Highlights from this issue...

Beyond fears and tears
Feminists Under Fire: Exchanges Across War Zones edited by Wenona Giles, Malathi de Alwis, Edith Klein, Neluka Silva (co-editors) with Maja Korac, Djurdja Knezevic, and Zarana Papic (advisory editors). Toronto, ON: Between the Lines, 2003, 238 pp., $24.95 paper.

By Ayse Gul Altinay

THE INSPIRING FEMINIST DIALOGUE between various women's groups in post-Yugoslavia and Sri Lanka enabled by the Women in Conflict Zones Network (WICZNET) has turned into a joint declaration of hope and solidarity for all of us to read and learn from.

Similar to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the ongoing conflict in Sri Lanka have often been dismissed by such phrases as: "Oh, what's going on there is too complicated for me to understand." They have also been regarded as "ancient" conflicts, with hundreds of years of ethnic hatred in their background. It is precisely this blindness and its legitimation that prevent both empathy and action. If things are too complicated, if nobody is innocent, if conflicts are embedded in long histories of "mutual bloodshed," then how can we do anything about them, right?

The 15 woman authors of this stimulating and important book offer a very different view. Through their lucid overviews, engaging stories, and insightful analyses, even the most "complicated" conflicts start making sense--political sense, historical sense, and, most importantly, feminist sense! But this book is not just about making sense of what is/was going on in these conflict zones, it is also about finding hope and the right channels to do something about them.

From rethinking sexual violence in wartime (and asking such provocative questions as "Did this really have to happen in Europe for it to be noticed and talked about?"), to developing feminist strategies for dealing with war trauma, to working against essentialist ideas about gender to finding creative channels of dialogue with women of the "enemy camp," this collection offers a wide range of feminist debates and deliberations about two of the most troubled war zones of the 1990s.

The first thing that catches the eye on the cover is the long list of seven editors and advisory editors. Not only is it difficult to imagine, say, seven men co-editing a book, it is also not often that we see such projects of feminist solidarity in print. This, I believe, is what makes this book special--and different from many of the recent edited volumes on women and war: It is a collective work of feminist dialogue and shared activism through and through.

Once you are past the cover, you are confronted with maps of post-Yugoslavia and of Sri Lanka, then with 20 essays that provide vivid feminist mapping of these conflict zones. Beware if you consider yourself outside of these maps. The writers of Feminists Under Fire challenge the reader to face her own participation in these conflict zones and others. Do you remember whose planes were bombing Serbia and Kosova/o in the spring of 1999? [Most of the authors in this book prefer this usage, which marks a resistance to choose from the politically charged dichotomization between the Albanian usage (Kosova) and the Serbian usage (Kosovo).] And what you were doing then?

As I read the experiences of Serbian and Muslim women under fire, I remembered. It had been almost eight years since my Bosnian Muslim relatives escaped to take refuge in our home in Turkey and six years since my nephew was smuggled out of a concentration camp. Like many other women in NATO countries, as I watched CNN in the last days of March 1999, my vote was turning into bombs. One part of me felt relief that the Serbian atrocities in Kosova/o might be coming to an end. Yet, another part of me felt terrified by the militarization of international intervention and by the destruction of human life and livelihood. I knew that there was a sizeable group of daring feminist peace activists in Yugoslavia who had tried hard to stop the violence. Would the bombings hurt them? Empower them? Feminists Under Fire tells the story of their sustained efforts to create spaces of feminist solidarity, even during the bombings.

As some of us watched the bombings on television, women in the former Yugoslavia were trapped in their homes, feeling more unsafe than ever. With bombs falling and the martial law declared by the Serbian government, "Fear had become a fact of life overnight." Zarana Papic tells us that activists of the Women's Center in Belgrade, unable to gather physically, found a solution in forming a Fear Counseling Team. Calling women across the country (including Kosova/o), they confronted fear, documented how women were feeling during the bombings, shared strategies for survival, or simply touched base. Some of the Albanian women whom they reached in Pristina in the first part of the bombings later called them from Macedonia, where they had fled as refugees, to let them know that "they were alive."

Similarly, women in Sri Lanka have been searching for ways to support each other across political and ethnic lines since the early 1980s, when the conflict between Tamil Tiger rebels in the Northeast and the Sinhala-dominated capital Colombo erupted. For instance, the Women's Action Committee in the south (of mostly Sinhala women) was quick to join their voices with Tamil women in the north when they decided to speak out against violence and to call on the state to "Stop the Rape of Women," saying "We live amidst fear and in tears."

