LONDON: A coordinated effort to bring an end to violence against women and girls gets underway this Saturday as campaigners across the world participate in the UN’s 16 Days of Activism against gender-based abuse.
On Nov. 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, buildings and landmarks across the world will be illuminated in orange — the color of the campaign, which this year runs under the theme “Leave No One Behind: End Violence against Women and Girls.”
In the Middle East, there has been some cause to celebrate in 2017, with the long-campaigned-for repeal of rape-marriage laws in Tunisia (article 227), Jordan (article 308) and Lebanon (article 522) marking an end to penal code provisions that allowed rapists to escape punishment by marrying their victims.
The decisions, which took place within the space of a few months, “heralded new change for the region” said Rothna Begum, women’s rights researcher for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch. “Now we’re seeing momentum to do away with these clauses in other Middle East countries,” she added, pointing to pressure building in both Bahrain and Palestine.
Middle Eastern countries including Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Syria still have versions of the rape-marriage clause.
“The 16 Days campaign allows women’s rights NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and activists around the world to galvanize and really address this incredibly egregious abuse that pervades all countries around the world,” Begum added.
Zoya Rouhana, director of Lebanon-based NGO KAFA (enough) Violence and Exploitation, described the “huge amount to be done to eliminate all forms of gender-based violence and exploitation and achieve gender equality.”
KAFA will spotlight issues surrounding sexual violence for the 16 Days campaign to raise awareness and “counteract the culture of victim blaming and shaming,” Rouhana said.
The campaign will also highlight the “existing laws that can protect women from certain types of sexual violence and call for new laws that protect women and hold perpetrators accountable,” she added.
According to the World Bank, the MENA region has the lowest number of laws protecting women from domestic violence of any region in the world, while UN Women claims that 37 percent of Arab women have experienced some form of violence in their lifetime, with indicators that the real percentage might be significantly higher.
In Jordan, figures from a recent population census reveal rising rates of child marriage, particularly among Syrian refugee girls pressured into early wedlock to reduce financial pressure on struggling families.
Salma Nims, secretary-general of the Jordanian National Commission for Women (JNCW) explained that the issue of child marriage does not just affect children.
Speaking at the launch event for JNCW’s 16 Days campaign “Too Young to be Married,” she said “it has a negative impact on women at all stages of their life as they cannot enjoy their youth or finish their education, and the majority of them are subject to gender-based and sexual violence.”
As part of its 16 Days campaign, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has launched a global cartoon competition calling on participants to illustrate the negative effects of child marriage and domestic violence — the two most common forms of gender-based violence (GBV), according to Fatma Khan, the GBV officer at UNFPA in Amman.
Speaking to the Jordan Times, Khan said that violence against women is highly underreported in the country, making the figures available unreliable.
It is a situation reflected across the region, where a culture of victim-blaming and normalized perceptions of GBV prevents many women and girls from speaking out about assault.
“Certain forms of violence are still (seen as) justified and women themselves believe it’s still ok for men to hit women in some situations,” said Begum, who stressed the responsibility of governments to tackle GBV at all levels, including challenging the stigma surrounding reporting gender-based violence in families and communities.
“The abolition of article 522 in Lebanon won’t be effective without tackling the existing survivor-blaming norms,” said Saja Michael from ABAAD, a gender equality NGO which spearheaded the campaign to repeal the rape-marriage law in Lebanon.
She also underlined the importance of raising awareness, citing “lack of information and knowledge about women’s rights and GBV at both the institutional and community levels.”
“Law amendment or law abolishment, does not automatically result in its effective and fair implementation. For instance, although Egypt has abolished similar legislation in 1999, the practice still takes place in marginalized areas,” she added.
Last summer, ABAAD attracted international attention after hanging ripped wedding dresses along Beirut’s corniche in an eerie public demonstration against the now-repealed rape-marriage law.
For the 16 Days campaign, it plans to highlight issues surrounding incestuous rape and sexual violence, building momentum behind a push to increase the penalty, which currently ranges from two months to two years for offenders.
Changing the laws is just part of the battle according to activists in the Middle East, who emphasized the need for coordinated efforts to implement and enforce legal changes.
“These laws are not enough — we need to keep the political momentum going to implement and then monitor these laws,” said Tunisian activist Ikram Ben Said, describing the danger of allowing women’s rights to be pushed down the political agenda.
“There are a lot of economic and security issues in the region and there is a tendency to forget about women’s issues. In Tunisia, we always hear from politicians that this is not the priority now.
“Having these laws is very important but the most vital thing is implementing them and having the tools to do so.”
This will be part of the focus at a regional conference taking place during the 16 Days campaign on Dec. 5 and 6 in Beirut, where high-profile women’s rights campaigners will discuss ways to transform new laws into enforceable and budget-backed policies to protect women and girls from violence.
