Headscarves and Hymens (9 page)

According to Human Rights Watch’s 2014 World
Report, thousands of Iraqi women have been unjustly detained by authorities and have suffered beatings and sexual assault, all so that government forces can gain leverage against the women’s male relatives suspected of terrorism or other crimes. Even as HRW brought this atrocity to the world’s attention, Iraq’s own Ministry for Human Rights dismissed the report, stating through a spokesperson that it was “exaggerated,” and claiming that those responsible for the claims in it had already been identified by Iraqi investigators and would be held accountable. Yet as HRW points out in the introduction to that study on the abuse of women by the Iraqi justice system, this is slim comfort to the victimized women. “Both men and women suffer from the severe flaws of the criminal justice system. But women suffer a double burden due to their second-class status in Iraqi society.”

Libya, during both the forty-two-year dictatorship of Muammar al-Qaddafi and the revolution that overthrew him, provides painful examples as well. In her book
Gaddafi’s Harem,
Annick Cojean, a reporter for France’s
Le Monde
newspaper, recounts how Qaddafi abducted young women, kept them as sex slaves, and forced them to take drugs.

As in all countries in the region, speaking about rape in Libya is a taboo that few are willing to break. Two of the women who spoke to Cojean, however, illustrate my point about state-sanctioned sexual violation as a form of multiple levels of punishment. “Soraya,” who was
twenty-two when Cojean spoke to her, said she was just fifteen when Qaddafi ordered that she be taken from her family and brought to live as a sexual slave whom he kept in a basement of his residence near Tripoli, Bab al-Azizia. Soraya’s story was verified by the experience of another of Qaddafi’s sex slaves, “Khadija,” who belonged to the infamous coterie of female bodyguards with whom he traveled. Her story dismantles the myth that many media outlets painted at the behest of Qaddafi that those female bodyguards were some kind of Amazonian warrior feminists. According to Cojean’s book, Khadija, kept by Qaddafi in the same basement as Soraya, was used to seduce dignitaries for future blackmail. Another woman, “Houda,” who was also a schoolgirl when she was first raped by Qaddafi, was told that her compliance would free her imprisoned brother.

During the revolution to unseat Qaddafi, the International Criminal Court said it had collected evidence that he had ordered rapes as a weapon against rebel forces. The first woman to speak out was Iman al-Obeidi, who burst into a Tripoli hotel to tell foreign journalists how she was gang-raped by Qaddafi’s troops. Reuters news agency reported on three other women who suffered a similar fate, and who had been targeted for the “crime” of criticizing Qaddafi in a video clip broadcast on an international television channel. Two of the women were unmarried, and Reuters reported they were never seen again. The third, known as “the Revolutionary,” spoke
at a conference in the capital, Tripoli, behind a face veil, to guarantee her anonymity. Married and pregnant at the time of her abduction by Qaddafi guards, she said she miscarried after she was raped in prison. “The Revolutionary” was in her twenties, and told the conference that her youngest fellow captive was fourteen and the oldest was her mother’s age.

In February 2014, the Libyan cabinet, in an unprecedented move, decreed that women who had been raped during the uprising that toppled Qaddafi should be recognized as war victims. That decree, which needed congressional approval, would have put the women on the same level as wounded ex-fighters and would have entitled them to compensation. As 2014 progressed, however, Libyan politics disintegrated amid militia fighting, and it is unclear when and if such a decree will help survivors of the sexual violence that took place during the revolution.

The cabinet’s acknowledgment came thanks to the incredible courage of the few women who spoke out knowing they could be shunned or killed by their families for revealing they had been raped. These women were supported by activists who have worked tirelessly to mitigate the government’s neglect of these women and the wrath of their male relatives, activists such as Souad Wheidi, who according to Reuters created an archive of the sex crimes committed during the revolution. Before Wheidi’s work, these rapes went undocumented:
Amnesty International told Reuters that it had not documented a single case of rape during the eight-month-long civil war that ended Qaddafi’s rule because the victims would not speak out. “We think [multiple rapes] might have happened but do not have any evidence,” said Amnesty International. “Everyone said, this happened, but not in our town. It was in the town next door.”

In addition to retaliation from government forces, militias, neighbors, and their own families, rape survivors in Libya who report the crimes leave themselves open to criminal prosecution under
zina,
the area of Islamic law governing unlawful sexual intercourse. The Arabic word
zina
means “fornication” or “adultery,” depending on whether the “sexual crime” was committed by an unmarried or married person. Under most interpretations of
zina
, any extramarital or premarital sex is criminal, and even rape victims are prosecuted unless they can prove to the court’s satisfaction that the alleged intercourse was not consensual. That is a risk that women in most countries across the region, not just Libya, face.

The well-armed and increasingly powerful militias that have paralyzed Libyan politics since the end of the Qaddafi regime pose their own lethal danger to Libyan women. In March 2014, I interviewed Libyan activist Zahra Langhli in Cairo for the radio documentary I made for the BBC World Service on women’s roles in the revolutions. Langhli, a cofounder of the NGO Libyan Women’s Platform for Peace, lamented that Libya had
turned into a security vacuum that threatened women’s physical and political existence. In such a vacuum, women’s rights were not considered a priority, especially with so many detentions and reports of torture. According to Langhli, Libyan women were not just casual victims of violence; they were also being deliberately excluded from the political process. Despite winning 16.5 percent of seats in the 2012 elections for the General National Congress, female parliamentarians were not safe, Langhli said.

“Women have been on television and exposing the kinds of threats they’ve been receiving from their colleagues [in the General National Congress] either affiliated to militias or themselves militias,” she said. “In Arab or Muslim countries the issues of honor and shame are important. We see many female activists, the kind of war they face every day, it starts with rumors and might end up with kidnapping, rape, or anything like that, but it’s targeted against female activists and politicians.

