When I received an invitation from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) to accompany a delegation from the Office of the Egyptian Ombudsperson for Gender Equality on a four-day study tour to investigate the progress achieved by the Spanish government in empowering women, I welcomed the opportunity for two reasons. First, developments in Egypt since the 25 January Revolution regarding the status of women in society in general, and the daily exposure of women to different kinds of harassment in particular, have become one of my main preoccupations, both as a woman of a senior generation and as myself the mother of a young woman. Second, I have been a great fan of the Spanish master painter Francisco Goya ever since I learned to appreciate Western classical and modern painting, and I thought of treating myself, after the official visit had ended of course, to some quality time in Madrid's Prado Museum in order to savour at my leisure Goya's late works. But let me first concentrate on the official visit and keep Goya and his ghosts to the end. Our hosts in Madrid, the AECID's Department for Cooperation with the Arab World and Asia, its MASAR Programme (masar means “path” in Arabic) and its affable coordinator Kinda Kharman, had prepared a busy schedule for the delegation in order to introduce us to as many facets of the Spanish experience in combating violence against women as a short visit could accommodate. MASAR is a cooperation programme providing technical and financial support to Arab countries in the transition to democracy. Gender equality and the strengthening of public institutions and social organisations defending women's rights is a priority of the programme, and hence the invitation extended to the Egyptian delegation headed by the Ombudsperson for Gender Equality Fatma Khafagy.
LEGISLATING RIGHTS: Our visit began by a day of introduction to the Spanish legislation against gender-based violence, which is different from domestic violence, since, as our hosts emphasised, domestic violence was a cross-gender phenomenon, while gender-based violence is defined as violence against women in intimate relation with male partners. We learned that a special law for the protection of women against gender-based violence was introduced in Spain in December 2004. This law, organic law 1/2004 on Integrated Protection Measures against Gender Violence, set up a body to protect the rights of victims of gender-based violence, whereby psychological, legal and social care, as well as care for the offspring of the victims of this violence, are provided. The mechanisms by which this care is provided were discussed at length within the Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality, the governmental body overseeing gender equality, and we were introduced to the different components of a comprehensive programme, starting with a clear long-term strategy, mechanisms of follow-up and monitoring, and an advocacy campaign with the aim of spreading a value system in the country as a whole that is mobilised towards ending gender-based violence. We were also shown samples of audio-visual materials used in this campaign, in which public figures including actors, musicians, and football players had all participated. The final session of our visit to the Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality was dedicated to a review of many of the statistical data regarding gender-based violence. One of the most shocking facts we learned was that in Spain an average of one woman a week dies as a result of gender-based violence. Indeed, the most important lesson we learned was that you cannot put an end to gender-based violence without legislation. The law on Integrated Protection Measures against Gender Violence is one of various laws in Spain regarding gender equality, in addition to the laws enacted by the different Spanish autonomous communities within the federal system. A meeting with women from the country's Commission for the Investigation of Women's Maltreatment was organised at AECID headquarters, during which we were given a glimpse of how the combined effects of different legislation on women's rights can be of great help to activists trying to improve women's conditions in general and the situation of victims of gender-based violence in particular. In fact, without legislation to combat violence against women there can be no guarantee of the safeguarding of women's rights or of the imposition of penalties on the violators of those rights. This is not only a problem concerning each country separately. It is also a worldwide issue that needs to be addressed on a global scale. This week, and to coincide with the International Day for Combating Violence against Women which falls on 25 November, six members of the US Congress have reintroduced legislation into the House of Representatives (the International Violence against Women Act) that aims to make “the US an important ally for the millions of women whose right to live free from violence is under daily threat”. The managing director of the Women's Human Rights Programme of Amnesty International USA, Cristina Finch, has said of this legislation that “Congress has the opportunity to show its commitment to millions of women and girls by supporting and passing the International Violence against Women Act in a bipartisan way… Amnesty International USA looks forward to the bill's reintroduction in the Senate in the coming weeks.”
WHAT IS AN OMBUDSMAN? Simply put, an ombudsman is a government official who hears and investigates complaints by citizens against other officials or government agencies. Since ours was a study tour for the staff of the Office of the Ombudsperson for Gender Equality in Egypt, most of the visit was dedicated to discovering the different aspects of the work of the Spanish Ombudsman's Office. The Office of the Spanish Ombudsman (at the moment she is a woman), called the Defender of the People, deals with complaints of maladministration, and it has the ability to bring cases before the country's Constitutional Court. The Defender of the People, or the Ombudsperson herself, is elected by the Spanish parliament for a five-year term, the same period as the mandate of the parliament. She is aided in her job by two deputies, both appointed by her, though they also have to be approved by a joint Congress-Senate liaison committee with the Ombudsman. Established in 1981 in accordance with organic law 3/1981, “the Ombudsman is the high commissioner of parliament appointed by it to defend the rights established in the constitution, for which purpose he may supervise the activities of the administration and report thereon to parliament.” In general, all employees of the office are either civil servants or people contracted for the duration of the parliament's mandate. The present Defender of People does not have a legal background, but she does have qualifications and experience in management and human rights. Her office comprises 170 employees, almost 30 per cent of whom are legal experts. How does this relate to the ombudsman's experience in Egypt? Khafagy said that, unlike in Spain and various other European countries, the Egyptian experience lacks any legislative base and does not have strong government backing or a large budget. Instead, her office, established in 2001 within the National Council for Women, relies heavily on grants from donor countries. “Of course this does not ensure sustainability. While the ombudsman's office in Spain is regulated by a special law which defines its responsibilities and accountability, our experience in Egypt mostly depends on good will,” Khafagy said. In Khafagy's opinion, “in order to set up a real ombudsman's office in Egypt and not to be concerned only with window dressing — something that very much informed the formation of the office under the auspices of Egypt's ex-president Hosni Mubarak and his wife — we need parliament's involvement, we need legislation, and we need political and governmental commitment.” In Europe, she said, “the office of the ombudsman is an independent entity with a government budget, and thus it is capable of approaching governmental and private entities with a view to resolving citizens' complaints.” Khafagy wants to see the experience of the ombudsman in Egypt developed. “Egypt should have an ombudsman's office that is able to defend the rights of all citizens and not only those of one sector of the population. Rather than fragmenting the cause, we should have a single office with extensive legal powers, within which there could be a department for women and perhaps also another one for children,” she said.
