CAIRO: It might have been another #MeToo moment: An Egyptian woman says a man stalked her at a bus stop, made inappropriate advances, and only backed off when she began filming him with her cellphone.
But when she posted the video on Facebook, it ignited an online debate in which many Egyptians, including women, took the man’s side. Some say he was politely flirting and the woman overreacted, while others have speculated about what she was wearing, suggesting she was the one at fault.
Sexual harassment, mostly ranging from catcalls to occasional pinching or grabbing, is rampant in Egypt. Polls have found that a majority of both men and women in the conservative Muslim country believe it is justified if women dress “provocatively” in public.
That may explain the response to the brief video Menna Gubran posted on August 15. In it, a man later identified as Mahmoud Soliman can be seen approaching her on a suburban Cairo street and inviting her to coffee at On the Run, a nearby convenience store. She politely declines, and he apologizes and walks away.
In a subsequent video and in TV interviews, Gubran said Soliman had circled in his car three times as she waited for a bus and made comments that made her feel uncomfortable. At one point, she went into a nearby supermarket, hoping he would leave. When she returned, he came by again and got out of his car, at which point she says she began filming.
Soliman, who has also given TV interviews, denies doing anything wrong and disputed her account of circling in his car. “I just invited her to drink coffee, and I never bothered her. When she said I was bothering her, I apologized and left,” he said.
The video provoked a torrent of angry responses, but while many praised Gubran for outing an alleged harasser, just as many accused her of overreacting or questioned her motives.
“The man was speaking in a very polite and respectful way and she as any Egyptian woman called him a harasser,” a man who identified himself as Mustafa El-Sokarri wrote on Twitter.
Others asked what Gubran, who does not appear in the video, was wearing, with some fishing personal photos out of her social media accounts. Many treated the incident as a joke. The Arabic phrase for “Let’s drink coffee” trended on social media, and “On the Run Guy” even enjoyed a moment of local fame.
The diverging responses reflect a long-running debate in Egypt over what constitutes sexual harassment and who is at fault.
“The incident was indeed harassment and a violation of the girl’s privacy,” said Maha Ahmed, a human rights lawyer at the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms. “Unfortunately, there is misunderstanding of harassment in Egypt and this caused the controversy.”
The problem of sexual harassment in Egypt gained worldwide attention during and after the 2011 uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, when women were harassed, groped — and in some cases, beaten and sexually assaulted — during mass protests.
In 2014, the government passed a law making sexual harassment punishable by up to five years in prison, but it is not widely enforced, particularly when it comes to milder forms of street harassment.
Mozn Hassan, a women’s rights activist, said that although the law was a positive step, it does not define different kinds of sexual harassment. “The state should lay down a clear definition,” she told the daily Al-Shorouk on Sunday.
A study released last year by the Thomson Reuters Foundation ranked Cairo as the most dangerous megacity in the world for women. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi questioned its findings, but acknowledged in TV comments last November that “there is sexual harassment in Egypt. There is a big percentage, but not to say it is the worst.”
Another poll carried out last year by UN Women and Promundo, a non-governmental organization, found that nearly 60 percent of Egyptian women say they have been sexually harassed, and nearly 65 percent of men acknowledge harassing women, though they mainly admitted to ogling.
The poll, which surveyed 1,380 men and 1,402 women in five governorates, found that 74 percent of men — and 84 percent of women — agreed that “women who dress provocatively deserve to be harassed.” Forty-three percent of men said women “like the attention” when men harass them.
Only 20 percent of women said they did.
#MeToo moment? Video of unwanted advance divides Egyptians
#MeToo moment? Video of unwanted advance divides Egyptians
Kurdish pupils denied language lessons in Turkiye amid wider curbs, families say
- Since 2012, pupils can ask for two hours of Kurdish lessons
- Teachers’ union says families fear stigmatization if they ask
- Some parents say requests not met, schools can’t find teachers
ISTANBUL: A Turkish government proposal to end a decades-long conflict with Kurdish militants has put Kurdish rights back in the spotlight, at a time when Kurdish leaders say repression is rife and freedoms won more than a decade ago have eroded.
One of those is the right to receive two hours of Kurdish language education in school, a move introduced by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in 2012 as an “historic step” in a country which once banned the Kurdish language outright.
More than a dozen parents, Kurdish politicians and education experts told Reuters their children today could not receive the language classes even in Turkiye’s largest cities, and not all Kurdish families knew of the right to ask for them.
Turkiye’s Kurds make up about a fifth of the population, numbering an estimated 17 million. Kurdish is the mother tongue for most and the right to education in Kurdish is one of their main demands.
