Armies of Liberation

Its just a happy story. The inability to procure funds for a dowry is one of the many social stressors young Yemenis face.

Saudi crown prince funds 3,200 marriages
October 22, 2010

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince has funded the marriage of 3,200 Yemeni orphans, described by local officials as the largest mass wedding in the region, Saudi newspapers reported on Friday.

The couples tied the knot after getting the nod from Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, who is also Saudi Arabia’s deputy premier and defence minister.

The wedding, which was staged in Sanaa on Thursday is “a unique and unprecedented marriage even in the Middle East,” said Hameed Zaid, head of the Yemeni Orphans Charity Establishment, which organised the wedding.

SABA: Nearly half of the 26,246 children aged 6-59 months screened in five western districts of Saada in July 2010 were found to be suffering from global acute malnutrition; in one area, the proportion was as high as three out of four children. Overall, 17 per cent of the children screened suffer from severe acute malnutrition and 28 per cent from moderate acute malnutrition.

“Malnutrition is the main underlying cause of death for young children in Yemen, and therefore this grim situation could spell disaster for the children of Saada,” said Geert Cappelaere, UNICEF Representative in Yemen. “As winter approaches, thousands of children are at serious risk if we are not able to act immediately.” (Read on …)

Thank God. What happens when a baby gets tetanus, usually through infection of the umbilical cord after birth, is that it withers and dies, slowly and painfully. As I noted in my recent article, one third of under five deaths in Yemen are from vaccine preventable illnesses. (And another significant portion can be traced to dirty water.) The maternal mortality rates may be understated in the following article. Its difficult to say anything about Yemen with clarity, but some estimates go as high as 340 deaths per 10,000 births. With two vaccine doses, the mother is able to provide some immunity for her newborn. Public awareness of the importance of keeping the umbilical cord clean is another issue. The medical workers still can’t get into Sa’ada though.

Up 1.7 mln women to be immunized against tetanus in Yemen
[09/أكتوبر/2010] SABA

SANA’A, Oct. 09 (Saba)– The Ministry of Public Health and Population in collaboration with UNICEF will launch on Saturday a weeklong Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus Elimination (MNTE) Campaign from 9-14 of October 2010. In a press release, UNICEF said that the campaign will target 1.7 million women of child-bearing age (15-49) in 202 districts in 14 Yemeni provinces. (Read on …)

500,000 children in Yemen targeted in Back to School Campaign

SANA’A, Oct. 11 (Saba)- Half a million children in Yemen, including IDPs and refugees, were being targeted by the Ministry of Education and UNICEF in collaboration with UNHCR, Save the Children, CHF and other development partners, in a major Back to School Campaign. (Read on …)

Hardliners maintain their opposition. Yemeni girls are the voiceless of the voiceless.

Other news from Parliament includes Saleh orders the dropping the election amendment after the JMP withdraws, and Chairman of the Central Organisation for Control and Auditing (COCA) Dr Abdullah al-Sanafi presented a statement on revising accounts of the state for the last year. I’d love to see those figures.

z(CNN) — Yemen’s parliament has delayed a vote on a child-marriage law that would have raised the minimum legal age for marriage to 17. (Read on …)

A ten year old has no capacity to consent.

al Jazeera: The International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) found that just under half of all girls in Yemen are married before they are 18 – classified as underage by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Yemen is a signatory.

With no legal minimum age for marriage, a study by Sanaa University found that in some of Yemen’s regions half of all girls are married before the age of 15.

“The greatest problem facing Yemeni women today is child marriages,” said Wafa Ali of the Yemeni Women’s Union. “These early marriages rob the girl of the right to a normal childhood and education. The girls are forced to have children before their bodies are fully grown.”

Many girls suffer repeated miscarriages or end up with complications brought on by the trauma of forced sex, said Dr Arwa Elrabee, a leading gynaecologist.

In April a local women’s rights group reported that 12-year-old bride Elham Shuee had died three days after marrying a man in his 20s. The girl suffered a rupture of the womb caused by sex, said Majed al-Mathhaji, a spokesman for the Sisters Arab Forum.

Last September, another 12-year-old, Fawziya Abdullah Youssef, bled to death during three days of child birth – her body, doctors said afterwards, was simply too small to cope. (Read on …)

SANA’A, Aug 30 (Bernama) — Some 1.4 million Yemeni children is unable to attend schools in Yemen, a governmental report revealed, Yemen News Agency (Saba) said.

The report, issued recently by the Supreme Council for Education Planning indicated that this makes these children live under the threat of illiteracy and represent a major tributary to double the number of illiterates in the country. (Read on …)

This is lovely news, and the organization certainly deserves to be honored after their tireless work on behalf of protecting children in Yemen.

