Sarah Birke

Women

I've been wondering for a while about a very curious, and seemingly global, way of treating women which seems to go against years of debates about feminism and equality and appears, frankly, rather paternalistic.

It is this: Reading news reports I often comes across phrases such as 'Ten people were killed, including women and children'.

Why do we get lumped in with the children? Is the life of a woman more important than that of a man? I can just about see justifications for mentioning children: they had their whole lives ahead of them, perhaps they weren't mature or grown enough to act in a way that may have saved their lives. But women. Really?

Fuelling my rage is a recent discovery of reserved parking spaces for women closer to the buildings at a university in Germany. In Germany! A male friend tried to suggest it was to allow women working late to reach their car quickly, and therefore more safely. That might hold if the car park in question was bigger than a Olympic-sized swimming pool, but alas I fear that wasn't the reasoning.

It seems to me that there is simply still a view that women are weak, victims. I find that rather insulting and, on men's behalf, why should my life be worth mentioning more than theirs?

The power of Turkey

Turkey's world standing is shooting up - in the eyes of the US, Europe and the Arab World, not least Syria. On the part of the Syrians, Turkey's willingness to take a stand on issues such as Israel's assault on Gaza, is gaining it extra points. But with shared history and close geographical proximity the relationship runs deeper than some convenient political alliance.

You can read about the relationship between Syria and Turkey in my piece in The National.

Refugees of the drought

The effects of the ongoing drought in Syria spread beyond the economic to the social. Thousands of people have moved, leaving their homes, and many are being exploited in the job market as they desperately seek work.

You can read one family's story of their move from Oamischle to the suburbs of Damascus, written for The National, here.

Here's a taster:

"In the dusty settlement of Ghazal on the outskirts of Damascus, Nofra al Deen points to a large factory across a patch of wasteland from where he lives. This is his new place of work, he tells me. Until drought forced him to move to the city a few months ago, Nofra lived in the farming town of Qamishle, on the Syrian border with Turkey. Now he works nights in the factory packing flavoured drink powder.

Working shifts from 9pm to 9am brings home just 5,000 Syrian Pounds (about Dh400) per month. His wife works too now, much to his shame, he says, earning the family an extra 4,500 SYP per month in day shifts at the same factory. Between them they earn just about enough to support themselves, his parents and their four young children – although that fragile economic equilibrium was upset recently when their youngest son needed an eye operation, which required them to rack up debts."

Child marriage

There was an interesting piece in The National on Saturday about child brides in the Arab world. (I will declare my interest in the form of additional reporting for the piece). Here is an extract:

"In Yemen, 37 per cent of women between the ages of 20 and 24 were married before they turned 18, the highest rate in the Arab world, according to United Nations figures. In other developing countries such as Afghanistan nearly half of all marriages involve brides under the age of 16.

In the Arab world, a political battle is currently being waged over the issue of child marriage.

Reformers and children’s rights groups are pushing to change the law to set a minimum age for marriage at 17 or 18. However, conservatives, usually backed by religious leaders, are against it."

Comparable statistics for Syria from the UN say 15 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 24 were married before their eighteenth birthday. A bulk of those may well have been over the legal age - 18 for men and 17 for women - and most probably many above the age of 13 for women (or perhaps women is an inappropriate term; girls) and 15 for men (boys) where permission is granted. It is clear the legal framework needs changing to raise the age and bring the age for men and women into line with one another. And there need to be penalities.

Bassam al-Kadi of the Syrian Women's Obervatory told me that the issue of underage marriage is very simple to solve, but it needs a decision to do so and the action to back it up. Unicef is working with the government on a draft law to set the minimum ages for marriage for both men and women to 18.

(The rest of the article is here.)

