This week, while perusing the newspaper and online media, I was confronted with quite a few articles about women around the world. The quality of life and liberty for women, I believe, is a harbinger of stability for all. After all, they bear and raise children and hold families and communities together. If women's rights are denied, all society suffers.
So as we close out 2005, how are women doing around the world?
Africa
Today's Washington Post features an interesting articleabout how Ethiopian girls are escaping early marriage, assured poverty and disease...by running from it.
Inspired by these new national heroines, Tesdale and thousands of other girls have left their villages and come to the capital, living with relatives in hardscrabble neighborhoods, training on their own and dreaming of being able to compete.
These girls are running for their lives.
In Ethiopia, getting an education is a true marathon: Girls' enrollment is among the lowest in the world, and women and girls are more likely to die in childbirth than reach sixth grade, according to UNICEF.
But perhaps these women are lucky. They do not live in Dafur.
Today's Sudan Tribune reports yet another salvo in the long, sad tale of Dafur. The women peace workers have sent another letter to the African Union Special Envoy asking for some progress in the peace process:
Dec 23, 2005 (ABUJA) -- We, the women of Darfur, coming from diverse backgrounds and in our different capacities as negotiators in the delegations of the Government of the Sudan and of the Movements, as gender experts, lawyers, civil society, endeavoring to push the peace process forward:
HEREBY:
- URGE all Parties to the negotiations to stay at the negotiating table and continue dialogue in order to arrive at a peace agreement, and heed the call from the Darfurian population to immediately put an end to the ongoing suffering.
- CONDEMN all forms of gender related violence and other types of security violations, such as :
- Selective murders taking the lives of innocent civilians in their homes or places of work in the cities of El-Fasher, El-Geneina and Nyala, as well as other cities and villages;
- The attack on the Abusruj Administrative Unit at Kulbus locality, West Darfur, and other bloody incidents, resulting in a number of innocent civilian casualties;
- Targeting the home of one of the female experts, currently supporting the peace process in Abuja, whose home was blown up, injuring a family member and amputating his body.
This Boston Globe
op ed piece by Swanee Hunt, director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, suggests some hope for women in Congo:
In Congo, several laws will be discussed in the coming months that could guarantee greater representation for women. Congolese voted overwhelmingly Dec. 18 to adopt a new constitution aimed at paving the way for national elections by the end of June 2006 and that instructs the new government to ''guarantee the establishment of equal representation between women and men in state institutions."
Why is this so important?
Political instability poses long-term consequences for citizens of Congo, particularly women, with militia gangs posing daily threats to their safety. Human Rights Watch reports that that many Congolese women and girls have been raped by men on all sides of the conflict. Despite the 2002 peace agreement, sexual violence as a weapon of war persists. Amnesty International reports widespread genital mutilation with sticks, knives, and even gunfire. Gang rapes and forced incest are rampant.
HIV is also increasing--
Worldwide, the growth of HIV/AIDS infection has alarmed international health agencies, which say almost half of all adults infected with HIV are now women. In hard-hit sub-Saharan Africa, 57 percent of those with the virus are women.
Middle East/Asia
CNN reports another Pakistani "honor killing":
MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) -- Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family's "honor" -- a crime that shocked Pakistan.
The 40-year old laborer, speaking to The Associated Press in police detention as he was being shifted to prison, confessed to just one regret -- that he didn't murder the stepsister's alleged lover, too.
His rationale?
"I thought the younger girls would do what their eldest sister had done, so they should be eliminated," he said, his hands cuffed, his face unshaven. "We are poor people and we have nothing else to protect but our honor."
Despite Ahmed's contention that Muqadas had committed adultery -- a claim made by her husband -- the rights commission reported that according to local people, Muqadas had fled her husband because he had abused her and forced her to work in a brick-making factory.
It's not just in Pakistan. From the Jerusalem Post:
When news spread through the Druse section of Shfaram that Samar Hasson had been found hanging from a tree in a local olive grove, drivers on the streets began honking their horns. "Everybody was celebrating, it was beautiful," recalled a young man who works at the Hasson clan's auto parts shop in this hillside, Muslim-Christian-Druse town northeast of Haifa. "She caused her family a lot of problems," nodded a co-worker.
It's not an isolated incident.
YEAR AFTER year, an average of about 10 Israeli Arab women become victims of family honor killings, said Aida Toama-Sliman, head of Women Against Violence, a Haifa-based organization of Israeli Arab women. Of the roughly 1,000 Israeli Arab women who've passed through the organization's state-funded shelter for women fleeing violent homes, some 200 to 300 came there in danger of being murdered for "violating" their family's honor, said Sahar Daoud, director of the Galilee shelter, which has been operating since 1993.
As we approach 2006, the state of women in much of this world is deplorable. And the US isn't doing much to help.