Press Release: Child rights institution (IDE) in Switzerland has chosen SEYAJ organization for childhood protection as a typical organization of the month for August 2010 to honor it for its distinct role in protecting, monitoring, supporting and advocating the rights of the child in Yemen.

(See their page in English here: Introduction about SEYAJ, its role in protecting childhood in Yemen and its main activities & programs will be displayed in English, French and Germany on one of the main pages of IDE web site that dedicated to highlight on the selected institutions. (Read on …)

Really tragic numbers here.

Daily Times: A study carried out in 2010 by the US-based aid group CHF International revealed that out of Yemen’s 11 million children, five million are currently employed. Three-fifths of those do not receive an education while the remaining two million both study and work at the same time.
CHF said that 40 percent of Yemeni children are drawn into the labour market between the ages of seven and 13. (Read on …)

UNICEF and Government of Yemen jointly launch the First Inter-Agency Comprehensive Child Protection Assessment Report in Conflict Affected Areas in the north of Yemen:

Key Findings:
* 68% of children interviewed have been subjected to domestic violence
* 8% of all abused children have admitted exposure to sexual exploitation perpetrated by host communities, aid workers and others
* 7.9% of IDPs and affected families have had one child killed as a result of the conflict
* 10.3% of children of these families have been injured as a direct result of the fighting from both sides of the conflict
* 21% of children reported that they saw someone being injured or wounded
* 7.1% had witnessed someone being killed
* 10.2% of families reported that their children had been subjected to detention by both sides of the conflict
* More than 15% of the fighters from Al-Houthi and tribal militias are Children below 18 yrs.
* 2.1% of displaced and affected families have indicated that at least one of their children is still missing
* High illiteracy levels amongst care givers in displaced and affected regions, 73% of fathers and 85% of mothers are illiterate without appropriate learning or educational opportunities

Yemen Post: There are roughly 423000 child laborers in Yemen aged between 6 to 14 years old, most of whom are working in the countryside, a recent official survey has said.

Also, most of the children are subjected to physical and psychological abuse, it said, pointing out that amid poverty many families send their children to work to support them. (Read on …)

Somebody is making big money from this. Some of these kids are very young four and five years old.

Trafficking in Persons Report 2010
YEMEN (Tier 2 Watch List)

Yemen is a country of origin and, to a much lesser extent, a transit and destination country for women and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labor and forced prostitution. Yemeni children, mostly boys, migrate across the northern border with Saudi Arabia, to the Yemeni cities of Aden and Sana’a, or – to a lesser extent – to Oman, and are forced to work primarily as beggars, but also for domestic servitude or forced labor in small shops. Some of these children are subjected to commercial sexual exploitation in transit or once they arrive in Saudi Arabia by traffickers, border patrols, other security officials, and their employers. The government and local NGOs estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of children in forced labor in Yemen. (Read on …)

An article covering the press conference is available here at the National.

SEYAJ Organization for Childhood Protection
Summary of press conference on victims of mines and explosive remnants of war
Child land mine victims urgently need medical treatment

May 31, 2010

SEYAJ detailed the horrendous apathy toward children and women who are victims of land mines and explosives in the northwestern province of Saada. Desperate their desperate medical condition, these victims are neglected and lack of access to medical care, even in the minimum standard by provided by hospitals and health centers.

The director of SEYAJ said at a press conference in Sana’a on Monday, May 31, 2010 that the injured had been expelled from the hospitals. The mattresses were pulled from beneath them and they were asked for money for their stay although they received no medicines. The shrapnel was not extracted from their bodies, despite that their injuries were received more than two months in most cases.

The victims of land mines live in harsh humanitarian conditions in the capital Sana’a, where they were not admitted to government hospitals, contrary to the directions of the president and the decision of the Minister of Public Health and Population that required treatment for all victims of war at the expense of the state. (Read on …)

A war against children, fought by children on both sides.

the Naitonal Annual study also finds young soldiers fighting on both sides
(Read on …)

In 2006, I wrote an article ( A Day in the Life of a Failing State) about a chickenpox outbreak in a remote village and how devastating it can be. There was some progress since (after one of the Dar al Hadeth Sheiks reversed his position that vaccines are a Zionist plot), but in Sa’ada, there are tens of thousands of children who were born since 2004 that have never seen a doctor. The following from IRIN

SANAA, 19 April 2010 (IRIN) – A 12-day measles and child polio vaccination campaign began on 17 April in parts of the troubled northern Yemeni governorate of Saada, targeting over 209,000 children, health officials say.

