Khady with prominent signatories in the Ban FGM campaign. You can sign, too!

No Peace Without Justice has provided the following link to news, quoted below, on the Ban FGM campaign in which Khady is involved.     See www.npwj.org/node/4677

OPEN QUOTE:

Ban FGM Campaign: First prominent signatories of the Appeal calling for a Resolution by the United Nations General Assembly in 2012

Brussels – Rome – New York, 23 May 2012  [www.npwj.org/node/4677] Access 27.05.2012

The International NGO Coalition for a worldwide ban on female genital mutilation has been campaigning since 2010 for the United Nations General Assembly to adopt a Resolution banning the practice. Such a Resolution would provide the highest-level expression of political will and be an essential step towards ending this violation of human rights against millions of women around the world. It would serve to strengthen laws that currently ban FGM and provide new impetus for those nations that currently do not have such laws on the books.

Following the decision by the 56th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in March 2012 recommending that the General Assembly consider the issue of female genital mutilation at its 67th session later this year, the African Group at the UN is currently spearheading the effort to draft a Resolution.

In support of the African Group’s effort, the Ban FGM Coalition has launched an appeal to the United Nations for a Resolution that explicitly bans female genital mutilation worldwide, and calling on all States to adopt and implement legislation to ban female genital mutilation and to take all necessary legislative, political and operational measures aimed at ending the practice.
Support this initiative and sign the appeal on www.banfgm.org
First signatories
Among the first prominent signatories of the Appeal are Chantal Compaoré, First Lady of Burkina Faso, Goodwill Ambassador of the Inter-African Committee, Coordinator of the  International Campaign to Ban FGM Worldwide; Raymonde Coffie Goudou, Minister of Family, Women and Childhood, Ivory Coast; Sihem Badi, Minister of Women and Family Affairs, Tunisia; Maikibi Kadidiatou Dandobi, Minister of Population, Women’s Promotion and Child Protection, Niger; Olivia Amedjogbe-Kouevi, Minister for the Advancement of Women, Togo; Joëlle Milquet, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Home Affairs and Equal Opportunities, Belgium; Isabelle Durant, Vice-President of European Parliament; Emma Bonino, Vice-president of the Senate, Italy; Sabine de Bethune, President of the Senate, Belgium; Olga Zrihen, Marleen Temmerman, Fauzaya Talhaoui, Fatiha Saïdi, Nele Lijnen, Members of the Senate, Belgium; Gisèle Mandaila and Fatoumata Sidibé, Members of the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium; Safia Djibril, Member of the Parliament, Djibouti; Mama-Raouf Tchagnao, Minister Counsellor, Permanent Mission of Togo to the United Nations; Ivan Hermans, Senior Policy and External Relations Advisor, UNFPA, Belgium; Mariam Lamizana, President of CI-AF, Burkina Faso; Khady Koita, President of La Palabre, Senegal.

For more information, contact Alvilda Jablonko, Coordinator of the FGM Program, on ajablonko@npwj.org / phone: +32 494 533 915 or Nicola Giovannini on ngiovannini@npwj.org or +32 (0)2 548-39 15.  END QUOTE

“They Promised Me a Wonderful Party” … FGM in Egypt

Although always ‘controversial’, FGM has recently attracted heightened attention that would be welcome if those concerned wished it to end. Unfortunately, most I have read do not.

Terre des Femmes campaign poster

Mona Eltahawy, a U.S.-based Egyptian-born columnist, wrote a cover story for Foreign Policy magazine in which she excoriates Arab governments and Arab males who, for instance, support FGM. The focus on Egypt ties her to the concluding chapter in Undoing FGM. Pierre Foldes, the Surgeon Who Restores the Clitoris, and an excerpt is below. The link to Eltahawy’s “Why Do They Hate Us? The Real War on Women in the Middle East” is http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/why_do_they_hate_us?page=full

Meanwhile, Makode Linde, an Afro-Swedish artist, has unleashed a firestorm. Not unlike 2004 Nobel Laureate in Literature Elfriede Jelinek who, in her novel Lust, de- and recontextualizes pornography only to be attacked by those whose inexperience in reading irony prevented their understanding how it worked, Linde was condemned for trying something similar with racist stereotypes. The artist’s installation, by definition a live performance, went viral with its black-face and grinning Jim Crow-era icons. No doubt, Linde uses racist images. The centerpiece was a black chocolate cake shaped like a female torso whose head, the artist’s in black-face, whimpered each time the vulva area was cut — to accompanying laughter  so clearly inappropriate as to open a space for thinking about the object of the art:  the real-life slicing of little girls’ flesh that takes place thousands of times each day. I doubt that anyone present at the installation thinks FGM is funny. As Waris Dirie contends: ” ‘If a white girl is abused, the police come break down the door. If a black girl is mutilated, nobody … care[s about] her. This is what I call racism‘.”  http://news.uk.msn.com/uk/medics-offered-genital-mutilation-1?cp-documentid=161153004#scptmh

