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Fighting against Female Genital Mutilation in Iraq

31.7.2013. The British Independent interviewed the vice-president of the Pana Center in Kirkuk, Iraq – a partner organization of Wadi. The women’s rights campaigner Awezan Muri talks about her own experiences in her family and the challenges she encounters fighting FGM in Iraq. Figures from the Pana Centre show that 38 per cent of women in Kirkuk are victims.

As a nine-year-old growing up in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, Awezan Nuri narrowly escaped female genital mutilation. “My mother was 12 when she was mutilated,” says the 31-year-old women’s rights campaigner, who is also a renowned poet. “She has told me about the terrible pain, how much she bled that night and how ashamed she was to tell her family she was hurting. She couldn’t talk to her mother, because her mother was the one who’d taken her to be cut. She felt alone and scared.”

Despite the trauma of that experience, Nuri’s mother still pushed for her six daughters to undergo the same process themselves. “She thought it was the responsibility of every Sunni Muslim to do this. Logically, she disagreed with it, but there was so much pressure from society.”

It is a misguided belief among Muslim communities in dozens of countries around the world that the practice is mandated in Islam. For Nuri, it was an intervention by her father that saved her sisters from the knife – he said he did not agree with it. But most Iraqi Kurds are not so lucky.  Figures from the Pana Centre – of which Nuri is vice president, in charge of the campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM) – show that 38 per cent of women in Kirkuk are victims. Among ethnic Kurds, that figure rises to 65 per cent.

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“I protect women’s honour”

Kirkuk Now 4.5.2013.

Pura Gullstan is well known outside of Kirkuk city due to her profession, as she performs female genital mutilation and according to her statement, she has so many stories about FGM to tell but she does not want to let people know about them.

Pura Gullstan - Photo: Hawlati

Photo: Hawlati

Female genital mutilation is a stain on reputation of the Kurds in their treatment of women.  There are very few women agreeing with FGM, and Gullstan claims herself to be the saviour of the women when she talks about her profession.  If there are not numerous clients, how has Pura Gullstan managed to continue what she has been doing for so long?

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Female Genital Mutilation Still Widespread in Egypt

Voice of America 30.4.2013 by Elizabeth Arrott

CAIRO — Egyptian activists are concerned that the rise of Islamist politicians could undermine years of work to discourage female genital mutilation. The practice, and the movement against it, however, have far deeper roots in the country.

To its supporters, it is a sign of purity, community and religious devotion. To its opponents, it marks the physical manifestation of a woman’s degradation. Read more

Moves to medicalize female mutilation could destroy ‘Stop FGM’ advocacy

WNN SOAPBOX 17.4.2013

By Faiza Jama Mohamed

(WNN) Nairobi, KENYA: Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a severe form of discrimination against girls.  It is an extremely violent act of control and an utterly invasive and destructive assault of the female sexual organs.  It promotes the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with girls, which needs to be changed.  It is often carried out for cultural or supposedly religious reasons, even though it is not referred to in any major religious text.  FGM is most prevalent in parts of Africa and the Middle East.  However, it is a global problem, which has already affected 100 – 140 million women and girls around the world.

One of the most worrying recent developments relating to FGM is the shift towards permitting it to be performed by medical professionals in a supposedly ‘safe’ environment.  We have recently been calling for urgent action in Indonesia, one of the first countries in the world to attempt to ‘legitimize’ FGM in this way.  As Indonesian girls are usually less than six weeks old when this is carried out, they have absolutely no say in this decision, which transforms their entire future.  We are also concerned about recent development in Malaysia, which could see something similar happening there.  The Malay Minister for Health is keen to formalize and legitimize the ‘medicalization’ of FGM, despite the fact that there is absolutely no benefit or necessity to do so.  This ignores both UN and WHO guidelines, which recognize it as a severe form of violence and child abuse against girls. Read more.

Hivos and partner WADI launch website against FGM in the Middle East

17.4.2013. Hivos and our partner WADI proudly announce the launch of the ‘Stop FGM Middle East’ campaign’s website to break the silence about female genital mutilation (FGM) in the Middle East and to contribute to its full elimination.

Girls and women all over the Middle East face the practice of FGM, which constitutes a gross violation of their rights and is often condoned by various cultural, traditional and religious excuses. Credible data and statistics on the prevalence of FGM are essential if we are to break the silence and taboos surrounding the practice of FGM in the Middle East. Hivos and WADI started collecting evidence on FGM and reporting on activism against FGM in Middle Eastern countries in 2011. In January 2012, WADI and Hivos organised a conference on FGM in the Middle East in Beirut. It was the first of its kind. Experts and activists from Iraq, Yemen, Indonesia and Egypt took part laying the foundation of a region-wide network to fight FGM.

