Mali battles over women's rights

Rebecca Stewart
Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 7 September 2010

Deep in the vast, burnt-orange Malian desert in the town of Gao, 17-year-old Zina is getting ready for school. One of the luckier Malian women, she is among the 33% who can read and write. "I hope to be a doctor when I finish my studies," she says, through wide eyes framed by her vivid blue veil. "I'm not sure if I'll get married before my studies or afterwards," she adds "but inshallah, I'll find a good husband."

While the professional workplace is slowly opening up to women, with a few female lawyers, doctors and MPs, it remains predominantly the realm of men. I ask if she thinks she'll marry another doctor and how she feels about being equal to her husband – a privilege denied her mother. "We won't be equal," she says with a nervous smile. "I will always be inferior to my husband. That's how it is in Islam. I never want to be equal to my husband."

Zina's pregnant, 19-year-old sister Nana is giggling. "It's not like that here," she says. "Your parents chose your husband and you must obey him. It is in the Qu'ran and it is in the law."

According to Brahim Koné, president of the Malian Association of Human Rights, the position and treatment of women is one of the biggest human rights abuses in Mali today. "If the authorities aren't careful, Mali risks back-sliding," he says.

Under family law, Nana's inferiority it not just cultural, it is imposed by the state. She has a legal obligation to guarantee "obedience" to her husband. This means she can be divorced for anything from burning the dinner to refusing to have sex; she is allowed to inherit only an eighth of her husband's property if he dies; and while the legal marriage age for men is 18, for women it is just 15.

Some seeds of change were sown in Mali more than a decade ago, when the ministry for the promotion of women, children and the family, in association with certain women's groups and NGOs, proposed changes to laws that discriminated against women.

Then, in 2003, the UN Human Rights Committee said changes were necessary to bring local law into line with internationally ratified conventions. "Why did we ratify the conventions emanating from Europe and the west just to then reject the changes and say that the west is imposing its values on our society," asks Maitre M'Bam Diarra, mediator of the republic – the senior-most legal figure in the country – and a leading human rights activist.

"The changes didn't just start now," she says. "There have been several revisions coming from the fact that we need to harmonise local laws with international ones. But what is in the code [family law] is nothing new."

She is flanked by armed bodyguards. "They say that those of us who support the code are blasphemers," she says. "The imam of Kati, a town just outside Bamako, spoke in favour of it, and now he is in hiding in fear of his life."

In August 2009, the national assembly adopted the code with all its provisions. Soon after, demonstrators took to the streets in the capital, Bamako, and in Timbuktu and Mopti, shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) and holding banners declaring: "No to the new code."

Weeks later, President Amadou Toumani Touré, instead of ratifying the law, sent it back to the assembly to be reconsidered "to ensure a calm and peaceful society". Touré, a former general, overthrew a military government in 1991 and handed power back to civilians the following year. He retired from the army in 2001 and was elected president in 2002. He was re-elected in 2007, in elections deemed free and fair by international observers.

The president's backing down on the code reflects the political power of those who oppose it.

"This code has no respect for the inherent values of our society," says Mahmud Dicko, president of Mali's High Islamic Council. "It's just the way our society is organised. The head of the family is the man, and everyone in the family has to obey him." The equality of women is one of the most contentious provisions in the code, along with the secularisation of marriage and the proposal to give women inheritance rights on divorce – all of which, opponents argue, run counter to Islam.

Many of those protesting against the code were women. Hadja Safiatou Dembelé, president of the National Union of Muslim Women's Associations, says: "There are passages of this code that are incompatible with Islam, and that's why we oppose it. We will never leave our religion for this code".

For those fighting for equal rights, there are two main issues. First, the interpretation of a woman's role in Islam, and second, the position of women in terms of economics and education. "It's very difficult for illiterate women to either read the Qu'ran or assert their legal rights," says Maitre M'Bam. "[But] the problem isn't the Qu'ran. It's just a question of interpretation."

Back in Gao, Zina is a symbol of the solution, of a new Mali. She is a devout Muslim and has been told the Qu'ran makes her inferior to men. But she is also part of a generation of women breaking out of the traditional mould. And it is through women like her that change will ultimately come.