BEIRUT — The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture announced Sunday that it had cut ties with Arabic music magazine and radio Ma3azef in organizing AFAC’s upcoming 15-year-anniversary festival, following allegations that musicians associated with Ma3azef had sexually assaulted an employee of a venue where they performed back in 2019 and that the organization had covered up the incident.
Here’s what we know:
• A former manager of the Hamra bookshop, cafe and event space Barzakh, Fatima Fouad, publicly posted a testimony on Saturday against two musicians associated with Ma3azef, alleging that they had drugged and sexually assaulted her on Dec. 31, 2019, during Barzakh’s opening event.
• Barzakh organized the party in collaboration with Ma3azef and music venue Ballroom Blitz, all of which have since issued statements condemning what allegedly happened to Fouad and standing in solidarity with her.
• Scheduled for July 16, a concert organized by AFAC will be held in Beirut’s Hippodrome featuring an assortment of Arab musicians. A collaboration with Ma3azef, which, according to AFAC’s statement, is responsible for the concert’s program, was ended on account of Ma3azef’s “silence and and cover up about the perpetrators and for not taking a stance against them.”
• According to Fouad’s statement, Ma3azef’s management “insisted that the team wrapped up the whole thing and didn’t release a statement condemning the actions of [the] rapist…” Fouad alleged in her statement that this decision came on the grounds that the management “knows [the rapist] well.”
• Ma3azef’s statement promised an “independent investigation” into its office and director and vowed to reconsider its practices so as to not endorse any “violent patriarchal structures” in music production.
• Rape and sexual harasment is a countrywide issue in Lebanon with many accounts remaining off the record due to fears of the social stigma that might follow. According to Human Rights Watch, the country’s sexual harassment law that was passed on Dec. 21, 2020 “falls short of international standards by addressing sexual harassment solely as a crime and neglecting prevention, labor law reforms, monitoring, and civil remedies.”
• According to the resource center for gender equality ABAAD, figures indicate that one out of four women in Lebanon are sexually harassed and 49 percent of those cases are perpetrated by people who are known to the victim.
• The first lawsuit against an alleged sexual harasser was filed in May 2021 by a group of seven of the alleged scores of victims. In September 2021, the public prosecutor formally charged Jaafar Attar, the alleged perpetrator, with sexual harassment and referred the case to the criminal court.
• While L’Orient Today would typically name neither alleged perpetrator nor victim in a criminal case of this nature ahead of charges being filed against the former, we have named Fouad because she came forward with a public statement about the case. You may read her statement here.