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Gender-Based Violence Galvanized Warlords' Foes
Women such as this protester, denouncing a proposed deployment of foreign peacekeepers in her country, are playing an active role in Somalia's political life. When fighting broke out in January, women took to the airwaves on local radio stations and denounced the warlords who had controlled Somalia since the government collapsed in 1991.
(By Karel Prinsloo -- Associated Press)
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A month later, the same gunmen returned to rape the young woman again, but she was already gone, said the neighbor, sent away in shame to a remote part of Somalia. So instead the gunmen demanded the man's wife. When she refused, the gunmen shot the man in both legs, crippling him, and shot and killed his wife.
Few dispute there has been a dramatic decline in crime in Mogadishu since the fall of the warlords June 5, though in the absence of a police force, there are no crime statistics.
But not all women say their stature has grown as the country moves toward Islamic law.
Ubah Mohamed, 34, a widow with seven children, was among the women who joined Mogadishu's workforce. But she said the beauty shop she opened a decade ago has been losing regular customers, from more than 300 to about one-third that number, as radical Islamic values appear to be gaining wider acceptance.
"The militias patrol our areas looking to see if girls are going out with boys," she said. "So the girls don't come to beauty salons like ours."
Mohamed, meanwhile, began wearing a black hijab to cover her own hair out of fear of what the newly powerful militias might do. In a city where residents report that public viewing of the World Cup has been curbed, she predicted that beauty shops, including hers, would be closed soon as well.
Yet even for Mohamed, recent months have brought a kind of liberation. When the public mood began to boil, she called one of Mogadishu's several radio stations and complained about the gunmen and their thirst for robbery and rape.
"I was one of those ladies," she recalled. "We don't need warlords."
Isaaq, the widow who has five children, has mixed feelings about the changes in Somalia. She would rather have remained home with her children, as her mother did, she said. And the stray bullet that killed her husband last month struck him at their house, which, because he was unemployed, is where he spent most of his time. As Isaaq went door-to-door selling clothes, he had stayed home, watching the younger children.
Their two daughters -- Nasteexo, 10, and Hamsa, 7 -- also spent most of their time at home because Isaaq forbade them to walk alone outside. She grimly recalled a time two years ago when she saw the body of a girl of about 4, the relative of a neighbor, who had been raped and killed.
But now, Isaaq revels in watching her daughters leave the house, hand in hand, and without her. For the first time since she had them, Isaaq said, she worries not at all.
