Heroic, Female and Muslim

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: December 15, 2010
The New York Times


What’s the ugliest side of Islam? Maybe it’s the Somali Muslim militias that engage in atrocities like the execution of a 13-year-old girl named Aisha Ibrahim. Three men raped Aisha, and when she reported the crime she was charged with illicit sex, half-buried in the ground before a crowd of 1,000 and then stoned to death.

That’s the extremist side of Islam that drives Islamophobia in the United States, including Congressional hearings on American Muslims that House Republicans are planning for next year.

But there’s another side of Islam as well, represented by an extraordinary Somali Muslim woman named Dr. Hawa Abdi who has confronted the armed militias. Amazingly, she forced them to back down — and even submit a written apology. Glamour magazine, which named Dr. Hawa a “woman of the year,” got it exactly right when it called her “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo.”

Dr. Hawa, a 63-year-old ob-gyn who earned a law degree on the side, is visiting the United States to raise money for her health work back home. A member of Somalia’s elite, she founded a one-room clinic in 1983, but then the Somalian government collapsed, famine struck, and aid groups fled. So today Dr. Hawa is running a 400-bed hospital.

Over the years, the hospital became the core of something even grander. Thousands and thousands of people displaced by civil war came to shelter on Dr. Hawa’s 1,300 acres of farmland around the hospital. Today her home and hospital have been overtaken by a vast camp that she says numbers about 90,000 displaced people.

Dr. Hawa supplies these 90,000 people with drinking water and struggles to find ways to feed them. She worries that handouts breed dependency (and in any case, United Nations agencies can’t safely reach her now to distribute food), so she is training formerly nomadic herding families to farm and even to fish in the sea.

She’s also pushing education. An American freelance journalist, Eliza Griswold, visited Dr. Hawa’s encampment in 2007 and 2008 and was stunned that an unarmed woman had managed to create a secure, functioning oasis surrounded by a chaotic land of hunger and warlords. Ms. Griswold helped Dr. Hawa start a school for 850 children, mostly girls. It’s only a tiny fraction of the children in the camp, but it’s a start. (Ms. Griswold also wrote movingly about Dr. Hawa in her book “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.”)

In addition, Dr. Hawa runs literacy and health classes for women, as well as programs to discourage female genital mutilation. And she operates a tiny jail — for men who beat their wives.

“We are trying an experiment,” she told me. “We women in Somalia are trying to be leaders in our community.”

So Dr. Hawa had her hands full already — and then in May a hard-line militia, Hizb al-Islam, or Party of Islam, decided that a woman shouldn’t run anything substantial. The militia ordered her to hand over operations, and she refused — and pointedly added: “I may be a woman, but I’m a doctor. What have you done for society?”

The Party of Islam then attacked with 750 soldiers and seized the hospital. The world’s Somalis reacted with outrage, and the militia backed down and ordered Dr. Hawa to run the hospital, but under its direction.

She refused. For a week there were daily negotiations, but Dr. Hawa refused to budge. She demanded that the militia not only withdraw entirely but also submit a written apology.

“I was begging her, ‘Just give in,’ ” recalled Deqo Mohamed, her daughter, a doctor in Atlanta who spoke regularly to her mother by telephone. “She was saying, ‘No! I will die with dignity.’ ”

It didn’t come to that. The Party of Islam tired of being denounced by Somalis at home and around the world, so it slinked off and handed over an apology — but also left behind a wrecked hospital. The operating theater still isn’t functional, and that’s why Dr. Hawa is here, appealing for money (especially from ethnic Somalis). She has worked out an arrangement with Vital Voices, a group that helps to empower female leaders, to channel tax-deductible contributions to her hospital.

What a woman! And what a Muslim! It’s because of people like her that sweeping denunciations of Islam, or the “Muslim hearings” planned in Congress, rile me — and seem profoundly misguided.

The greatest religious battles are often not between faiths, but within faiths. The widest gulfs are often not those that divide one religion from the next, but those between extremists and progressives within a single faith. And in this religious season, there’s something that we can all learn from the courage, compassion and tolerance of Dr. Hawa Abdi.

