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Muslim and gay: Activists urge freedom at WorldPride in Madrid

The Arab Spring brought a taste of liberty for north Africa's gay and transgender communities, but six years on their battle for rights and recognition continues, activists say.

Muslim and gay: Activists urge freedom at WorldPride in Madrid
Madrid's Plaza Cibeles in rainbow colours for WorldPride. Photo: AFP

In Madrid for WorldPride 2017, one of the globe's biggest celebrations of LGBT rights, activists from the Muslim world called for greater freedom or the de-penalisation of homosexuality in countries where being gay is so frowned upon it can lead to jail.

In Tunisia, the fragile democracy ushered in after the 2010-2011 revolution against dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has allowed for open debate on the situation of the country's LGBT community.

But homosexuality is nevertheless still punishable by three years in jail as per article 230 of the criminal code. Paradoxically, the country made abortion legal in 1973, ahead of France.

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Silence and control

At a three-day gathering of more than 180 activists, Tunisian activist Hafedh Trifi said the “priority” was to abolish this article and the anal test used to see if someone had gay sex — a practice he qualified as “inhuman” and “degrading.”

He said the LGBT community had called for the repeal of this article ahead of elections in 2014, but was met by “silence from all parties.”  

In the Islamist Ennahda party that forms part of the ruling coalition, he added, some “say that it is an illness that must be treated, or that you have to kill, imprison or send homosexuals away into exile.”

But it's not just about religion. In October 2015, Tunisia's President, the secular Beji Caid Essebsi, said on television that article 230 would not be repealed.

“I'm against it,” he said.    

In neighbouring Algeria, meanwhile, openly gay imam Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed says that “there is the impression that it isn't even possible to debate these issues.”

Homosexuality there is also punished by jail — as it is in Morocco and Libya — and he says his country is in the hands of a “military-economic oligarchy” that fears diversity.

“If people live in a climate of diversity and debate, (the elite) will lose control, and it knows it,” says this imam who has lived in France since the 1990s.

“It's easy to control a harmonised population.” 

Beware of cliches

In Egypt, the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011 did not free up the situation.

There, the law doesn't explicitly penalise homosexuality, but gay men are regularly jailed for “debauchery.”

But in a talk on the LGBT community in the Islamic world, Muslim activist Daniel Ahmed Said warned against blanket-labelling Muslim countries as homophobic.

He said that in north Africa and the Middle East, French and British colonisations from the 19th century brought “rigid morals with regards to sexuality.”

Trifi concurred, saying that laws against homosexuality in Tunisia came with the French protectorate, set up in 1881.

Secular Turkey

Further afield, the situation is particularly complex in Turkey, where secularity is one of the pillars of the modern republic proclaimed in 1923.  

A first Gay Pride march took place in Istanbul in 2003. But authorities have banned it since 2015, citing security concerns.    

This year, police fired rubber bullets at a small group of activists that tried to defy the ban.

Sedef Cakmak, an activist and councillor for Istanbul's Besiktas district, said the prohibition hides political and religious motives.  

She told AFP that authorities in the secular country couldn't openly say that the 2015 ban was for Ramadan, but on the phone, she was told that it was due to the Muslim holy fasting month coinciding.

In 2014, the 35-year-old added, 80,000 people took part in Istanbul's Gay Pride march.

She said “the government saw that the LGBT movement is becoming a political actor in the country, so they started to see this as a threat.”  

Turkey is currently under a state of emergency implemented after a failed coup in July 2016 to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and critics say their freedoms are not safeguarded.

Homosexuality is legal in Turkey, but on the other hand, Cakmak says, “there are no laws that forbid discrimination on sexual orientation and identity.”

“So literally the state is saying 'we don't care about what happens to the LGBT community'.”

By Alvaro Villalobos / AFP

GAY

Germany to compensate gay soldiers who faced discrimination

Chancellor Angela Merkel's government on Wednesday agreed a draft bill that would compensate gay soldiers who faced discrimination in the armed forces between 1955 and 2000.

Germany to compensate gay soldiers who faced discrimination
A German flag is sewed to the uniform of a Bundeswehr soldier in Dresden. Photo: DPA

Under the proposed law, which needs to be approved by parliament, soldiers
who were convicted by military courts for being gay, demoted or who otherwise
saw their careers damaged because of their sexual orientation, would receive a
“symbolic amount” of €3,000.

“We cannot erase the suffering inflicted upon these people,” Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told the RND newspaper group. “But we want
to send a signal” and “turn the page on a dark chapter in the history of the
armed forces”, she said.

The compensation would apply to soldiers from the Bundeswehr, which was
created in West Germany in 1955, and to troops from former East Germany's
National People's Army, founded in 1956.

READ ALSO: More Germans identify as LGBT than in rest of Europe

The defence ministry estimates that about 1,000 people would be eligible
for a payout.

Military court judgments against soldiers for engaging in consensual gay sex acts would also be quashed under the draft bill.

It took until 1969 for homosexuality to be decriminalised in West Germany, but discrimination against gay service people continued for much longer, including after Germany was reunified in 1990.

Gay soldiers could expect to be overlooked for promotions or removed from positions of responsibility, with senior officers often deeming them a “security risk” or a bad example to others.

That ended with a law change in 2000 that officially protected gay, lesbian
and bisexual people from discrimination in the armed forces.

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