Women and politics in the Sudan

TheHuman Rights of Women in Sudan

by :D.Nahid Tobia

Dear readers of Darb Alintifada,

We continue our on-line political symposium on the Sudanese Women Rights. It is our pleasure to introduce to you today, a distinguished Sudanese woman activist and a scholar who contributed in many occasions to the cause of the Sudanese women inside and outside Sudan.

She is the first woman surgeon in Sudan, a member of several scientific and technical advisory committees of World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and UNDP. She is a member of the board of directors of the "Women's Rights Watch".

Please let's welcome our speaker today, Dr. Nahid Farid Toubia: assistant Professor at Columbia University and the Director of the Research, Action & Information Network for Bodily Integrity of Women, RAINBO (http://www.rainbo.org).

______________________________________________________________

Dear fellow Sudanese,

My name is Nahid Toubia. I am a Sudanese (even though I do not belong to a known tribe or a large extended family & therefore, as common in Sudan, my Sudaneseness is constantly in question).

Well I am Sudanese not only because I carry a Sudanese passport but most importantly, because I identify as being Sudanese and am proud of it. I also believe that my heart and loyalties are to Sudan. To me that is enough.

Excuse me for this unusual introduction but I've to communicate what I believe is at the heart of many of the human rights and social conflict issues of Sudan. I am a medical doctor by training and currently live and work in New York.

What do I think of the issue of the human rights of Sudanese women? I can easily fill a few books with my thoughts, feelings and pain but, I think neither I or the readers have the time for that right now.

My general thoughts about the NDA exclusion of women is that I am not surprised. I am not sure that the NDA or any of the political parties who belong to it ever truly cared about the women's issues and therefore I do not necessarily want them to have women representative.

My long and painful experience with the so called "progressive movement" of Sudan, is that they may be progressive about many things but not women ! If they invite women to participate it is because they think it is something the modern world expects of them and therefore they would get a token woman here or there to fill in a space. A second reason is that they think that when we go back to democracy they will need women's vote. I know I am sounding very cynical, but this is the result of being a political activist in Sudan for many years.

I have been invited to write a paper to contribute to what I think may be the NDA conference referred to in this symposium. I did not find the time to write it. The reason I did not find the time amongst my other priorities is not because I do not care about Sudanese women's issues but my profound conviction that anything I say will not be taken seriously enough to be worth my efforts.

My thoughts about the human rights of women in Sudan is that they have been violated not only by this government, which only took the violations to another height and extreme, but by every government and political party in Sudan through out its modern history. Let me give you one example. We are one of the few countries amongst our African as well as Arab neighbors who have had a rule in the books that does not allow women to travel without the permission of their male guardian. This rule was put in place by the Numeiri government and was kept intact by the following governments and no political opposition political party or Sudanese human rights organization ever questioned it.

Of course "freedom of movement" is a fundamental principle of human rights but the majority male leaders of the opposition never thought that for a grown woman (whether educated or uneducated) to take permission to travel is a humiliation never entered their minds. As part of my work I once did a comparative between the laws that affect women in different Arab countries. This included the laws of the current government but also laws that have been there since independence. I found out that Sudan have the worst set of laws regarding women's freedom & decision making, marriage, divorce, custody and such issues that most countries. It is simply a disgrace.

A fundamental reason why women's rights was not considered human rights in the international forums until the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993 is that much of what severely affects women and violates them happens in the home which was considered a private domain and therefore not subject to public policy. This has now changed because the link between the private (where violations happen in the family and by individuals and groups in society) is fundamentally linked to what happens in public. For example we can say that the right to education is a public issue but the control of a brother over his sisters life is a private issue.

Well it does not take much reasoning to realize how the brothers control could stop his sister from going to school. Other issues such as domestic violence (which of course people in Sudan as many other countries deny it ever happens) sexual abuse, female circumcision and lack of reproductive choices are always considered by traditional political parties as irrelevant or secondary to the great struggles for national freedom, economic development or whatever happens to be the issues of the moments. Most political parties (and I believe those of the NDA are no exception) will only want to speak of the human rights of women when they overlap with those that affect men as well such as political imprisonment, torture etc and they avoid the specifically women's issues.

I believe, and experience all over the world has proved it, that you cannot truly build a democratic society until you are willing to discuss the full range of human rights abuses whether they are undertaken by a repressive regime such as the one we have now or by the society as a whole. My question to us as a Sudanese people is whether we have the courage, the honesty and true believe in the equality of all human beings to start addressing all human rights violations in Sudan and not only the extremes of the current regime which has the audacity to use Islam to oppress women beyond human tolerance.

One thing I witnessed in the last years I lived in Sudan is that repressive Sudanese regimes (under Numeiri or El Turabi/El Bashir) leadership use the social control over women's as a way to win over the men. That says something very deep and ugly about our society. I am not accusing or incriminating all men (because women are part f the patriarchal structure) but I believe that Sudanese society is so deeply conservative and antagonistic to true equality and freedom for women. If we want to start a discussion about women's human rights we must be ready to open the discussion to all women's issues and not whether the current regime covered women in suffocating clothes or put some in jail.

If we are to talk about women's participation in development and in a democratic Sudan we cannot stop at some lip service to improved education but to truly bridging the literacy gap and putting in place the investment and infrastructure that will give women education and employment opportunities without total dependency on the family which is where much of the oppression occurs. We need to facilitate the development of institutions that will give autonomy to women in their lives and decisions and to provide the services, including birth control, child support benefits and other fundamentals to reduce the burden of child birth and child caring for women.

If the NDA wants women to join their forces only to contribute wailing over the excesses of this government maybe women are not interested. Could it be that many Sudanese women, including hundreds who are living working and flourishing in other societies (where there is social, economic as well as political freedom for women) cannot be bothered with contributing to the agenda because they feel the futility of talking to those who do not really want to listen?

There are a lot of talented, intelligent and high spirited Sudanese women in the smallest village in Sudan and in the toughest capitals of the world. If a future plan for Sudan is to include these women, and not further alienate them, the NDA will have to show a much stronger commitment to women's economic, social and personal rights as well as their political rights than they have done to date.

Women are not just sheep to be herded to where the men of the NDA want them. My guess is that women, by their silence and absenting themselves from the debate have already voted on the policies of the NDA towards women's issues. The message is that we will stand by you in the struggle to liberate Sudan and restore democracy but do not insult us by pretending to care about our issues.

I know what I said will anger many, but I only spoke my mind truthfully and honestly without diplomacy or any political calculations. I have kept my silence and will continue keeping my silence unless I feel there is equal honesty in the listening and the consequent action.

My best wishes to all of you in your struggle to survive and to make sense of this world inside and outside Sudan.

Nahid Toubia