Around 50 girls, including some as young as four, are being treated in hospital in Burkina Faso after they underwent female genital mutilation (FGM).
Two women, along with some of the girls’ relatives, have been
arrested. Not all the girls who underwent the circumcision have been
traced, the minister of women’s affairs, Laurence Marshall Ilboudo, told the BBC.
The procedure is reported to have been carried out in Kaya, northeast
of the capital, Ouagadougou. The NGO Voix de Femmes, which runs a
centre on the outskirts of the capital for survivors, said it had
assisted five girls, while many others were taken to local hospitals.
On Tuesday campaigners in
Somalia
announced that a third girl had died in less than a week after
undergoing FGM in the Puntland region. Suheyra Qorane Farah was cut
along with her sister, Zamzam. Both bled profusely and fell into a coma.
Zamzam’s condition improved, but Suheyra’s worsened. She was diagnosed
with tetanus and died on 17 September.
Her death follows those of two sisters
Aasiyo and Khadijo Farah Abdi Warsame, aged 10 and 11, last week in
Somalia. The Somali government announced recently that it would bring
the first-ever FGM prosecution in the country, following the death of a 10-year-old girl, but little progress has been made.
Hawa Aden Mohamed, executive director of the Galkayo Centre in
Puntland, Somalia, which supports girls affected by FGM, said she hoped
the deaths would “serve as a wake-up call for those responsible to see
the need to have the law in place to protect girls from this heinous
practice”.
FGM has been illegal in Burkina Faso since 1996, making it one of the
first African countries to outlaw the practice. According to the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, three-quarters of women aged 15-49 have undergone the procedure. The vast majority of people oppose FGM, Unicef says.