On December 14, Sudanese journalist Halima Mohamed blogged on PulseWire. Pulsewire is a part of World Pulse, which is a global media and communication network devoted to bringing women a global voice. “PulseWire is a place where women and our allies can come together to transform our lives and the world.”
Halima reported some disturbing news. On the 14th, Sudanese Police and members of National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) brutally beat and detained dozens of women in Khartoum. The women are members of the Women Initiative Against Violence (WIAV) and, ironically, they were peacefully protesting the Public Law Order, which condones violence against women. Sudan has been governed by Islamic Shariah law since 1983 when it was introduced by former president Gaafar al-Nimeiri. The Public Order Law criminalizes acts such as the mixing of unmarried couples sitting together, drinking alcohol and women wearing trousers in public, and punishes them with fines or lashes.
Rights groups say the law doesn’t give guidelines about what constitutes an indecent act, leaving it up to the personal interpretation of each policeman. Amnesty International has called on the Sudanese government to amend its penal code and abolish laws that allow for flogging as a penalty, calling it “cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.” The introduction of Sharia law was one reason why people in the south, where most people are Christian or follow traditional religions, took up arms against the Arabic-speaking, Muslim north. After a 2005 peace deal, a referendum is due in January on whether the south should secede from Africa’s largest country.
Four World Pulse members, including physicians and journalists of all ages, were among the arrested women. The impetus behind the protest was a recent lashing of a young woman because she wore pants in public. This event was captured on video and quickly made the rounds online all over the world.
Khartoum’s police “contained an illegal assembly” today arresting 46 women and six men, because the organizers didn’t get permission for the protest, the police said in a statement on the Interior Ministry’s website. The detainees were released, but they remain under investigation for illegal assembly, disturbing public safety and public nuisance, the statement said. The women said they had tried to get permission for the protest but had been refused. The police declined to comment.
The arrest of the protesters captured the attention of many major media outlets: BBC, CNN, Reuters, etc. As the women started to gather, the police blocked most roads leading to center of Khartoum and prevented many cars and mini buses bringing women from adjacent areas to join the gathering. Undaunted, more than forty women got around the police blockage and assembled outside the Justice Ministry building holding banners condemning the law, while they were surrounded by riot police telling them to disperse. The women held their ground.
What many major media outlets neglected to mention, however, was that when faced with their passive resistance, policemen in plain clothes hit, kicked and otherwise brutalized the women, forcing them into submission. The women shouted “Humiliating your women is humiliating all your people,” as they were dragged and thrown into vehicles and hauled to prison. All detainees were eventually bailed out and set free.
Halima described the violence in more detail in the following statement. The photo included with this post is one of the photos she refers to from the university demonstration.
“One of the protesters was taken to the emergency unit to be treated. There were women in the middle of their sixth decades. Najlaa Sid Ahmed, World Pulse member and citizen journalist, was one of the arrested women. She told me over phone, from Khartoum, that police and security had beaten women regardless of their ages or health conditions, while insulting and calling them bad names. To have full idea on how security men subdue demonstrations and put under their sway, please have a look on these photos depicting such treatment to subdue a demonstration that took place in Darfur this month, when Zalinge University Students protested denouncing the killing of two of their colleagues.”
Halima reports that until recently women have been afraid to speak out against brutality “for fear of being stigmatized as indecent.” But this is changing. She describes one woman, a journalist, Lubna Al Hussein, who was sentenced to flogging for wearing pants. Al Hussein brought massive international attention to the issue because she invited media to her flogging. Ultimately she was required to pay a fine instead. Al Hussein now lives in France where we can imagine she enjoys the freedom of wearing pants.
Thousands of women in Sudan have endured the mental and physical anguish of being publically flogged, but that won’t stop them from continuing to fight for justice. Halima aptly describes the shortsightedness and stupidity of a male-dominated society that humiliates and suppresses its women in the following statement:
“For the sitting government women in pants are more dangerous than the hard living conditions. Women in pants are more dangerous than malaria, environment deterioration, war in Darfur, looming cessation of the South, Abyei issue that may ignite violence over a 2100 km borders densely populated by different southerner and northerner tribes. Women in pants are more dangerous than the high rate of illiteracy, mass migration of physicians to other countries. Women in pants are more dangerous than a country that falls apart and that four important parts of its frontiers are trimmed by its neighbors, when it turns a blind eye to their army violating its supremacy. Women in pants are more important than a president crippling the country, economy, reputation and force his people to be scattered in the four corners.”
Yes Halima, women in pants are dangerous to the status quo because they are organizing and fighting for their rights and it is only a matter of time before they achieve the change they seek.
