CEDAW: The One Who is Covered with the World is Naked

By: Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

It is said that a mistake in politics is permissible, except for the mistake after which there is no recovery. Perhaps the earth-shattering and fatal mistake was what the progressive movement committed in its “liberation” from what we used to call the mass organizations, namely the unions of women, youth, students, and workers. The argument of the progressive opponents for that liberation was that Inqaz would not allow the like of it. It knew its fate first-hand from its experience in political work on the same fronts. They usually told you that the Islamists had a “star-struck” cadre in destroying everything they were not satisfied with, and when the modern movement left the positions where its strength was, it “fallen” on the military in what was known as The “protected uprising” (in which protection is the demand, not the uprising) and its command was handed over to it. Whenever you heard about the Women’s Union, it was about the “London branch,” and when you heard about the unions, they were the “legitimate unions” in every place except Sudan, and when these movements returned after the revolution, they were searching ghosts on its own, it fought a monster struggle over the union law and did not dare to form a single labor union, and it became a “coordinating unit” that preceded even the elite unions.
This is a speech in which I mourned the progressive movement that began to besiege the world with the radiance of modernity because it failed to germinate it among its people, as the generation of the forties and after did. If it is one of the geniuses of the Sudanese Communist Party, it is that it was not only a party, but rather a comprehensive social movement that settled the meanings of the conflict in another country among women, youth, students, workers, and farmers. These social movements emerged in their longings for themselves, in their timing, in their potential, and in controversy with their society and fight first and foremost. Our reference for women’s liberation was the program of the Women’s Union, La CEDAW.
To the old article:
There is pity in American government and media circles for two groups that will be left behind in Afghanistan after America withdraws from it. The two groups are America’s “agents”, that is, those who assisted it in its missions in their country in different ways. As for the second group, unfortunately, they are the women who will be attacked by the Taliban as a result of the Americans, and their former life will return them to harems (house wives) after their liberation. Among the two groups, relief for America’s “agents” is facilitated by taking them to America. Of course, there is no way to take the women of Afghanistan completely to America. It will be difficult, when the Americans’ compassion is true, to describe women’s rights in Afghanistan as “liberation” as long as they depend on the presence of the Americans. In truth, it is a “liberation” imposed from above by a force that has some kind of guardianship over creation. In Sudan, we experienced this guardianship liberalization in the form of the Anti-Circumcision Law of 1946, which was imposed on us by the will of a foreign power that had a bad opinion of our culture and was dominated by men. Such rescue of women from their own nation is known as “colonial rescue.” Indian women were one of its major fields of application.
This framework of colonial relief came to me throughout my thinking about CEDAW. Although it is a document of rights issued by the United Nations, which has no way to compare it to colonialism, its legitimacy, like saving colonialism, is rooted in a country other than the country concerned with the rescue, except from a womb.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with CEDAW, had it not been that its internationalism is its strongest argument. Ratifying it in the progressives’ doctrine is the most obligatory of duties because it is what the world has unanimously agreed upon in its well-known pulpit. However, I do not find an echo in a movement that is widespread among all of our women. When we did not mobilize women in a movement for their authentic liberation, we sought liberation as an agency of mobilizing the world and its pledges to advance our cause. For us, CEDAW has become like an amulet for international trade union demands. Whoever opposes it disobeys the United Nations, not because he is free to do so, and his cure lies in carrying him with wisdom and good advice in the context of a radical women’s movement that imposes its agenda with its political and social weight.
It seemed to me that we might have surrendered women’s rights to the United Nations. A few days ago, I read about the third conference of the Plan Organization, Sudan branch, being held in the city of El Obeid, under the slogan “Girls Lead Change.” The conference, to which one hundred girls from all over Sudan came, discussed the issue of child marriage. The head of the Kordofan office of the association and the responsible for combating violence against children in the association’s office in Sudan spoke at the conference. I do not know much about the Plan Association, but it is clear that it is an international organization of some kind, with a branch in Sudan and an active role in “aiding” Sudanese women. I was surprised that no leader of any women’s organization in the city addressed the conference. Thus, we see with the naked eye the penetration of the world into liberating us from what created us when we went on strike for liberation in the first place with a social movement that mobilizes hearts and determinations to enact progressive legislation for women that abolishes, for example, the Personal Status Law of 1991.
Politics, in its simplest definition, is local. CEDAW will not save us from engaging victoriously and vigorously with our unmerciful realities, in full view of conservative or distorted forces. If we want women’s rights to be consolidated, we will not feel sorry for them due to global fluctuations that are not in our control. We will give CEDAW itself a bad name if it is our only excuse for liberation. If the globalization of CEDAW is of any benefit, it is in helping us strengthen our criticism of the flawed national law against women, not in being the revelation of that right from the heavens of the world.
The women of Afghanistan will know whenever something bad happens to them due to the Americans leaving them, that those who are covered in the world are naked. The world is already naked in some ways. Any fallacy in CEDAW can expose the CEDAWIST by saying that America, in its majesty, did not ratify CEDAW. It is known that America has thrown the agreement into its ever-present cultural conflict between progressives and conservatives. So it froze. Conservatives abandoned it because, in its definition of the family and the roles of women and men would destroy the traditional family. This is what our CEDAW opponents raise. Moreover, the world in general is retreating before our eyes from the progressive goals that were humility and hope. The American “Foreign Policy” published an article about this reaction, in which it praised the importance of women themselves in this reaction. It mentioned the World Congress of Women, which was established in 1997 to promote Christian values ​​on a global scale. The organization adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to protect the family as the natural and basic foundation of society and a duty to protect against the state and society.
The world is now being stripped of its progressive edges, citing it in the example of CEDAW, which we think is the final say, is not safe