AS WOMEN IN BOTH CONTEXTs crossed the armed boundaries of the ethnic divide, they became vulnerable to political pressures from all sides. Being criticized for "disloyalty" was not their only difficulty, though. Lepa Mladjenovic's very interesting essay reveals the numerous tensions embedded in the feminist desires to create an antimilitarist political stance and the ethical dilemmas regarding the use of arms and military interventions. Mladjenovic presents a sophisticated reading of the two positions that developed out of the questions "To shoot or not to shoot?" and "Military intervention: yes or no?":

If we choose at all times to be on the pacifist no shooting side, and meet a friend who was saved in Bosnia or Kosova after the military intervention, we are embarrassed when facing her….We look into her eyes and end up with an ethical problem, because our position has not included her reality.…If we have a basic pacifist position of no shooting at any time, but in certain concrete situations we say yes to military intervention, we face our own pacifist politics and feel a moral embarrassment in siding with the military intervention…. It pains me that patriarchy as manifested in a military system has placed us in positions in which our free desire has no expression that can be recognized by the patriarchal reality. (p. 166)

In the end, To shoot or not to shoot? becomes a multi-layered historical question. Do we have a friend who might have been saved if there had been a military intervention in Srebrenica? In Rwanda? (p.166)

A quote from the Algerian writer Assia Djebar speaks for the shared effort in the various feminist projects that form the background to this volume: "Don't claim to 'speak for' or worse to 'speak on' other women"; our acts of solidarity should be based on "barely speaking next to, and if possible very close to" women who are different from us.

Of course, it is no easy task to speak "very close to" women of "the enemy" in times of conflict and fighting, but the feminists in Sri Lanka and post-Yugoslavia have gone out of their way to do so, facing all kinds of patriarchal and nationalist prejudices and pressures. Each one of their stories of feminist border-crossing reminds us once again that such solidarity is crucial both for activism and for working through the many dilemmas about war, violence, and peace that our increasingly militarized world forces us to confront. How different our political discussions would be if we formulated our ideas looking into the eyes of friends who were on the other side of the line!

A unique aspect of Feminists Under Fire is that it pays as much attention to post-war periods as to the difficult times of fighting and bombing. As the renowned feminist scholar and activist Kumari Jayawardena emphasizes:

[I]t is in post-conflict times that we have to be really vigilant. In conflict situations and anti-colonial struggles, patriarchy breaks down a bit, sometimes quite a lot. Women are in battle dress, carrying bombs, and are even suicide bombers…. But [post-conflict] is a time for greater vigilance, since the patriarchs will now assert their authority and will tell you how to behave, what to wear and whom your daughter should marry. So you have to watch out for patriarchal backlash, and monitor the way in which it tries to come back into the lives of women and girls. (p. 208)

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Afghan heroines
Meena, Heroine of Afghanistan: The Martyr Who Founded RAWA, The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan by Melody Ermachild Chavis. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003, 208 pp., $19.95 hardcover.
The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 253 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

By Bettina Aptheker

Meena speaking at a press conference. From Meena: Heroine of Afghanistan.

MELODY ERMACHILD CHAVIS, accompanied by Latifa Popal, traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to interview everyone she could find who had known Meena, the founder of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Meena's surname is never used. She is simply and always Meena. Through these interviews and other research, Chavis reconstructs Meena's life, while also providing a brief history of Afghanistan and the region. She provides a useful map of the area, and photographs of Meena. Acknowledgments at the end of the book detail her investigatory process and the names of the many people whom she interviewed.

Chavis, who lives in Northern California, makes her living as a licensed private investigator, handling death penalty cases. She is a highly trained investigator and an expert at interviewing witnesses. She had the fullest possible cooperation from RAWA, which wholeheartedly supported her project. Chavis is donating her proceeds from the sale of the book to RAWA.

Latifa Popal, who accompanied Chavis on her travels and served as her guide and translator, was born and raised in Kabul. When she was 17 years old, she and her family fled. They left Afghanistan in the winter of 1986, traversing the mountains of Tora Bora by foot to a refugee camp in Quetta, Pakistan, as literally millions of Afghans had done before them. Popal worked in the refugee camps teaching children to read. Eventually she and her family left Pakistan and took up residency in a number of European countries before settling in the United States.

Chavis writes in a simple, direct way, in keeping with RAWA's mission to educate women and girls; the writing is completely accessible to anyone with, say, a high school education. Sometimes she creates dialogue or imagines scenes, as when the book opens with Meena's near-death in childhood from typhoid fever. The story is so filled with horror and suffering that any other approach would have rendered it unbelievable, or worse, melodramatic. It is the power of the story itself that sustains the book's momentum.

Born in Kabul in 1957 into a comfortably middle-class family--her father, Latif, an architect, her mother, Hanifa, his second wife--Meena was one of ten children, with pleasures and privileges unknown to the vast majority of Afghan women. She was privileged, too, as part of the Pashtun ethnic majority, since many other ethnic groups, such as the Tajiks and the Hazara, faced severe discrimination. Her father was a progressive man and encouraged her studies at Malalai Girls High School in Kabul, where she excelled. From her history teacher, Madame Nooria, she learned about revolutionary Muslim women such as Jamila Bopasha, a leader of the Algerian resistance to French colonialism, and Ashraf Dihquany, an Iranian who led an underground resistance to the Shah. Thus, Meena was endowed with a radical, feminist legacy; and, likewise, she was carefully instructucted in the Koran.

