A number of prominent women influence public
policy. In 2004, three women, two of whom are
Muslims, held ministerial portfolios: justice (Fozia
Hashim), tourism (Amna Nur Husayn), and labor
and social affairs (former NUEW chair Askalu
Menkerios). The same three women sat on the
PFDJ’s 19-member Executive Council, chosen at
the party’s last congress in 1994, and women held
22 percent of the seats in the National Assembly
and 11 percent of ambassadorial posts. In no-party
elections held throughout the country in 2002 for
village administrators and deputy administrators in
both Muslim and Christian communities, women
won more than a fifth of the posts.
However, gender-related changes in the public
sphere are not woman-led. Eritrean women have
access to the top, but they lack organized represen-
tation in the president’s inner circle, where most
policy is determined. More importantly, women
lack a genuinely autonomous and activist social
movement to push the state (and the party) from
the outside.
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R. Iyob, The Eritrean struggle of independence. Domi-
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1995.
NUEW, NUEW and gender issues in Eritrea (1991–
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Dan ConnellSudanSudan has experienced a number of revolution-
ary movements: for example, the Mahdist mes-
sianic movement of the nineteenth century, freeing
the area for a time from the British and building its
sudan 661own society and administration; the nationalist
movement of the first half of the twentieth century,
culminating in independence from the British in
1956; the guerilla war that spanned the second half
of the twentieth century and extended into the
twenty-first century, pitting the southern region
against the northern region, and led primarily by
the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army
(SPLM/SPLA), a revolutionary organization that
aimed for a united socialist Sudan; the Islamist
revolution (1989) that transformed the society
into one guided by Sharì≠a and Islamic principles;
and various socialist, progressive, and “minority”
liberation movements and fronts in the late twenti-
eth and early twenty-first centuries. Especially since
the “Islamic Trend” emerged in the 1980s and
Islamists took power in 1989, imposing Islamiza-
tion projects, different regions of the country have
engaged in uprisings that are broader than identity
or minority politics (for example, in eastern Sudan
the Beja People’s Party; in the west the Nuba
Mountains resistance, and in the west an uprising
in Darfur). Like all sociopolitical movements, these
have been gendered. Women have played greater
and lesser roles in terms of the armed/military
struggles, but have played essential support roles
as well as engaging in political activityand some
leadership roles. Furthermore, each of theserevolu-
tionary or proto- and quasi-revolutionary move-
ments has altered the gender division of labor and
gender relations in significant, if not revolutionary,
ways.
The only enduring progressive revolutionary
party to develop in Sudan in the twentieth century
was the Marxist-Leninist Sudanese Communist
Party (SCP). Although an offshoot of the Egyptian
communist party and having strong ties to the
Soviet Union, it was still very much a “national”
party. As Sudan’s main leftist party, the SCP has
been persecuted, driven underground and into
exile, and has been beheaded (with the 1971 exe-
cution of Secretary-General ≠Abd al-Khàliq Ma™
jùb). The SCP has fought for social revolution via
paths mostly eschewing armed struggle, the failed
1971 coup d’état being one of the exceptions. A
full-scale revolutionary process in the Marxist sense
has not occurred in Sudan – in fact has seen a severe
setback since the 1989 Islamist coup d’état.
Despite impediments within the context of a con-
servative, religious sectarian, Muslim society, the
SCP was strong in its organizing in various spheres:
the tenant farmers, the trade unions, and especially
among railroad workers, youth, the intelligentsia,
and women. Even some strong influence in the all-
powerful military occasionally emerged.