In Yemen, women belong to men. Most are illiterate. They are arrested in the street. They die in childbirth. In this special report, Rachel Cooke meets the brave few who are campaigning for midwives and against early marriage<

by Rachel Cooke, Guardian U.K., May 11, 2008

It is early morning in Al-Hudaydah, a small city in the northwest of Yemen, and Aminah, my translator, is going about the awkward business of eating breakfast. We have come to a restaurant, our hotel dining room being somewhat unappetising in appearance, and this means, for starters, that we’ve been put in a special room, segregated, away from the eyes of male diners.

In fact, it’s more of a corridor, a place at the back of the restaurant, where oil cans are stored, and great piles of vegetables kept in the cool. There are no windows - the only light is provided by the door through which we entered - and not much space: our table takes up all of that. It is dark and dank, and it makes me feel as though we are being punished rather than entertained. Aminah, I can tell, is in two minds about her veil. Should she raise it, so she can eat? Or should she leave it down, in case of passing males, and push her bread, beans and spring onions awkwardly behind it? Sometimes, I have noticed, waiters count as males, and sometimes they don’t; they become conveniently invisible. This place, though, is wide open to the street, so waiters are the least of her worries. Eventually, she decides: the veil goes up, and she eats. Only now she is sitting at an odd angle, so that her face is carefully cast in shadow, like that of a spy or a fugitive.

When I first met Aminah, four days ago, I was dismayed. In Yemen, few women go about unveiled. In fact, almost none. Even so, for some reason I was expecting her to be different: the fact that she spoke English, and had a job, encouraged me to believe that when I talked to her, I would be allowed to see her face, and thus to tell what she was thinking. So when I saw her, sitting in our hotel lobby, another inverted ghost, with only her brown eyes and her hennaed fingers revealed to the world, my heart sank.

In Yemen, there is so much that is hard to understand; if she is my only means of grasping what people were feeling and saying - not even able to frown at me, or to smile - how would I ever make sense of anything? I don’t feel like this any more, though. I like Aminah a lot; she has an expressive way of talking, and an openness that takes you by surprise. But I’m also used to her now. I can pick her out in a crowd of women at 10 paces even though, to all intents and purposes, everyone looks exactly the same. I know when she is cross - frequently - and when she is content. The way she looks makes me feel oddly safe, too. In her company, it is as though she has anointed me - an unveiled woman in Birkenstock sandals - with her discretion. She can take me places, literally and metaphorically. Aminah is my very own code-breaker.

In any case, her veil is a red herring. Simply by travelling with us, alone and far from her home in a southern province, Aminah is doing something exceptional (she has already been asked - by a man, a supposedly liberal man who should know better - what her father thinks of this trip). In the Arab world, as in the wider Muslim world, the words ‘women’ and ‘rights’ rarely go together, and even then only in the mouths of the earnest young people who work for NGOs.

In Yemen, however, the situation is more serious even than it is among its neighbours. In terms of freedom, it is probably Saudi Arabian women who have the hardest time of all. But even there, females have access to education and healthcare. In Yemen - sorry to make this sound like some terrible competition - an absence of citizenship rights for women horribly combines with crushing poverty to create a society in which women are not only the property of men, unable to leave the house without the permission of a male relative and vulnerable to arbitrary arrest on the street even once they have it, but are also likely to be illiterate, to be married before they reach puberty, and to die in childbirth. ‘Our family law is the worst in the Middle East for women,’ says Suha Bashren, a Yemeni who works as a campaign officer for Oxfam. ‘It is medieval.’ Does the fact that the law permits Yemeni women to drive - something that is illegal in Saudi Arabia - make up for any of this? You’ll forgive Suha for thinking that it does not.

Yemen is one of the least developed countries in the world, with a Human Development Index of 149 (out of 177 countries), and a poverty level of over 40 per cent. Only 35.9 per cent of the population has access to safe drinking water. For women, though, life is especially tough. A woman has only a one-in-three chance of being able to read and write (some 71 per cent of Yemeni women are illiterate, as opposed to 31 per cent of men; in most other Middle Eastern countries, the average female illiteracy rate stands at 35 per cent). If a Yemeni woman has a baby, she has only a one-in-five chance of being attended by a midwife, and she has a one-in-39 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth over her lifetime. As for rights, she has none - or very few. The law does not state what age a woman must be before she marries, which means that many females find themselves with a husband when they are as young as 12, something that has a serious impact on maternal mortality rates, and which can also result in other serious health problems, such as incontinence.

Male power is total, and not only in politics (one woman MP out of 301 members, 35 women represented in local councils out of 6,000). A woman cannot, for instance, marry without the permission of a male relative; if she has no father, she must ask her brother, or a cousin and so on until, if she has no male relatives at all, she must turn to a judge. Women are regularly the victims of arbitrary arrests, picked up for ‘immoral acts’ such as adultery, smoking or eating in a restaurant with a ‘boyfriend’. It is not only the police who can make such arrests; power is invested in all kinds of men from the minister of the interior to local neighbourhood chiefs, even coastguards. (Continue Reading this Article)