“It is of utmost importance to increase coordination between women’s rights organizations and exchange best practices in terms of advocacy and policy implementations,” said Michael, “There is much more work to be done in order to attain gender equality for women, girls, men and boys.”
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Mideast campaigners confront violence against women
Mideast campaigners confront violence against women
Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, a haven for journalists during Lebanon’s civil war, shuts down
- The hotel, located in Beirut’s Hamra district, shut down over the weekend
- Officials have not commented on the decision
BEIRUT: During Lebanon’s civil war, the Commodore Hotel in western Beirut’s Hamra district became iconic among the foreign press corps.
For many, it served as an unofficial newsroom where they could file dispatches even when communications systems were down elsewhere. Armed guards at the door provided some sense of protection as sniper fights and shelling were turning the cosmopolitan city to rubble.
The hotel even had its own much-loved mascot: a cheeky parrot at the bar.
The Commodore endured for decades after the 15-year civil war ended in 1990 — until this week, when it closed for good.
The main gate of the nine-story hotel with more than 200 rooms was shuttered Monday. Officials at the Commodore refused to speak to the media about the decision to close.
Although the country’s economy is beginning to recover from a protracted financial crisis that began in 2019, tensions in the region and the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war that was halted by a tenuous ceasefire in November 2024 are keeping many tourists away. Lengthy daily electricity cuts force businesses to rely on expensive private generators.
The Commodore is not the first of the crisis-battered country’s once-bustling hotels to shut down in recent years.
But for journalists who lived, worked and filed their dispatches there, its demise hits particularly hard.
“The Commodore was a hub of information — various guerrilla leaders, diplomats, spies and of course scores of journalists circled the bars, cafes and lounges,” said Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent who covered the civil war. “On one occasion (late Palestinian leader) Yasser Arafat himself dropped in to sip coffee with” with the hotel manager’s father, he recalled.
A line to the outside world
At the height of the civil war, when telecommunications were dysfunctional and much of Beirut was cut off from the outside world, it was at the Commodore where journalists found land lines and Telex machines that always worked to send reports to their media organizations around the globe.
Across the front office desk in the wide lobby of the Commodore, there were two teleprinters that carried reports of The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies.
“The Commodore had a certain seedy charm. The rooms were basic, the mattresses lumpy and the meal fare wasn’t spectacular,” said Robert H. Reid, the AP’s former Middle East regional editor, who was among the AP journalists who covered the war. The hotel was across the street from the international agency’s Middle East head office at the time.
“The friendly staff and the camaraderie among the journalist-guests made the Commodore seem more like a social club where you could unwind after a day in one of the world’s most dangerous cities,” Reid said.
Llewellyn remembers that the hotel manager at the time, Yusuf Nazzal, told him in the late 1970s “that it was I who had given him the idea” to open such a hotel in a war zone.
Llewellyn said that during a long chat with Nazzal on a near-empty Middle East Airlines Jumbo flight from London to Beirut in the fall of 1975, he told him that there should be a hotel that would make sure journalists had good communications, “a street-wise and well-connected staff running the desks, the phones, the teletypes.”
During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and a nearly three-month siege of West Beirut by Israeli troops, journalists used the roof of the hotel to film fighter jets striking the city.
The parrot at the bar
One of the best-known characters at the Commodore was Coco the parrot, who was always in a cage near the bar. Patrons were often startled by what they thought was the whiz of an incoming shell, only to discover that it was Coco who made the sound.
AP’s chief Middle East correspondent Terry Anderson was a regular at the hotel before he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1985 and held for seven years, becoming one of the longest-held American hostages in history.
Videos of Anderson released by his kidnappers later showed him wearing a white T-shirt with the words “Hotel Commodore Lebanon.”
With the kidnapping of Anderson and other Western journalists, many foreign media workers left the predominantly-Muslim western part of Beirut, and after that the hotel lost its status as a safe haven for foreign journalists.
Ahmad Shbaro, who worked at different departments of the hotel until 1988, said the main reason behind the Commodore’s success was the presence of armed guards that made journalists feel secure in the middle of Beirut’s chaos as well as functioning telecommunications.
He added that the hotel also offered financial facilities for journalists who ran out of money. They would borrow money from Nazzal and their companies could pay him back by depositing money in his bank account in London.
Shbaro remembers a terrifying day in the late 1970s when the area of the hotel was heavily shelled and two rooms at the Commodore were hit.
“The hotel was full and all of us, staffers and journalists, spent the night at Le Casbah,” a famous nightclub in the basement of the building, he said.
In quieter times, journalists used to spend the night partying by the pool.
“It was a lifeline for the international media in West Beirut, where journalists filed, ate, drank, slept, and hid from air raids, shelling, and other violence,” said former AP correspondent Scheherezade Faramarzi. “It gained both fame and notoriety,” she said, speaking from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
The hotel was built in 1943 and kept functioning until 1987 when it was heavily damaged in fighting between Shiite and Druze militiamen at the time. The old Commodore building was later demolished and a new structure was build with an annex and officially opened again for the public in 1996.
