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March 7, 2004
Review: Near invisible actors
WHAT do we know of the women suicide bomber? Leila Khaled who successfully hijacked a TWA flight in 1969 instantly became the glamour girl of international terrorism. Dhanu who assassinated the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 was apparently avenging the rape she experienced at the hands of the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF). Are they all violated women and therefore seeking personal revenge? Can there be another motivation like their steadfastness and adherence to a political ideology, something that can only be envisioned by her male militant counterpart?
The 20th century saw protracted wars in the world and thus disciplines like conflict management, conflict situations, women and security studies, etc., took birth. This also made the feminists ponder the actual role women played and the constructed role that were attributed to them and which the media has portrayed all along.
The book under review Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, edited by Caroline O.N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark, is a compilation of papers on the diverse and changing role of women, the relationship between men and women during conflict and war. It questions the “simplistic division” and the common perception of wars as being a completely male domain with violence perpetrated by men acting as soldiers, guerillas, peace-keeping forces, etc., and women as mere victims, particularly of sexual abuse and abduction.
Women were the harbingers of peace and men of war and aggression. Where men became victims, they were still brave and masculine. “This under or mis-representation of the gendered causes, costs and consequences of violence has resulted in insufficient recognition of women’s involvement and participation, both unavoidable and deliberate, in violent conflicts, and of de-linking of women from the passive, peaceful stereotypes.”
The book is a compilation of twelve papers that were presented at a two-day conference entitled “Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence” held in Washington in 1999. However, the revised versions of these papers have been provided with profound insight from Caroline O.N. Moser, a social anthropologist and social policy specialist, who became “preoccupied by the way in which political violence and armed conflict was generally perceived as a male domain, fought, negotiated and studied primarily by men” and looks at the violence and conflict from a gendered lens and challenges the gender-blind theories that exist.
The book puts forward many other views that had not been projected by the mass media and therefore not really contemplated. Its importance lies in its diversity and the rich experiences from authors who themselves belong to varied geographic regions.
It deals with various aspects of a gender dimension of armed conflict-or political violence. While it states that there is enough evidence to show women as victims and that women suffer severe forms of victimization during and after conflicts and that men, overwhelmingly, are the perpetrators, there is an unusual point made — that men, too, are victimized — where they are forced to commit sexual violence against each other. And yet it is under-reported or never makes for a major story in the press.
Dubravka Zarkov in his paper, “The body of the other man: sexual violence and the construction of masculinity, sexuality and ethnicity in the Croation media”, gives his own analysis after careful research: “the invisibility of men who endured sexual violence is related to the position of masculinity and the male body within nationalist discourses on ethnicity, nationhood and statehood.”
Another interesting aspect of the case of women in armed conflict is the lack of recognition of the active role they play as guerrilla fighters. Ana Cristina Ibanez gives the El Salvador example and presents the cases of Josefina and Rosaura, two women who joined the guerrilla groups and when the time came to give up arms, didn’t know how to reintegrate and adjust in to their families and society. Josefina joined the guerrilla group because she’d lived in a conflict zone and suffered repression and Rosaura because of her ideological affinity. Once demobilization was initiated it meant leaving camp life, losing weapons, being separated from comrades and going back to families. They had to learn to earn and handle money and food was not guaranteed, nor were jobs. The latter required education, which they lacked.
And after the war clouds have scattered and negotiations for peace take place, why again, is it so male-dominated? Take the case of Iraq? News clippings and reportage show a male-dominated Iraqi Governing Council and the US negotiators of peace — all men. Women, as a whole, are not considered an important enough social capital to be involved in sustainable peace!
Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence
Edited by Caroline O.N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark
Kali for Women, K-92 Hauz Khas Enclave, New Delhi-110016.
Tel: 91-11-6864497, 6964947.
Email: kaliw@del2.vsnl.net.in
ISBN 81-86706-47-X
243pp. Indian Rs250
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