel – was awarded to Legna, an evocative documentary about the traditions of Saharawi poetry. Second prize went to Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, screened as part of this years’ festival tribute to Nelson Mandela. The third prize for the documentary Dirty Wars was collected by the film’s scriptwriter, David Riker who also led a screenwriting workshop for refugee filmmakers.

“I have taught similar workshops for many years in many parts of the world, but I have never had such an exceptional group of students,” Riker said. “I think the reason is simply this – that the Saharawis have an overwhelming need to tell their stories.”

Cultural activities
As well as films and workshops the festival also offered cultural activities, children’s activities led by a team of clowns and evening concerts by renowned world music star Mariem Hassan and legendary musician Jonas Mosa Gwangwa who flew in from South Africa with his nine-piece band.

Gwangwa, who wrote the Oscar-nominated score for Richard David Attenbough’s Cry Freedom, was just one of large South African delegation invited as part of the festival’s tribute to Nelson Mandela. “Culture can replace the gun. It can be much more powerful,” Gwanga told an audience at a roundtable discussion which also included 88-year-old iconic anti-apartheid fighter Andrew Mlangeni, imprisoned with Nelson Mandela for 26 years. Together with Gwangwa, Mlangeni drew parallels with the Saharawi struggle for self-determination and South Africa’s own liberation struggle and highlighted the importance of culture as a weapon in freedom struggle.

“The South African experience is very inspiring and holds many lessons for the Saharawi,” said Jadiya Hamdi, the Saharawi government in exile’s minister of culture. “Creating our own film culture is important in the nation-building process because culture can carry an audience far beyond any political speech.

“The atmosphere in the camp during the week of the film festival is fantastic,” 70-year-old Abaya Ambarak Asalak says despite not having seen any films herself. “Why should I sit on the sand at watch a film when my life has been like a film?” she asks. Abaya has lived in the refugee camp since 1976 after fleeing Western Sahara ahead of the advancing Moroccan troops. “One night a plane dropped bombs from the sky,” she says describing a napalm attack that killed her young son and daughter. “The scars on my body may have faded but the wounds in my heart are still raw.”

And it is stories like these that David Riker feels need to be told. “Film can serve the Saharawi struggle both in helping to express a collective reflection on their circumstances, and by bring their unique story to the world” he says. “Unlike most things planted in the desert, the FiSahara film festival has taken root and continues to grow and flourish” actor said Javier Bardem ahead of this year’s festival. “It is increasingly attracting great films and great film-makers from around the world and in doing it sends a signal to our political leaders that this crisis that can no-longer be ignored and a signal to the Saharawi refugees that despite their isolation, they have not been forgotten.

Stefan Simanowitz is a journalist and the international co-ordinator of FiSahara. This post was first published on the Mail & Guardian Online.

10 years ago

Malawi votes in closely contested election

Malawians voted on Tuesday in the most closely contested election since the end of the one-party state two decades ago, with incumbent Joyce Banda, southern Africa’s first female head of state, facing no fewer than 11 challengers.

In the absence of reliable opinion polls, most analysts rank People’s Party leader Banda as the favourite because of her popularity in rural areas where she has been rolling out development projects and farm subsidies.

Polling stations opened more or less on time at 0400 GMT in the capital, Lilongwe, although logistical problems in the southern commercial hub of Blantyre delayed the start of voting, adding to a tense and acrimonious pre-poll atmosphere.

Many of Banda’s rivals have already cried foul, saying they have unearthed plots to rig the ballot. Diplomats say they have seen no credible evidence of vote-rigging, but delays – for whatever reason – may fuel the sense of unease and distrust.

There were chaotic scenes at a polling centre at a school in a Blantyre township, with hundreds of voters milling around for several hours while officials waited in vain for election materials to arrive.

“There’s no ink. We’re still waiting for the consignment,” one of the officials told the frustrated crowd.

Banda came to power in the landlocked, impoverished nation two years ago after her predecessor, Bingu wa Mutharika, died in office.

President Joyce Banda at the launch of her electoral presidential campaign on March 29 2014 in Lilongwe. (Pic: AFP)

In her first months in power, Banda, who grew up in a village in southern Malawi, enjoyed huge goodwill from many of the country’s 13 million people who had grown to hate Mutharika’s autocratic style.