In Iraq and Yemen, FGM is known to be practised. In Iraqi Kurdistan a law criminalising FGM was adopted in 2012. In other countries in the Middle East there is only anecdotal evidence of the existence of FGM. In the Gulf region so far, only a few individuals have come forward to address the issue. In the United Arab Emirates, a student conducted a survey for her graduation project and found 34 percent of the questioned women had been circumcised. In Oman, bloggers demanded the government take action against the practice. In Saudi Arabia, a clinical study about the possible connection between female sexual dysfunction and FGM, conducted in 2007-08, found that of 260 women interviewed at a Jeddah clinic, half had been mutilated. A study in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia found 38 percent of FGM-cases among 4800 pregnant women. There is also circumstantial evidence that it is carried out in Syria and Qatar.

Although more solid data and statistics must become available, it can be said with certainty that FGM exists in the Middle East and is threatening the lives of millions of girls in the region in as much as it causes medical, psychological and sexual problems for adult women. Hivos and WADI will continue their work to break the silence shrouding these crimes against girls and women in the Middle East.

Original on Hivos Website

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Times of India: NID student’s film on female genital mutilation

30.3.2013. What is it like to have undergone female genital mutilation, asks NID student’s film

When a 24-year-old student of film and video communication at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad received a special mention at the 60th National Film Awards, it was for showing nerve. Although devoid of sting operations and hidden cameras, Priya Goswami’s 27-minute documentary goes where no one has. In A Pinch of Skin, the young filmmaker gets a string of women to openly share the horror of female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice so secretive, often brothers aren’t aware their sisters have undergone it. The one-million strong community of Dawoodi Bohras, a sect of Ismaili Shias concentrated in trade-focused centres of Maharashtra and Gujarat, carry out the practice citing ‘faith’ as reason, although Islamic scholars say Islam doesn’t sanction it. Original article

More background on the film on kracktivist and DW Blog Women talk Online.

The film on Facebook

Indonesia denies mutilation in circumcision traditions

Thrashing wildly, five-year-old Reta wails as she is hoisted onto a bed during a circumcision ceremony in a school-hall-turned-clinic on Indonesia’s island of Java.

“No, no, no,” she cries, punching and kicking as her mother cups her tear-soaked face to soothe her.

Doctors clap and cheer encouragingly. One of them gently swipes her genital area with antiseptic and then swiftly pricks the hood of her clitoris with a fresh sewing needle, drawing no blood. Read More…

Islamic Pluralism: The Global Campaign Against Female Genital Mutilation Continues

23.3.2013 by Irfan Al-Alawi

A global campaign to eradicate female genital mutilation [FGM], often misnamed “female circumcision,” continues. While foreign NGOs have made Iraqi Kurdistan a center of the effort to do away with this practice, many observers have argued that it is not a “Kurdish” problem.

FGM is also not just a “Muslim” phenomenon. However widespread it may be among Iraqi Sunni Kurds, its acceptance in Islam is limited. According to the German relief organization WADI [The Association for Crisis Assistance and Development Co-operation], in the four provinces of Iraqi Kurdistan, only the farthest north, Dohuk, which borders on Turkey, shows little evidence of FGM at any age. Among the remaining three “governorates,” in the province of Erbil, named for the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), 63% of women have undergone the atrocious custom; in Suleymaniya, 78%; and in Garmyan/New Kirkuk, the southernmost, 81%. Read more…

“A Tiny Cut”: Female Circumcision in South East Asia

The Islamic Monthly, 12.3.2013

I am a Muslim of Malay ethnicity, who was born in Singapore, where Malays are an ethnic and religious minority today, and lived there until I was 24 years old. The Malays, of whom 99 percent are Muslim, are the indigenous people of Singapore and the Malay archipelago. Until the arrival of the British colonizers in the early nineteenth century, this area (which covers what is south Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and south  Philippines today) shared many cultural and linguistic similarities.

When I was about six years old and attending a kenduri, or ritual feast, for two male cousins who had just been circumcised, I whispered to my mother, “Are girls circumcised too?” Growing up in Singapore in the 1990s, boys were commonly circumcised before puberty (around eight or nine) – making it seem like a rite of passage into adulthood. The six year-old me observed the fuss and attention they got: they were not allowed to eat certain foods, they could only bear to wear a kain sarong for up to two weeks due to the pain, and had to be fanned at night to keep the wounds dry. These ritual feasts to celebrate a boy’s circumcision are less common today, partly due to the increasing use of doctors to carry out circumcision, and usually on infants a few weeks old.

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Statement on Behalf of the OIC Secretariat 57th Session of the Commission of the Status of Women

11.3.2013 The Secretariat of the Organisation of Islamic Countries stresses the necessity to eliminate FGM in this statement.