Sociolingo’s Mali

The following article shows some aspects of Mali democracy in action.  It seems to be a tenet of Mali democracy that all interested parties have a say and are consulted in the drafting of legal documents. However, having a ’say’ or being able to express and opinion does not necessarily mean that demanded changes will be agreed. In this case some Islamic organisations are opposing a family law bill particularly in the areas of inheritance and the recognition of religious marriages.

The family law bill, which was first drafted back in 1996, is being hotly debated at the moment in Mali. It ratifies international protocols that Mali has already signed up for including the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The driving force behind the latest attempt to get this bill passed is a group of women parliamentarians who have got together with lawyers and human rights activists and are  pushing this bill back to prominence again.

Source: IRIN NEWS

MALI: New family law faces opposition from Muslim organisations

BAMAKO , 2 May 2008 (IRIN) - A new family law code waiting to be adopted by Parliament is facing opposition from some Islamic groups who claim it goes against Islamic principles, particularly when it comes to proposed changes to the country’s marriage laws.

The new code aims to bring more equality between men and women in relation to marital status, parental rights, ownership of land and inheritance, wages and pensions, employment laws and education.

“The code is a significant step towards gender equality while reflecting the reality of Malian culture today,” the minister of women, children and the family, Maiga Sina Damba told IRIN.

The current code has seen little change since it was first passed in 1962, three years after Mali gained independence, and according to Oumor Cissé, communications adviser at the ministry for women, children and the family, it is heavily influenced by “outmoded” French laws, and a strict reading of Koranic texts.

Opposition

When the draft code went out to civil society groups for the latest round of consultations in early 2008, some Islamic groups started campaigning hard against the proposed changes to marriage laws, inheritance laws and property rights.

In early April the Islamic Salvation Association (AISLAM) called for the bill to be withdrawn from Parliament.

“All the proposals we made in the consultation phase of the new code were rejected,” said Mohamed Kimbiri, president of AISLAM.

The most controversial sticking points relate to shifts in marriage laws. Today in Mali traditional or ‘religious marriages’ as opposed to civil marriages, are legally accepted but the new code will cease to legally recognise religious marriages.

“Despite much opposition to this change, legalising religious marriages has been dropped from the bill altogether,” Kimbiri complained to IRIN.

But Parliamentarian Mountaga Tall elected in Segou a town north of Bamako, said religious or ‘traditional’ marriages deny some women their basic rights.

“Widows who have only had a traditional marriage are legally excluded from any inheritance rights and their children must go through expensive, lengthy and often humiliating procedures to inherit the basic family allowances due to them.”

In defiance of the soon-to-be-adopted law, Islamic groups are continuing to issue marriage certificates.

“For the moment, the issue is unresolved. But if [these marriages] go ahead it will be in violation of the law, and the marriage certificate will not be legal. No one can appropriate a power that is not legally bestowed,” said Cissé.

Further controversy

In another vein, under the current law when two people marry if they commit to monogamy they must stick to it in theory, but in reality a husband can re-marry without the consent of his wife.

“Men can circumvent the law by making a new marriage without any legal consequences,” said Daouda Cissé, a legal adviser to the women’s ministry.

The code also gives more inheritance rights to illegitimate children, and enables them to choose either their mother’s or their father’s name, but according to Kimbiri, “Islam can not accept that. [Illegtimate children] can only inherit their mother’s name, they do not have a right to their father’s.”

And finally, some clerics are concerned about changes the new code makes to giving couples joint rights to land and property - currently separate rights are maintained for property. But one Imam told IRIN, “under Islamic law spouses must accept separation of ownership of possessions.”

Compromise solution?

The code has already faced many delays and some fear it will stagnate altogether. Redrafting began in 1996 but it was slow to gain momentum in Parliament.

“Many Parliamentarians didn’t want to see change. or else they didn’t bother to read it,” Oumor Cissé told IRIN.

But in 2007 a group of women Parliamentarians - there are about a dozen, said Cissé - formed a group with lawyers and human rights activists to defend the code’s changes and to push it through Parliament.

“If Mali wants to be a fully-functioning democracy it is important to pass this code,” Omar Touri, head of a women’s rights network, Association of Women’s NGOs (CAFO), told IRIN. “People have to change their behaviour and they have to accept change.”

The code brings Mali in line with a number of international protocols it has signed up to, including the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

Given this, she said, “We have no choice but to pass it.”

But Abdoulaye Dembélé, deputy of the National Assembly, thinks it much more likely that a compromise deal will have to be struck, ensuring yet more delays.