By the late 1950s, first under the government of Prince Mohammed Daoud, and then under King Zahir, women had begun to enjoy a growing freedom of movement, education, professional training, and employment. The first national elections in Afghan history were held in 1965, with both men and women allowed to vote. Kabul was a city of about 350,000 people, with wide boulevards, shops, cafes, gardens, museums, and a growing intelligentsia. And yet, there was a vast difference between the population of urban centers like Kabul, Kandahar, and Bamiyan and the overwhelming majority of Afghans, who were peasants farming wheat and rice or nomads herding sheep, camels, and goats, living in poverty, eking out an existence in mountainous, unforgiving terrain. Traditional practices left most children, especially girls, uneducated; health care almost nonexistent; polygamy standard; and women segregated from men and heavily veiled if they left their homes. Ninety percent of the women and 63 percent of the men were illiterate.

In 1973, with the overthrow of the king, who had, in fact, been elected and was in the process of developing a constitution for the first time in Afghan history, Prince Daoud returned to power, declared himself president, and invited an increasing Soviet presence including technicians, teachers, doctors, engineers, and military advisers.

Meena entered Kabul University in 1976, at the age of 19, determined to study law, because she thought it would enable her to make the greatest contribution to the liberation of Afghan women. However, as she began her studies, Afghanistan was descending into political chaos. In April 1978, Daoud was assassinated. Two additional presidential assassinations took place before Hazifullah Amin took over government. The number of Soviet military advisers increased. As the Afghan government teetered, divided, and realigned itself, thousands of intellectuals were "disappeared"--arrested, tortured, and executed. Into this maelstrom, an Islamic fundamentalist movement, likewise factioned, grew and began its own reign of terror. Among the most notorious of the fundamentalist leaders was Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, whose band of fanatics, in an attempt to drive women from the university, threw acid on the legs and faces of female students.

RAWA members distribute blankets to refugees in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, January 2001. From Meena: Heroine of Afghanistan.

MEANWHILE, STUDENTS AT KABUL UNIVERSITY and in high schools began organizing a pro-democracy movement. Meena decided to give up her legal studies, which had begun to seem absurd in the context of a lawless society and instead, to launch RAWA. Working with great caution and secrecy, she met individually with women, developing personal ties before presenting her idea for founding a revolutionary organization. RAWA's official founding principles were: (1) The restoration of democracy in Afghanistan, with free elections, and voting rights for both men and women. (Likewise, RAWA used a democratic process within its own organization. Every woman fully participated, and issues were discussed until consensus was reached.) (2) Equality and social justice for women, including access to education, health care, legal rights, freedom from poverty and violence, including domestic and sexual violence. (3) Religious observance up to each individual to decide. (4) Separation of religious institutions and government. (5) Women of every ethnicity welcomed.

Meena felt that having women in charge of their own organization working for equality and liberation was by its very nature revolutionary. Her politics were neither left nor right, neither Communist nor fundamentalist. She stepped outside the parameters of debate established by Afghan men and insisted upon a feminism that grew out of women's everyday lives, everyday needs, and everyday survival. She believed that rooted in these principles, democracy could flourish.

Shortly before founding RAWA, Meena had married a physician, Faiz Ahmed, who was leader of the Afghan Liberation Organization, an independent, pro-democracy, Marxist group. Important to Meena were Ahmed's affirmation of women's liberation and his commitment to her education and her right to hold independent political views. Meena and Ahmed's first baby was born in 1979 under the most dire circumstances, as Meena was being hunted by the secret police. She named her baby girl Anosha, which in the Farsi language means "immortal." Four months after Anosha's birth, 50,000 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, and Meena fled to Pakistan to continue organizing. Ahmed had already been forced to flee, and they saw each other only sporadically as Meena traveled between Peshawar, where Ahmed was located, and Quetta, where she worked.

Meena set up RAWA's base of operations in Quetta and later in Peshawar. RAWA established schools for both girls and boys within the refugee camps, a sewing cooperative to help women earn money, safe homes, and what medical care they could. Meena and others traveled by foot or by bus between Pakistan and Afghanistan over the Khyber Pass, one of the most dangerous of mountain passages, bringing medical supplies into Afghanistan, holding literacy classes, and smuggling weapons and cameras under their burqas to aid the resistance and photograph atrocities. Trusted men, allies to RAWA, escorted the women when it was necessary to conform to fundamentalist edicts. Ultimately, RAWA established Malalai Hospital in Pakistan to treat victims of landmines.

In October 1981, Meena traveled to France at the invitation of the French government, under the socialist leadership of Prime Minister Francois Mitterand, to attend the International Socialist Conference in Valence. She gave a speech to delegates from 250 nations in which she described the Soviet invasion of her country despite pressures from an international movement more comfortable with condemnations of Western imperialism.

Meena gave birth to twins in May 1985 in the relative safety of Pakistan, although she agonized over her decision to have more children. The women of RAWA helped her to care for her babies, as they had cared for countless others, many of whom were orphaned. Tragedy struck hard a year and a half later when word reached Meena that Ahmed had been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. His killer was Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the same man who had thrown acid at the women students in Kabul a decade earlier. Three months later, on February 4, 1987, Meena herself was betrayed by a trusted friend who had served as her English and Russian translator. Her body was never recovered. Hekmatyar was believed responsible for her assassination as well.