ALSO: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2133427/100-000-women-undergo-brutal-sexual-mutilation-illegally-Britain.html#ixzz1so7z5PVd

Excerpt from Hubert Prolongeau. Undoing FGM. Pierre Foldes, the Surgeon Who Restores the Clitoris.

Chapter 9 “In the Land of the Pharaohs”

…Rupturing the tacit omerta … Hayet has told Christiane … what her excision had been like. “I was eleven. Nobody told me anything. The daya[1] arrived. I knew her because she’d already been to our house to deliver my little sister. So I had confidence. But it hurt so much. The pain was horrible. Still, I forgot about it and understood only years later what they had done to me, one day while watching TV. But they switched off the set. You just don’t talk about these things.”

We’re in Egypt. Why would we finish this book in that country? First because Pierre Foldes has had high-level contact and his discovery has attracted attention there, but above all because, in contrast to Burkina Faso, Egypt is one of those nations where excision stubbornly persists. It’s omnipresent yet at the same time taboo and a pretext for confrontation between a relatively moderate but rapidly expanding Islamist milieu; a government in denial that nonetheless tries to oppose it; and strong-minded militants, too few, who fight as they can.

Ninety-seven percent: 97% of Egyptian women who have ever been married and are aged 15 to 45, as often Christian as Islamic, are excised. This number, which dates from 2000, is official. It is stupefying. Most specialists on FGM consider it exaggerated: the questionnaire that produced it was the first to use the word “circumcision” and, because “circumcision” is thought to be an Islamic practice, not admitting it would make oneself appear a bad Muslim. OK, let’s accept the argument. That doesn’t obviate the fact that, even if inflated, the figure speaks to a reality that according to other sources touches 80% of Egyptian women. Who, among the hordes of tourists unfolding regularly on the Nile River to cruise between Luxor and Aswan, to run from the Museum of Cairo to the Pyramids amid the concert of horns and the dust of the capital, to plunge into the shadows of royal tombs, among all those people, who is informed? In Upper Egypt, where vestiges of the past are most famous, prevalence explodes, far exceeding 90%. …

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/why_do_they_hate_us?page=full

---

“StopFGM!” Worldwide Campaign for a U.N. General Assembly Resolution: U.S. support

Khady (Blood Stains), a spokeswoman for NPWJ (No Peace Without Justice), brainchild of  Vice-President of the Italian Senate Emma Bonino,  is pictured here in 2001 with Emma and the oldest living Nobel Laureate, Italian Senator for Life, Dr. Rita Levi Montalcini at a Rome conference on FGM that followed  a   European Parliament resolution to address a broader public, presenting the damaging ‘rite’  no longer ‘merely’ as a health issue but equally important as a violation of human rights. 2001 marked the beginning of a decade of increasingly fruitful parliamentary efforts to intensify international activity and will culminate in an anticipated, African-drafted General Assembly resolution to Ban FGM now in committee, as announced by Representative Crowley at the State Department Zero Tolerance to FGM Day event.  See at approximately 7 minutes 36 seconds: http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/clinton_zero_tolerance_fgm_2012

Lucy, Khady, and Hillary Clinton

In the photo, founding president of the Inter-African Committee (IAC) Berhane Ras-Work and activist/publisher Tobe Levin chat after their high level panel on FGM (UN Commission on the Status of Women) in March 2012.

Despite Hillary Clinton’s courageous reference to “female genital mutilation” in her 1995 speech at the UN’s 4^th World Women’s Conference in Beijing, it was not until this year that, for the first time, the U.S. State Department finally acknowledged Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation Day. Since 2003 it has been officially observed in Africa and Europe on February 6, birthdate of the Inter-African Committee that ‘invented’ the occasion. The IAC did so to emphasize that mainly under-aged girls’ genitals are maimed, not merely ‘cut’; and to ensure that African activists’ voices are heard above North American policy-makers’ who prefer to “decorate the truth,” in Lucy Mashua’s words, to disguise the practice’s brutality. You can observe the conflict in discourse unfold in all its irony during the February 16, 2012, State Department event. Representative Joseph Crowley (who, with Rep. Mary Bono Mack, introduced HR 2221, The Girls’ Protection Act); German activist Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, founder of WADI that fights FGM in Kurdistan; Zeynab Eyega, MSc., executive director of Sauti Yetu; an anonymous caller from Mali, and UnCUT/VOICES Board Member Lucy Mashua challenged the refusal of some State Department panelists to acknowledge the full extent of harm.  Lucy Mashua insists that, as a victim, her genitalia had been gravely injured. In Blood Stains, Khady backs her up. Mashua’s eloquent contribution begins around 1:02:24 in this link: http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/clinton_zero_tolerance_fgm_2012 See also http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mashua-Against-FGM/225406701415

