Hala Al-Karib
Hala Al-Karib is the Regional Director of SIHA (the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa – @Sihanet). SIHA was established in 1995 by a coalition of women’s rights activists with the aim of strengthening the capacities of women’s rights organisations and addressing women’s subordination and violence against women and girls in the Greater Horn of Africa (GHoA).
Hala is also the editorial head of the SIHA annual journal ‘Women in Islam’, an annual journal published by SIHA that focuses on gender relations and women’s rights within Muslim communities in the GHoA. She often writes on women’s rights and social justice issues and the politics of the region for media outlets such as OpenDemocracy, Al Jazeera and The New Humanitarian Pambazuka and The East African.
Prior to joining SIHA network, Hala studied Human Rights, Women Studies and Psychology. She worked as a Research Assistant for the College of Social & Economic Studies of Juba University in South Sudan; and as an Assistant Researcher for the Sociology Department at the American University in Cairo.
She lived in Canada and worked for Open Door Society Refugee Agency in Regina and as a Program Director for the International Women of Saskatoon (then known as Immigrant Women of Saskatchewan). She also worked as a Grant Officer for Irish organisation Trócaire and other international and regional organisations. She is a board member of Musawah, a global movement working on reforming Muslim family law, and she is a fellow with the Rift Valley Institute. Follow her on Twitter @Halayalkarib and Instagram @halayalka.
Hala was profiled by Julie Bardèche, a French lawyer and presently Legal Advisor at REDRESS, with the assistance of Dorine Nauleau, Legal Intern at REDRESS (@DorineNauleau). Read more about Julie’s work at the end of this profile and follow her on Twitter: @JulieBardeche.
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What drew you to working in international law/domestic human rights law? And what were your first steps?
There is a combination of factors that have affected my career path. First of all, the political situation of my country, Sudan. The 1989 military coup has affected the life of every citizen. This coup was so scary that it changed my life. By that time, I was a Top Senior at University. I was 22 years old and I realised nothing would be the same anymore. After having struggled to find a job, my career started in 1991 as an Assistant Researcher in an organisation helping internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees. I was introduced to a massive number of South Sudanese people living in the suburbs of Khartoum. I heard their struggles and the challenges they interfaced with and the way they were miserably treated by the central government. The experience working there allowed me to expand my horizon and understand the lived realities and the struggles that are caused by inter-communal and ideological conflicts. Of course, I had also witnessed this first-hand while studying in South Sudan. I had seen the brutality of the persecutions, the rape and social violence.
Then, having to flee Sudan due to the militant Islam, the militarised regime and the shutting down the Displaced Persons research centre where I was at that time, I went to live in Cairo where I furthered my studies at the American University while working different part-time jobs such as translation and editing. During that time, I was also working as an Assistant Researcher in a feminist organisation. This definitely pushed me toward the career I have today.
Finally, I would say that my personal background and experience have both played a great role as to where I am today. I have always been interested in change and making things better. I was privileged enough to grow up in an open Sudan with access to literature in a family which valued education. I went to study abroad, where I met prominent feminists. In particular, I was very influenced by Professor Shahnaz Rouse, who at the time, was documenting pre-colonial feminist movements in Middle Eastern countries. I moved to Canada where I was exposed to refugees and migrants from across the world. I am one of the happy few with an opportunity to work on my passion.
SIHA is my life project: it is a space where I have learnt a lot, where I have been able to give back and support other people. My awareness of the status of women along with my own struggle to become equal in society have significantly shaped my experience.
When was SIHA born? What was your role in that?
SIHA was born in the mid-1990s. I was not involved in its creation. It was developed by brilliant women from across the Horn of Africa. They felt that this particular region needed a very specific movement. It is a hybrid region with a large Muslim population and in which the violence against women has its own specificity, as it intersects with other forms of violence and subordination. SIHA was specifically founded by women activists from Somaliland, Ethiopia Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan. It was sustained through the political will of the activists across the region.
