SOUTH KURDISTAN :What annoys female members of the provincial council!

A reply to this article: Human rights committee of KPC doubts high prevalence data of FGM

Falah Muradkhan Shakaram –  Lawyer and coordinator of the German Wadi e. V

Yet again, the surveys concerning female genital mutilation conducted by the Pana organization and Wadi e. V have caused nervousness, rage, and even denial. Again the manifestations of illiteracy and ignorance hits again in the state of the black gold and makes us listen to the same old songs of 2010 of the Kurdistan region when the statistics of the female genital mutilation caused waves of criticizing and denial, leading to numerous official and unofficial announcements against the statistics by people who have never read or reviewed the statistics.

The reactions of the women’s rights committee of the Kirkuk Provincial Council are in fact illogical and incomplete.  Not the survey they are criticizing, as the evidence of the not reading the survey by the committee can be witnessed as they slammed the survey for not mentioning the age groups in the survey which in fact are presented in numerous charts and schemes for the age groups between 14-19 years of age and others for each in the ten-year-old range of age.  Another point of evidence for the committee’s reluctance and illiteracy is they are still unable to differentiate between surveys and census.

It is a pity that the reluctance, nervousness, and raging of the council is of a level that they deny and refuse the entire survey without ever thinking about the crimes which are practiced in their city.  They do not know that the results of the survey are revealed in the presence of the Kirkuk prefect and numerous organizations and facilities; they do not know that the survey is the result of the two years of hard work by our teams, they know nothing… nothing!

They are upset because the reports are handed to the Iraqi Council of Representatives and are calling for prevention and prohibition of female genital mutilation by law.  The committee thinks that the reputation of the city is ruined, because they find it easy to see such crimes committed in the city but the revelation ruins the city’s reputation. In fact, the reverse is totally true: the confrontation of female genital mutilation is one of their major duties as they are the representatives of the people of the city.

Finally, I do hope the committee will be able to spare a couple of hours of their time to read and evaluate the survey, and to decide later as their worry and raging are at the peak of nonsense.

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