Tunisia: Longing For A Place To Call Home

Since the outbreak of war in 1991, Somalia has been left with no central government. Located in the Horn of Africa, this east African country has managed to maintain an informal economy based on livestock, remittances from its expatriate community, and the telecommunications sector. However, two decades of civil war has disrupted many lives and forced many Somalis to flee their country in search of asylum.

Sixty-three year old Hawiyeh Awal is one of them. Eighteen years ago Hawiyeh embarked on a treacherous journey through the desert with her daughter after violence, which claimed the lives of her entire family, and caused severe damages to both of her hands.

"Both of my hands were hit during a gun battle and they were unable to save my small finger on my left hand. My right hand suffered many fractures. After losing my family it was hard to ignore the situation anymore," Awal told Her Blueprint. "The government in Mogadishu wasn't doing anything to protect us and I needed to find safety for me and my daughter."

Relying on middlemen, Hawiyeh was able to survive a four month journey through the desert to finally reach her destination in Libya. For eighteen years, she managed to rebuild her life working as a domestic worker for Libyan families but then the civil war broke out.

When we met, Hawiyeh was sitting outside her makeshift tent with her daughter and grandson as they tried to find a bit of shade from the Tunisian desert's scorching sun. She was sitting on a white bucket that she had turned upside down to function as a temporary chair, while her daughter -- who is in her late twenties -- nibbles at the couscous mixed with onions and tomatoes they were given for lunch.

"I'm scared that I'm going to die in this hot desert," she explains. "I have diabetes and I've lost more than eight kilos since coming here because of the hot weather."

Like many other migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers from Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, Hawiyeh was once again uprooted from her fairly stable situation and forced to flee to Libya's North African neighbor of Tunisia by bus several months ago.

"The situation was getting really bad. Many families were being held up at gunpoint in their homes and robbed," Hawiyeh adds. "I started to worry for my daughter because she is without a husband and emotionally I just couldn't bear going through another war."

Tens of thousands of individuals have crossed Ras Ajdir border crossing to the under-equipped and under-staffed Shousha refugee camp in Tunisia with what little belongings they manage to salvage. For many, Libya was a relatively stable economy where one could find modest work or flee political violence due to Muammar Gaddafi's Pan African stance in the 1990's, which opened the country's borders.

Now many just wait for another border to open.

"My daughter and I can't bear the situation in this camp anymore because all we do is sit and wait. We're just hoping to be resettled in a safe place where I can find medical treatment because here we must first get approval from the Tunisian military in order to access any kind of healthcare," Hawiyeh adds. "The problem is that the West decided to bomb Libya in order to protect people but also decided to close their borders so no one is interested in protecting us. We're trapped here."

Pakistani Rape Victim and Women's Rights Leader Mukhtar Mai Denied Justice

Mukhtar Mai

If a decision made last week by the Pakistan Supreme Court is upheld, five men convicted of gang rape in 2002 will be released back to the village where the crime took place, and the life of an international women's rights leader will be in danger.

Nine years ago, Mukhtar Mai was ordered by a tribal council in Pakistan to be gang raped in her home village of Meerwala in retaliation for an adultery accusation. The accusation, made by a rival clan, claimed that Mai's then-12 year-old brother had sex with a woman from the higher-caste Mastoi tribe. Outside investigators would later find that her brother had been molested, and that the Mastoi were trying to cover it up.

Mukhtar Mai's rape case gained international attention when she refused to do what most Pakistani women would do in her position -- commit suicide. Instead, Mai waged a legal battle against the five men who had attacked her. She would then go on to form Mukhtar Mai Women's Welfare Organization, to support and educate Pakistani women and girls; and have her story retold in Nicholas Kristof's Half the Sky, as well as in an upcoming feature film.

According to the Aurat Foundation, nearly 1,000 women were raped in Pakistan last year, while 1,500 were murdered and 2,000 were abducted.