“In this atmosphere of misunderstanding it is difficult for deputies to vote for this code at the risk of provoking a mass-uprising. We have to take into account the concerns and aspirations of all groups before passing it through Parliament.”

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Evanescense has a great story about a Canadian lady who has married a guy from Timbuktu.

Seen on IRIN NEWS

MALI: Child marriage a neglected problem

NIORO DU SAHEL, 30 August 2007 (IRIN) - Two years ago, in the western Malian village of Korera-Kore, a 13-year-old girl was forced into marriage during her school summer holiday. She died after complications during sex on her wedding night.

This young Malian, whose case was documented by a local organisation called the Coordination of Women’s Associations and Non-governmental organisations (CAFO), is one of more than 60 million women globally who were married or in union before the age of 18, according to estimates by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Campaigners say forced early marriage, or child marriage, is a problem that has been largely untouched by the international community. In Mali it is considered by the research organisation Population Council as “one of the most severe crises of child marriage in the world today”; the few workers in this field say progress is too slow.

“There hasn’t been a really concerted effort to address the issue [at the international level],” said Naana Otoo-Oyortey, a founding member of the Forum on Marriage and the Rights of Women and Girls, a network of mostly UK-based organisations who campaign against early marriage and violence against women. “It’s been a neglected issue.”

Otoo-Oyortey said unlike female genital mutilation/cutting, which is prohibited in many international conventions, child marriage receives little visibility and little funding from donors for programmes to reduce the practice, despite its link to increased rates of maternal mortality, fistula and HIV/AIDS.

Slow decline

In Mali, according to the latest statistics from the 2001 Demographic and Health Survey, 65 percent of women aged 20-24 were married by the age of 18, one of the highest rates in the world. Nationwide, 25 percent of girls were married by the age of 15, and one in 10 married girls aged 15-19 gave birth before age 15.

While this marks a decrease since 1987, when 79 percent of Malian women married as children, advocates say the numbers are not dropping fast enough, largely because not enough people are working on the subject.

“The global trend has been a slow decline,” said Nassra Abass, a consultant in UNICEF’s child protection section in New York. “[But] there’s definitely a lot more that we can do.”

She said UNICEF’s focus has been on reducing female genital cutting (FGC), a movement that has “momentum”, unlike child marriage, honour killings and other traditional practices considered harmful by the UN.

“There have not been very many resources or much time invested in early marriage. There aren’t many programmes running. That’s why the decline is slow,” Abass told IRIN.

Dangers

The mild decline in early marriage in Mali has been attributed to the few education and awareness raising programmes that do exist.

In the western Malian region of Kayes, where 83 percent of girls are married by the age of 18, particular effort has been paid to informing people of the risks of early marriage.

According to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), girls aged 15-19 are twice as likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth as women aged 20-24. Among girls aged 10-14, the risk is five times greater. Early onset of sexual activity has also been linked to increased risk of HIV/AIDS because child brides are less likely to be educated and more likely to have unprotected sex with older men who have had more sexual partners.

New research by CAFO of Nioro du Sahel, one of Kayes’s largest cities, showed that in Kayes, between 2005 and May 2007, at least 10 girls - many not yet teenagers - lost their lives because of complications after their wedding nights, sometimes due to haemorrhaging after forced intercourse.

Education

As a result, in July, CAFO joined with UNICEF, the government department responsible for the promotion of women, and the union of independent radio and TV stations, to organise the first public awareness campaign in the region of Kayes. It included a three-day workshop with religious and community leaders, informing them of the dangers of early marriage and helping them produce messages against early marriage to be broadcast in the local media. A similar workshop took place in the eastern region of Gao in June.

“We were ignorant. We married girls at 9, 10, 11 or 12 years old. Now, we’ve seen the reality. We will no longer practice this,” Diawara Mamadou, head of the town of Gogui and one of 12 community representatives present at the workshop, told IRIN.

For the last two years, UNICEF has also been working with communities in three regions of Mali - Segou, Mopti and Kayes - to inform residents of the risks, help them abandon the practice, and set up committees that will intervene in cases of early marriage. UNICEF in Mali has set up an internal working group to better coordinate work on early marriage, and hopes to extend these programmes nation-wide.

“[In Mali], we are the only ones interested in this problem,” said Fabienne Dubey, assistant programme officer for education at UNICEF-Mali. “I don’t know of other organisations working on this. It is still very rudimentary.”

UNFPA runs educational programmes focusing on reproductive health that include, but do not specifically target, early marriage. Starting in 2008, UNFPA will make early marriage more of a priority, according to reproductive health programme officer Mariam Cissoko.

