Somaliland: Students of UN funded school promote female genital mutliation

[mota bhai 2,675]

HARGEISA, Somalia (AP) - The 30 Somali teenagers - both boys and girls - all agreed: Female genital mutilation is harmful and the practice should be abandoned. But what they really meant, they revealed moments later, is that girls should have their genitalia cut - just not sewn shut.

"It's our tradition and if the girls are not subjected to suna(cutting) she will not be accepted for marriage," said Asthma Ibrahim Jabril, 17.

The students, who are part of an afterschool club in Somaliland which the U.N. children's agency helps fund, discuss issues like child labor, early marriage, and female genital mutilation in a classroom with several large hearts scrawled along the walls.

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All 15 girls sitting opposite the boys at Sheik Nuur Primary school have undergone suna - the removal of the ####### and the ####### minora. They all said it was the right thing to do.

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Officials with UNICEF tried to underscore that they do not believe female genital mutilation is required by Islam, though it is not strictly practiced by Muslims. Haydar Nasser, a UNICEF official who is Iraqi by birth but now a Canadian citizen, told the leaders that they were following a custom first practiced by the Egyptians some 6,000 years ago, long before Islam was founded.

"So the question to you to discuss today is why as a Muslim practice do you employ a pharaoh practice, pharaohs who went to hell because they are kaffirs," he said, using the Arabic word for someone who doesn't believe in Islam.