Human Rights Watch called on Pakistan's government to petition the full court to review the case and asked authorities to protect Mai, who now fears for her life. Human Rights called the case "one of the most important tests of women's rights in memory."

Mai, now 40, plans to file a petition against the acquittal in a few days.

Can Sharia Law Benefit Women in the West?

Photo courtesy of Shirin Neshat

A recent article by Indiana attorney Rafia Zakaria in Guernica magazine begs the question of whether or not Islamic feminism is possible.

Zakaria takes us from her personal account of a childhood spent in Pakistan, to her experiences as a social worker helping battered women in Indianapolis, where the complexities faced by married women in the Muslim world seem without boundaries. Ironically, it was in Indianapolis that the author realized that an Islamic version of a prenuptial agreement could grant women more rights than one filed in America.

Representing a Jordanian woman whose husband divorced her by forging her signature then abandoning her in a motel room, Zakaria worked tirelessly to help the woman gain more rights than American law had allowed. In a harrowing tale fraught with many obstacles, Zakaria eventually managed to grant the woman a fair chance at financial stability in her chosen home country--by convincing the court to honor her Islamic pre-nup.

Zakaria's piece couldn't be more timely, as a handful of state legislatures are contemplating passing policies that would ban Sharia law from being practiced in the U.S. Whether or not Sharia law is in all actuality a threat to state and federal constitutions is also under debate. So far the squeakiest wheel in the "Sharia v U.S. law" debate has been Newt Gingrich, who received a standing ovation at a Values Voter Summit recently by demanding a national call to action regarding the issue.

The author's conclusion from her client's ordeal is that sometimes even traditional, faith-based laws can strengthen the U.S.'s more modern court systems. But is a breach in the separation of church and state even tenable to westerners, even if it does lift the oppression of women?

Zakaria writes, "...if things are to change, the recipe lies not in eliminating faith from the legal sphere but rather redefining it in a way that empowers women using the very tools that were used to enslave them."

I want to agree with this assessment, but is it really possible to take minute aspects of Sharia law and integrate them into the U.S. justice system in a way that is progressive and beneficial to all?

United Nations Creates a New Women's Rights Coalition

A group of Pokot women in Chemeril Dam, Kenya.

After four tense years of negotiations between global advocates and UN Member states, the United Nations has established UN Women, an organization combining four previous UN women’s rights groups, to fight for gender equality and the empowerment of women.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “UN Women will significantly boost UN efforts to promote gender equality, expand opportunity, and tackle discrimination around the globe.”

Over the United Nations’s 65-year history, its primary objectives have centered on “gender mainstreaming,” or the promotion of gender equality through legislative initiatives and special programs. The UN’s focus on women began with the establishment of the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) in 1946.

While there has been a steady increase of government commitment to women's rights in the developing world, critics argue that many of the UN’s initiatives have been signed into legislation without further monitoring or even implementation. And while women comprise the majority of the population—as well as the world’s most impoverished—they are direly lacking in representation on an international scale.

According to UNIFEM, women provide 70 percent of agricultural labor and produce more than 90 percent of the food in some regions of the globe. Yet women earn 10 percent of the world’s income and own one percent of the world’s property.

With so much on the line for women struggling under global financial collapse, will the new coalition go beyond the UN’s initial aims of “gender mainstreaming” in order to create real change?

While the organization will not get to work until January 2011, Secretary-General Ban is currently inviting suggestions as to who should be appointed Under-Secretary-General to head UN Women. Member states and civil society partners are more likely to choose a leader from the non-Western, developing world, where international legislation is sorely needed. According to Amnesty International, maternal deaths in the US rose from 6.6 per 100,000 pregnancies and births in 1987 to 13.3 percent in 2006. While in South Asia, some 300 to 400 maternal deaths have been reported for every 100,000 pregnancies and births.

Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet rumored to be a top choice for Under-Secretary-General.