Iraq-Kurdistan – Female Circumcision FGM – Traditional & Controversial

WUNRN

By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Foreign Service
December  29, 2008

TUZ KHURMATU, Iraq

Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her
neighbor’s house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had
promised.

There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red
door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to
remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women
pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the
air. “I do this in the name of Allah!” she intoned.

As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan’s genitals, the girl let out a
high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing
child back home, Sheelan’s mother smiled with pride.

“This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can
remember,” said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this
ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. “We don’t know why
we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it.”

Kurdistan is the only known part of Iraq –and one of the few places in the
world–where female circumcision is widespread. More than 60 percent of women
in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq have been circumcised, according to a study
conducted this year. In at least one Kurdish territory, 95 percent of women
have undergone the practice, which human rights groups call female genital
mutilation.

The practice, and the Kurdish parliament’s refusal to outlaw it, highlight
the plight of women in a region with a reputation for having a more progressive
society than the rest of Iraq. Advocates for women point to the increasing
frequency of honor killings against women and female self-immolations in
Kurdistan this year as further evidence that women in the area still face
significant obstacles, despite efforts to raise public awareness of
circumcision and violence against women.

“When the Kurdish people were fighting for our independence, women
participated as full members in the underground resistance,” said Pakshan
Zangana, who heads the women’s committee in the Kurdish parliament. “But
now that we have won our freedom, the position of women has been pushed
backwards and crimes against us are minimized.”

Zangana has been lobbying for a law in Kurdistan, a semiautonomous region
with its own government, that would impose jail terms of up to 10 years on
those who carry out or facilitate female circumcision. But the legislation has
been stalled in parliament for nearly a year, because of what women’s advocates
believe is reluctance by senior Kurdish leaders to draw international public
attention to the little-noticed tradition.

The Kurdish region’s minister of human rights, Yousif Mohammad Aziz, said he
didn’t think the issue required action by parliament. “Not every small
problem in the community has to have a law dealing with it,” he said.

The practice of female circumcision is extremely rare in the Arab parts of Iraq,
according to women’s groups. They say it is not clear why the practice —
common in some parts of Africa and the Middle East — became popular with Iraqi
Kurds but not Iraqi Arabs.

Supporters of female circumcision said the practice, which has been a ritual
in their culture for countless generations, is rooted in sayings they attribute
to the prophet Muhammad, though the accuracy of those sayings is disputed by
other Muslim scholars. The circumcision is performed by women on women, and men
are usually not involved in the procedure. In the case of Sheelan, her mother
informed her father that she was going to have the circumcision performed, but
otherwise, he played no role.

Kurds who support circumcising girls say the practice has two goals: It
controls a woman’s sexual desires, and it makes her spiritually clean so that
others can eat the meals she prepares.

“I would not eat food from the hands of someone who did not have the
procedure,” said Hurmet Kitab, a housewife who said she was 91 years old.

Kitab, who lives in the village of Kalar in Kurdistan’s eastern Germian
area, where female circumcision is prevalent, has had the procedure done on
herself and all her daughters. When asked if she would have her 10-month-old
granddaughter Saya circumcised, Kitab said “Of course” and explained
that the procedure is painless.

“They just cut off a little bit,” she said, flicking her finger at
the top part of a key, which she then dropped on the floor.

Women’s rights groups in Kurdistan are working eagerly to change the
perception that the procedure is harmless and that it is required under Islam.
They go to villages in rural areas where the practice is most ingrained and
tell women and religious leaders of the physical and psychological damage the
circumcision can cause. Health experts say the procedure can result in adverse
medical consequences for women, including infections, chronic pain and
increased risks during childbirth.

Ghamjeen Shaker, a 13-year-old from the Kurdish capital of Irbil, said she
is still traumatized from the day she was circumcised. She sits with her legs
clenched together and her hands clasped tightly on her lap, as if protecting
herself from another operation. Indeed, Shaker says she sometimes dreams that
the midwife who circumcised her is coming back to perform the procedure again.

