The World's New Gay Rights Battlegrounds: Pakistan, Turkey, Uganda & Malawi

The World's New Gay Rights Battlegrounds

They're here, they're queer, and governments from Africa to Asia don't quite know what to do about it. Four countries where gay rights movements face an upward battle for equality.

PAKISTAN

The battle: Hijras, or transgender and transvestite men in India and Pakistan, have long been a recognized and partially tolerated population, scraping together a living as wedding dancers and prostitutes and facing the constant threat of aggression and discrimination. India decriminalized homosexuality last summer, but it is still illegal in Pakistan, and a private gay marriage ceremony there in 2005 was met with death threats. So it was big news in July 2009 when Pakistan's Supreme Court ruled that hijras would be officially recognized and registered as citizens. Like India, whose election commission began allowing hijras to mark their gender as "other" on ballot forms last November, Pakistan is recommending that a third gender option be researched for entry on the country's state-issued identity cards.

The outlook: Since the historic 2009 ruling, there has been a significant increase in hijra activism, with demonstrations and celebrations taking place across the country, and the country's first ever hijra cricket team beat a professional squad last August. But the fight for equality is by no means won -- the cricketers had trouble convincing any local politicians to show their faces at the match. Meanwhile, Pakistan's gays continue to live privately. If they find community, it's in small, isolated, urban pockets. Grassroots movements may be encouraged by the recent legal victories there and in India, but broad social acceptance is still a ways off.
 

TURKEY

The battle: Turkey is widely recognized as being one of the most LGBT-tolerant countries in the Middle East. It is one of only four countries in the region -- the others being Israel, Jordan, and, since 2003, Iraq -- where gay sex is legal, and Istanbul has a lively gay community. But Turkey's ostensibly liberal society has come under scrutiny over the last couple of years due to a string of murders committed against gay and transgender people. In 2008, Ahmet Yildiz was killed by his father in Turkey's first reported honor killing of a gay person. Over the last two years, meanwhile, at least eight transgender people have been murdered. In the first months of 2010 alone, two transgender women were killed, apparently due to homophobic violence. The country is split between a modernizing Islamist government that hopes to join the European Union and a conservative population that is squeamish about the increasingly visible role of gay people in Turkish society. But now, on top of the killings, Ankara is cracking down on gay rights activists, filing civil proceedings to close local group Black Pink Triangle on the grounds that it violates "Turkish moral values and family structure."

The outlook: International NGOs are in an uproar over the violence and the government's attempt to hinder activist groups. And Turkey's effort to join the European Union will probably lead it to temper some of its worst excesses. Still, the deaths and the governmental repression suggest that Turkey's reputation as a relative oasis of human rights in the Middle East isn't going to last long.

Full Article From the Foreign Policy magazine - March 9, 2010