Painful ritual for Kurdish girls
Assyrian International News Agency reports on female genital mutilation (FGM) in Kurdistan.
Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor’s house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.
There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. “I do this in the name of Allah!” she intoned.
As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan’s genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan’s mother smiled with pride.
“This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember,” said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. “We don’t know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it.”
Your elders may require it, but Islam apparently does not. The barbaric practice is not accepted in most Muslim states, nor does it occur among Iraqi Arabs. Also, some African tribal groups practice FGM for reasons unrelated to religion.
Pakshan Zangana, head of the women’s committee in the Kurdistan parliament, has been pushing for a law carrying a maximum ten-year sentence for anyone involved in FGM. A see-no-evil cabinet minister, however, says this is not necessary.
The Kurdish region’s minister of human rights, Yousif Mohammad Aziz, said he didn’t think the issue required action by parliament. “Not every small problem in the community has to have a law dealing with it,” he said.
FGM a “small problem”? Kurdistan needs a minister of human rights who actually knows something about human rights.