RIGHTS-SUDAN: Women Demand a Place at the Negotiating Table

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Apr 9 2004 (IPS) - Strategic Initiatives for the Horn of Africa, a regional organisation that promotes women’s participation in politics, has called for gender issues to be addressed in the Sudanese peace negotiations.

“So far, there is no voice of women in the talks. Women are not visible in whatever has been accomplished at the negotiations and that is why we are advocating for them to have a say in the process, because they are the ones who have been affected most by the civil war in Sudan,” Hala Elkanib, Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Horn of Africa (SIHA), told IPS in Nairobi.

SIHA serves as an umbrella organisation for 18 groups from Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan.

Negotiations to end 21 years of civil war in Sudan are currently underway in Kenya between government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army. The conflict between Muslim authorities in the north and southern rebels has led to the death of over two million people – and caused an additional four million to become internally displaced. About half-a-million Sudanese have been turned into refugees.

The talks, which began in 2002, bore fruit last September when the warring parties agreed to integrate troops from both sides into a national army. Further progress was made at the start of this year when they reached consensus on sharing Sudan’s oil wealth and other government revenues.

However, a settlement has yet to be established for control over the contested areas of Abyei, the Nuba Mountains and the Southern Blue Nile.

“We are lobbying civil society groups and political parties in Sudan to ensure women are represented at an equal level to their male counterparts. We demand a 50 percent representation,” said Elkanib, who hopes this will result in policies which protect women and girls from violence, particularly that arising from armed conflict.

She was speaking in Nairobi this week during the launch of the ‘Stop Violence Against Women and Girls In the Horn of Africa’ campaign.

Said Anisia Achieng, Director of Sudanese Women’s Voice for Peace, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in Nairobi, “We want women and girls to be protected. We are demanding control over the use of guns which have been responsible for the death and trauma of women in Sudan.”

“More than ten women in Sudan die daily from abuse of arms, which includes rape,” she added. However, this figure could be higher because many attacks on women go unreported.

Accounts of violence against women have also emerged from the Darfur region of western Sudan, where the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement are battling government troops and Arab militias backed by Khartoum.

Human Rights Watch, an NGO based in New York, has accused the militias of routinely raping women and girls in the area – as well as setting fire to villages and crops, and looting livestock.

Following concerted pressure from the international community, the government and rebels this week agreed to a 45-day ceasefire so that aid could be delivered to the area. United States officials believe the conflict in Darfur may have displaced up to a million civilians in the past year.

Activists say that traditional practices in the Horn of Africa have contributed to a culture where violence against women is condoned – especially the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). And, they have called on governments to work with communities to phase these practices out.

According to SIHA, FGM is almost universal in Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia. About 95 percent of women have been circumcised in Eritrea, 98 percent in Somalia and 90 percent in Ethiopia.

The practice involves the cutting away of part – or all – of a girl’s clitoris and other parts of the genitalia, in some instances to initiate her into adulthood. There are numerous side-effects to the procedure, which may be performed with crude equipment such as broken glass or a tin lid. These include the transmission of HIV, sexual dysfunction and urinary tract infections.

“FGM is harming our girls, some who go through it at the age of six years,” noted Asmahan Abdisalaam, Chairperson of the Somali chapter of SIHA.

“We need the government to collaborate with anti-FGM organisations in changing attitudes of communities, educating parents who give up their daughters for the practice and the circumcisors who carry out the job, about the danger of FGM on women and girls.”

A campaign to root out FGM in Somalia was launched last month on International Women’s Day (Mar. 8), led by four women’s groups. They hope to end misconceptions about the practice, namely that it is required under Islamic law. Human rights activists and Muslim scholars say there is no basis for this belief.

The ‘Stop Violence Against Women and Girls In the Horn of Africa’ campaign has also drawn attention to the insufficiencies of laws against domestic violence.

“The Ethiopian legal system provides legislation against assault and physical injury. But these provisions are difficult to apply when convicting a husband or intimate partner – because male-female relations are considered private matters,” said Yetnayet Andarge of the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association.

“These issues therefore cannot be discussed in public. For this reason, the laws are flawed,” she added.

Jane Kiragu, Executive Director of the Kenyan chapter of the Federation of Women Lawyers, agrees.

“The law should not only be out there, but also govern inside homes, in bedrooms where domestic violence is rife,” she told IPS.