Frauenproteste im Sudan
Über die wichtige Rolle von Frauen in der sudanesischen Protesbewegung, in der heute voller Freude die Erfolge in Algerien gefeiert wurden. Der Rücktritt des dortigen Präsidenten gilt auch ihnen als hoffnungsvolles Zeichen:
Jode Tariq, a slight 23-year-old with red hair extensions on her shorn head, has been arrested three times since street protests against Sudan’s strongman leader, Omar al-Bashir, started in December. On one occasion, her arm was broken by security agents, she says. On another, they cut off her hair.
“The first time I was arrested from Khartoum’s downtown, while in the truck before reaching custody, they poured cold water on my back,” Tariq says. “One of them ripped off my headscarf and cut the bun off my head with a razor blade.”
Tariq is one of the thousands of Sudanese women, long repressed by al-Bashir’s Islamist regime, who have appeared in huge numbers at the vanguard of a protest movement calling for him to step down. Sparked by a demonstration in December over the rising price of bread, the protests have become the biggest threat to al-Bashir’s rule since he seized power in a military coup in 1989.
Initially led by mostly male doctors, lawyers and other professionals fed up with economic decline, the movement has since broadened to include more women, youth and political leaders angered by the regime’s corruption and authoritarianism. At least 57 protesters have been killed and hundreds have been arrested since the protests began. Last month al-Bashir declared a state emergency, appointing military and security officials to run Sudan’s 18 states.
Women are now at the forefront of the campaign, often taking to the streets in larger numbers than men, according to Ihsan Fagiri, head of the No to Women’s Oppression Initiative, a rights organization.
Footage of the demonstrations frequently shows hundreds of women chanting anti-government slogans. In some cases, as many as 80 percent of the protesters, Fagiri estimates, have been women. Their participation is a dramatic rebellion against the aging autocrat — still wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in the eastern Darfur region — and the country’s so-called morality laws, which curtailed women’s rights in the 1990s.