Poster published by RAWA in 1987 during the war of resistance against the Russians and their Afghan puppet government. From Meena: Heroine of Afghanistan.

In the aftermath of Meena's death, the RAWA women feared capture, but realized after several weeks that whatever torture Meena had endured, she had remained silent. Meena's selfless devotion and love made it possible for them to carry on. Her strength had transcended even death. In collaborating with Melody Chavis to write Meena's biography, RAWA wished to keep the memory of her work and vision alive to inspire future generations of women in Afghanistan and in the world.

SAIRA SHAH PROVIDES A BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN memoir of deliberate and growing intensity, which traverses back and forth between her childhood memories of her artistocratic Afghan family with its estate in Paghman, "overlooking Kabul jan," she writes, "beloved Kabul," and war-ravaged Afghanistan. Shah was born and raised in England, the daughter of Indries Shah, the renowned Sufi philosopher. His legacy of jeweled poems and haunting tales infuses the memoir, giving it, at times, the dream-like quality of a timeless odyssey, as Shah searches for her heritage, truth, and people, lost to her in the family's long exile.

Shah's memoir is also the story of a brave journalist who made two daring trips into Afghanistan. She prepared vigorously for her first trip, in 1986, when she was 21, studying Persian and Arabic, and taking lessons in martial arts. "To fortify my nerve," she writes, "I went on a series of parachute jumps. Above all I devoured any scrap of news about Afghanistan." She stayed for three years, traveling between Pakistan and Afghanistan, over the same mountain passes Meena frequented, reporting on the guerilla war against the Soviet invasion. Shah traveled with one or another mujahid (warlord) either disguised in men's clothes or suffocating under a burqa.

Shah learned rapidly:

When visiting segregated houses [in Afghan villages] it really paid to be female. Men are left in the formal but remote visitors' room, condemned to make polite conversation, but the women's quarters are the engine room of the house. (p. 76)

Outside, shells were landing in clumps: the signature of a multiple rocket launcher.... I was imprisoned in a world of criss-cross shadows and stifled sounds: a bad dream under the blanket. For an instant I stood stock still in the kill zone, faltering, clinging to the burqa's illusory protection, as if this flimsy piece of fabric could stop shrapnel. Then I ran for my life [on bare feet]. (p. 131)

Although the world tends to view divisions within Islam in terms of schools and creeds, I believe there is a much more fundamental conflict. It is between those who cling to the literal letter of the Islamic law, and those who stress its inner values. At one end of the spectrum are the fanatics, the religious zealots; at the other, the Islamic mystics. (p. 132)

In April 2001, now a seasoned journalist, Shah traveled to Afghanistan a second time. Guided through Kabul by a member of RAWA, with a camera concealed under her burqa, she filmed what became the acclaimed documentary Beneath the Veil, revealing the conditions for women under the Taliban, and their resistance. Following the 9/11 tragedy, Shah's documentary was broadcast over and over again on CNN and referred to by a plethora of politicians from President Bush on down as support for the US attack on Afghanistan--a fact deeply troubling to Shah, who had made the film earlier, with very different intentions. Three Uzbek girls in the film, Amina, Fairuza, and Fawzia, from the village of Mawaii, whom she had interviewed, became international icons. Their mother had been murdered by the Taliban, and the girls left alone with men for two days. There was little doubt in any viewer's mind that they had been repeatedly raped.

Shah decided to go back to their village and rescue them even while the US attack raged, using funds she obtained from a television station. Her plan was to arrange for them to attend school. Shah found a girls' school, miraculously recently opened, only a 40-minute drive from the girls' home. The head teacher told her, "Afghan women are courageous--they cannot be beaten, whatever the odds. We are optimistic and hopeful for the future." But despite her best efforts, Shah was unable to convince the girls' father to allow them to go. "I had failed," Shah declares in grief. "Afghanistan had confounded me, just as it has always confounded the West." Shah speaks with one of the girls, Fairuza.

I asked her what she needed, and, again, I heard that clear, melodic voice: "We have lived through a war and a revolution. We just want our country to be at peace." She looked sadly at her two sisters. "Until then, we will suffer in silence. We just suffer in silence." (p. 237)

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Feminist peacemaking
In Resolution 1325, the United Nations requires the inclusion of women in all peace planning and negotiation

By Carol Cohn

1 "Women are not just victims of violence. They are often the driving force for peace."

2 "In our view, only the full participation of women in global affairs can open up greater opportunities for achieving global peace."

3 "Yet, when it comes to negotiating peace, post-war reconstruction and reconciliation, women are still grossly under-represented."

4 "No approach to peace can succeed if it does not view men and women as equally important components of the solution."

5 "Peace is inextricably linked to equality between women and men."

