'Our enemy in Yemen is ignorance'

Washington Amat Alim Alssosowa was only eight when she came across a newspaper ad for auditions at the local radio station for a children's music show. She could not carry a tune, but the station was close to home, so she went, along with 20 boys.

"You could not sing," she was told years later by Abdel Rahman Mutahhar, the Mister Rogers of Yemen. "You made it into the chorus because of your courage."

When she was 12, Alssosowa became a radio personality and a news announcer, sitting on her mentor's lap to reach the mike. "I did it with no fear because I was so young. I had no idea where I was headed," she said.

The soft-spoken and self-effacing woman is now 45 and Yemen's first minister for human rights. She spoke at the National Democratic Institute on Thursday and at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery last week on Yemen's cultural heritage. She fretted that she was on a plane when her two children had their first school day last week.

Alssosowa studied at Cairo University, then at American University in Washington on a USAID scholarship, earning her master's degree in international communications in 1984.

By then, she had already launched her career as host of a cultural talk show and programming director.

She rose in the ranks of the General People's Congress, Yemen's ruling party, and served as ambassador to Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands before becoming her country's representative to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

She had pioneered in the 1970s as a leader of 1,000 scouts known as Girl Guides - planting trees, cleaning up graves and visiting hospitals. The little girl never stopped working.

"I consider myself lucky," Alssosowa said in one of several interviews this week. "However, it was not out of luxury, but out of necessity." She said her father died an honest but poor judge when she was 11, and she and her four older siblings had to work to help their mother make ends meet.

"Amat had to go out and work at an early age," said Yemeni businesswoman Huda Mohammad Sharafi, a longtime friend. "This kind of exposure brings out the strength of a woman."

While studying in Egypt, Alssosowa would go home in the summers to work. She once visited a local television station, where the chief suggested she read the news. At 17, she recalled, "My hair was pulled back in braids. I had no makeup or great features, and I was scared to face the camera. I tried out and was ordered to anchor the news that night. Next morning, I was the news of the town."

The city where she grew up, near the southwestern tip of Yemen, remains her first love. Taizz, a dreamy walled city of old Islamic structures rising in crimson, rose and ocher hues, spirals out of the mountain earth and the lap of the undulating highlands.

In a departure from Yemeni traditions elsewhere, it is the women who are the merchants, descending from their hamlets with bushels of khat and flowers to sell, wearing twisted colourful turbans, their faces and necks exposed but for a yellowish powder of saffron and limestone to protect them from the sun.

Today, she is setting up the Human Rights Ministry, decreed into existence last spring. Yemen's legal system has to be updated, she said, but there are no military tribunals now and judgeships have moved from religious to civilian hands.

Still, "it is not a rosy picture," Alssosowa said. "We have already started surprise visits to prisons to write up a report on conditions."

Complaints from citizens are being collected and catalogued, as are recommendations from non-governmental organisations. Alssosowa has a huge task ahead in sensitising people to their rights, as many are "knowledge-impaired," she said delicately.

"If you want to do something, be ready with all your guns. By that I mean education, because our enemy in Yemen is ignorance," she said. "I am ashamed to tell you we have an illiteracy rate of 60 per cent among women. It is a matter of resources."