feminist blogs

A few great pieces. First, Mark Goldberg speaks with filmmaker Lisa Jackson, who recently released the documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo:

Stephen Lewis, the co-director of AIDS-Free World, has another must-read piece up in The Nation — it’s the transcript of the remarks he gave on V-Day in New Orleans. (Also at AlterNet).

Women in the Congo are also speaking out. Rural women have started radio shows to tell their stories, disseminate information and connect with others.

And a reminder that this is not a new issue: A Ms. Magazine article about rape in the Congo from 2005.

This is what happens when “pro-life” policies dominate.

In Nigeria abortion is illegal unless the life of the woman would be at risk if she were to give birth.

But the Guttmacher Institute estimates that more than 456,000 unsafe abortions are done in Nigeria every year.

Some women go to traditional healers to terminate their pregnancies.

Methods include trying to break the amniotic sack inside the womb with a sharp stick. This causes infection and in extreme cases the tissue inside the body can start to die.

“They’re pulling out intestines,” says gynaecologist Dr Ejike Oji, of Ipas, an international organisation working to secure reproductive rights for women.

Another method is to pump a toxic mixture of fiercely hot Alligator chilli peppers and chemicals like alum into their bodies.

“The women go into toxic shock and die,” Dr Oji said.

27 women every day. 10,000 women every year. And that’s in Nigeria alone.

Thank a pro-lifer today.

Thanks to Susan for the link.

(”Thowra,” which in Arabic literally means “revolution”)

Hey All,

I’m Fauzia and I guest blogged here at Feministe a while back. I initially wrote to Jill about this story as I thought she’d have some good commentary on the issue. But after some thought, and an offer from Jill to return to my guest-blog status for just one more post I figured it might be easier if I wrote about this myself.

Disclaimer: I’m an American currently living in Egypt (Cairo) working at a center that promotes civic engagement and researches the rising sector of Arab philanthropy. I work downtown, near Midan Tahrir (literally “Freedom Square”). In the last 9 months that I’ve been living in Cairo I’ve managed to witness the absolute poverty this country is living in. On the other hand, I’ve managed to witness the growing gap between the rich and poor. Students at the American University, for the most part, are the upper echelon of Egyptian society (note: I’m not saying that they are ALL upper class Egyptians, but for the most part…). I’ve only lived here for 9 months so I’m not professing that I have a huge handle on the situation. So here it goes…

I don’t know how much Western newspapers are covering this issue, but I’m sure by the end of the week they’ll be a few stories. I know that the hard copy of the International Herald Tribune covered this issue this morning (Monday) and online, again, a few minutes ago.

Yesterday (Sunday, April 6) was, essentially, a nationwide strike for many Egyptian workers and activists, in solidarity with the workers of Ghazl El-Mahalla, one of the biggest textile factories in Egypt. The growing problems of low wages and rising prices of food (especially bread and cooking oil) have pushed Egyptian society into a state of anger and frustration. The production and distribution of bread has led to, on many occasions, violence in bread lines. In one instance, a man was stabbed during an argument over bread distribution.

Before I go further, here is some logistical and basic information on the history of labor movements, the current strike (who initiated it, how it snowballed into a national call, etc.) The writer of these articles is Joel Beinin, a professor and head of the Middle East Studies department at the American University in Cairo. He links a few other articles that are pretty informative as well.

Yesterday’s strike, though, was a historical moment for Egypt. Though the country professes to be a “democracy,” (ironically Hosni Mubarak’s party is called “The National Democratic Party,”) it is pretty apparent that no such thing exists in the Egypt. Protests, strikes, and demonstrations have been completely outlawed in Egypt since the declaration of emergency law after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.
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Thanks to P.M. Lawrence @ LewRockwell.com (2008-03-10) for highlighting an interesting passage from an old book. Interesting to me, anyway, because of the way in which its aging rhetoric reveals what it once tried to conceal, and the way in which what it reveals lives on to this day, in the theory and practice behind countless privateering government development projects, both at home, and abroad. This is from Sonia E. Howe’s 1938 history of the French conquest and colonization of Madagascar, under the rule of political hit man Joseph Simon Gallieni.