Did you think it might be a meeting of American feminists discussing Iraq or Afghanistan? Or a group of women activists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, talking about the role they can and should play in bringing an end to violence in their country? Or an international meeting of women peace activists? Whatever you guessed, if you are an American, you are unlikely to have known that these comments are actually the public statements of United Nations Security Council ambassadors--all of whom are men. The occasion for their remarks was a day-long Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security in the Context of Peacekeeping Operations, held this past October 29th.

The Open Debate marked the third anniversary of the UN Security Council's passage of Resolution 1325. If the terms "UN" "Security Council" and "resolution number" all immediately set off your "irrelevant and uninteresting" alarm, you might want to pause and reconsider. For women in many war-torn regions, in many local, national, and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and in many multilateral institutions, what happens at the UN matters a lot, and they follow it with close attention. For those women, just saying "1325" evokes a host of new possibilities and the promise of a radical change from politics-as-usual. Whether that promise is realized or not hinges, in large part, on women's international mobilization.

Resolution 1325 is often called a landmark resolution because it represents the first time the Security Council has ever turned its full attention to the subject of women and armed conflict. Previously, on those rare occasions when women showed up in Security Council resolutions at all, it has been in passing reference to women as victims, or women as a "vulnerable group," (along with children, and elderly and disabled people); it was never in reference to women as active agents.

Resolution 1325 breaks new ground because it not only recognizes that women have been active in peace-building and conflict prevention; it also recognizes women's right to participate--as decision-makers at all levels--in conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and peace-building processes. Further, it calls for all participants in peacekeeping operations and peace negotiations "to adopt a gender perspective." Gender perspectives, in this context, are taken to include attention to the special needs of women and girls during disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, resettlement, rehabilitation, reintegration and post-conflict reconstruction, as well as measures supporting local women's peace initiatives. Resolution 1325 recognizes that women are disproportionately victimized in wars and calls upon all parties to armed conflict to take special measures to respect women's rights, to protect women from gender-based violence, and to end impunity for crimes of violence against women and girls. It calls for gender training for peacekeepers and others involved in peace operations. And it calls for better representation of women throughout the UN system itself. In other words, if Resolution 1325 were fully implemented, the world would look like a very different place.

Granted, that is a big "if," as a glance at many other Security Council resolutions quickly affirms. Even when the Council members unanimously approve a resolution, as they did 1325, the Council structurally lacks adequate ways to implement or enforce its commitments. And the scope of 1325 is especially far-reaching, so the impediments to implementation are particularly daunting. It calls for changes in the behavior of member states, international agencies and institutions, and the Security Council, the Secretary-General, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, and many other parts of the UN itself. Those changes would fundamentally shift the gendered distribution of power--and we are all too familiar with the many institutional, bureaucratic, and individual barriers that stand in the way of such transformations.

These challenges, however, are not reason to write off Resolution 1325 as "just another resolution," or as "no more than rhetoric." What makes 1325 unique is not only that it (finally) addresses women, war, and security, or that its scope is expansive and its implications radical; what makes 1325 unique is that it is both the product of and the armature for a massive mobilization of women's political energies.

WOMEN'S NGOS PLAYED A CRUCIAL ROLE in the genesis and passage of 1325. While feminists internationally have long been active in trying to shape the UN agenda in areas such as development, human rights, and violence against women, the main focus of their work has been the General Assembly or the Economic and Social Council. The idea of mobilizing to influence the Security Council, and to get a Security Council resolution on women and armed conflict, represents a new and important strategy. The Security Council, as the primary UN decision-making body in the area of international peace and security, is at the center of UN power. And Security Council resolutions, in contrast to General Assembly resolutions, are binding on all member states of the UN.

Since 1325's passage, feminists inside and outside the UN have put tremendously creative thought and energy into making it a living document--an ongoing commitment for the Security Council, rather than a one-time rhetorical gesture. Around the UN, 1325 is known as the only resolution that has such an active constituency--and the only one that has an annual anniversary, when there are multiple panel discussions, Security Council meetings, and other events organized to try to advance the women, peace, and security agenda. The UN Inter-Agency Taskforce on Women, Peace, and Security and a member state group called Friends of 1325 are among the groups working hard to bring gender perspectives into the daily procedures and mechanisms of the Security Council and relevant UN departments. The NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, which came together to create and pass the resolution, now focuses its energy on implementation; for example, the UN office of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) has created the PeaceWomen website, www.peacewomen.org, to share information among women peace activists from around the world and the UN. The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has just launched a complementary web portal, www.womenwarpeace.org, to provide national and international actors with timely information on the impact of conflict on women and their role in peace-building and to show how and when gender issues should be addressed in preventive actions and in post-conflict peace-building.