SPANISH LESSONS: “Spain is different” was a saying — attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte — that we heard many times from different Spanish officials during our visit to the country. As I tried to search for the origin of this phrase, I discovered that it was also the slogan of a tourism campaign in the early 1960s during General Franco's dictatorship, which aimed at luring tourists to a country that, according to Spanish journalist Almudena Grandes, “promised nothing but sun and oranges, flamenco shows and glorious beaches”. Yet, I have never felt during the few visits I have made to Spain over the past 40 years that it was so very different from my own country Egypt. The common heritage we, whether Egyptians or Arabs, share with this country is both amazing and moving. One does not need to go as far back as 711 CE when Tarek Ibn Ziyad crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa and landed with his army on the Spanish shores, burning his ships there as if to signal that this was a moment of “no return”. Nor need one dwell on that painful moment almost 800 years later when the Arabs were expelled from Spain following their final defeat in Granada in 1492. It is enough to focus on more recent history and the 19th and 20th centuries. As Grandes noted in an article in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, republished in the London Guardian in April 2011, Spain “throughout the 20th century went the other way, marching to a different beat to that which defined the development of Western nations”. The painful experience of the almost 40 years of Franco's dictatorship has been very well documented in world art, cinema and literature. What I want to note here is the impact of the 1936 military coup against the Second Republic on socio-economic development in Spain. Grandes said in her article “and so began the great historical anomaly of 20th century Spain, the only country where fascism won a war and remained in power for almost four decades. And not only was the mighty modernising drive of the Second Republic stopped in tracks, but Franco also took Spain back to the middle of the 19th century.” If this does not resonate with the present situation in Egypt, then what does? However, we should return to the early 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte and Goya, as was promised at the beginning of this article. When Bonaparte left Egypt in 1799 following the French invasion of the country to attend to matters closer to home, he took with him some 300 Egyptian Mamluks to form a Mamluk corps in France called the “Mamluks de la République”. Those very Mamluks were then depicted by the Spanish master painter Francisco Goya in his famous painting The Second of May 1808, also known as The Charge of the Mamelukes (in Spanish: El 2 de mayo de 1808 en Madrid, or La lucha con los mamelucos), which is housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid. As I stood before the painting in the Prado on my trip to Spain with enough time to savour every detail of it, I was shocked to see that many of the mamelucos mounted on horses and stabbing the inhabitants of Madrid on behalf of Bonaparte looked very much like the Egyptians in some of the French paintings depicting the Cairo uprising against the French invasion of the country in 1798, among them the Revolt in Cairo on 21 October 1798 by Girodet-Trioson. The Egyptians in the French painting are being killed by French soldiers, while in Goya's painting the people of Madrid are shown being killed by mainly Egyptian hands. This reversal of roles, whereby the Egyptians (granted in the service of the French Republic) who had fought Napoleon's army as it had entered Cairo some 10 years before were now killing other people who were also trying to stop a French army from occupying their capital, was quite unsettling. The common denominator between the two incidents, 1798 in Cairo and 1808 in Madrid, lies in what happened on the day after the day of resistance. I don't know if there is a painting commemorating the execution of hundreds of Egyptians by the French army as it established its rule over Egypt, but we can feel the horror experienced by the inhabitants of conquered cities by looking at the faces of the people depicted in Goya's masterpiece The Executions of the Third of May, 1808. These were carried out by French soldiers brandishing guns and not by Mamluks armed with knifes and swords, as can be clearly seen in Goya's painting. Goya's late works, especially the 82 prints entitled The Disasters of War and the 14 paintings called The Black Paintings, tell the story of the horrors of these dark times. Dictatorship, conquest and resistance (beside tourism and glorious beaches, of course, which everyone prefers to concentrate on) are some of the things that link Egypt and Spain together. Should we also heed another Spanish lesson? Quizás, quizás, quizás is a refrain from a famous Spanish song, the word itself meaning “perhaps”. If, as the song suggests, “perhaps” is a favourite and non-committal reply in Spain, perhaps it is also very similar to our own reply of inshaallah (if God wills).