“I think it’s targeted and systematic against women activists specifically to shrink them out of political space.”

Three months after I interviewed Langhli, prominent Libyan human rights activist Salwa Bugaighis was assassinated in her home in Benghazi, just hours after casting her vote in elections for a new congress. Bugaighis was a lawyer and a strong advocate of women’s rights who took part in some of the earliest protests of the Libyan Revolution in February 2011.

She was also an outspoken critic of the militias, and
her killing was part of a string of attacks against politicians, activists, and journalists who’d spoken out against the armed groups that control much of Libya.

Less than a month after Bugaighis was murdered, a female lawmaker was killed in the restive eastern city of Derna, which is known as a stronghold of Islamic extremists. A Libyan security official was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that unknown assailants sprayed bullets at Fareha al-Barqawi near a gas station. She was a member of a liberal-leaning political bloc in Libya’s outgoing parliament. Her husband was a longtime political prisoner under Qaddafi, the AP said.

Women in Syria—where an uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad that began in March 2011 has led to a civil war—have also been targeted with sexual violence and abuse both by regime forces and by armed groups. According to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), between March 2011 and July 2013 some six thousand Syrian women were raped. A report issued by the group described how women were being targeted by snipers and used as human shields, often along with their children. Furthermore, the EMHRN said women were being either kidnapped so that they could be exchanged for prisoners or gang-raped in retaliation for their male relatives’ actions.

“The stigma makes them socially unacceptable so they have to flee the area; some don’t even have a chance to flee with their family members. They’re very much left
alone and isolated,” the EMHRN spokesperson Hayet Zeghiche told the BBC.

Like women in Libya, Syrian women took part in their country’s revolution, protesting alongside men and risking imprisonment, torture, and death. And as in Libya, sexual violence became a weapon of war to punish them and terrorize others.

Female Syrian refugees have also been subjected to sexual violence in camps outside the country. In December 2012, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), in collaboration with the Arab Women Organization (AWO), sent an international fact-finding mission to meet with Syrian women who had fled to Jordan. The FIDH said its delegation visited three refugee camps (al-Zaatari, King Abdullah Park, and Cyber City), and held meetings with eighty refugees living outside “official” camps in Amman, Rusaifa, Dhleil, and Sama Sarhan (Zarqa Governorate).

The FIDH’s report, “Violence Against Women in Syria: Breaking the Silence,” states:

Girls and women were not always safe in refugee camps. In October 2014
The Christian Science Monitor
reported that “in the refugee camps and crowded Turkish towns on the border with Syria, impoverished Syrian women and girls are falling prey to criminal rings that are forcing them into sexually exploitative situations ranging from illicit marriages to outright prostitution.” Several other media outlets have documented similar horrors in the camps in Jordan.

It is not just in countries with a security vacuum or those ripped apart by civil war that the state violates women’s bodies. In April 2014 the website Morocco World News lamented that “in modern Algeria, in the twenty first century, a girl walking in the street, which is
a male space par excellence in Arab societies in general, can likely be arrested by the police to find herself in a hospital for [a] virginity test.” It went on to quote an Algerian news site that reported that two young women were subjected to virginity tests after they were arrested by police while on their way home from a birthday party.

“A gynecologist in a hospital in eastern Algiers admits that ‘the cases of virginity examinations requested by the police are increasing,’ ” Morocco World News said. “These girls ‘were terrified, shocked to have been arrested by the police to pass this kind of test,’ the gynecologist adds. These tests are usually made [in] the presence of the mother in cases of rape, but to break into a girl’s privacy and subject her to [a] virginity test can have the same traumatic effect of rape!”

Morocco World News also quoted a Facebook group called Algerie Fait, which claimed that three women in the city of Constantine, ages eighteen to twenty, had been subjected to virginity tests by the authorities after being questioned over their having a picnic. The website also quoted an unnamed lawyer who made it clear that these virginity tests were the authorities’ way of punishing the young women for behavior it deemed unacceptable:

“This kind of test is an attack on individual liberty. What has virginity got to do with a crime or offense? Does it constitute an essential element of the offense?” the lawyer said. “There is no law that says a woman has no right to go out in the evening with a man.”

A similar dynamic was in play when police arrested a fourteen-year-old in the conservative emirate of Ajman (part of the United Arab Emirates) in 2011 on an “adultery charge” after neighbors complained she was meeting a man on the roof of their building. The girl was detained in an adult prison for two weeks and forced to undergo a gynecological exam that determined she was still a virgin, the
Gulf News
reported. The man she was said to have been meeting (in his mid-twenties) was also arrested, but undoubtedly not subjected to a humiliating examination of his genitals.

In Egypt, we have reached the point at which the state can physically strip you of your veil, and forcibly examine your hymen, while claiming to protect you. During a 2005 protest, activists claim, our former dictator Hosni Mubarak’s regime used plainclothes policemen and pro-regime thugs to sexually assault female journalists and activists. The protest was to call for a boycott of a referendum to allow multiple candidates to run in the presidential elections—up until then, Egyptians would vote yes or no for Mubarak. Activists did not trust Mubarak or his political system and felt that the referendum alone, without large-scale political reforms, would not guarantee free and fair elections. Male police officers, plainclothes security forces, and hired thugs contained female activists and journalists in a confined area, then groped and sexually assaulted those women caught inside the
tight circle. At least one woman was pinned to the ground as several men pressed their bodies over hers, as if to mime the act of rape. Female activists and journalists had their headscarves, shirts, and skirts ripped off, and some were left almost naked, leading their male colleagues to screen them with their own bodies.