One of the main goals of the UNIFEM web portal is to foster the inclusion of gender perspectives in resolutions, mandated missions, and debates of the Security Council and regional organizations focused on peace and security, and in the reports of the Secretary-General, "where attention to specific gender issues in individual countries is lacking." In fact, a recent study by the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women revealed that of the 225 Security Council resolutions adopted in the three years since 1325's passage, only 33 of them even mention the words "women" or "gender" at all. Clearly, there is a yawning chasm between the sentiments expressed by the Security Council ambassadors in their Open Debate statements and the actual routine work of the council and the Secretary-General. The challenge, both for the community of NGOs that tries to have an impact at the UN on this issue and for advocates working inside the UN, is to develop a strategy that identifies and targets the critical leverage points that offer the most effective ways to move the organization forward. Although this may sound self-evident, it is not that easy to do. The UN is a rather byzantine institution, with structures, processes, and unspoken rules that are neither quickly learned nor readily transparent, even to people who have been there for some time. And one of the exigencies of working in or alongside the UN is that you are confronted with many short-range deadlines and the need to respond to many developments that are not of your own creation--so the space and time for strategic planning is not as readily available as many advocates wish it were.

Luckily, women "on the ground"--grassroots activists in conflict zones--are not simply waiting for a thorough transformation of the UN. While 1325 is a document profoundly shaped by its institutional context, including the boundaries of the mandate of the Security Council, women in NGOs far from New York and from UN bureaucratic politics are finding ways to use 1325 in their own countries. Word of the resolution has spread through UN and NGO consultations and trainings and through websites such as www.peacewomen.org--which as of this writing has posted translations of 1325 into 30 different languages. In November, I had the privilege of organizing a 1325 workshop where women peace activists from countries including Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), El Salvador, Fiji, Iraq, Kosova, Liberia , Rwanda, and Sri Lanka could share their strategies for deploying 1325 as a tool in their own contexts. Among the many ways women are using 1325 on the ground:

* Women from Melanesia have formulated a plan of action to implement 1325 at local, regional, and national levels. They have established women's community media as a way to spread information and to make 1325 a reality at the community level, and will be establishing a regional magazine, to be called FemTalk 1325, to highlight what 1325 is about and what women are doing.

* After women from the DRC heard about 1325 from UNIFEM, they wrote a memorandum to their government, telling them that as signatories to the resolution, they now needed to implement it! For two years, they lobbied extensively for 1325's implementation in the DRC, both nationally and internationally, including writing to the Security Council. When the UN peace-keeping mission arrived in the DRC in 2000 without a gender component, they lobbied the director of the mission for a gender office and perspective in the mission. Since a Gender Advisor became a part of the mission in March 2002, the women have been working closely with her on projects such as translating 1325 into the four official languages and strategies for inserting a gender perspective into all levels of the government.

* Women in Kosova have not only translated 1325 into local languages, but have also translated it out of "UN language" into more accessible terms. Among their many initiatives, they negotiated with a women's group in Italy and got some financial support from the UN to sponsor about 20 shows on TV explaining the resolution. They also organized several roundtables, not only in Kosova, but also in Macedonia and Albania, and built a network around the resolution.

* At their July 9th conference on democracy in Baghdad, Iraqi women held a workshop in which they explained 1325 to the many participants (including lawyers, university lecturers, and so on) who had never heard of it. At the end of the day, they came up with recommendations, saying that, "We need equality between men and women with regard to rights and responsibilities." They used 1325 to support their call.

BUT RESOLUTION 1325 (2000) has very special qualities. It was a landmark. For the first time, we broadened our gaze from the traditional political and military aspects of peace and security and rightly turned our attention to the rights of those most widely and frequently affected by conflict. Crucially in doing so, we recognized that women were not just disproportionately affected by conflict but also in many ways the key to peace.

--Ambassador Sir Emyr Jones Parry, Permanent Representative
from the United Kingdom to the UN, October 29, 2003

So why aren't more US feminists and women's organizations paying attention to 1325? The issues it addresses are literally matters of life and death for women across the globe. And it commits powerful international actors, including our own government, to put gender squarely in the center of their security deliberations, policies, and actions. It was the US's own ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, who said, "No approach to peace can succeed if it does not view men and women as equally important components of the solution." Isn't it time we mobilized to get the US government to live up to those words, both in its foreign policy and in its role as a permanent member of the Security Council?

Resolution 1325 not only requires the UN system and its member states to think anew about the pathways to sustainable peace; it also offers us the opportunity to think anew about what it means to be an American feminist in this age of brutal intra- and inter-state wars--some of which are started by our own government, many of which depend on weapons supplied by the US, and many others of which depend on our failure to take preventive action or intervene.

Many participants came away from the Women's World Conferences in Nairobi and Beijing thinking that we were part of something global and that we had to strengthen our alliances with women around the world. Many of those women are already mobilizing to get 1325 implemented; many more desperately need the promises of 1325 to be realized. We don't need to wait for another world conference to create a new opportunity for alliances. All we need to do is broaden our gaze and follow the lead of women around the world for whom 1325 is an important part of the struggle to end wars and build sustainable peace.

