Women fueled Mogadishu takeover

[Paragon]

THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING

 

 

Women fueled Mogadishu takeover

Abused by warlords, they threw support to Islamic militias

By Craig Timberg, Washington Post | June 19, 2006

 

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Sometimes, the women said, it began with a knock on the door after dark or with a kidnapping in broad daylight. And sometimes, the gunmen who ruled this city would use a long, sharp knife to slice open the tin shacks of poor families and snatch their daughters away.

 

The girls would return -- if they returned -- in the morning, sobbing and marked permanently as castoffs in a traditional Islamic society that demands virginity at marriage.

 

``Four-year-old girls, 5-year-old girls were raped," said Anab Mohamed ***** , 35, a solemn, long-faced widow who has two girls among her five children. ``I was scared for my daughters."

 

An epidemic of sexual violence during 15 years of lawlessness in Somalia was among the factors that strengthened opposition to this city's notorious warlords, residents said. The Islamic militias who drove them out in months of recent fighting were embraced as keepers of public order, as a force strong enough and pious enough to keep Mogadishu's daughters safe.

 

That helped the militias win the support of Mogadishu's increasingly influential women, who in recent years had joined the job market en masse to support their families in the midst of a collapsing economy. On streets throughout this ruined city, they sold vegetables, plastic jugs of gasoline, and khat, a popular, addictive leaf chewed widely here.

 

``Women were doing what men used to do here," said Shariff Osman, 45, dean of the faculty at Mogadishu University. ``They were paying the bills."

 

When fighting broke out in January, the airwaves suddenly were full of angry denunciations of the secular warlords and support for the Islamic militias fighting them. Most of the callers were women, said Somalis who monitored the political upheaval as it played out on radio talk shows.

 

And though it was guns and not words that chased away the warlords, the intensity of the public revulsion for them provided crucial support for the Islamic militias as they advanced through this oceanside capital, analysts, activists, and business leaders say.

 

``Somalia was saved because of the Somali women," said Khadija O. Ali, 47, founder of a women's group here and a graduate student in conflict resolution at George Mason University. ``I think it is even something that the men acknowledge now. Finally."

 

At the top of the list of their concerns, Ali and other women said, was curbing murder, robbery, and rape in one of the world's most dangerous cities.

 

In the absence of a central government -- the last one fell to the warlords in 1991 -- city leaders chose to deal with these problems by establishing traditional Islamic courts, with one overseeing the members of each of the city's dozen or so leading families.

 

The courts relied on Islamic law, which calls for thieves' hands to be amputated, murderers to be publicly executed, and rapists to either die or face public lashings, depending on the circumstances of the case. (Residents say that, in practice, jail sentences have been far more common punishments for crimes.)

 

One such court was set up last year, Ali said, after four gunmen knocked on the door of a home shortly before midnight and demanded that the man inside turn over his 20-year-old stepdaughter. She returned the next day in tears, said a neighbor, who spoke on the condition on anonymity.

 

A month later, the same gunmen returned to rape the young woman again, but she was already gone, said the neighbor, sent away in shame to a remote part of Somalia.

 

So instead the gunmen demanded the man's wife. When she refused, the gunmen shot the man's legs, crippling him, and fatally shot his wife.

 

Few dispute that there has been a dramatic decline in crime in Mogadishu since the fall of the warlords June 5, though in the absence of a police force, there are no crime statistics.

 

But not all women say their stature has grown as the country moves toward Islamic law.

 

Ubah Mohamed, 34, a widow with seven children, was among the women who joined Mogadishu's workforce.

 

But she said the beauty shop she opened a decade ago has been losing regular customers, from more than 300 to about one-third that number, as radical Islamic values appear to be gaining wider acceptance.

 

``The militias patrol our areas looking to see if girls are going out with boys," she said. ``So the girls don't come to beauty salons like ours."

 

Mohamed, meanwhile, began wearing a black hijab to cover her own hair out of fear of what the newly powerful militias might do. She predicted that beauty shops, including hers, would be closed soon.

 

Yet even for Mohamed, recent months have brought a kind of liberation. When the public mood began to boil, she called one of Mogadishu's several radio stations and complained about the gunmen and their thirst for robbery and rape.

 

``I was one of those ladies," she recalled. ``We don't need warlords."

 

 

 

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[Che -Guevara]

``Somalia was saved because of the Somali women,"

Coudln't agree more. Sadly alot of the criminals who commit these horrofic crimes agianst women will never face justice, not in this world anyway.

[Sharmarkee]

^^

Somali Woman for Presidencey :cool:

 

Starting from SOL ; CAST your vote for a Somali woman you know to run this blood-soaked country, what you say Political Junkies?