This is a guest post by amie
I joined sixty women’s delegates from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia on a moored boat at Embankment last Wednesday to hear what they had to say in protest against women’s inequality at the Olympics. The protest was coordinated by the European Women’s Lobby, which is linked to a network of more than 1,500 women’s organisations across Europe.
You can read the details here about the speakers, the women’s demands, and the programme for the day.
I was surprised to find nearly all the participants and speakers including the women from the MENA countries, were francophone. Peter Tatchell told me he had notified many women’s organisations but none were interested. “That’s the progressive left these days”, he remarked.
I spoke to one of the very few British women there, from the London Women’s Network, who lamented the difficulty in getting local women’s organisations to find common ground, and the misrepresentation of Peter Tatchell’s role by some of these groups. We both noted that of the 90 minutes of presentations, Peter had had exactly 3 minutes, just to express his support, very simply, and that when a journalist approached him for comment, he said, speak to the women, not me.
Whatever one’s views on various elements of the protest’s agenda, there were women from MENA and South Asia who bore personal witness with passion to what oppression meant for them in general, and for sports in particular, under those regimes.
Iran was expressly named as the main target for protest, closely followed by Saudi Arabia.
A speaker pointed out the inconsistency of the application of the rules of FIFA and ISOC against display of religious and political symbols: for example, a football player put on a kippa to celebrate scoring a goal and got a yellow card, another player lifted his shirt to display another shirt with a message about Jesus: yellow card.
All the speakers firmly identified the wearing of Islamic head and body covering as a religio- political gesture which fell foul of IOC rule 50.3 which prohibits any kind of political, religious or racial propaganda at the Olympics, and which athletes swear an oath to uphold.
I asked the chair, Anne-Marie Lizin, President of the Belgian Senate, whether this covered wearing a cross, for example. She said this would not constitute “proselitism” which I gather is the French version for propaganda.
As many of the speeches were in French, and some were roughly translated, this account may lose something in translation, for example when the speaker from Ni Pute ni Soumise said: Salafism is not an opinion, it is a crime.
Iranian exiled activist Anna Pak claimed the hijab at the Olympics was a fulfilment of Khomeini’s declared intent when he said “I want to export our model of Islam to the world”. Iran wants to show their slogan of political Islam through the body of women. At first Khomeini didn’t allow sport for women, but then had the idea of using sport as propaganda through the body of women, just as Hitler used the body in sport to advance his ideological propaganda. The ideas of the Islamists are the same as Hitler. For 33 years for women in Iran, the veil has been their yellow star, for women as it was for the Jews struggling under the yellow star.
My first response was an automatic recoil when anyone draws parallels with Nazis or appropriates any aspect of the Jewish experience, but when I read this interview with Pak later, I thought the analogy tenable insofar as her parallel is the forced wearing of an item which denies the person their humanity (and women have been killed for refusal to do so).
The statement that Islamism attempts to give a character of universality to sexist apartheid, was met with loud cheers and applause.
The IOC supports separate games for women in Iran as a step forward, yet during apartheid SA, the IOC declared separate competitions for Blacks were unacceptable and SA stayed banned.
Nina trains PE teachers in Palestine. Since the first and second intifada, girls’ sport has deteriorated drastically. There is separation, head to toe veiling. 10 years ago she could train in the school yard- now it is forbidden to do so outside of the school building.
Sundas Hoorain from Pakistan, completing an MA in Human Rights at LSE from the organisation One law for All said she was shocked at the cultural relativism in UK. We had no relativism about slavery and apartheid, she declared. When Pakistan women are burned alive for wanting to choose their own husbands, and even worse conditions apply in Afghanistan, it is deeply offensive when multiculturalism is used to defend such practises and is hijacked by dictators and tyrants. How can ISOC say with a straight face that Saudi Arabia has now complied with the requisite minimum standards, with two token diaspora Saudi women, when sport for women in Saudi Arabia is not permitted.
Another speaker related the struggle of particular women in a Tunisian university today, and other countries, and said one cannot dismiss this struggle as just about a piece of cloth when their stand against the veil results in violence and even death.
Soad Baba Aissa Amel from Algeria said she fights for secularism. She says Islamism is an ideology which instrumentalises the body of women for propaganda, and that ISOC is killing these women for a second time.
The group then proceeded up to Westminster bridge, led by a Dixie band, to throw a mock coffin symbolising the death of the IOC charter, into the river.
UPDATE: A Saudi woman competing in the Olympic judo will fight wearing a special headscarf in order to comply with both safety issues and Saudi dress codes. The team had threatened to withdraw 16-year-old Wojdan Shaherkani from the competition if she was not allowed to wear the hijab.