Key to the Quotes:

1 Ambassador Stephan Tafrov (Bulgaria): original language French

2 Ambassador Cristian Maquieira, Deputy Representative of Chile to the UN

3 Ambassador H. E. Vladimir Drobnjak, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Croatia to the UN

4 Ambassador John D. Negroponte, United States Permanent Representative to the UN

5 Ambassador Marcello Spatafora, Permanent Representative of Italy to the UN, speaking on behalf of the European Union

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Crucial reporting
Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath by Women's Rights Project. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996, 103 pp., free online in pdf format.
Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda by Human Rights Watch. New York: Human Rights Watch: 1999, 789, pp., $35.00 or free online in html format.
Hopes Betrayed: Trafficking of Women and Girls to Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina for Forced Prostitution by Human Rights Watch, New York: Human Rights Watch, November, 2002, 73 pp., $7.00 or free online in pdf format.
"Killing You is a Very Easy Thing For Us": Human Rights Abuses in Southeast Afghanistan by Human Rights Watch, New York: Human Rights Watch, July, 2003, 73 pp., $7.00 or free online in pdf format.

By Cynthia Enloe

IT'S HARD TO FIND THE AUTHORS. Sometimes their names are buried in an opening paragraph; other times you have to read to the very end to track them down. But their names are important. It is, after all, real people, with histories, skills, locations and commitments, who write reports such as the four discussed here. But the people who work for organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and International Alert, who do the hard, often physically dangerous work of researching, double-checking, and writing human rights reports are in pursuit of something elusive: credibility.

Credibility is like beauty--it is in the eye of the beholder. What shapes the decisions made by the authors of human rights reports when they craft their research methodologies and their authorial tones is their desire to be taken seriously by their readers, whom they are criticizing. Thus, they put themselves in the background. No authorial "I" here. These writers' collective goal is to prod into action officials of governments and international agencies who all too often pretend that they have no responsibility for wartime rape, for trafficking in women, and for warlords' armed intimidation of women and girls. Rather, officials in suits working in air-conditioned offices try to convince themselves--and us--that rapists, traffickers, and warlords are loose canons, not funded or facilitated or tolerated by anyone in a suit.

How can these well-dressed, well-defended wielders of authority, these past masters of denial and lack of accountability, be stirred? By evidence. Lots of damning, embarrassing, concrete evidence, collected and presented by individuals whose own egos are kept securely under wraps.

Thus, these four studies are called "reports." Perhaps many of us have been slow to read and to use these vital feminist publications because we ourselves have written too many "reports." Our own report-writing efforts have been things like curriculum reviews, funding assessments, and performance evaluations, which are often couched in syntaxes and vocabularies designed to maximize blandness. Consequently, we don't expect other people's reports to put us on the edges of our proverbial chairs. Yet the four Human Rights Watch reports here are some of the most eye-opening feminist works available. Each pulls back the curtain, showing exactly how institutionalized patriarchy distorts the lives of women and girls before, during, and after war. (By "patriarchy," I mean any group where the prevailing culture assumes that "masculine" qualities are wiser, smarter, more rational, while "feminine qualities," although necessary for the care and feeding of the group, should not influence significant decisions.)

TAKE SHATTERED LIVES. I was literally dumbfounded when I read this report in 1996. It was a full two years after the horrific attempt by the ethnic Hutu-ist ruling party in Rwanda to eliminate ethnic Tutsis--and any Hutus who were married to or friendly with Tutsis. The international media covered the genocidal conflict in bloody detail, eventually compelling the US and other members of the UN Security Council to intervene, although belatedly. But in all the coverage of the four months of killing, from April to July 1994, there was virtually no mention of--no curiosity about--the thousands of sexual assaults perpetrated by Hutu-ist militants. I myself hardly noticed, even though by 1994, I thought I had learned from Yugoslav women to ask when and why sexual assaults against women become so deliberate and routine as to acquire the status of "systematic." Nonetheless, when it came to the violence in Rwanda, I forgot to ask. It is not clear that the male researchers and directors of Human Rights Watch thought to ask, either. In fact, one of the most important innovations in human rights institutional politics in the last 15 years has been that the feminists inside Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other investigatory organizations have persuaded their boards of trustees to create in-house departments devoted to researching violations of women's rights. Thus, in Shattered Lives, the women who ran the women's rights division of Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigated the frequency, motivation, and patterns of rapes experienced by women and girls a year earlier. The principal author was Binaifer Nowrojee, joined by Janet Fleischman and Alison DesForges. Although Shattered Lives is out of print, many of its findings are included in the more recently published major report on the Rwandan genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story, whose principal author is Alison DesForges.

I use photocopies of Shattered Lives every time I teach the course Women and Militarization. Students engage with its potent combination of first-hand accounts by Rwandan women who survived sexualized, ethnicized brutality; evidence that the assaults were systematically planned by senior party officials; and indications that international authorities--from the UN and the governments of the US, France, and Belgium--all turned their backs on early warning signs. As we have read Shattered Lives, my students and I have been prompted to delve into the violent workings of wartime misogyny and to come to grips with the "un-newsworthy" bureaucratized workings of pre-war and post-war patriarchal denial and complicity.

