Thread: Genital mutilation and a polygamist husband await illegal im

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Genital mutilation and a polygamist husband await illegal immigrant
The Virginian-Pilot
© January 16, 2007
Last updated: 12:12 AM


BY TIM McGLONE | THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

In a small village in the West African nation of Niger, a man has been waiting four years for his new wife to come home.

Haoua Mahaman has never met her husband and hopes never to have to. Not only does she object to becoming part of a pre arranged marriage to a polygamist, she also disagrees with her tribe's long-held custom of female genital cutting.

Mahaman has been fighting for asylum since 2002.

The U.S. government successfully obtained a deportation order, which would have forced her to return to Niger, but Mahaman this month won an appeal. The U.S. a ttorney's o ffice in Norfolk argued that she should be sent home.

Mahaman, who has been living near Greensboro, N.C., will get a new chance to argue for asylum before an immigration court in Northern Virginia.

Her case highlights the decade-long fight of immigrant women seeking to avoid the painful and potentially life-threatening procedure of genital cutting.

Mahaman was 33 when she arrived in the United States in 1999 on a student visa. She already had received a college degree in Niger and hoped to continue her studies here. She lived in Riverside, Calif., before moving to Burlington, N.C., where she studied computer technology at TechSkills, a vocational school.

In 2002, having overstayed her visa and under pressure from her parents, Mahaman returned to Bagagi, the village where she was raised. When she arrived, her parents informed her that they had arranged for her to marry an elderly chieftain, who already had a number of wives.

She tried to talk them out of the marriage, but a dowry had already been paid. She would have to marry and, in keeping with the custom of her tribe, the Hausa, she would have to undergo female genital cutting.

Female genital cutting, or female genital mutilation, dates back hundreds of years. I t is unclear when or why it began, though t here are reports from the 17th century of African female circumcisions, based on religious beliefs.

The U.S. government first recognized in 1996 that forced female genital cutting can constitute "persecution " and began granting asylum based on evidence that a woman would face the procedure. Asylum was never automatic.

Health organizations estimate that 130 million girls and women alive today have undergone genital cutting, with at least 2 million females undergoing the procedure each year.

The practice occurs largely in Africa but is also prevalent in the Middle East and Asia. About 14 African nations have outlawed female genital cutting, but most countries do not enforce the law.

Female genital cutting, often referred to as female circumcision, encompasses several types of partial or total removal of the external genitalia. The most common procedure is the removal of the clitoris and the labia minora.

According to the World Health Organization, genital cutting occurs to about 90 percent of girls and women in northern Sudan, 80 percent in Ethiopia, 99 percent in Guinea - but only 5 percent in Niger, where the custom was outlawed in 1999.

Mahaman told authorities that the practice is much more prevalent than that because it is rarely reported publicly outside the remote tribes.

Mahaman declined to be interviewed for this story. C ourt records, including her testimony before an immigration judge, shed light on her plight.

After learning in 2002 that a marriage had been arranged for her, and failing to convince her parents to cancel the pact, she fled her village and sought help from an uncle who lived in the Niger capital of Niamey. The uncle helped her get a false passport and she returned to the United States on Sept. 16, 2002, according to the court records.

That December, the marriage took place in her absence. She received a letter from her brother instructing her to return home.

"The letter also mentioned that I was to be circumcised before going to my husband's home and that is why I need to hurry up because the man who is a chieftain is getting impatient," Mahaman later told an immigration judge in Arlington.

Had she returned and refused to accept the marriage, she told the judge, "I will be banished from the family, and I know that a bad fate will come upon me." She feared she would be killed.

Mahaman appeared before the immigration judge in Arlington twice, in 2003 and 2004, to face two citations involving violations of immigration law, including possessing an invalid entry document.

Officials would not reveal how she first drew the attention of immigration authorities. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement, and at the Department of Justice, which prosecuted Mahaman, declined to comment on her case.

At the 2004 hearing, Mahaman and a friend testified and she introduced evidence of the persistence of female genital cutting in Niger, citing U.S. State Department human rights reports.

The judge found her story "credible," according to the court record, but denied her asylum, based in part on the government's position that she could return to Niger and live with family in the capital city instead of returning to her tribal village, some 180 miles away. The judge found that Mahaman would face only a "10 percent chance" of having to undergo genital cutting. The Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the judgment.

Mahaman appealed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond.

The U.S. a ttorney's o ffice in Norfolk, which sometimes assists in immigration appeals, filed a brief on behalf of the Justice Department, listing nine reasons why Mahaman should be deported.

"It is only if she is near her family, and assumes the role of a married woman, that there is any realistic risk that she could be compelled to undergo FGM," wrote Mark Exley, an assistant U.S. attorney in Norfolk. He declined to be interviewed.

"She has the intellectual, cultural and verbal skills necessary to avoid being subjugated to the tribal customs in a village 300 kilometers from the capital city if she chooses to avoid - and if necessary resist - contact with those members of her family who would seek to force her to undergo FGM," Exley wrote.

The 4th Circuit, in a ruling released Jan. 5, disagreed with both the immigration judge and the U.S. attorney's office.

The court ruled that the judge's conclusion that Mahaman faced only a "10 percent chance" of undergoing genital cutting and the contention that she could live elsewhere in Niger "was not supported by substantial evidence."

The case now returns to the Board of Immigration Appeals in Northern Virginia.


Reach Tim McGlone at (757) 446-2343 or tim.mcglone@pilotonline.com.





© 2007 HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com

Just return her to Africa and she can decide where to live. The woman has an education and can support herself.

Had she returned and refused to accept the marriage, she told the judge, "I will be banished from the family, and I know that a bad fate will come upon me." She feared she would be killed.

No one is making her go back to the village she was born in. Her parents don't even have to know she is back in Africa.

Isn't living in America almost the same as being banished? Her family is a whole ocean away. Can't she repay the dowry with her education?

Dixie

Human rights organizations and governments should get this procedure outlawed.

If a person can loose themselves in New York City, I'm sure the same can be done in Africa. IMO, she's just trying to beat the system. Heck, she's a smart lady, she probably created her so-called problems to simply avoid deporation.

Something is weird because she is about 35 and not married. It's possible she doesn't want to have children. Who knows, she may really be gay.

Dixie