But Coco the parrot was no longer at the bar. The bird went missing during the 1987 fighting. Shbaro said it is believed he was taken by one of the gunmen who stormed the hotel.
For many, it served as an unofficial newsroom where they could file dispatches even when communications systems were down elsewhere. Armed guards at the door provided some sense of protection as sniper fights and shelling were turning the cosmopolitan city to rubble.
The hotel even had its own much-loved mascot: a cheeky parrot at the bar.
The Commodore endured for decades after the 15-year civil war ended in 1990 — until this week, when it closed for good.
The main gate of the nine-story hotel with more than 200 rooms was shuttered Monday. Officials at the Commodore refused to speak to the media about the decision to close.
Although the country’s economy is beginning to recover from a protracted financial crisis that began in 2019, tensions in the region and the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war that was halted by a tenuous ceasefire in November 2024 are keeping many tourists away. Lengthy daily electricity cuts force businesses to rely on expensive private generators.
The Commodore is not the first of the crisis-battered country’s once-bustling hotels to shut down in recent years.
But for journalists who lived, worked and filed their dispatches there, its demise hits particularly hard.
“The Commodore was a hub of information — various guerrilla leaders, diplomats, spies and of course scores of journalists circled the bars, cafes and lounges,” said Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent who covered the civil war. “On one occasion (late Palestinian leader) Yasser Arafat himself dropped in to sip coffee with” with the hotel manager’s father, he recalled.
A line to the outside world
At the height of the civil war, when telecommunications were dysfunctional and much of Beirut was cut off from the outside world, it was at the Commodore where journalists found land lines and Telex machines that always worked to send reports to their media organizations around the globe.
Across the front office desk in the wide lobby of the Commodore, there were two teleprinters that carried reports of The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies.
“The Commodore had a certain seedy charm. The rooms were basic, the mattresses lumpy and the meal fare wasn’t spectacular,” said Robert H. Reid, the AP’s former Middle East regional editor, who was among the AP journalists who covered the war. The hotel was across the street from the international agency’s Middle East head office at the time.
“The friendly staff and the camaraderie among the journalist-guests made the Commodore seem more like a social club where you could unwind after a day in one of the world’s most dangerous cities,” Reid said.
Llewellyn remembers that the hotel manager at the time, Yusuf Nazzal, told him in the late 1970s “that it was I who had given him the idea” to open such a hotel in a war zone.
Llewellyn said that during a long chat with Nazzal on a near-empty Middle East Airlines Jumbo flight from London to Beirut in the fall of 1975, he told him that there should be a hotel that would make sure journalists had good communications, “a street-wise and well-connected staff running the desks, the phones, the teletypes.”
During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and a nearly three-month siege of West Beirut by Israeli troops, journalists used the roof of the hotel to film fighter jets striking the city.
The parrot at the bar
One of the best-known characters at the Commodore was Coco the parrot, who was always in a cage near the bar. Patrons were often startled by what they thought was the whiz of an incoming shell, only to discover that it was Coco who made the sound.
AP’s chief Middle East correspondent Terry Anderson was a regular at the hotel before he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1985 and held for seven years, becoming one of the longest-held American hostages in history.
Videos of Anderson released by his kidnappers later showed him wearing a white T-shirt with the words “Hotel Commodore Lebanon.”
With the kidnapping of Anderson and other Western journalists, many foreign media workers left the predominantly-Muslim western part of Beirut, and after that the hotel lost its status as a safe haven for foreign journalists.
Ahmad Shbaro, who worked at different departments of the hotel until 1988, said the main reason behind the Commodore’s success was the presence of armed guards that made journalists feel secure in the middle of Beirut’s chaos as well as functioning telecommunications.
He added that the hotel also offered financial facilities for journalists who ran out of money. They would borrow money from Nazzal and their companies could pay him back by depositing money in his bank account in London.
Shbaro remembers a terrifying day in the late 1970s when the area of the hotel was heavily shelled and two rooms at the Commodore were hit.
“The hotel was full and all of us, staffers and journalists, spent the night at Le Casbah,” a famous nightclub in the basement of the building, he said.
In quieter times, journalists used to spend the night partying by the pool.
“It was a lifeline for the international media in West Beirut, where journalists filed, ate, drank, slept, and hid from air raids, shelling, and other violence,” said former AP correspondent Scheherezade Faramarzi. “It gained both fame and notoriety,” she said, speaking from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
The hotel was built in 1943 and kept functioning until 1987 when it was heavily damaged in fighting between Shiite and Druze militiamen at the time. The old Commodore building was later demolished and a new structure was build with an annex and officially opened again for the public in 1996.
But Coco the parrot was no longer at the bar. The bird went missing during the 1987 fighting. Shbaro said it is believed he was taken by one of the gunmen who stormed the hotel.
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