There was the introduction of equitable taxation, so vital from the financial point of view; but also of such great political, moral and economic importance. It was the tangible proof of French authority having come to stay; it was the stimulus required to make an inherently lazy people work. Once they had learned to earn they would begin to spend, whereby commerce and industry would develop.

The corvée in its old form could not be continued, yet workmen were required both by the colonists, and by the Government for its vast schemes of public works.

No, they weren’t.

The General therefore passed a temporary law, in which taxation and labour were combined, to be modified according to country, the people, and their mentality. Thus, for instance, every male among the Hovas, from the age of sixteen to sixty, had either to pay twenty-five francs a year, or give fifty days of labour of nine hours a day, for which he was to be paid twenty centimes, a sum sufficient to feed him. Exempted from taxation and labour were soldiers, militia, Government clerks, and any Hova who knew French, also all who had entered into a contract of labour with a colonist. Unfortunately, this latter clause lent itself to tremendous abuses. By paying a small sum to some European, who nominally engaged them, thousands bought their freedom from work and taxation by these fictitious contracts, to be free to continue their lazy, unprofitable existence. To this abuse an end had to be made.

No, it didn’t.

The urgency of a sound fiscal system was of tremendous importance to carry out all the schemes for the welfare and development of the island, and this demanded a local budget.

No, it didn’t.

The goal to be kept in view was to make the colony, as soon as possible, self-supporting. This end the Governor-General succeeded in achieving within a few years.

No, he didn’t.

The Malagasy natives supported themselves well enough on Madagascar, through the sweat of their own brow, for centuries before ever a white man ever arrived. What the Governor-General succeeded in achieving within a few years was not to make Madagascar self-supporting, but rather to use a mixed system of robbery and involuntary servitude to coerce otherwise unwilling Malagasy workers into working more than they otherwise would, in return for less than they would otherwise get, so that a self-supporting population could be browbeaten and bullied into not only supporting themselves, but also supporting a parasitic new class of governors and land-grabbers in the style to which the kleptocrats had become accustomed.

Of course, it is typical enough for politicians and politically-connected businessmen with a vast scheme to call out armed men to seize taxes and force labor, on the excuse that something so big couldn’t ever be pulled off consensually, which amounts to nothing more than demonstrating that robbery and slavery are the necessary means to an unnecessary goal. But what’s especially interesting to me here is the classical colonialist rhetoric, to the effect that it must be the inherent laziness and moral turpitude of the Malagasy natives that made them more interested in living their own lives and freely pursuing their own projects and traditions, rather than happily turning over their wealth and their lives to the vast schemes of the Government and the enrichment of its sponsored privateers. If they dare to prefer working on their own stuff to working on white people’s stuff, then clearly it will take the cudgel to teach them some civilized manners.

For the colonial mindset, this kind of attitude was like oxygen is for us—pervasive, invisible, taken for granted, and absolutely essential. In 1938, a European historian writing about colonialism in Africa would think nothing of saying commonplaces like these, and if it is jarring to read now, it’s only because, in the intervening years, the most explicit statements of that mindset have been questioned, vigorously challenged, and cast down out of cultural favor in Europe and the U.S. But the mindset itself is not gone, and its legacy lives on in the new words that the new powers that be have crafted to conceal what these old words now reveal to us. This is true of the way that the ruling elite in the U.S. and the other Great Powers talk about their military and government-financing projects abroad; it’s also true of the way that the ruling elite in the U.S. and the other Great Powers talk about their government seizure and government financing projects at home—whether in the form of taxes, government-driven technology plans, or the seizure, bulldozing, transfer, and subsidized remaking of undeveloped land.

via UN Dispatch, some disturbing statistics:

Over 15 per cent of women and girls in the violence-ridden north of the Central African Republic (CAR) are victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.

Reports coming in on a weekly basis describe such incidents as two 12-year-old girls being raped while searching for firewood in the bush and a 13-year-old girl assaulted on her way to sell palm oil at a market.

