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Yemen protests: women take centre stage

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Summary of story from BBC News, April 21, 2011

Three months into anti-government demonstrations in Yemen, and it is the women who are taking centre stage, defying sceptics who predicted the Gulf Arab nation would be unable to mobilise half of its population.

Seated in her tent in the middle of Sanaa’s Change Square, Tawakul Karman, a young female activist and now household name in Yemen, says she is astonished.

“I could never imagine this,” she says. “In Yemen, women are not allowed out of the house after 7pm, now they are sleeping here.”

In the last three months, Mrs Karman has been imprisoned, beaten and humiliated in the state media, yet she continues to campaign.

The unexpected level of women’s participation shows, many believe, the great depth of public discontent with the three-decade-long rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Yemen’s embattled president does not, however, share this enthusiasm for female political participation.

As he addressed a rally of tens of thousands of his mostly male supporters at a highly orchestrated rally recently, Mr Saleh – who the West had praised as a secular leader – shamed the opposition for allowing women to protest with the man (see WVoN story).

It was, he said, “un-Islamic”.

The irony is that Yemen’s Islamist opposition party, Islah, is the biggest force in mobilising women.

Happily, not all male protestors agree with him. One said: “Women have a real place in the Yemeni history and I would even vote for a woman president,” he adds.

Other women have noticed a difference as well.

“I went home last night after being in the square till almost midnight. I was expecting a lecture – but there wasn’t one,” says Sara, a British Yemeni filmmaker who grew up in Sanaa before moving to the UK.

On this trip back to Yemen, she says, she doesn’t recognise her family.

“The family here controls you fully, what you do, how you dress, how you behave in public and in private. And it does not change when you grow up – then you get married and control is passed on to your husband’s family. So this change of attitude is astonishing,” she says.

Although women’s rights isn’t quite on the agenda, the mobilisation of women in Yemen signals an exciting change.

Nadwa al-Dawsari, executive director for the Yemen branch of Partners for Democratic Change hopes that the demonstrations will act as a platform to campaign for women’s rights.

Every day in Sanaa’s Change Square, dozens of women are getting up on stage to tell tens of thousands of men what they think.

Just three months ago, this was simply unimaginable.

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