She was 5 when her mother sent her out to buy parsley and then locked her in
the front yard of their home with six other girls. “I knew something bad
was going to happen, but I didn’t know exactly where they were going to
cut,” she recalled. “My family just kept saying, don’t worry, this is
a social custom we have been doing forever.”

“They pinned me to the ground, and I just cried and cried,” said
Shaker, who spoke barely above a whisper. “I was just so astonished. But
now I realize that they want to prevent women from living their lives
normally.”

Her mother, Shukria Ismaeel Jarjees, a 38-year-old housewife, said she was
forced by her relatives and elderly women in the community to have her daughter
circumcised. “I made a huge mistake, and now my daughter is always
complaining of pain in her pelvis,” Jarjees said. Her eyes began to fill
with tears. “I now advise my daughters to never circumcise their
children.”

Shaker hopes to become a social worker focusing on women’s issues, in
particular other girls traumatized by female circumcision.

“I want to make sure the world understands they cannot silence girls
like this,” she said.

Susan Faqi Rasheed, president of the Irbil branch of the Kurdistan Women’s
Union, said that even in the cosmopolitan capital, as many as a third of young
girls are circumcised. “When the Kurds hold on to something, they hold on
to it strongly,” she said. “So now they hold to Islam more than the
Arabs.”

One of the religious leaders who have been less vocal in demanding female
circumcisions is Hama Ameen Abdul Kader Hussein, preacher at the Grand Mosque
of Kalar and head of the clergymen’s union in Germian. Previously, he preached
that female circumcision was required. Now he says it is optional, which
Hussein believes has caused the area’s rate of female circumcision to drop from
100 percent to about 50 percent.

“If there is any harm in this exercise,” he said, “we should
not do it.”

Despite the outreach efforts, a study of women in more than 300 Kurdish
villages by WADI, a German nongovernmental group that advocates against female
circumcision, found that 62 percent underwent the procedure.

In Tuz Khurmatu, the most famous practitioner of female circumcision is
Maharoub Juwad Nawchas, a 40-year-old midwife with traditional Kurdish tattoos
covering her chin. She learned from her mother, who used to perform the
procedure for free, though Nawchas now charges 4,000 Iraqi dinars, or just
under $3.50, because her husband is disabled and can’t work. She has
circumcised about 30 girls a year for the past two decades.

On the day she circumcised Sheelan, the midwife began the ritual by laying
down an empty white potato sack to serve as her working area. AK-47
assault rifles hung from the wall of the dingy concrete house, and watermelons
rested below.

When Sheelan entered the room, her mother, Nawchas and a local woman placed
the girl on a tiny wooden stool the size of a brick. The midwife applied yellow
antiseptic to her pelvic area and injected her with lignocaine, an anesthetic.
Little children peeked through the window to see what the noise was about.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Sheelan’s mother whispered, as
the girl screamed so loudly her face turned red. She tried to bunch up her
skirt over her pelvis and shield the area with her hand, but the women jerked
her arms back.

Then Nawchas uttered the prayer, made a swift cut, and immediately moved the
girl over a pile of ashes to control the bleeding.

The entire ritual took less then 10 minutes.

Back home, Sheelan lay on the floor, unable to move or talk much. She
clutched a bag filled with orange soda and candy and barely said anything
except that she was in pain.

But she became more animated when asked whether it was worth it to have the
operation so her friends and neighbors would be comfortable eating food she
prepared. “I would do anything not to have this pain, even if meant they
would not eat from my hands,” she rasped slowly.

“I just wish that I could be the way I was before the procedure,”
she said.

_____________________________________________________________

Elahe Amani
– elahe4peace@yahoo.com

https://www.iran-women-solidarity.net/spip.php?article635

Female Genital Mutilation – A Violation of Women’s Human Rights

 4
January 2009

 

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