“Sexual violence is a disturbingly common feature of the insecurity in the north of the Central African Republic,” said UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes. “We must ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.”

According to some reports, the number of rapes during the 2002-2003 civil war exceeds the number of extra-judicial killings in the same time period. And the plight of women is exacerbated by being displaced:

Over 1,000 rape survivors among 20,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the region have received medical and psychological care, including HIV testing and counselling, in the past six months from aid groups.

Thank a pro-lifer today!

According to the Health Ministry statistics, complications arising from unsafe abortions account for 16 per cent of maternal deaths in the country and a shocking 55 per cent of all admissions to hospital obstetric and gynecological services.

I don’t think any further comment is necessary.

This guy has more influence on American international health policy than do the lives of African women.

“Pro-life” activists are angry at people they call “pro-aborts” — because progressive politicians want reality-based HIV/AIDS prevention strategies in Africa. The strategies being promoted have nothing to do with abortion, but that doesn’t matter — yelling “abortion” is a convenient way for anti-choicers to distract from the fact that their “pro-life” policies are killing people.

President Bush returns from Africa, where he justifiably touted the success of his AIDS relief initiative, to face a battle with Congress over that laudable program. Bush wants to nearly double funding, to $30 billion over the next five years, for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief; the House wants to spend $50 billion and expand the program to fight malaria and tuberculosis. But that $20-billion dispute probably won’t generate as much heat as the provision in the bill, written by the late Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame), killing the requirement that one-third of all funds spent on AIDS prevention go to programs that promote abstinence until marriage. The State Department and some House Republicans oppose the bill, which is now spearheaded by Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Valley Village) and is slated to be considered by a House committee next week.

The religious right has begun whipping up the hysteria, calling the Lantos bill the “Pro-Aborts Emergency Plan for Abstinence Reduction.” In fact, the bill would do nothing to alter the long-standing ban on U.S. funding for abortion. What it would do is increase the availability of contraception for poor African women — and that is desperately overdue.

Nothing about abortion. Nothing about reducing abstinence. The plan is about recognizing that abstinence isn’t a cure-all when millions of women die after contracting HIV from their husbands (pdf) and when women lack the power to negotiate sexual and marital relationships.

Conservative “pro-lifers” aren’t stupid; they know that these are the facts on the ground. But because reality conflicts with their ideology, they ignore it, even at great human expense. We say this all the time on this blog, but it’s worth repeating: Political “pro-life” groups do not care about life. They are more than satisfied letting millions of people die, so long as they can keep promoting their dogma.

Religious groups are fixated on the need to stop HIV transmission through premarital and extramarital sex, but what’s killing African women by the millions is unprotected sex with their husbands. Yet the United States spends more on promoting abstinence and fidelity programs ($198 million in fiscal 2007) than on promoting condom use ($147 million in 2007). Roughly 10 million African girls under the age of 18 are married each year, many to older men who seek HIV-free brides. To those wedded to HIV-positive men, marriage often means a death sentence. They have little power to control their husbands’ condom use or extramarital behavior; they are more likely than young men to contract HIV; and those who know they’re infected and do not want to bear children often have no access to contraception.

Have I mentioned that not a single “pro-life” group in the United States favors contraception access? And that the anti-contraception, anti-condom movement in Africa has been almost entirely created by American anti-choice organizations, effectively ushering in the preventable deaths of millions of African women, men and children?

By providing life-saving drugs to HIV-positive pregnant women, the president’s program claims to have prevented 157,000 infants from becoming infected. This is a huge accomplishment. What the U.S. funding hasn’t done is reduce unwanted pregnancies. In a clinic in Uganda where pregnant HIV-positive women were receiving anti-retroviral treatment, 93% reported that their pregnancies were unintended. It’s no surprise that many HIV-positive women do not wish to bear children whom they might infect with the virus or leave orphaned. It’s cruel to deny contraception to such poor and sick women should they desire it. And as a public health matter, it’s far cheaper to prevent unwanted pregnancies than to prevent mother-child HIV transmission. Yet U.S. funding for family planning has flat-lined.

