NY Times:
Joseph Lubega and his wife were strolling through a popular part of town, doing some shopping over the Christmas weekend, when a uniformed police officer approached and slapped his wife across the face, he said. The officer slapped her again. Then one more time.
“The reason, he said, was the blouse,” said Mr. Lubega, a motorcycle driver from Uganda working here in the southern Sudanese capital. “It had an open back.”
Southern Sudan is scheduled to hold a landmark referendum next month on whether to declare independence, after decades of civil war, from the northern part of the country, which is mostly Arab and heavily Islamic.
The struggle against Islamic law became a focal point of the war for the mostly Christian and animist southerners, who say they were brutalized under the north.
“In southern Sudan, you can dress in anything,” said Information Minister Benjamin Marial, addressing the attacks and threats by southern Sudanese police officers on civilians over the way they are dressed.
“Everyone is free,” Mr. Marial said.
But for some women in Juba, the run-ins with the police have been an unwelcome reminder that cultural norms and freedoms here are still up for debate.
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But cultural clashes come in many varieties, and sometimes involve foreigners as well. On Wednesday, a German woman who had ventured out was ordered home by an un-uniformed man for wearing a dress he considered too revealing.
The man warned, “ ‘If I see you like that pass here again, I will take you,’ ” said the German woman, who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.
An officer in the southern Sudanese Army with knowledge of the abuses, who asked not to be named because he was speaking outside the mandate of his job, said that the police had been advised to “counsel” women on their dress, and that the officers had “mistaken the advice they were given.”
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They seem to have a strange definition of counseling. Corporal punishment for violation of an unwritten dress code is clearly extreme as is a threat to "take" a woman because the cop does not like her dress. I think I can guess which way these women will vote in the referendum.
Image via Wikipedia
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