I came across SIHA when I came back from Canada to Sudan. They were looking for a part-time staff. I fell in love with the idea, the resilience of the network, the activism of the founders and this idea of ownership in the sense of being part of a coalition of African women who actually lead their work based on their own views and positions, and were able to support and collaborate with each other. It was a very small organisation when I started (about 3 staff members). For the first few years, I was not quite sure if I would continue to work with SIHA, however I felt strong sense of ownership. I felt that SIHA represents who I am. SIHA allowed me to work for my people. Today, we are more than 60 staff members working across 7 countries. We have connections across generations and different identities.
What have been the high points of your career thus far?
They happen frequently all throughout the years – for instance when I meet someone whose life has been completely transformed for the better by SIHA’s work and has got a better education with their livelihood improved. Also, when women and girls are protected from risks and are not exposed to violations; when women become see themselves as equal human beings and feel like they are entitled to being treated equally – these are all high points in my career, all which I have fully experienced.
I have the privilege to work where my heart wants to be; there are no differences between my career and my passion. Engaging in the world that matters to me and getting to where women can live in dignity is an area of personal priority. During the time of the Darfur crisis, I remember establishing literacy classes for IDPs. The impact of this action still lives on today. When I receive genuine gratitude and look at girls’ and women’s lives transformed, I believe these are the high points of my career.
What are some of the challenges that you faced coming up in your career?
My life is an everyday struggle, like all of us. I am a transparent human being; I feel my surroundings, I receive energy and at times, I react to the energy.
My life has not been easy on a personal level. I am proud of the complexity and difficulties I went through, and I own them. To grow as a feminist and human being, you need to own your struggles, failures and achievements. I had to learn a lot and I fought very hard for every success. I went through failures before I attained my success. When I speak with young women about their entitlements, I tell them that realistically our entitlements must be connected to our struggle. This is a challenge for many in the feminist movements and in particular the elite feminist movements: gains that were hard won by previous generations are sometimes taken for granted. Recently in this region, we have seen major setbacks on the progress feminist movements had earned. This is why I am extremely protective of each step forward and each gain that we achieve.
The biggest challenge I met was not being able to compromise my humanity, my dignity and my pride, while living in a very patriarchal society, facing religious discrimination, deeply entrenched misogyny, and harmful gendered social norms. The intersectionality of me being a black Muslim woman from a humble background has been a test both to myself and to other individuals who are misogynist, racist and Islamophobic. Showing that you will not accept to be treated this way triggers resentment and judgment from the outside.
Being a Muslim woman from a poor country, I realised that there were many layers of discrimination and assumptions that I should be grateful and quiet. Women of similar background are expected to lessen themselves and ideological standing, and not question. The fact that I am resisting and challenging the status quo is a difficult choice. I am disliked by many, but I am very proud of it. By contrast, I am also genuinely loved, appreciated and have received solidarity, respect from many. These are challenges that I have had to learn to live with, negotiate with and challenge.
There are so many examples of me making difficult choices throughout my life. For one, deciding to live as a single parent— taking care of myself, my daughter, my mother and my aunts and the women in my family who did not have children. I am very keen on protecting their dignity. I have seen how hard they worked in their youth and I am aware how our society treats older women without children.
I made a conscious choice of going through a painful divorce. I gained a lot of awareness from that experience and it was part of my journey. In my profession, I also go through various challenges in terms of dealing with individuals without a belief in activism and who reduce our exchanges to cash exchange. We have to challenge donor agencies and call them out, as well as having to be confident and claim our equality and knowledge as women and as Africans of our own realties and not allow others to shape our realties for us. As a woman activist and a manager, I often challenge my team’s commitments and remind them that we are working for our own – in our own – institutions; therefore we should have strong sense of ownership and accountability to the communities that we are working with in the first place. Unfortunately, we often internalise our own alienation and the notion of working for the donor agencies becomes very prevalent, which is poisoning and obstructive to activism within civil society in the Global South.