Although some U.S. religious conservatives find contraception objectionable, most Americans do not. Congress should take note and expand funding for family-planning programs to help the HIV-positive girls and women.

Let’s hope a new administration will bring some real help to women, men and children here and abroad.

One of the projects I have been working on is helping to develop a conference examining the new African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Similar to the European Court and American Court, the African court was established in January of 2004 in order to hear human rights cases across the African Continent.

Established in part to reinforce the existing system comprised of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, it was also instituted because of serious flaws in the existing system. These flaws included institutional weaknesses, lack of resources ($), and inefficiency (long delays in cases because of communication and always favoring amicable settlement at the expense of efficiency). Currently the court has not started hearing cases.

The African Court is unique because it protects not only civil and political rights, like other human rights courts, it also protects, social, economic, cultural and peoples’ rights, broadening the scope of rights. It is also unique because it is the only human rights court where judges are not allowed to sit in cases that deal with the country of which they are a citizen. It is also unique because it allows the court to look beyond the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights and its own protocol, it also can refer to any human rights instrument ratified by the State at issue. This includes international instruments such as the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination and The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women. This could potentially provide additional avenues for women and other minorities.

While there is much potential good coming out of the new court, there are several serious issues that may hinder it.
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One of the things I really enjoy doing while living in another country is taking an art class, particularly in a local craft. Here in Tanzania, batik is one of the most popular art forms. All along the town streets young men hawk piles of batiks to tourists, offering deals of “just 10,000 tsh”. Many of these batiks are simple, black outlines of animals in the Serengeti, backed by sunsets of yellow and orange. A huge industry, these inexpensive batiks are produced en-masse. At the same time, there is a market for high-end batiks that are incredibly detailed and can be as large as ten feet long.

I decided that I wanted to learn how to batik while I was living here. I was introduced to a local artist, Mollel, who agreed to give me lessons. On the first day I met him at his house and was introduced to his wife and three of their children. They were all warm and welcoming, and very excited to meet an American. Over the past two months I have gone to their house and learned how to make simple batiks, but I have also learned so much more.

For my third lesson I showed up at the house around noon. Because of confusion created by the language barrier, Mollel had not understood I would be coming. Instead of telling me to leave, he invited me in to join him and his family for their afternoon. I spent the next three hours talking to them about local culture, life in Tanzania and how the US differed. His wife taught me how to wear the local kanga around my waist and gave me one as a gift. She showed me how she braids her daughter’s hair in tiny rows, while her daughter taught the youngest son how to iron his clothes with an old fashioned iron that is heated with coals. After this day my art lessons became history and cultural lessons as well.
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I recently attended a conference that was co-hosted by the East Africa Law Society and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The conference was held to discuss the legacy of the ICTR court. Established by the UN in 1994 in order to prosecute those responsible for genocide in Rwanda, the court’s mandate is up in two years, after which the court will close. The conference topics ranged from how to apply the decisions in international cases, the future of international law in Africa, and how to transfer ICTR jurisprudence to Rwandan courts and/or hear cases in East African Regional Courts.

One topic that I found particularly interesting was the issue of where to house the massive archive collection that the ICTR has compiled after the court is closed. These materials include case files, appeals, exhibits, audio cassettes, video cassettes, transcripts, confidential records, etc.

According to one speaker, one of the unique aspects of the ICTR court is the fact that all evidence has been electronically recorded. Rather than bringing in a photo or an artifact for evidence, lawyers refer to a large electronic screen where the evidence is shown to the entire court. As a result, in some sense the archives can have multiple ‘houses’.

While this is true, there is apparently a movement by some to remove the physical archives from Africa and house them in the Hague. As one speaker, Yitiha Simbeye, a law professor in Tanzania pointed out in her presentation, “countless Africans will be virtually denied access if the Tribunal’s archives are relocated outside the continent and in particular to a Western country as Visa requirements and cost of travel will curtail access.”
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