The constitution however states, “no language other than Turkish shall be taught as mother tongue to Turkish citizens.”
“The Kurdish people’s right to education in their mother tongue is essential for the expression of their cultural identity and social equality,” said Gulistan Kilic Kocyigit, chairperson of the pro-Kurdish DEM party in parliament.
“Education in mother tongue is essential for peace, equal citizenship and the protection of cultural rights.”
Erdogan’s key ally in his ruling alliance made a shock proposal in October that jailed Kurdish militant PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan end his group’s insurgency in exchange for the possibility of his release.
Previously, a peace process with the militants was started in 2012 but collapsed in 2015 and was followed by fresh violence and a crackdown on the pro-Kurdish political movement.
“Optional Kurdish classes have become invisible in schools since the end of the peace process,” said Remezan Alan, a lecturer within the Kurdish Language and Culture department of Artuklu University in Turkiye’s southeastern Mardin province. The department was formed in 2009.
Two of Alan’s children were unable to access Kurdish class in Diyarbakir, a city of 1.8 million in the mainly Kurdish southeast. “There were enough requests, but a teacher was not available,” he said.
Asked about the classes, Turkiye’s ministry of education, which speaks for schools, said, “it is possible for a course to be taught if at least 10 students are enrolled.” It did not comment on the situation in individual schools.
Education Minister Yusuf Tekin last month denied that the state was ignoring requests from parents for the lessons or discouraging them from asking for them. If there were not enough students he said, it was because of a 2012 boycott of the lessons by DEM’s predecessor party, which said two hours were not enough.
Parents want children to learn Kurdish in school so they can read and write in the language, they say.
Hudai Morarslan, a member of teachers’ union Egitim-Bir-Sen which campaigns for teachers’ rights and educational rights, says pupils have access to optional Kurdish classes in only 13 cities across Turkiye. He is campaigning for them to be available in Bingol, a town in the mainly Kurdish southeast region.
“Everyone is afraid to ask,” he said, adding that there is a constant fear of being stigmatized by the state and linked to the PKK, designated as a terrorist group by Turkiye, the United States and the European Union.
In November, Turkish authorities detained 231 people and replaced six pro-Kurdish mayors over suspected PKK ties. The DEM Party said those detained included its local officials and activists.
Earlier, dozens of people singing and dancing to Kurdish songs at weddings were detained on charges of “spreading terrorist propaganda,” which the DEM party said showed “intolerance toward Kurdish identity and culture.”
Government officials said the songs were an expression of solidarity with the PKK and a threat to national unity.
SLOW PROGRESS
Turkiye’s ban on the Kurdish language was lifted in 1991. Seventeen years later, state broadcaster TRT began a Kurdish TV channel, which some Kurds boycotted and criticized as government propaganda.
Nevzat Yesilbagdan, 43, lives in Istanbul’s Bagcilar district with his family. He says three of his children’s requests to learn Kurdish have been denied by the school due to a lack of teachers or an insufficient number of students.
“Our main demand is to be educated in our mother tongue, but an optional course is an important step toward that goal.”
A study released by Rawest Research, a think tank focused on Kurdish issues, found in 2020 that only 30 percent of some 1,500 parents were aware of the optional Kurdish courses.
Ihsan Yildiz, 42, who works in the construction sector in Istanbul, said his 15-year-old daughter Meryem received no response to her request for Kurdish class from her Islamic Imam Hatip school. She then stopped asking.
His children understand some Kurdish but can’t read it.
“My mother who lives with us does not speak Turkish. I translate when my children talk to their grandmother. This is so sad.”
New militias sow future danger for war-weary Sudan
- They established the so-called joint forces to fight on the army’s side, while other groups “wavered, before throwing their weight behind the RSF,” Hamrour said
- Historically, though ethnic or tribal armed groups “may ally themselves with the regular army, they remain essentially independent,” according to Ameer Babiker, author of the book “Sudan’s Peace: A Quagmire of Militias and Irregular Armies”
CAIRO: Mohamed Idris, 27, has despaired of ever finding a job in war-torn Sudan. Instead, he’s now set his sights on a training camp on the Eritrean border, hoping to join a militia.
“I got my university degree but there aren’t any job opportunities, if I get into a training camp I can at least defend my country and my people,” he told AFP from Kassala in Sudan, the nearest city to the border.
Analysts say the growing role such militias and armed groups are playing in the war will only prolong the country’s suffering.
