A Defiant Amira Osman Outside Khartom Court

Activist engineer and business owner Amira Osman out of the court September 1 in Khartoum carrying a not yet confiscated sign saying “Public Order Laws are humiliating Women in Sudan.

Amira Osman’s Clothes Not Modest Enough?

Amira Osman wearing the same clothes in which she was arrested conducting business in Khartoum on August 27, 2013. The Sudanese regime sought to bring Amira to a speedy trial, but it wasn’t soon enough to stop people in Sudan from rallying around her.

#AmiraOsman has just left the court after her trial adjourned September 1 until September 19, carrying a sign says: “Public Order Laws are humiliating Women in Sudan - Movement of No to Oppression of Women in Sudan”.

The Sudanese judge was MIA — missing in action — for unknown reasons. We believe it was the intention of the Sudanese right-wing zealots to push Amira’s case through very quickly, so that the word wouldn’t spread internationally of her arrest.For #Amira Osman to be arrested on Aug. 27th and scheduled to appear in court on September 1 Sunday, in a court on the far outskirts of Khartoum sounds like a plot to eliminate the proper judicial proceedings to me.

In Europe, it’s the last weekend of the summer holiday and people are traveling back home. In the US, we are also returning from holidays, and it is Labor Day weekend, a major US holiday. If Sudanese officials thought Anne of Carversville would be sleeping at the switch, they were DEAD WRONG!!!

What country with any values would brutally flog 40,000 women a year while men watch and cheer on the streets?

In Most Countries of the World, There Are Two Kinds Of Men: Friends To Women and Foes

Note that many Sudanese men stood up for Amira in court today, and my own activist friend working on women’s rights in Sudan is male. These men — real men with sound values and respect for women — went to work, right along with Sudanese women to fight back against the Sudanese regime determined to put all Sudanese women under burqas for fear of the lash.

Let us be clear here. The ‘lash’ that I see in the video smuggled out to me is a bullwhip. Sudan whips women with bullwhips on a whim. Whoever arrested Amira Osman this week — another step in a concerted effect to discredit the women’s rights movement in Sudan — has galvanized us all.

Lubna and I haven’t been in contact for a year. Now we are. I am so angry I will use my front page — not an interior page on AOC — to tell the story of Sudanese women, once the most educated and advanced in North Africa.

The women of Sudan were a shining inspiration to all women worldwide until the Islamic fundamentalists decided to snuff out women’s progress in Sudan, much as Christian fundamentalists seek to repeal women’s progress in America. We are joined in the same fight over the same issues. The difference in our punishments is degrees of barbarity, with the Sudanese women having to pay a much higher price than women in the US.

I’ve asked for English translations of all the propaganda columns that were written in Sudan this week, in an attempt to discredit Lubna Hussein and the women’s rights activists in Sudan. Shortly, we will publish the first testimony from a professional woman — a lawyer — who has herself been flogged in Khartoum. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to tell the full story of the Sudanese women one by one.

Let us share the truth about flogging 40,000 women a year in Sudan with my readers worldwide — who now understand what “telling women’s stories from fashion to flogging” is all about.

If the Sudanese government chooses to silence women with their unspeakable brutality, Anne of Carversville will give them a voice because these brave Sudanese women will NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHT under their government-provided burqas. ~ Anne

Power and courage to the women of Sudan and the men who support them!!!!

We will all be ready on September 19 when Amira Osman returns to court — just as we were ready for Lubna Hussein and the reprehensible attempt in 2012 of Sudanese courts — and I use the term loosely — to stone to death a young woman in a paternity case. We were successful in turning back that sentence, too. Only international public scrutiny keeps Sudan from rounding up all its women in the pickup trucks that roam the streets of Khartoum.