Indonesian girl howls as circumcision in spotlight

Gorontalo, Indonesia, March 27: Indonesian toddler Salsa Djafar was wearing a glittering golden crown decorated with ribbons and a shiny purple dress to mark a special occasion — her circumcision day.

At the celebrations attended by relatives, shrieks filled the modest, yellowwalled house in remote Gorontalo province as a traditional healer covered the 18-month-old girl with a white sheet and sliced skin off her genitals.

The healer used a knife to remove a tiny piece of skin from the hood that covers the clitoris — which she said looked like a “garlic skin” — then stuck the knife into a lemon.

It marked the end of a procedure supposed to rid the child of sin and signal she was now officially a Muslim.

“It’s hard to see her crying like this, but it is tradition,” her father Arjun Djafar, a 23-year-old labourer, said at last month’s ceremony.

Female circumcision — also known as female genital mutilation or FGM — has been practised for generations across Indonesia, which is the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country, and is considered a rite of passage by many.

The United Nations condemns the practice and the government once sought to ban it.

But opposition from religious authorities and its widespread acceptance mean FGM has been impossible to stamp out.