But she saw her popularity wane after she was forced to impose austerity measures, including a sharp devaluation of the kwacha, to stabilise the economy.

More recently, her administration’s reputation for probity has been hit by a $15 million corruption scandal, dubbed ‘Cashgate‘ after the discovery of large amounts of money in the car of a senior government official, that has soured relations with donors.

More than 80 people have been arrested and a former cabinet minister has been dismissed and put on trial for money laundering and attempted murder but urban voters in particular have criticised Banda’s response as ponderous and ineffectual.

Banda’s main challenger is Lazarus Chakwera, an evangelical pastor who retired from the church last year to lead the Malawi Congress Party, the rejuvenated party of the late Hastings Banda, who ran the former British colony with an iron first in its first three decades of independence.

Read Malawi elections: Big four vie for power

Mutharika’s younger brother Peter is also running as the head of the Democratic Progressive Party. Another prominent contender is Atupele Muluzi, son of former president Bakili Muluzi, who took over from Hastings Banda in 1994.

10 years ago

Sudanese judge orders Christian woman to hang for apostasy

A Sudanese judge on Thursday sentenced a heavily pregnant Christian woman to hang for apostasy, a ruling which Britain denounced as “barbaric” and left the United States “deeply disturbed”.

Born to a Muslim father, the woman was convicted under the Islamic Sharia law that has been in force in Sudan since 1983 and outlaws conversions on pain of death.

Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag (27) is married to a Christian and eight months pregnant, human rights activists say.

“We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged,” Judge Abbas Mohammed Al-Khalifa told the woman, addressing her by her father’s Muslim name, Adraf Al-Hadi Mohammed Abdullah.

Khalifa also sentenced Ishag to 100 lashes for “adultery”. Under Sudan’s interpretation of Sharia, a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim man and any such relationship is regarded as adulterous.

In Washington, the state department said the United States was “deeply disturbed” by the sentence and urged Sudan to protect freedom of religion.

Britain’s Minister for Africa, Mark Simmonds, said he was “truly appalled”.

“This barbaric sentence highlights the stark divide between the practices of the Sudanese courts and the country’s international human rights obligations,” he said in a statement.

Ishag, dressed in traditional Sudanese robes with her head covered, reacted without emotion when the verdict was read out at a court in the Khartoum district of Haj Yousef, where many Christians live.

Earlier in the hearing, an Islamic religious leader spoke with her in the caged dock for about 30 minutes, trying to convince her to change her mind.

But she calmly told the judge: “I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy.”

Sudan has an Islamist government but, other than floggings, extreme Sharia law punishments have been rare.

‘Appalling and abhorrent’
“The fact that a woman has been sentenced to death for her religious choice, and to flogging for being married to a man of an allegedly different religion, is appalling and abhorrent,” said Amnesty International’s Sudan researcher, Manar Idriss.

If the death sentence is carried out, she will be the first person executed for apostasy under the 1991 penal code, said Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a British-based campaign group.

One of Ishag’s lawyers, Mohanad Mustafa, told AFP that they would take the case all the way to Sudan’s top Constitutional Court if necessary to get the verdict overturned.

The defence believes the criminal code prohibition against apostasy violates the constitution, he said.

After the hearing, about 50 people demonstrated against the death sentence.

“No to executing Meriam,” said one of their signs, while another proclaimed: “Religious rights are a constitutional right.”

A smaller group supporting the verdict also arrived but there was no violence.

“This is a decision of the law. Why are you gathered here?” one supporter asked, prompting an activist to retort: “Why do you want to execute Meriam? Why don’t you bring corruptors to the court?”

Sudan is perceived as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, ranked 174th by campaign group Transparency International.

About 100 people, mostly Ishag supporters, were in court to hear the sentence, which was also observed by Western diplomats.

In a joint statement ahead of Thursday’s ruling, the embassies of the United States, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands expressed “deep concern” over her case and urged “justice and compassion”.

She was convicted on Sunday, May 11 but given until Thursday to recant.

Amnesty said Ishag was raised as an Orthodox Christian, her mother’s religion, because her Muslim father was absent.

Information Minister Ahmed Bilal Osman told AFP earlier that Sudan is not unique in its law against apostasy.

“In Saudi Arabia, in all the Muslim countries, it is not allowed at all for a Muslim to change his religion,” he said.

Abdelmoneim Abu Idris Ali for AFP