A strange alliance

Why Syria is of interest to a Latin American country headed by a leader with global ambitions:

SUWEIDA, SYRIA // Around the streets of the southern Syrian city of Suweida there is evidence of a curious relationship. Taxis zoom past with Venezuela bumper stickers, shop awnings are made out of Venezuelan flag-patterned material and restaurant walls are adorned with joint pictures of the Syrian and Venezuelan leaders, Bashar Assad and Hugo Chávez, respectively.

Read the rest in The National.

Drought

There has been little coverage of the Syrian drought which is affecting the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people. It is, unfortunately, only getting worse.

DAMASCUS, 2 September 2009 (IRIN) - Thousands of Syrian farming families have been forced to move to cities in search of alternative work after two years of drought and failed crops followed a number of unproductive years.

"The situation has now got really severe; we are talking about desert, rather than farming land," said Abdel Qader Abu Awad, MENA (Middle East and North Africa) disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). "People cannot live in this environment any more and their final coping mechanism is migration."

Read the rest of the report on IRIN.

Young people and the private sector

Extract from The National:

As Syria makes the transition from a centrally planned to a social market economy, new companies, including multinationals and international chains, are opening, offering young Syrians professional jobs with high wages and good career prospects.

“Five years ago no one was interested in the private sector but things are changing drastically,” said Rana Shanawani, the head of Bidaya, a non-profit that supports young entrepreneurs, and a former employee of the government’s agency for combating unemployment."

Read the rest of the article on young Syrians' changing job preferences here.

Urban refugees

The UNHCR has just released an interesting report looking at the effects of Iraqi refugees settling in cities rather than camps. Although the urban settling allows the refugees to intergrate and seek work more easily, they are much harder to reach, says the report. This has brought challenges in assisting the most vulnerable refugees - an ever increasing number.

Read IRIN's front page article on the report here.

Syrian Bride School

In the northern Syrian city of Aleppo a unique school has opened its doors - the Bride School. The school is a project run for local Muslim girls who get married at a young age, often lacking in education and awareness. The school does not aim to deter the girls from marriage, but to prepare them for how to bring up their family and to have ambitions for themselves. The results are very successful.

Here is an extract from my article, published in The National newspaper on Saturday:

ALEPPO, SYRIA // In a room off the courtyard of a restored school, tucked away in the winding maze of streets in Aleppo’s old city, girls in hijab and long coats jostle around a table to watch as their teacher explains how to make a Greek salad.
In an adjacent room, more faces focus expectantly on a whiteboard as the teacher takes them through English and Arabic sentence structure.

This is Aleppo’s school for brides-to-be, which has been running in the conservative neighbourhood of Qalat ash-Sharief for just over a year. The young Muslim girls are taught skills that will be useful when they marry – an inevitable eventuality in an economically and educationally poor area of the city where women are expected to take a traditional family role.

You can read the full article and see photographs here.

Syria and the UK

A lot has been said about Syria and the possibility of re-engagement with the West. It started with France's rapprochement (President Sarkozy's sorting out of Lebanese - Syrian diplomatic ties in June last year), moved on to the UK (David Milliband visited Damascus at the end of 2008) and, with Barack Obama's inauguration, talk moved to the US at the start of 2009.

Many Middle East commentators have been sceptical, seeing the Syria issue as an easy area to make progress at the expense of the Israel-Palestine question, i.e. a cheap political move. That has been denied by others. As far as the UK is concerned, British ambassador to Syria, Simon Collis, says this is the crux of the issue:

"The reason for the change is a new manner in Syria’s approach to regional issues and progress in the Middle East peace process – there have never been difficulties in the bilateral relations between Syria and Britain. Over the past year we have seen an intensification of political exchanges with Iraq, leading to a Syrian ambassador being sent to Iraq, indirect talks with Israel, and the Doha Agreement which resulted in the exchange of embassies with Lebanon."

However, though delegations have been sent to Damascus and the US ban on selling Boeing parts to Syria lifted, Syria has complained that as of yet there have been no concrete policy changes. Has the talk of an improved relationship been exaggerated?

For more of the British ambassador's views, you can read my interview with him from February this year here.