Sudan’s war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in April 2023, sparking what the UN calls the world’s worst displacement crisis.
More than eight million people have been uprooted internally and more than three million have fled abroad.
The northeast African country is on the brink of famine, according to aid agencies, and a UN investigation found both sides committed rights abuses with the RSF particularly implicated in sexual violence.
In Sudan’s east, Kassala and Gedaref have so far been spared the chaos of war, but host more than a million people who have fled fighting elsewhere.
In both cities, AFP correspondents have seen convoys of four-wheel drives mounted with anti-aircraft weapons speed through the streets.
Each vehicle, blasting its horn as it went, was manned by a handful of young men waving assault rifles — though the nearest battles are hundreds of kilometers (miles) away.
The men, like Idris, are part of a generation who have lost their futures to the flames of Sudan’s war.
Now, they represent recruiting potential for new armed groups being formed, particularly along ethnic and tribal lines in the country’s army-controlled east.
“The forces I want to join are from my tribe and my family,” said Idris.
According to Sudanese analyst and former culture and information minister Faisal Mohammed Saleh, “these groups haven’t yet joined the fray in the current war.”
“But the fear is that they could be preparing for future rounds,” he told AFP.
Sudan, which has only known brief interludes of civilian rule since independence from Britain in 1956, is rife with armed groups, some with the capacity of small armies.
For decades, many were locked in wars with the central government, claiming to champion the rights of marginalized ethnic minorities or regions.
In 2020, most signed a peace agreement with the government in Khartoum, and several rebel leaders subsequently became senior officials in the government of army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan.
“In the first months of the war, many of these groups were neutral, but have since declared allegiance to the army,” Sudanese policy researcher Qusay Hamrour told AFP.
They established the so-called joint forces to fight on the army’s side, while other groups “wavered, before throwing their weight behind the RSF,” Hamrour said.
According to former information minister Saleh, “what’s new now is the eastern Sudanese groups, most of which are training inside Eritrea.”
Eyewitnesses told AFP earlier this year that they saw Sudanese fighters being trained in at least five locations in neighboring Eritrea, which has not commented on the allegations.
The witnesses said the camps were linked to Burhan’s army or to figures from the former Islamist-backed regime of ousted dictator Omar Al-Bashir.
Historically, though ethnic or tribal armed groups “may ally themselves with the regular army, they remain essentially independent,” according to Ameer Babiker, author of the book “Sudan’s Peace: A Quagmire of Militias and Irregular Armies.”
Khartoum has long relied on armed groups to fight its wars in other parts of Sudan.
In response to an uprising in Darfur in 2003, Bashir unleashed the Janjaweed militia, leading to war crimes charges against him and others.
The RSF, formalized by Bashir in 2013, are descended from the Janjaweed.
In 2021, army chief Burhan led a coup that derailed a fragile civilian transition that followed Bashir’s own ouster.
By April 2023, a long-running power struggle between Burhan and his deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, erupted into all-out war.
Now, what Babiker calls “the weakness of the Sudanese state” has compelled it to again to depend on militias to secure territory.
He said this strategy would “only lead to these groups growing stronger, making them impossible to bypass in the future.”
Already, there have emerged “multiple centers of decision-making within the army,” he told AFP.
According to a May report from the International Crisis Group think tank, “both main belligerents are struggling with command and control.”
Burhan, increasingly reliant on powers from the Bashir regime “as well as communal militias and other armed groups ... risks losing his hold on the various factions.”
Meanwhile the RSF is “an ever more motley assortment of tribal militias and warlords,” according to Crisis Group, which says that both wartime coalitions have become more unwieldy.
UN General Assembly pushes for Palestinian state
- The United Nations considers the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip to be unlawfully occupied by Israel
- Alluding to recent rulings by the International Court of Justice, the assembly called on Israel to end its “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as rapidly as possible” and halt all new settlement activity
UNITED NATIONS, United States: The UN General Assembly on Tuesday called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories and pushed for the creation of a Palestinian state, convening an international conference in June to try to jumpstart a two-state solution.
In a resolution passed by a 157-8 vote, with the United States and Israel among those voting no, and seven abstentions, the Assembly expressed “unwavering support, in accordance with international law, for the two-state solution of Israel and Palestine.”
The Assembly said the two states should be “living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, based on the pre-1967 borders.”
It has called for a high-level international meeting in New York in June 2025, to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, to breathe new life into diplomatic efforts to make the two-state solution a reality.
The assembly called for “realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, primarily the right to self-determination and the right to their independent state.”
The United Nations considers the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip to be unlawfully occupied by Israel.
