HEALTH-SENEGAL
Ban On Female Circumcision Backfires
By David Hecht
DAKAR, Feb 8 (IPS) - If article 299A of Senegal's penal code were fully applied, more than one million Senegalese would go to jail.
The amendment, which passed parliament last month, bans anyone from violating 'the integrity of the female genitalia,' or 'influencing' others to do so.
More than 130 million women in at least 28 African countries have undergone some form of what is now officially called Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Many experience health problems, particularly when giving birth.
But there is little sign in Senegal that the practice will end any time soon. The supreme spiritual leader of northern Senegal's Toucouleur people, Mountaga Tall, leads by example when he tells his followers ''I would rather die than be forced to stop what I believe in.''
Other traditional leaders say they too will defy the ban. One rebellious village in the south has reportedly circumcised 120 girls en mass. Even worse, the new law has undermined local efforts to stop female circumcision.
Last year one organisation, Tostan, had some success informing hundreds of villages of the health risks and encouraging discussion. Thirty-one of the villages then publicly declared they would ban the practice on their own, and more were planning to follow.
But now Tostan has had to suspend activities. Some villagers that made the declaration say they may no longer be able to abide by it as it is seen as the spark that turned their relatives and friends in the neighboring villages into criminals.
International organisations gloss over these problems. UN Children's Fund (Unicef) chief, Carol Belamy, claims women from the thirty-one villages, who get funding from Unicef, travelled to Senegal's capital to convince parliament ''to abolish the practice.''
In fact they went there to explain why making it a crime at this time would not help their cause. Senegal's women parliamentarians listened and recommended that implementation of the law be delayed for two years.
Even many parliamentarians in the ruling party said they were against the legislation as it stood. Some noted that it contradicts the first paragraph of Senegal's constitution, which states that the government must respect all the beliefs of its citizens. But in the end they 'maintained party discipline' and rubber-stamped the law.
The government has tried to minimise dissent by simply not informing the population that what they have been doing for a thousand years would be made illegal. Even local leaders say they didn't know about it until just before it passed.
Many note the irony of the rights of individuals being dictated by outside forces rather than presented to them for debate. The government circulated drafts of the law to representative of international organisations based in Dakar, particularly Unicef and US Aid for International Development (USAID).
The law was pushed through a month before the US State Department's annual country report on Human Rights is to be released. The report lists those African governments that have banned female circumcision and those that have not and is used as a guide for Congress and US agencies on how to apportion military and financial assistance.
Many African countries have recently banned female circumcision but none have dared enforce the law, remembering the colonial days when there were bloody riots.
In Kenya, pro-female circumcision groups helped build support for the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. As colonial law banned cutters from performing the procedure, girls would do what was called 'Ngaitana', which translates as 'I cut myself'.
''You just can't outlaw a cultural practice,'' says political scientist Gerry Mackie who has also researched attempts to stop footbinding in China.
''Criminal law works only when the criminals are the minority. It is not possible to criminalise the entirety of the population, or the entirety of a discrete and insular minority of the population, without the methods of mass terror.''
Shock therapy also fails. In Uganda, after activists went to villagers showing a horrifying film of the practice, the number of girls circumcised reportedly doubled.
In some cases Africans have, however, been quietly stopping on their own. Western groups reviled Aja Tounkara Diallo Fatimata, the chief cutter in Guinea's capital Conakry, until a few years ago when she confessed that she has never actually cut anybody. ''I'd just pinch their clitorises to make them scream,'' she said, ''dab on some mercurochrome and tightly bandage them up so that they walked like they were in pain.''
Local activists say that the kind of interventions that work depend on what motivates people to maintain the tradition. The reasons are as different as the different forms of circumcision. Infibulation, the sowing together of the vaginal opening except for a small hole for menstrual blood, is a surefire method to guarantee chastity.
But milder forms, such as the removal of skin on top of the clitoris as recommended in one Islamic text is believed to actually increase genital sensitivity. Often performed at the same time as male circumcision, some say it is necessary to awaken pubescent children to their sexuality.
In the West, opponents see female circumcision as African men 'mutilating' African women to oppress them. ''Misogyny cannot continue to be hidden under the rubric of traditional practices,'' Belamy argued recently.
On the ground, however, those trying to stop the practice consistently report that women are the 'guardians' of the tradition and are more resistant to stopping it than men.
Many local opponents won't use the word 'mutilation' preferring to look at female circumcision as simply a health problem. A survey of those women in Sudan and Egypt who are against it, found that most support a strategy of education over criminalisation.
Rather than ban it altogether their governments decided to only allow medical practitioners to perform it. But international pressure was too great for the Egyptian government and the law was changed. ''Now, like with abortion, the new ban has driven the practice underground,'' says one government official. ''It is more often performed under unhygienic conditions.''
In Senegal there are concerns that the new law could increase tensions between the minority ethnic groups that practice female circumcision and the dominant ethnic group, the Wolof, who do not. That has sent shivers up international groups who are distancing themselves from the law.
It 'was never an explicit policy of Unicef,' claims Augusto Paganini, Unicef's local resident representative, although the organisation financed a study last year which included a draft of the law. It 'is not the best instrument to help the small minority of women, which have denounced and abandoned female genital mutilation, to become a majority.'
The government is also backtracking. Last week president Abdou Diof made a statement saying the law would be applied 'intelligently.' That is widely understood to mean that it won't be applied at all.
Everyone will be happy in the end, promised one international official with a hint of sarcasm. ''We will have our law, the government will have more money and the people will be able to do what they like.''
Tostan is also confident that it will soon be able to resume activities. ''We'll just pretend the law doesn't exist,'' says director Molly Melching. ''Otherwise what's the use of getting villages to make public declaration saying they'll stop.''
She is even hopeful that ten villages that were planning to renounce the practice before it was illegal may still do so.
(END/IPS/dh/mn/99)
Origin: Harare/HEALTH-SENEGAL/
[c] 1999, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS)
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