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Fearing
Forced Female Genital Mutilation
Nigerian
Pamela Enitan Izevbekhai Flees to Ireland with Daughters
My
name is Pamela Enitan Izevbekhai, I am a Nigerian seeking
permission to remain in Ireland on humanitarian grounds with my
two female children, Naomi (4) and Jemima (3).
I fled from my country for fear of persecution from my in-laws.
I lost a female child (Elizabeth) in 1994 due to “Female
Genital Mutilation,” which is a tradition in my in-laws family
and I could not have another child from fright of not knowing if
the next would be a boy or a girl. After six years, I had Naomi
in 2000 Jemima on 2002.
I came under a lot of threats, harassment, and castigations from
my in-laws standing the risk of losing my two girls to another
possibility of death through “Female Genital Mutilation.” I
am appealing to you to consider my situation for permission to
stay in Ireland on humanitarian grounds so that we are not
deported back to Nigeria. We will have nothing to go back to but
horror, my children will be taken away from me and I will loose
my marriage.
My husband and I decided that Ireland represents a safe place
for us. Please help to give our children a right to life, a
right to be free and freedom to be the best they can be. Ireland
is the epitome of hope for my children and I. Please help.
Source:
SupportPamela
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FGM Leads Nigerian to Plea
for Daughters' Asylum
By Meghan Sapp
WeNews correspondent
DUBLIN, Ireland (WOMENSENEWS)--Pamela
Izevbekhai fled her native Nigeria with her two young daughters
just over a year ago and sought refuge in Ireland to save the
girls from female genital mutilation. Since then she has been alternatively in
housing for asylum seekers, in hiding or in prison. On Monday
she was released from prison and now her request for asylum has
gone to the country's High Court.
She left her husband behind in Nigeria. It is
his family who insists the girls undergo the procedure, and some
relatives are in the United Kingdom. They chose to seek asylum
in Ireland because it is an English-speaking nation and she felt
safer there.Izevbekhai, a banking executive who used to
work in Lagos, knows the horrors of female circumcision well. Her first daughter, Elizabeth, bled to death
at 18 months of age in 1994 when the family of her husband--a
successful businessman--demanded the procedure.
Female genital mutilation sometimes entails
the removal of the clitoris. It can also entail cutting the
outer labia and sewing together the remaining skin so that only
urine and menstrual fluid can escape. "I have a daughter in the grave, don't
you understand that?" Izevbekhai demanded of the barrister
representing the Irish government during her hearing. Now Izevbekhai is struggling to prevent her
living daughters from meeting the same fate as their deceased
sister.
On Monday, Irish High Court Justice Finlay
Geoghehan released Izevbekhai from Mountjoy Prison where she had
been held since Jan. 13 and ordered her to return to the asylum
home in Sligo where she and her daughters had lived during the
past year. Despite repeated calls by Galway-based Rape
Crisis Network Ireland and the Health Service Executive, the
country's national health service, Izevbekhai may still be
deported.
Lost Appeal in November
Last November, Izevbekhai lost her appeal to
gain asylum in Ireland, resulting in the deportation order that
sent her into hiding. After a month in underground safe houses, she
was arrested by immigration officers who followed a tip and
discovered her in a meeting with a social worker who was trying
to help her see her children. The girls, Jemima, age 3, and
Naomi, age 5, were in state-run foster care at the time. As the justice read out her prison release
order on Monday, Izevbekhai held back tears, but one of her two
female prison guards gave in to them.
In the small courtroom reserved for asylum
cases at the High Court in Dublin, more than a half dozen wigged
senior barristers considered her case as about a dozen newspaper
and radio journalists sat in the back of the room.
Beside Izevbekhai a row of supporters sat on
the edge of their seats, their hands going out to her every time
she went to or came back from the witness box. Monday's release allows Izevbekhai to stay in
the country until the next step in the legal process, at which
time she may or may not be ordered back to Nigeria.
Her lawyers say the case will go through a
handful of hearings and may not be resolved until late June.
Documents including baby Elizabeth's death
certificate and a doctor's report detailing the cause of death
as well as a letter from the attending physician dated Jan. 19,
2006, explain the risks Izevbekhai and her daughters face if
deported.
Asylum Petition Central to Case
The case revolves around the question of why
her asylum petition was rejected despite evidence that both she
and her children face danger in Nigeria. Her lawyers call that
gross neglect and are pinning hopes of gaining her freedom
through the country's highest court by proving the charge.The government claims her children are not at
risk in their home country. Izevbekhai and her supporters say
the decision was reached on the basis of faulty reports of
female genital mutilation that have since been revised.
Izevbekhai's case includes a list of
risks--including kidnapping and genital mutilation of her
daughters as well as violence to herself--that would seemingly
grant nearly automatic asylum in just about any European
country. Female genital mutilation, however, is not
specified as a risk in itself, although it is recognized as a
human rights abuse and an illegal act by both the European Union
and the African Union, including Nigeria.
Nigeria's president, Olusegun Obasanjo, has
led the African Union for two years up until this week, when the
seat rotated to the president of the Democratic Republic of
Congo.
Obasanjo chaired the 2003 signing of the
Maputo Protocol banning human rights abuses against women. The
protocol includes especially harmful traditional practices such
as female genital mutilation. Yet according to the letter from
Izevbekhai's doctor--seen by Women's eNews--the national
government continues to look the other way on such practices.
Maputo Protocol in Force
Togo was the 15th and last country needed to
ratify and sign the protocol in October, bringing the protocol
into force Nov. 26. Mozambique also ratified the protocol Dec. 8,
the same day Izevbekhai went into hiding. Further ratification and government-led
training on implementing the protocol is now needed, said Khady
Koita, a Paris-based advocate who recently published a book
about her own mutilation experiences, "Khady Mutilee,"
or "Mutilated Khady."
"Now it is all our jobs to best
implement this protocol. It is up to the governments to monitor
the program and train themselves in the protocol. When people
don't know what's in it, they can't use it," she said. Koita's book was released last October in
French in an enormous first run of 70,000 copies. Translations
in 14 languages are planned in coming months with Italian and
German scheduled for February. Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese,
Russian and Polish will follow. The book still lacks an English
publisher.
Koita hopes her book not only opens minds but
also helps girls to speak with their parents about female
genital mutilation. In the book, Koita writes that 60,000
mutilated girls live in France while 2 million girls worldwide
are mutilated every year.
Izevbekhai is herself "intact" and
does not come from a tradition where girls are mutilated. She
and her husband have been trying to protect their daughters from
his parents who have stopped at nothing to get a hold of the
girls, including attempted kidnap on a handful of occasions.
In his letter, the doctor said Izevbekhai's
mother-in-law has approached the hospital where he worked to
have the procedure done there. The hospital denied her request,
he said, and though they tried to educate her against what he
called the "evils" of female genital mutilation, he
said she continues to believe her grandchildren will not find
suitable husbands if they remain intact.
Meghan Sapp is European correspondent
for Women's eNews. She is a freelance journalist based in
Brussels, Belgium, and writes primarily on trade, development
and agriculture issues.
For more information:
Let
Them Stay!
FGM
in Kenya: Outlawed, Not Eradicated In
Africa, FGM Checks Into Hospitals
Source:
WomenseNews
27 January 2006
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
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what's in your heart than what's in your
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principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
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can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 17
December 2011
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