 

Endangered Activist: One More Reason to Offer Support

In Blood Stains. A Child of Africa Reclaims Her Human Rights, Khady notes that “every time we raised the topic [of stopping FGM]  … insulting phone calls followed” (198). For fighting FGM, she was also accused by the Diaspora community in Paris of betrayal. Similarly, in Undoing FGM. Pierre Foldes, the Surgeon Who Restores the Clitoris, a chilling scene takes place in the doctor’s office when a bearded fundamentalist confronts the physician with a knife. The two men are alone. That time, Foldes gives a rehearsed explanation and the intruder leaves. Another time, the visitor turns tail only after slitting the surgeon’s left shoulder, resulting in a four-inch scar. These thoughts came to mind on reading today’s message from Cody of INTACT giving the good news from Liberia: that the death threats journalist Mae Azango had received for speaking out against FGM were being taken seriously by the government, and it has issued its first statement condemning the practice. Whether there is political will to follow through, however, remains to be seen. The photo below (March 2011) pictures activists against FGM in MALI where the APDF with Erica Pomerance and FORWARD – Germany filmed teens and their advisers on a seven-day caravan through villages in Ségou in September 2007. Seated center is the youth leader nicknamed “Vieux.” Though their efforts at persuasion were largely successful, opposition was not absent.http://cima.ned.org/liberia-journalist-mae-azango-moves-nation

More updates on Liberia’s embattled journalist https://twitter.com/#!/unicefprotects/status/189698815278854145

UNDOING FGM “In the Land of the Pharoahs…”

Under the headline “Female Genital Mutilation Rife in Egypt despite Ban,” we read in INTACT’s latest quarterly newsletter: “Astonishingly, in 21st Century Egypt, … more than 90% of the women have been subject to female genital mutilation (FGM). The figure comes from a UNICEF approved survey [from] 2008, the year that the practice was banned.  …New…  figures … due to be published later this year [are expected] to show a 10% decline. That still leaves [most] women in Egypt exposed to unimaginable physical and psychological pain and denied what the rest of us would call a normal sex life.”  If you are curious to learn why the painful custom remains so popular, take a look at “In the Land of the Pharoahs…”, the concluding chapter in Hubert Prolongeau’s Undoing FGM. Pierre Foldes, the Surgeon Who Restores the Clitoris (2011; original 2006). Why does the story end in Cairo? The author, who speaks some Arabic, followed up on Foldes’ contacts and interviewed opinion-makers in medicine and government; they feel that  those who wish to stop FGM also want to destroy Egyptian culture … Typical of Prolongeau’s informants speaking before regime change is a woman parliamentarian, Azza El Garf, speaking up today who would reverse the ban, claiming it’s a ‘woman’s’ right to choose to be cut. But I ask, when seven-to-nine year-olds are  victims, which women choose?

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/9696353.stm and

http://womensenews.org/story/genital-mutilation/120327/islamist-parliamentarian-objects-egypts-ban-fgm

Khady on YouTube: for a Worldwide BAN against FGM

 (Photo by Britta Radike, Brussels, EuroNet FGM, 2009)

To see Khady and other African leaders campaigning to ban FGM during the UN General Assembly in the fall, see http://www.npwj.org/FGM/BAN-FGM-CAMPAIGN.html

Excerpt from the NPWJ BANFGM site: “A Resolution of the United Nations General Assembly banning female genital mutilation worldwide will be a pivotal moment in the fight to bring an end to the practice, providing the recognition that FGM is a violation of fundamental human rights. The gravity and the dimensions of this violation demand the attention of the international community as a whole and require that international measures be put in place to eliminate it.

A Resolution with an explicit ban on female genital mutilation will help to complete the shift of perspectives on FGM from a problem of ‘public health’ or a ‘cultural’ problem, to its universal recognition as a human rights violation and a form of violence against women.”