Somalia-Gender Based Violence Impact on Warlord Opposition
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: June 19, 2006
Foes
Somali Women Gave Crucial Support
for Islamic Militias
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday,
June 18, 2006
MOGADISHU, Somalia, June 17 — Sometimes, the women here said, it began with
a knock on the door after dark or with a kidnapping in broad daylight. And
sometimes, the gunmen who ruled this city would use a long, sharp knife to slice
open the tin shacks of poor families and snatch their daughters away.
The girls would return — if they returned — in the morning, sobbing and
marked permanently as castoffs in a traditional Islamic society that demands
virginity at marriage.
“Four-year-old girls, 5-year-old girls were raped,” said Anab Mohamed Isaaq,
35, a solemn, long-faced widow who has two girls among her five children. “I was
scared for my daughters.”
An epidemic of sexual violence during 15 years of lawlessness in Somalia was
among the factors that strengthened opposition to this city’s notorious
warlords, residents said. The Islamic militias who drove them out in months of
recent fighting were embraced as keepers of public order, as a force strong
enough and pious enough to keep Mogadishu’s daughters safe.
That helped the militias win the support of Mogadishu’s increasingly
influential women, who in recent years had joined the job market en masse to
support their families in the midst of a collapsing economy. On streets
throughout this ruined city, they sold vegetables, plastic jugs of gasoline and
khat, a popular, addictive leaf chewed widely here.
“Women were doing what men used to do here,” said Shariff Osman, 45, dean of
the faculty at Mogadishu University. “They were paying the bills.”
When fighting broke out in January, the airwaves suddenly were full of angry
denunciations of the secular warlords and support for the Islamic militias
fighting them. Most of the callers were women, said Somalis who monitored the
political upheaval as it played out on radio talk shows.
And though it was guns and not words that chased away the warlords, the
intensity of the public revulsion for them provided crucial support for the
Islamic militias as they advanced through this oceanside capital, analysts,
activists and business leaders say.
“Somalia was saved because of the Somali women,” said Khadija O. Ali, 47,
founder of a women’s group here and a graduate student in conflict resolution at
George Mason University. “I think it is even something that the men acknowledge
now. Finally.”
At the top of the list of their concerns, Ali and other women said, was
curbing murder, robbery and rape in one of the world’s most dangerous
cities.
In the absence of a central government — the last one fell to the warlords
in 1991 — city leaders chose to deal with these problems by establishing
traditional Islamic courts, with one overseeing the members of each of the
city’s dozen or so leading families. The courts relied on Islamic law, which
calls for thieves’ hands to be amputated, murderers to be publicly executed and
rapists to either die or face public lashings, depending on the circumstances of
the case. (Residents say that, in practice, jail sentences have been far more
common punishments for crimes.)
One such court was set up last year, Ali said, after four gunmen knocked on
the door of a home shortly before midnight and demanded that the man inside turn
over his 20-year-old stepdaughter. She returned the next day in tears, said a
neighbor, who spoke on the condition on anonymity.
A month later, the same gunmen returned to rape the young woman again, but
she was already gone, said the neighbor, sent away in shame to a remote part of
Somalia. So instead the gunmen demanded the man’s wife. When she refused, the
gunmen shot the man in both legs, crippling him, and shot and killed his
wife.
Few dispute there has been a dramatic decline in crime in Mogadishu since the
fall of the warlords June 5, though in the absence of a police force, there are
no crime statistics.
But not all women say their stature has grown as the country moves toward
Islamic law.
Ubah Mohamed, 34, a widow with seven children, was among the women who joined
Mogadishu’s workforce. But she said the beauty shop she opened a decade ago has
been losing regular customers, from more than 300 to about one-third that
number, as radical Islamic values appear to be gaining wider acceptance.
“The militias patrol our areas looking to see if girls are going out with
boys,” she said. “So the girls don’t come to beauty salons like ours.”
Mohamed, meanwhile, began wearing a black hijab to cover her own hair
out of fear of what the newly powerful militias might do. In a city where
residents report that public viewing of the World Cup has been curbed, she
predicted that beauty shops, including hers, would be closed soon as well.
Yet even for Mohamed, recent months have brought a kind of liberation. When
the public mood began to boil, she called one of Mogadishu’s several radio
stations and complained about the gunmen and their thirst for robbery and
rape.
“I was one of those ladies,” she recalled. “We don’t need warlords.”
Isaaq, the widow who has five children, has mixed feelings about the changes
in Somalia. She would rather have remained home with her children, as her mother
did, she said. And the stray bullet that killed her husband last month struck
him at their house, which, because he was unemployed, is where he spent most of
his time. As Isaaq went door-to-door selling clothes, he had stayed home,
watching the younger children.
Their two daughters — Nasteexo, 10, and Hamsa, 7 — also spent most of their
time at home because Isaaq forbade them to walk alone outside. She grimly
recalled a time two years ago when she saw the body of a girl of about 4, the
relative of a neighbor, who had been raped and killed.
But now, Isaaq revels in watching her daughters leave the house, hand in
hand, and without her. For the first time since she had them, Isaaq said, she
worries not at all.
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