All under fives in seven of the governorate’s 15 districts will be vaccinated against both measles and polio. Those aged 5-15 will be vaccinated against measles, Hinbush Hussein Hinbush, head of the Public Health and Population Office (PHPO) in Saada, told IRIN.
(Read on …)

Quite a logical manifesto by one of Yemen’s leading female activists

Marriage of the Small Girls, and the Absence of Religious Renewal and Reform

By / Tawakkol Abdul Salam Karman*

In our jurisprudence heritage there is a wide place for harmony and compatibility with the claims of banning the marriage of small girls and determining the age of eighteen as a minimum for marriage for girls, and this is exactly what is deemed by the Maliki school.. It is exactly what was transformed by Ibn Abbas, whom he said 23 years old, and 25 said by others, and who knows maybe there is space for what is higher.

In light of the broad claims by engaging the need to complete the process of religious reform and renewal, it is painful that we find that the horizon is narrower than the eye of a needle; since it was supposed to accomplish many of jurisprudence that achieve urgent requirements of the times .. and provide evidence that Islam is valid for all times and places. They are glued deep in the heritage and are looking for fatwas that are closer to the shackles and handcuffs which ,in the best situations, are no longer valid since hundreds of years.

The following day to the protest of Aleeman University in front of the Yemeni parliament opposed to enact a law forbids marriage of small girls, it was quoted by the news that ((a handicapped girl had been raped by several persons)), unless they will not hear in the future that there is a similar demonstration will emerge to claim the application of the punishments of God in the perpetrators, so I will claim from now, that the law of God has nothing to do with all this drivel, and what is required is a show of force and political presence, which is closer to the bad exploitation of religion for instantaneous political purposes.

* Anomaly and the psychological deviation (Read on …)

SEYAJ is such a good organization, advocating for children on such issues as tainted formula, child labor, child marriage, child imprisonment, child abuse, child soldiers, education. Its amazing what a few determined individuals can do when they put their minds and efforts on a goal, even a goal as large as rescuing millions of kids.

News Release: Emad’s story chosen to participate in Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival (Read on …)

Update: the opposing view

LAT Sheik Mohammed Hamzi, an official of the Islamist Yemeni opposition party Islaah and the imam of the Al-Rahman mosque in the Yemeni capital of Sana, is one of those who staunchly opposes a legal ban on child marriage… “I am against the child marriage law because it restrains the freedom of others. When a certain age [for marriage] is set, it violates the rights of others. For example, imagine a young man of 13 or 14 years of age who wants to have sex. … This is a violation of his rights,” Sheik Hamzi told The Times in an interview at his Sana home last week.

Wow, how warped is that thinking? Boys have a right to have sex whenever they have the urge, but girls do not have the right not to be raped. On to the original post, an article published by the Yemen Times:

There is no law in Yemeni legislation that defines a minimum age for marriage. However, there are Islamic legislations that prevent men from forcing their wives into intercourse. Renowned religious scholar Mohammed Hassan said that the Islamic Jurisprudence prohibits forced intercourse between the husband and wife.

“If a woman is forced to bed by her husband, she should know that he is committing a sin and should be punished according the jurisprudence. She should not think that Islam discriminates against women, it is the sole act of this man,” he said.

He emphasized that, in Islam, marriage is a relationship based on kindness and empathy as read in the Roman’s Chapter in the Quran verse 21: “And among His signs is that He created spouses for you from yourselves for you to gain rest from them, and kept love and mercy between yourselves; indeed in this are signs for the people who ponder.”

“The essence of the marital relationship is passion and the husband should make his wife feel that he wants more than just her body for early pleasure but also her companionship and emotions, and so should the wife. Aggressiveness and violence in the bedroom is not acceptable in Islam,” he added.

The Prophet Mohammed (MPBH) had said: “Do not fall onto your wife like an animal, and have a messenger between the two of you.” He was asked: “What is this messenger?” He replied: “The kiss and the conversation.”

Seyaj’s contact info and the Arabic version below the fold. Related Saba news article here.

Press Release: A letter to the Minister of Interior about the trafficking of kidneys

Seyaj organization for childhood protection demanded the Minister of Interior to bring a number of detainees including citizens from Arab nationalities to the prosecution and justice on the charge of trafficking in human organs of Yemeni citizens including children. (Read on …)

The second most malnourished child population in the world is going to lose aid from the World Food Program unless donors step up to the plate.

YEMEN: Food crunch warning for July

Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) Date: 07 Apr 2010

Aid organizations are warning of a food crisis in Yemen unless international food aid funding is dramatically increased before June 2010.

The World Food Programme (WFP) says it has only received a quarter of its annual budget for 2010 (US$25.6 million out of $103.2 million), and will run out of food for 3.2 million people by the end of June. (Read on …)