One of the strongest and most warmly received speeches of the conference given by Somali, Edna Aden Ismail, founder of the Edna Aden Hospital. It is given below.

Edna Aden Ismail, Edna Aden Hospital

"Ladies and gentlemen, dear brothers and sisters; I'm happy to welcome you to Hargeisa and I'm very happy and honoured to be here today. The fight against FGM has taken up much energy and a very long time. As a midwife myself, I have experienced at first hand the complications that result from this harmful practice.

I was going to work every day and being confronted with women giving birth through a very damaged part of their body. The extraction of a living baby from a living mother is an extremely difficult and complicated physiological process, and major damage can be caused to the soft skull of a new baby's head when passing through hard scar tissue formed as a result of FGM.

The tissue should be elastic and stretch to allow safe delivery so that this little baby can grow up to be a happy healthy human being. In my professional capacity, I was feeling great pain for these women because of problems caused by human beings. God has created women to perpetuate the human species and man has taken girls - who are healthy, who have survived all the problems of childhood in our country, the diarrhoea, the measles the infections, the respiratory problems, all the possible accidents and diseases that can affect children - and he has mutilated them.

Children who have escaped falling into a well, or being bitten by a snake, or eaten by a lion; children who have survived! And grown up to be happy, laughing young girls of five or six years old, a pride and a joy to their parents - these girls are being caught and mutilated and damaged and sometimes killed. Killed as a result of infection, killed as a result of haemorrhage. This is a great human tragedy that is not traditionally spoken about in Somali culture.

Family pressure and the possibility of shaming the family are the greatest barriers to talking about FGM. It was considered rude and indecent to talk about genitals. I remember that in my younger days, I wanted to talk about what had happened to me and to all the other girls, but I suffered in silence, even though I could remember the pain. In 1976, I attended a conference in Sudan about women's health problems, and there I heard a Sudanese male doctor speaking about FGM to a mixed audience of people, including men, women and religious scholars. I was shocked and amazed - and empowered to bring this new awareness back to Somalia.

That Sudanese doctor was a Muslim like me, an African like me, a health worker like me, and that gave me courage. So it came about that at the inauguration of the Somali Women's Congress I mentioned the word 'gudninka' (circumcision) for the first time at a public occasion. The first reaction was 'surprise! shock! shame!' but after I started to describe the health complications in detail, the word came out of the closet and the first anti-FGM group was formed.

The groups grew in size and number, they gained experience, they gained confidence and they linked with other campaigners all over the world. Somalia was an example for the anti-FGM movement internationally - until the war intervened. However, since 1997, and the Congress on FGM held in Hargeisa, there has been much more activity happening in Somaliland, such as workshops, forums, the National Committee on FGM, and now every women's organisation has an FGM policy. Since starting this fight twenty-six years ago, there are some developments that I am very happy about and others that make me sad. I am very happy that other women from all over the world are joining the fight against FGM and that people in every university and every city are engaging with this issue.

A sixteen year old girl from ....... was brought to a hospital in Mogadishu. Her husband thought that she might be pregnant, but she had seemed to be for the last two years. The girls stomach was extremely distended - she screamed with pain if someone touched her. The doctor discovered that she had been very tightly infibulated, and when he opened her to investigate the problem, he found that two years of menstrual blood were blocked inside her, unable to come out. Her reproductive organs were infected and had to be removed. Her husband divorced her immediately when he found that she would never be able to bear children.

I am also sad meanwhile, because girls in Somaliland, in Somalia, in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti are still being mutilated and killed in the name of tradition, out of ignorance, while the fight against FGM is converting the converted. Even in this hall here, I can see doctors, experts in reproductive health, policy makers - these are people who already know about the damage caused by FGM.

We need to inform those who do not know, who have not heard, that FGM is forbidden in Islam, about the terrible health complications, that in other Islamic countries women are not mutilated. We Muslims go on pilgrimage to Mecca and to Medina; their women are not circumcised. Are we more religious than they are? Women in Kabul are not circumcised, Are we more religious than the Taliban? Women in Pakistan, in Iran, in Syria, in Kuwait, Oman, Morocco, Libya, Indonesia, Bangladesh - these women are not circumcised.

Why is it that Somali women - who mostly cannot read or write, who cannot even read the Holy Qu'ran and understand it for themselves - should be the ones to be mutilated this way in the name of Islam? We need to see Muslims from all different traditions come together to talk about this. The focus of FGM education needs to be within Africa, in the villages, towns and local communities.

It needs to be allied to other health issues of the African mother and child; you cannot take FGM in isolation, you need to take into account the standards of nutrition, education, hygiene, environmental conditions, poverty and the rights of women and children

I would like to welcome our foreign visitors, and hope that you enjoy yourselves and have a pleasant stay in Somaliland. We are happy that you have come, as it is good for the image of our country. FGM crosses borders; it is an international subject. We should all unite and come together in the fight to rid the world of this harmful practice."