When the United States under George W. Bush waged its losing wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the war on terror, many American women enlisted in the military, and took part in all military roles except for direct combat. In Afghanistan and Iraq, 6376 Americans were killed, according to the latest statistics released this month, including 144 women. But how did the U.S. military reward its women? In 2011, the Pentagon recorded 3192 incidents of sexual assaults in the military, in an increase of one percent from 2010. However, the Department of Defence itself states that the majority of incidents of sexual assault, rape and harassment go unreported, and estimates that reported cases represent only 13.5 percent of the real number of incidents, which means that the latter should number around 19 thousand each year. There is a similar situation in Britain, according to what I read in the press from time to time. However, such incidents remain limited because the number of British troops is much lower, while it seems that this trend exists all around the world – yet we probably hear about it more in countries where there is the rule of law and a free press. Against this backdrop, we heard about a rally for women's rights that took place in Washington Square in New York City this week, which included a show presented by the Raging Grannies, sponsored by the Occupy Wall Street movement. If women in developed Western democracies are suffering from injustice, then what is the status of women in the countries of the Third, Fourth and Tenth worlds? Do I even need to ask? People from the Third World flee to developed countries away from poverty and lack of rights but take their world along with them. I am writing against the backdrop of the ongoing trial in London of a couple of Pakistani origin, namely Iftikhar and Farzana Ahmed, who strangled their daughter Shafilea, aged seventeen, to death, because she rebelled against their will. The crime was witnessed by Shafilea's younger sister Alesha, who testified against her parents in court. What I understood from following up the story was that the parents killed their daughter for fear of things a rebellious girl may do, not for things she had already done. In Pakistan, one of the ‘hobbies' men pursue is throwing acid on women's faces. There are civil associations fighting this crime which has been around for decades, but which only came to the limelight recently when Fakhra Younus committed suicide by throwing herself from the sixth floor of a building she lived in at a suburb south of Rome. Fakhra had undergone 38 surgeries over a full decade, after acid was thrown in her face. The other crime was the fact that her husband, who was accused of the crime, was tried and exonerated. Her husband was a rich regional governor named Bilal Khar, and his cousin Hana Rabbani Khar went on to become the Foreign Minister of Pakistan. In Morocco, a few days after Fakhra committed suicide, Amina Filali, aged sixteen, committed suicide, after she was forced to marry the man who had raped her. A major campaign in Morocco ensued, demanding that the relevant laws, such as Article 475 of the Criminal Code which allows the charge to be dropped if the minor girl marries her abductor, to be amended. As I was reading about the campaign, I learned that in 2010, there were 41 thousand instances of minor girls getting married in Morocco, an increase of 25 percent compared to the previous year. In truth, the marriage of minors is more endemic in Yemen and Sudan. Meanwhile, honour crimes are widespread in Jordan, where a person who kills his daughter or sister may return to his village a hero a few months after he commits his crime, because the law is on the side of the killer, not the victim. Tahrir Square in Cairo witnessed a historic youth revolution, but which had not been free of abuse of women, sometimes recorded in video and audio, and which will not be easily forgotten, like the sight of the young woman with the blue bra as she was being assaulted and dragged by security men , all while she was semi-naked. This girl disappeared from the news. However, the colleague and friend Mona Eltahawy is a true warrior, and when she was assaulted and sexually harassed she did not keep quiet; instead, fought back and wrote about her experience. Recently, I read in the Independent an interview with her, in which she was pictured with her arms in bandages six months after the incident. Mona had a previous encounter with the authorities, when she entered bareheaded to the office of the late Sheikh al-Azhar Dr. Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, who looked at her and said: How do you enter like this naked? Mona became furious because the Sheikh took a bare head as the equivalent of being nude, and had a loud argument with him. I will not get myself into the debate over the headscarf, but I just want to say that the Al-Azhar itself had once issued a statement saying that the headscarf is tradition, not religious duty. So perhaps Al-Azhar will soon issue a statement confirming that driving cars is not a violation of religion, so that the mentally and humanly backwards people will leave the Saudi activist Manal al-Sharif alone. [email protected]