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 16, 2010, on page A39 of the New York edition.

In Siberia Race, Ruling Party Uses Clenched Fist

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: December 10, 2010
The New York Times


NOVOSIBIRSK, Russia — On the eve of regional elections, an opposition candidate named Olga V. Safronova arrived at a school for a campaign finale. She planned a rousing speech with a refrain that Russia had been seized by a dictatorial ruling party.

But operatives from that very party showed up to stop her.
What displeased them was this: Ms. Safronova’s political party was supposed to be a fake opposition, created by the Kremlin to give the illusion that Russia was a thriving democracy. Now, though, this puppet party was rebelling here in Siberia — battling for votes, defying the governing party and even assailing Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin himself.

The governing party — in coordination with the authorities themselves — soon responded. And their efforts to suppress Ms. Safronova’s party, A Just Russia, seemed to underscore how laws intended to guarantee free and fair elections carry little weight in Russia.

The governing party operatives tried to bar Ms. Safronova from the school. They called the police to interrogate her. They warned teachers and others that they would be fired if they attended, and most left. Ms. Safronova ignored the threats and began speaking in an auditorium that was nearly deserted. Even so, the operatives sought to shout her down.

“You do not have permission to speak here!” said Gennadi V. Bykovsky, a former prosecutor and aide to the governing party candidate. “We don’t want to hear your blabbering.”

Ms. Safronova lashed back. “You are corrupt!” she said. “Do you see this? They can violate the law as much as they want. And me? How dare I! I should be lined up against the wall and shot for just trying to express my point of view.”

All around Novosibirsk, A Just Russia came under pressure, and had little chance of defending itself. The police raided the party’s offices, and the state television channel accused it of conducting a dirty campaign. Local officials even emblazoned logos of the governing party, United Russia, on city bulldozers to give the party, not the government, credit for fixing roads.

On Election Day, hundreds of soldiers from a military garrison were marched to a polling place and ordered to vote for United Russia, according to nonpartisan voting monitors.

It was as if the governing party and the government had merged, just as in the Communist era. And in many ways, they have. United Russia effectively controls regional governments, prosecutor’s offices, courts, police departments and election commissions.

Up against this colossus went Ms. Safronova, 53, a former Kremlin supporter who grew increasingly frustrated with the country’s political stagnation and decided to do something about it this year. She mounted her campaign for regional assembly, and worked to transform A Just Russia in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city.

From the start, Ms. Safronova realized that the odds were against her.
She dressed like a corporate lawyer on the campaign trail, slogging through the mud of a dairy farm in the city suburbs in high heels. But the truth was that she was a widow with little money who lived with her mother, son and granddaughter in a threadbare housing project that looked as if it had not been renovated since Brezhnev’s time. She had long blond hair that she sometimes styled in a classic Slavic peasant braid, as if to hark back to her rural roots.

An economist by training, she had made many enemies as regional leader of a group called the Public Anticorruption Committee and, before that, as an advocate for small business in Novosibirsk. She expected that the governing party would be infuriated with the regional branch of A Just Russia. And so she was not surprised when she received menacing phone calls from people who would not identify themselves.

“They say, if I don’t end my campaign, they will kill me,” she said.
Still, she thought that even if she did not win, she could secure a high enough percentage of the vote to help prove that Russia had a viable new opposition at the regional level.

If United Russia went unchallenged, she insisted, then Russia would end up like the Soviet Union: foundering under the corrupt and incompetent reign of a single party.

“We are hoping that a massive number of people will come out on Election Day and declare that they will not take this anymore,” she said shortly before the voting. “We are striving to create a true multiparty system, a real democracy in Russia.”

To United Russia, those were fighting words.

A Puppet Rival Party

When the Kremlin birthed A Just Russia in October 2006, Mr. Putin, then Russia’s president, said the new party would “promote democratic values.” But it would also allow the Russian leadership to declare that the country had a multiparty system — even though A Just Russia was loyal to Mr. Putin.

(To read the rest of this article, please click on the link in this blog post's title above.)