In Casablanca, thousands of Islamic conservatives took to the streets on March 12,
2000 to protest a proposed reform of the family legal code, which governs the status
of women.
Badia Skalli
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It is better to be a man than
a woman because even the most miserable of men has a wife to order around.
Isabel
Allende,
Chilean writer (1942-)
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Now
that she had entered the fight for political power as an equal, Skalli saw repressed
machismo coming to the surface again. |
For years, Moroccan member of
parliament Badia Skalli has put her long-standing loyalty to the Socialist Party
before her feminist beliefs. Now she is at the centre of a tough battle
 Badia Skalli had the good fortune
to be born at a time when the world made sense, and everything was linked to some
kind of cause. First came the struggle for independence, then the big push to build
a new and freer country. Cold reality eventually dashed these hopes, but from the
outset, there had been that dream.
Skalli was born in 1944 in El Jadida, about 100 kilometers south of Casablanca. At
10 she had her first taste of political activism. A pro-independence demonstration
passed her house, and suddenly she was marching in step with the protesters. This
earned her a good hiding when she got home, but the seed had been sown.
When Skalli enrolled at the University of Casablanca in 1962 to study law, the National
Union of Moroccan Students (UNEM) was at its height and spearheading the left-wing
opposition party, the National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP).
“You just had to join in,” she remembers. “You just felt it so strongly. The students
were the elite.” Women students were few and far between, and only a handful were
activists like her. They were fussed over by the men in the organization, who wanted
to show they were modern-minded and strongly in favour of women’s emancipation. The
UNEM executive committee welcomed Skalli and she took on her first political responsibilities.
King Hassan II, who came to the throne in 1961, soon called a halt to these “antics.”
In 1965, a high-school student rebellion grew into a popular uprising and a state
of emergency was declared. The UNEM was decapitated when all its leaders were drafted
into the army. Except for Skalli, that is, who greatly resented being treated differently
because of her sex. “I had dreams about an army truck that would pick me up and take
me away with my comrades.”
Skalli acquired her yen for politics during these years of activism. But the state
of emergency drove the UNFP, of which she was a member, underground. Morocco entered
a period of political repression. Women party members busied themselves with looking
after political prisoners’ families. The young Skalli married, but her husband was
killed in a road accident three years later. It took her several years to recover.
The call of politics was too compelling. When the UNFP split in 1975, she sided with
the party’s “democratic” wing to help found the Socialist Union of Popular Forces
(USFP), which meant giving up the tempting dream of revolution. The battle was now
to be fought within the institutional bounds defined by the law. Skalli was one of
the party’s few female candidates in the 1976 local elections, the first to be held
under the state of emergency.
She campaigned in a poor, predominantly Berber-speaking area, where she found women
cut off from the world because they were illiterate and did not understand Arabic.
She had put her finger on the plight of Moroccan women. The young candidate also
found that voters had no preconceptions about women in politics and judged her by
what she said. But the party asked her not to mention the fact that she was a widow—a
woman without a husband—in her nomination papers.
Skalli’s election bid failed, and she took it badly because the party had lost a
seat. The issue of women’s participation in politics sparked little public interest.
But she was leader of the USFP’s women’s organization, founded in 1975 during International
Women’s Year. Awareness was rising, but female party activists still put women’s
issues on the back burner.
“Next to the historic figures who had fought for independence or spent time in prison,
we felt small and tended to fade into the background,” she says. Though a key figure
in the USFP, it was a long time before Skalli gained enough self-confidence to assert
her rightful place in the party.
After another defeat at the polls, this time in a parliamentary election, she won
a municipal council seat in 1983. Two women Socialist Party candidates were elected
in the same town and the party planned to make Skalli the council president. The
proposal triggered an uproar. Despite being socialists, some “comrades” were dead-set
against the idea. “A people who entrust their business to a woman are heading for
ruination,” the prophet Mohammed is supposed to have said. The party leadership backed
down and the job went to a younger and less qualified man. Skalli had to settle for
being the council vice-president.
The practical experience of sharing power with men was highly instructive. “Everything
happens behind the scenes, in the framework of a male complicity that shuts out women,”
she says. Women’s issues rarely interest men, she notes, and because female politicians
are so few, they are “like clay pots against iron ones.”
Now that she had entered the fight for political power as an equal, Skalli saw repressed
machismo coming to the surface again. The USFP’s decision to put her up as a parliamentary
candidate sparked rebellion in the ranks and she encountered her first sexist attacks,
such as “she smokes. . . she’s a widow.” But she was pleased to note once more how
little her gender mattered to the voters. In fact, many people believed she was more
trustworthy than men because of her sex.
Skalli’s political career continued to prosper and she remained a staunch party stalwart.
She campaigned for women’s rights, but “the party still came first.” Until the 1993
parliamentary elections, the USFP wanted her to be its only female candidate. At
that point, she protested and threatened to withdraw if other women were not allowed
to stand. The party gave in.
Two woman entered parliament that year, a milestone for Morocco—Skalli and Latifa
Bennani Smires of the Istiqlal (Nationalist) Party. Just two women among 300 men.
After the 1997 elections, there were still only two. But the political scene changed.
The left-wing opposition, kept out of power for nearly 40 years, took over the reins
of government and USFP secretary-general Abderrahmane Youssoufi became prime minister.
In his inaugural speech, Youssoufi said he wanted to promote women’s rights. The
secretary of state for protection of the family and children got to work on the matter
with the help of women’s NGOs.
Bitter
attacks over proposed code
A year later,
a draft programme to “make women part of the development process” was presented to
the prime minister. It included a reform of the mudawana, the family legal code based
on sharia (Islamic law), which governs the status of women. The planned reforms include
abolishing polygamy, raising the marriage age for girls from 15 to 18 and, in every
case, replacing repudiation with court-approved divorce. “It was too good to be true,”
says Skalli. “But we believed in it. We didn’t expect such a fuss.”
The first attack on the project came from a member of the government itself, religious
affairs minister Abdelkebir Alaoui M’daghri. A broad range of conservatives led by
Islamic fundamentalists took up the cry. They put on a show of force, bitterly attacking
the reform’s supporters as bad Muslims and even atheists. Bogged down by internal
divisions, the government is playing for time. The reform is a burning issue, and
the government has no intention of getting burned.
The government, says Skalli, bears an important responsibility and has clearly displayed
a lack of courage on the issue of women. She recognizes that much is at stake, for
women in particular and Moroccan society in general, and finds the situation distressing.
But what can you do when you are “a clay pot”?
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