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967 and maintained troops and settlements there until 2005. Though it has withdrawn, it is still considered the occupying power there.
Alluding to recent rulings by the International Court of Justice, the assembly called on Israel to end its “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as rapidly as possible” and halt all new settlement activity.
“The question of Palestine has been on the UN agenda since the inception of the organization and remains the most critical test to its credibility and authority and to the very existence of an international law-based order,” Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour said.
It was a UN General Assembly resolution in 1947 that divided British-ruled Palestine into two states — one Arab and one Jewish.
But only the creation of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948. This triggered a war between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
UN condemns deadly shelling of Sudan displacement camp
- According to the UN, which managed to deliver its first aid convoy to Zamzam in months in November, families have been reduced to eating peanut shells to survive as children die of malnutrition
UNITED NATIONS, United States: The United Nations on Tuesday denounced the shelling of a displacement camp in North Darfur by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which killed at least six people.
The famine-stricken Zamzam camp, just south of state capital El-Fasher, came under intense rocket and artillery bombardment by the RSF on Sunday.
“The United Nations and humanitarian partners in Sudan strongly condemn these acts of violence against innocent civilians,” the UN resident coordinator for Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, said in a statement.
She added: “I am deeply concerned by reports of the indiscriminate shelling of Zamzam camp, health clinics and shelters of displaced people. Their protection is paramount.”
Since April last year, a war between the regular army and the RSF has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 11 million and created what the UN has called the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.
El-Fasher has been besieged by paramilitaries for months, paralyzing aid operations and plunging the Zamzam camp, which is home to at least half a million people, into famine.
According to the UN, which managed to deliver its first aid convoy to Zamzam in months in November, families have been reduced to eating peanut shells to survive as children die of malnutrition.
“It is now 232 days since the siege of El-Fasher began, which has resulted in unacceptable levels of human suffering,” Nkweta-Salami said.
Both sides of the conflict face accusations of war crimes, including targeting civilians, shelling residential areas and blocking or looting aid.
In recent weeks, the RSF has tightened its grip on El-Fasher, launching attacks on multiple fronts against Sudan’s military and allied armed groups.
Doctors urge medical evacuations from war-torn Gaza to east Jerusalem
- Israel controls all points of departure from the Gaza Strip which has been battered by over a year of war between Israel and militants led by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas
JERUSALEM: Medics and rights groups on Tuesday called for the immediate opening of a humanitarian corridor from Gaza to allow the urgent evacuation of patients to hospitals in east Jerusalem.
Israel controls all points of departure from the Gaza Strip which has been battered by over a year of war between Israel and militants led by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
Rare medical evacuations have been organized by international organizations or foreign countries in coordination with Israeli authorities.
But amid mounting casualties from the war, the East Jerusalem Hospitals Network and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) called for the immediate reopening of the Gaza to east Jerusalem medical corridor, estimating that about 25,000 patients in Gaza were in need of urgent care.
Fadi Atrash, the director of the Augusta Victoria Hospital in east Jerusalem, said the reopening of the evacuation corridor “is essential to allow us to continue to provide vital treatments in hospitals in east Jerusalem, where we have both the space and the medical expertise.”
Prior to the war, patients in Gaza who were in need of medical care unavailable in the Palestinian territory could be evacuated to hospitals in the Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem or the occupied West Bank, and in some cases in Israel.
But since the Gaza war broke out last year, that mechanism has been defunct.
During an exceptional evacuation of about 200 patients from Gaza in early November, the World Health Organization said about 14,000 people were awaiting medical evacuations.
Days later, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said “Israeli authorities blocked, without explanation, the medical evacuation of eight children and their caretakers from Gaza who are in need of medical care, including a two-year-old with leg amputations, to the MSF hospital in Jordan.”
“We strongly denounce this decision,” it said.
On Tuesday, “31 patients and caregivers left Gaza” through the Kerem Shalom crossing between Gaza and Israel, COGAT, the Israeli Defense Ministry agency managing civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, said.
It added that the patients were to be transferred to Jordan and the United States for treatment.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X that the 31 comprised 11 children with cancer awaiting treatment and 20 companions.
“Thousands of patients across Gaza still need medical evacuations for life-saving medical care. We urge that all corridors be utilized for the safe transfer of patients outside the Gaza Strip,” he said.
More than 105,000 people have been wounded in Gaza since the war erupted on October 7, 2023, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry which the United Nations deems reliable.
Gaza’s health care system has largely been decimated by the war, with only a handful of medical facilities now able to provide care.
