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Djibouti: Women Fight Mutilation
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UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
12 July 2005
Posted to the web 12 July 2005
Djibouti City
For thousands of years, girls in the area that is now the tiny African country of Djibouti, have been subjected to pharaonic circumcision.
It is a practice that involves cutting away a girl's inner labia and clitoris, and sewing the wound together, leaving a tiny hole for passing urine and menstrual blood.
Siti Robitu, 21, describes a recent argument she had with her family over the circumcision of her four-year old daughter. "My father, my mother - they all cried," she said. "They wanted my daughter to be circumcised. I was against it."
Siti, a nursing aid in a local clinic, belongs to a small number of mothers in Djibouti who are trying to protect their daughters from the circumciser's knife.
Despite medical evidence that genital mutilation puts women at risk of infection, pain and complications during childbirth, social pressure is such that most mothers opt to circumcise their daughters.
"At first, I asked the doctor to do it, but he refused," Siti said. "My mother was furious. When you are not circumcised, the whole neighbourhood talks behind your back. They say she [my daughter] is like a white woman."
Djibouti's health ministry estimates that 98 percent of all Djiboutian women are circumcised - the highest rate of any country in the world.
"Mothers have their daughters infibulated to make sure that they get a husband and a secure future. Otherwise they get loose and become prostitutes, people believe here," Fatuma Abdi, from the Djibouti National Women's Union (UNDF) explained.
"It is the women not the men who insist on circumcision," she added. "The weird thing is that my mother believes she has benefited from it. How, she can't tell me."
Siti is encouraged by activists like Fatuma Abdi not to follow age-old tradition.
Door to door campaigns, programmes on government radio and roundtable television shows bring the new message into every home.
Teachers are obliged to talk about the issue for at least five minutes a day, so girls do not perpetuate in adulthood what may have already been done to them.
It has been a long, hard struggle for Djiboutian women activists to get this far.
QUARTER CENTURY OF STRUGGLE
Twenty-six years ago, members of the women's union started the fight against female genital mutilation (FGM). The breakthrough came only early this year after a decade-long series of conferences and meetings with religious leaders.
Safia Elmi, technical advisor to the Ministry of Health, recalls the outcry of more than 200 women in a conference hall on 2 February, when Muslim Imams conceded that female circumcision was not required by the Koran.
Nonetheless, they demanded that women still have at least their clitoris cut.
"That was the best thing that happened to us," Safia says. "We all stood up and shouted - 'don't touch our girls'."
The Minister of Health was forced to call another closed session with clergymen. They finally declared female circumcision a thing of the past.
This, however, was just on paper.
FGM was made a criminal offence in Djibouti as far back as 1994, incurring a penalty of one million Djbouti francs (US $5,500), or up to two years imprisonment.
"But until now, nobody was jailed or fined because it is difficult to fine someone for a cultural practice that is very widespread," said Ayanne Hassan Omar, spokeswoman for Djibouti's president, Omar Guelleh.
FIGHT ACROSS BORDERS
Safia Elmi is establishing an organisation of midwives who oppose FGM. She wants to track down those who carry out female circumcisions and have them prosecuted.
Increased public censure in Djibouti, she says, means more Djiboutian mothers are taking their daughters to Ethiopia or Somaliland to be circumcised. To prevent this, she wants to create a regional anti-FGM committee.
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The UNDF's Fatuma Abdi says circumcision is primarily cultural, not religious: "It is not just the Muslims who are practicing infibulation. It is the Catholics as well."
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