A woman in the lion's den

UNESCO Courier, June, 2000 by Hinde Taarji

For years, Moroccan member of parliament Badia Skalli has put her long-standing loyalty to the Socialist Party before her feminist beliefs. Now she is at the centre of a tough battle

Badia Skalli had the good fortune to be born at a time when the world made sense, and everything was linked to some kind of cause. First came the struggle for independence, then the big push to build a new and freer country. Cold reality eventually dashed these hopes, but from the outset, there had been that dream.

Skalli was born in 1944 in El Jadida, about 100 kilometers south of Casablanca. At 10 she had her first taste of political activism. A pro-independence demonstration passed her house, and suddenly she was marching in step with the protesters. This earned her a good hiding when she got home, but the seed had been sown.

When Skalli enrolled at the University of Casablanca in 1962 to study law, the National Union of Moroccan Students (UNEM) was at its height and spearheading the left-wing opposition party, the National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP).

"You just had to join in," she remembers. "You just felt it so strongly. The students were the elite." Women students were few and far between, and only a handful were activists like her. They were fussed over by the men in the organization, who wanted to show they were modern-minded and strongly in favour of women's emancipation. The UNEM executive committee welcomed Skalli and she took on her first political responsibilities.

King Hassan. II, who came to the throne in 1961, soon called a halt to these "antics." In 1965, a high-school student rebellion grew into a popular uprising and a state of emergency was declared. The UNEM was decapitated when all its leaders were drafted into the army. Except for Skalli, that is, who greatly resented being treated differently because of her sex. "I had dreams about an army truck that would pick me up and take me away with my comrades."

Skalli acquired her yen for politics during these years of activism. But the state of emergency drove the UNFP, of which she was a member, underground. Morocco entered a period of political repression. Women party members busied themselves with looking after political prisoners' families.

The young Skalli married, but her husband was killed in a road accident three years later. It took her several years to recover.

The call of politics was too compelling. When the UNFP split in 1975, she sided with the party's "democratic" wing to help found the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP), which meant giving up the tempting dream of revolution. The battle was now to be fought within the institutional bounds defined by the law. Skalli was one of the party's few female candidates in the 1976 local elections, the first to be held under the state of emergency.

She campaigned in a poor, predominantly Berber-speaking area, where she found women cut off from the world because they were illiterate and did not understand Arabic. She had put her finger on the plight of Moroccan women. The young candidate also found that voters had no preconceptions about women in politics and judged her by what she said. But the party asked her not to mention the fact that she was a widow--a woman without a husband--in her nomination papers.

Skalli's election bid failed, and she took it badly because the party had lost a seat. The issue of women's participation in politics sparked little public interest. But she was leader of the USFP's women's organization, founded in 1975 during International Women's Year. Awareness was rising, but female party activists still put women's issues on the back burner.

"Next to the historic figures who had fought for independence or spent time in prison, we felt small and tended to fade into the background," she says. Though a key figure in the USFP, it was a long time before Skalli gained enough self-confidence to assert her rightful place in the party.

After another defeat at the polls, this time in a parliamentary election, she won a municipal council seat in 1983. Two women Socialist Party candidates were elected in the same town and the party planned to make Skalli the council president. The proposal triggered an uproar. Despite being socialists, some "comrades" were dead-set against the idea. "A people who entrust their business to a woman are heading for ruination," the prophet Mohammed is supposed to have said. The party leadership backed down and the job went to a younger and less qualified man. Skalli had to settle for being the council vice-president.

The practical experience of sharing power with men was highly instructive. "Everything happens behind the scenes, in the framework of a male complicity that shuts out women," she says. Women's issues rarely interest men, she notes, and because female politicians are so few, they are "like clay pots against iron ones."

Now that she had entered the fight for political power as an equal, Skalli saw repressed machismo coming to the surface again. The USFP's decision to put her up as a parliamentary candidate sparked rebellion in the ranks and she encountered her first sexist attacks, such as "she smokes... she's a widow." But she was pleased to note once more how little her gender mattered to the voters. In fact, many people believed she was more trustworthy than men because of her sex.