Furor Abating Over CNN Report on Female Circumcision

by James J. Napoli

Two years after the Atlanta-based Cable News Network (CNN) ran a controversial story on female circumcision in Egyptfor which the TV network was much malignedthe Health Ministry has banned the practice in public hospitals and launched a major public relations campaign against it.

The ministry was scrambling to placate public revulsion at the deaths of two young girlsone named Sarah, 11, and the other Amina, 14who underwent the operation last summer. Sarah died when a barber removed her clitoris and Amina died at the hands of a doctor. Both girls bled to death.

Debate, reports the Cairo-based Middle East Times, still rages about the wisdom of banning the practice from public hospitals while the vast majority of Egyptians still consider the operation necessary to make their daughters marriageable. Even some people opposed to female circumcision genital mutilation argue that at least public hospitals can ensure that it’s done cleanly and safely.

Complicating the issue is that although female circumcision is not prescribed in Islamic law, the late Sheikh of Al-Azhar Islamic University, Gad Al-Haq, has said it is a religious duty. An estimated 3,600 girls are circumcised every day in Egypt, one of only a handful of countries, including neighboring Sudan, where it is widely practiced.

The Egyptian press has been covering the issue extensively since September 1994, when CNNran its highly graphic circumcision story during the U.N. International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. The story centered around a 10-year-old girl, Naglaa, who underwent the operation without her prior knowledge, much less her consent, in front of a CNN camera.

Although the footage was wrenching, the story did not provoke an immediate reaction. But a few days later, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was filmed by CNN saying he had not known the operation, which affects about 80 percent of Egyptian females, was still practiced in the country.

Shortly after the interview was aired, six people the girl’s father, a man who had allegedly talked to the father about permitting the photo shoot, two men who performed the operation, an Egyptian woman working for CNN, and her aunt were arrested and detained by police. The government eventually decided not to press charges against the woman working for CNN under a law that makes it a criminal offense to tarnish the reputation of Egypt.

But the CNN stories aroused a firestorm of vituperation in the Egyptian press. The initial target was not female circumcisiona horrific practice, by most lights but against the network for its handling of the story.

Egypt’s Reputation Tarnished

Said Sonbol’s normally unsensational daily column in the government paper al-Akhbar tore into the network for showing the mutilation in a “very inhumane way.” According to Sonbol, the intent of the story was “to tarnish the reputation of Egypt in addition to distorting its image in the eyes of the world.” He excoriated CNN for not hiding the face and identity of the girl, and attacked the Egyptians who collaborated with the network to hurt Egypt’s image.

Other newspapers followed suit. “CNN Circumcision News Nuts” read one memorable headline in the English-language Egyptian Gazette. CNNwas also accused of betraying Egypt’s hospitality and of staging the event by paying the participants. Both government and opposition newspapers lambasted their Western colleagues, who, many writers recalled, had also been running stories about the waves of terrorist violence that had been sweeping Egypt. They carried stories quoting people who promised to attack physically foreign journalistsindeed, any foreigners with camerasat the next opportunity.

The situation for foreign journalists trying to gather information in Egypt, which had been precarious before the CNN story, got much worse after the orchestration of outrage against the network, not only in the press, but on Egyptian television.

Photographers and reporters on routine assignments reported being bullied or ignored by officials, harassed by people on the street, challenged by passersby to show their credentials and, in some cases, beaten up.

At one meeting with a group of journalists and academics shortly after the incident, Nabil Osman, director of the State Information Service, acknowledged that the story was on an appropriate topic, but he asserted the Western media “sometimes treat the Third World as a guinea pig” and that CNN should have protected “the privacy of this young lady [Naglaa].”

Western media “sometimes treat the Third World as a guinea pig.”

He also said any foreign correspondent would continue to be “free to go where he wants and to talk to whom he wants.” Osman could afford to be gracious since, as Cairo-based foreign journalists then observed, the Egyptian media campaign against correspondents had turned the average Egyptian citizen into a government censor. Journalists were encountering so many problems on the street that they were discouraged from pursuing stories without being accompanied by government “minders,” or at least obtaining written government permission.

Two years later the rage in the Egyptian press against foreign journalists seems to have abated. Increasing attention has been paid to problems associated with the practice of female circumcision. But there’s been no rush to acknowledge the contribution the “circumcision news nuts” made in opening up a largely taboo subject to public debate and inspiring Egyptian press campaigns against female genital mutilation.

The public relations campaign by the Health Ministry also is unlikely to include any mention of the role played by Naglaa, whose face reflecting shock and then torment was televised around the globe, in getting the government to act.