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The Organization for Islamic Cooperation calls to end FGM
IRAQI KURDISTAN: WADI shifts attitudes toward Female Genital Mutilation
Christian Peacemakers, 4.11.2013.
by Rosemarie Milazzo
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| Falah Muradkhan addresses the media |
On 30 October 2013, CPT’s partner organization, WADI Iraq office, organized a press conference—which media representatives from six major Kurdish satellite channels and several newspapers attended —about the decline in Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Kurdistan. The WADI project coordinator, Falah Muradkhan said his organization had called the press conference because of the huge international attention stirred up on the topic caused by the recent BBC World and BBC Arabic’s airing of two documentaries and the reporting of the Guardian newspaper.
WADI used this occasion to present new data about the FGM situation in Kurdistan and WADI’s current activities. Two years ago, the Kurdistan Regional Government banned FGM as part of a wide-ranging law to improve women’s rights, after years of grassroots campaigning run by activist and civil society organizations, including WADI. In a region where honor killings still happen, journalists write about Kurdistan as a “rare success story.” Read full article
How Kurdistan ended female genital mutilation
Gulf News 24.10.13. By Shaimaa Khalil
Toutkhal: Kurdistan is one of Iraq’s rare success stories; autonomous from Baghdad since 1991, the region has recently enjoyed an oil boom that’s fuelled foreign investment unknown elsewhere in the country.
And recently Iraqi Kurdistan has been looking closely at its human rights record. Two years ago Female Genital Mutilation was banned, as part of a wide-ranging law to improve women’s rights, and since then the rate of FGM has fallen dramatically.
But how have they achieved this? Kurdistan is very much the exception.
Many other countries in the Middle East and Africa still suffer from high rates of FGM. According to Unicef the countries where FGM is most prevalent is Somalia and Guinea, while Egypt is in the top five.
However according to Unicef the practice is ‘practically non-existent’ in the rest of Iraq. In a special report that is part of the BBC’s 100 Women Season, I found out more about the grass roots campaign that led to this practice being outlawed. I wanted to know if enough is being done to enforce the law, and end FGM in Kurdistan altogether.
One leg of my journey was to the sleepy village of Toutkhal — in a remote and mountainous area in Iraqi Kurdistan. At first glance, life seems untouched by the modern world. The small mud houses, surrounded by farm animals and people living off the land make it hard to imagine why this village would make the news.
Hivos and Wadi Call for Action on FGM in the Middle East/ West Asia
For Download: Leaflet on FGM in the Middle East
“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.