I vividly remember my conversation with a donor agency; the person asked me who the director was. I said I was the director. He insisted on asking the same question until he eventually said he was curious to know who was managing. I called off the meeting and stopped the conversation. This is an example of the level of intimidation that women like me experience, especially pertaining to the external scepticism of what we achieve. I understand the struggles of marginalised women, because, as privileged as I have been myself, I have also struggled with layers of marginalisation. It is very clear that people like me, and poor people in this part of the world have to be aware of the layers of hostility and the fact that we are often targeted, profiled and judged. Such attitudes have been constructed from the colonial era and it sometimes becomes worse at these polarising times.
It is not easy to take such positions in a context where civil society and particularly the feminist movement have been intentionally depoliticised. Gender equality and women’s rights are often used by private companies to generate resources where patriarchy and racial supremacists manipulate concepts such as accountability, which is largely linked to justice, integrity and equality. They weaponised and used it against poor people in order to intimidate and limit social and gender justice activism. Global solidarity must come with respect, understanding and a position of equality.
Advice for those, particularly women with intersecting marginalised identities, hoping to work in international or domestic human rights law in the future
In my opinion, working on women’s rights is like flying a kite; one must keep it up all the time. It requires a belief system, an ideology, commitment and hard work.
Do not shy away from being politicised. It is very important for activists and human rights advocates, for people who are interested and willing to push and fight for women’s rights, to understand this. One of the biggest problems of the traditional women’s movements is that they took women’s rights, put it in a box and hid in a corner with it. But women’s rights and equality are part of everything: they are part of our everyday lives; from the very moment we wake up; it is a constant struggle.
The fight for equality does not have time; it does not have an occasion. Unless you have a good understanding of political dynamics as well as intersectional dynamics, it will be difficult to make progress. Progress has been made so far because women understand that they need to be present in different spaces.
As women, we come with ideas, but we also come as populations of a society that seek equality. We have to keep intersectionality in mind when we speak about equality. Women acting for justice and human rights is not different from women acting against poverty, environmental injustice or any other issue or concern.
Observe what obstructs other women and be very sensitive and aware so that you are not complacent. We have to be aware of the burdens of other women: some of us are carrying heavier burdens than others. It is important to keep this in mind when approaching other women for solidarity and for collective action.
I am concerned about how we work with girls. The human rights framework for children’s rights does not provide for girls as well as they should, especially in this part of the world – they are deprived of basic child rights because of the perceptions of society. When they ask me how they can be like me, I lay the possibilities down in front of them. I tell them:
Activism is a collective action. We have to connect and learn how to work together and extend solidarity to each other.
Be strategic; always contextualise and analyse situations as this helps in being selective in your battle and see what you can do at this point in time and what you can influence. There is no single path to get to where you want to be.
Be creative, innovative and look around for options and resources.
Be humble and open to learn.
Development and evolution of human beings do not follow one rule: there are many ways to become an activist and to positively influence your surroundings. One of the biggest mistakes we often do is that we seek to impose the model of privileged people: going through one line of education to become recognised in society. For this reason, we are offering a programme on “gender stereotypes” for the girls in Sudan and Somalia. We negotiate with the girls if they want to become vocational workers. At first, there was reluctance, but now over 500 girls have applied to the programme, which started only 4 or 5 years ago.
To all women, including those living in the so-called developed world: do not shy away from navigating politics and having a voice in political decision-making based on your own position as women. This is very critical in transforming women and humanising societies. Even though we are blocked by layers of burdens and presumptions, and we often do not have equal access to resources and there is no interest in us coming to power -we must continue to fight. We should refuse to become an accessory, or a shadow of patriarchy, we should fight for our real self, carrying and exposing all our heritage of struggle.
Hala Al-Karib was profiled by Julie Bardèche, a French lawyer and currently Legal Advisor at REDRESS. She served as a Legal Officer for the International Co-Investigating Judge at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). There, she worked on investigations into allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. She practiced at the French Bar (Paris) where she represented asylum seekers and practiced criminal law. She also worked on developing legislative frameworks for public private partnerships, and white-collar crimes and on regional human rights cases in West Africa. She holds an LLM in human rights, conflict and justice from SOAS and a Master’s degree from Université Paris 2. Follow her on Twitter: @JulieBardeche.