Legal framework

In Mali, a girl is legally allowed to wed at the age of 15 with the consent of her parents. In some cases, girls younger than 15 can wed with the authorisation of a judge.

A government bill that would, among other things, raise the legal age of marriage to 18 has been on the books for five years, but has yet to be passed.

“Now, it’s a question of political will,” said Bakary Traoré, technical adviser on children at the Malian Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children and Family.

According to Founé Samaké, lawyer and member of the Clinique juridique des femmes maliennes, a legal aid clinic, Malian law punishes the abduction of women for forced marriage by one to five years in prison. When the abducted girl is less than 15 years old, the sentence is up to 10 years of forced labour and, at the discretion of the judge, an injunction banning the convicted person from specified places for up to 20 years.

But enforcing the law is an “arduous task”, Samaké said, because family members are often accomplices in the forced marriage.

What works

“The most important thing that a national government should do is ensure enforcement of its own laws,” said Kathy Selvaggio, senior policy advocate at the Massachusetts-based International Center for Research on Women, an organisation lobbying the US government to spend more of its aid money fighting early marriage.

She said legal enforcement must be combined with programmes that provide alternatives to early marriage by increasing the levels of education and economic opportunities of girls.

“Where you have successes in combating child marriage, [as in India and Ethiopia], they’ve been these comprehensive approaches,” Selvaggio told IRIN.

The Malian government does consider child marriage a form of violence against women, and “there is a whole policy to fight against violence done to women,” according to Kanté Dandara Touré, national director for the promotion of women at the Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children and Family.

She said the national committee for the fight against detrimental practices does include early marriage in its sensitisation work, using media, community leaders and theatre, but no government program targets early marriage exclusively.

“It’s a question of priorities,” and right now “female genital cutting is at the top,” Touré said, noting that more than 90 percent of Malian women are circumcised.

Priorities

Making early marriage a political priority is a necessary first step for change, according to maternal mortality research by American professor Jeremy Shiffman, of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University.

“In Honduras, safe motherhood became one of the country’s foremost health priorities, and between 1990 and 1997, the country experienced a 40 percent decline in its maternal mortality ratio, one of the most significant reductions in such a short time span ever documented in the developing world,” he wrote in a May 2007 article in the American Journal of Public Health.

He found that nine factors shaped the degree to which maternal mortality reduction emerged on the national policy agenda, including efforts by international agencies to establish a global norm concerning its unacceptability; financial and technical resources from international donors; the degree to which national advocates coalesced as a political force; the generation of national attention for the cause; and the existence of competing health causes.

A strange but sad story seen on BBC NEWS:

An Australian farmer falls in love over the internet with a Liberian refugee in Mali. He goes out to Mali to meet his bride and get the £43,000 ($86,000) dowry promised - and then is kidnapped and held to ransom. The Australian police laid a trap at the Canadian Embassy and caught the kidnappers freeing the farmer.

Last weekend we had a wedding just half a block away from my apartment. First I knew of it was the drums the night before. That was fun! They set up shop on the street corner … several large Djembé drums and lots of smaller ones … some that you hold under your arm and beat with a stick. The decibel level was incredible. The apartment seemed to reverberate. All the local kids were out and a big crowd developed. Then just as suddenly as it started, it stopped.

The following day I was drawn to our balcony by the sound of a huge number of mopeds (called motos) and motor bikes .. all revving up and sounding horns. It was the start of a cavalcade .. they paraded the streets in our area for about half an hour. After the motor bikes came the cars .. all sounding their horns and flashing lights. The roads around here are really bad. The rains have washed some of the red mud away and there are huge holes and bumps. You should have seen some of these posh cars trying to make their way around .. I felt really sorry for some of the ladies dressed in their finery being slung around the back seat of a mercedes!

Then the men congregated at one of the local mosques …for the wedding ceremony, without the bride!!! This is the formal part of the day. I think there are five mosques around here.

Later in the afternoon I heard drumming again from the street corner. They had put up a sheltered area and brought in lots of chairs. It was ladies afternoon ….wonderful colours, wonderful boubous in bright colours. It seemed at one point like most of the area had turned out. During this time various ceremonies are carried out by the women. The poor little bride sits under a veil in a courtyard, usually looking terribly scared. There are praise singers (griots) who sing the praises of those who pay them. The ones for this group sang really well. In fact there seemed to be two and one would sing with the other making encouraging comments. Sometime in the late afternoon everyone dispersed and the area settled down for the night.

Then the local night club began …..

P2090002, originally uploaded by Malilady.