Indonesian girl howls through circumcision as debate heats up

GORONTALO — 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, yellow- walled 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 laborer, told AFP 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.

Nowhere is it more common than Gorontalo, a deeply conservative area on the central island of Sulawesi, where the procedure is typically accompanied by elaborate rituals and celebrations.

A government survey estimated over 80% of girls aged 11 and under in Gorontalo had been circumcised, compared to about 50% of girls in the same category nationwide.

AN OBLIGATION

Despite the pain it causes and growing opposition inside and outside Indonesia, residents of Gorontalo, mostly poor rice farmers, consider female circumcision an obligation.

The healer, Khadijah Ibrahim, who inherited her job from her mother when she passed away several years ago, said that girls who were left uncut risked developing “mental problems and disabilities.”

Local healers say the practice prevents girls from becoming promiscuous in later life, while there is also a widespread belief that uncircumcised Muslim women’s prayers will not be accepted by God. — AFP