Mohammad Fadhel
AFP
November 5, 2006
MANAMA — Aminah Abbas believes she has the perfect qualifications to represent the poor in Bahrain’s parliament – she has spent a chunk of her life working as a hawker to support her family.
“All candidates speak of combating poverty and improving living standards, but for me, I’m talking of personal experience,” says Abbas, mother of five and one of 18 women candidates in the kingdom’s November 25 parliamentary polls.
“I have experienced poverty and all its hardships… I worked as a street vendor to support my family,” she says. Her experience of hardship, she adds, prompted her decision to run for parliament. She insists she wants to enter the legislature “to represent the poor.”
Mohammad Fadhel
AFP
November 5, 2006
MANAMA — Aminah Abbas believes she has the perfect qualifications to represent the poor in Bahrain’s parliament – she has spent a chunk of her life working as a hawker to support her family.
“All candidates speak of combating poverty and improving living standards, but for me, I’m talking of personal experience,” says Abbas, mother of five and one of 18 women candidates in the kingdom’s November 25 parliamentary polls.
“I have experienced poverty and all its hardships… I worked as a street vendor to support my family,” she says. Her experience of hardship, she adds, prompted her decision to run for parliament. She insists she wants to enter the legislature “to represent the poor.”
“Businessmen say they want [lawmakers] who represent their interests [in parliament] … I want to defend the poor,” says veiled Aminah, who is in her early forties. There is a big difference, she adds, between campaigning against poverty as part of electioneering as many candidates do, and “real suffering.”
Despite her impeccable poverty credentials, however, she will be hard-pushed to win enough votes in the conservative male-dominated kingdom – all 31 women candidates who ran in the last elections in 2002 lost.
But if nothing else, she has drive, having managed to leave the streets to become a businesswoman – she now owns a perfume factory among other interests. “My husband was unemployed in 2001 … I borrowed 10 dinars [$26] from my father and started selling perfumes in the street,” after being a housewife, she says.
Between peddling perfumes she managed to take several work-orientation courses and later secured a loan of 16,000 dinars [$46,000] in 2002 to build a perfume factory. The venture was successful and she later twinned it with a new initiative that markets homemade goods produced by other poor families. “All this was not easy. It took strong will and determination,” she says.
Abbas’s campaign for parliament is not her first experience with elections, having run last year for a seat on the board of Bahrain’s chamber of commerce. Despite failing to be elected, she describes the exercise as a “success.”
“I had decided to enter the competition only four days before the end of registration for candidates … I got 367 votes and this can be considered as success given that I was new in the field of trade,” she says.
Having cut her electioneering teeth on the chamber of commerce vote, Abbas is now standing in the fourth constituency of the northern district November 25. She is up against tough opposition – current parliamentary deputy speaker Abdul Hadi Marhoun and another candidate backed by the main Shiite opposition Islamic National Accord Association.
But the test by fire does not seem to phase her. “People in my constituency say: ‘We have tried men so why don’t we vote for women … Others say we don’t want political associations or former deputies,” she says. “People are fed up with talk [without action] … They hear [promises from] the government but see nothing [materializing], and they hear from the opposition but see nothing,” she says. “I say let them try women … Women can deal with all sorts of problems.”
Come what may in the November 25 ballot, there will be at least one female voice in parliament as Latifa Al Qouhoud, 50, has not been opposed in her constituency and she will become the first woman lawmaker in Bahrain.
Qouhoud, who is a former director of human resources in the finance ministry, was one of two female candidates who made it to the second round in the 2002 polls, but failed to reach the parliament.
The kingdom’s parliament was restored in 2002 after it was scrapped in 1975, as part of reforms spearheaded by King Hamad to transform the Gulf state into a constitutional monarchy. The 40-member elected chamber has the authority to examine and pass legislation proposed by the king or cabinet and also has monitoring powers.
The archipelago’s population of 650,000 is mainly Shiite but the kingdom is ruled by a Sunni dynasty.
