Holiday in Somalia turns into nightmare (part 1)
Sarah, of Somali descent but born in the Netherlands, was 16 when she was forced to marry her uncle in Somalia. After several attempts she managed to escape from Mogadishu last month and go back home. She now lives in hiding in a women’s shelter in the Netherlands.
This part 1 of a two-part story. Part 2 will be published on Saturday 17 August.
Sarah’s mother was pregnant when she fled war-torn Somalia, in 1994. Growing up in a middle-sized town in the Netherlands, Sarah had a pretty carefree youth. But when she was around eight years old, the situation at home became tense.
“I went to a Roman Catholic school, so I didn’t wear my hijab in class,” says Sarah, who requested not to use her real name. “But my mother felt the pressure to raise me as a proper Muslim girl. So after school I had to wear my headscarf and I was not allowed to hang out with the girls in my class. I wanted to be like my friends; I repelled the idea of being different.”
The local child welfare office started to interfere when Sarah was 12. This made Sarah’s mother flee once again. She took her daughter to London and its big Somali Muslim community. “There were mosques everywhere, and every single Muslim girl wore hijabs and [other] covering clothes,” says Sarah. “I couldn’t use my friends as an excuse not to wear these clothes. Still I didn’t want to. I refused to wear a hijab. My mother made my life a living hell. She was angry and kicked me out of the house several times.”
Forced marriage
After finishing secondary school, home wasn’t such a bad place for Sarah anymore. “Suddenly, my mother was nice to me and very understanding. She even bought me a dress for the end of school party. And when the summer came, she told me we’d go to Somalia, to visit my sick grandmother.”
Little did Sarah know that her mother bought for her only a one-way ticket to Somalia. “I thought Somalia was weird, I could not adapt. I was the strange, bad girl from Europe. As it turned out, my grandmother wasn’t really sick. My mother told me we would stay in Somalia for one year, so I could learn about my culture. And then we would go back. But that was never the plan. She had arranged my wedding.”
Three days before her wedding party, Sarah learned she was about to marry her mother’s 35-year-old cousin. “Everybody had warned me, but I really thought my mother had changed. I didn’t think she was going to leave me there.”
Sarah had to marry her uncle, because in her mother’s eyes he was a good man, and a rich man, too. In the wedding pictures Sarah produces a faint smile, but her heart was torn by grief. “It’s something I like to forget. It was a good wedding, to be honest. Not for me personally, but it was a sumptuous party in an expensive hotel. I was a sad bride, however. I thought this was the end. And he was my uncle - that was the worst thing. I was marrying my blood, my relative.”
Repeatedly raped
Sarah says that her husband was a horrible, cruel man. “He treated me like an animal. I was just his whore from Holland, that’s what his whole family called me. In our community a woman has to be deflowered within seven days after the wedding. In my case that didn’t happen - I told him I had my period. I told him that for two weeks and then he raped me. And after that he did it all the time. I didn’t feel anything. I was numb”.
Sarah was not the only woman in the family. Her husband had two other wives, who are now 45 and 16 years old, respectively. He would be with a different wife every two days. “I was the only one who felt bad about it. The other ones liked it, because over there it’s not a bad thing. But I found it was disgusting and I felt very ashamed I told my friends in London to help me, to get me back. But I could never tell them why because I was too embarrassed. Until today, they don’t know I was married to that guy.”
Trapped
She decided to take matters in her own hands by asking help from her country of birth, the Netherlands. Along with five other Somali girls, who grew up in London, she fled to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, where she went to the Dutch embassy. “[The embassy] told me, ‘We can’t help you because you’re 17 and they’re still liable. So either we call your parents or you go back [to Somalia]’.”
The British girls were first put in a hotel and then brought to London, but, Sarah says, “[at the Dutch embassy] it didn’t look as they were willing to help me. They were very offensive.” Sarah kept trying her luck at the embassy, to no result. In the meantime, her family-in-law had found out she was in Addis Ababa and brought her back to Mogadishu. At first she became depressed and developed an addiction to sleeping pills. But somehow she managed to regain hope.
(to be continued)
By Saskia Houttuin, RNW