Human Rights Watch reports have a distinctive format. The primary conclusions are right up front. There's no building toward a dramatic climax. These reports are designed for busy, distracted officials and politicians and for give-me-a-hook media editors, impatient with subtleties. On the heels of the conclusions come the recommendations. These are divided into various sections aimed at particular audiences. Thus, UN professionals can skip over the recommendations aimed at international donors or US government authorities and go straight to those for which they must answer. Only after the recommendations do the HRW authors back up, slow down, and provide the historical context and damning evidence. This format may seem a bit dry to readers accustomed to engaging case studies, historical narratives, and nuanced ethnographies. But the medium here is the message: This HRW format reflects the researcher/activists' understanding of what grabs the attention of sound-bite-addicted editors and officials-in-denial.

HOPES BETRAYED WAS PUBLISHED seven years after the 1995 Dayton peace accord that ended the devastating war in Bosnia. Again, feminist researchers inside HRW stayed focused even when many other activists had turned their attention to other conflict zones. As they worked to prevent the "repatriarchalization" of the post-war society, they knew that the end of gunfire would not mean the advent of women's liberation.

For instance, HRW's feminist investigators have revealed that the international trafficking of women and girls needs to be understood not only as a violation of human rights, but as a commercialized, sexualized industry that grows directly out of patriarchal war-waging and peace-building. They conclude that when peace accords and the subsequent international programs for rebuilding a war-torn society do not explicitly address women's impoverishment, misogynist peace-keeping soldiers, and eventually criminal syndicates, will end up using women's bodies to maximize their profits. Thus, the authors of Hopes Betrayed decided that a Bosnian anti-trafficking activist would be an especially valuable source to use for a report on life in post-Dayton Bosnia. "The chief of police gives tip-offs to the owners [of bars] in exchange for free sex," reported Celhia de Lavarene, the director of a grassroots anti-trafficking group in Bosnia, to Human Rights Watch researchers Martina E. Vandenberg and Kathleen Peratis. Then the HRW investigators turned to a Ukranian woman who had been trafficked into Bosnia. They were testing de Lavarene's implication that woven into the alleged peace was a cozy relationship between Bosnia's new post-war police force and international traffickers In her sworn testimony to HRW's researchers, the Ukranian woman said,

About a month ago, a lot of policemen came to the bar to celebrate the birth of a baby girl to one of the policemen. Since that man had already spent all of his money, Djordje [the owner and also a police officer] paid for him to have sex with J.K. [a trafficked woman] for half an hour.

One [US] monitor bought a woman in Illidja... He was a duty officer with me and told me about the woman he bought… He admitted to me that he did this. He had her for a few months at least… She was either Romanian or Moldavan, they met in a bar… Who knows what happened to the report [of this American's purchasing a woman]. It was not published… They talked him into repatriating and resigning. This would cause too much embarrassment for DynCorp.

The feminist researchers of HRW are teaching us all how to follow more precisely the cause-and-effect breadcrumbs. Their account of women trafficked from the former Soviet Union into the brothels of post-war Bosnia sheds light on two interconnected processes: First, the mutually reinforcing dynamics between traffickers and authorities that create and sustain the international exploitation of women for men's commercialized sex. Second, the ways in which active and passive patriarchal politics stunt women's citizenship in a post-war society.

ONE OF HRW'S MOST RECENT REPORTS, Killing You is a Very Easy Thing For Us, shines a bright light on the Southeastern provinces of Afghanistan, including neighborhoods of Kabul, in the two years since the Taliban regime was toppled by the US-led military invasion-an invasion justified in part by rhetoric about liberating Afghan women. The HRW report gives a detailed account of what is often too facilely described as "warlordism." The researchers demonstrate, through their usual combination of scores of eyewitness accounts and a laying out of general patterns, that these regional Afghan commanders-men with whom the Bush administration allied in its war against the Taliban-control economic, political, and gender relationships by myriad means. One of these is by maintaining their own militias, made up of men from the same ethnic group and loyal to the commander, their paymaster. Another is by making strategic alliances with other regional commanders and, where convenient, with some parts of the Karzai-led government in Kabul. A third means these militarized commanders use is the one most often overlooked by observers lacking a feminist curiosity: positing themselves as the arbiters of "true" Afghan Islamic values, including of the standards for "proper" Afghan womanhood. The HRW researchers thus have gathered evidence to show how each local commander's efforts to control the lives of women--what they may wear, where they may go, whom they may marry--are not just after-thoughts. They are part and parcel of each Northern Alliance warlord's general plan, intended to sustain his hold on local power in the unstable, post-war Afghanistan. The result is that in many provinces of post-Taliban, US-occupied Afghanistan, girls do not go to school, and women are not empowered to make their own decisions.

In their recommendations, the Human Rights Watch authors name names. They specifically chastise the US government for refusing to disarm those regional commanders whom Washington deems allies in its "war on terror." They also call on the US government to invest the money and resources necessary to extend genuine physical security beyond Kabul.

One of the most profound contributions of feminist-informed human rights investigators is their documentation of the causal connections between, on the one hand, generalizable women's rights and, on the other, the realities of women's and girls' lives in war zones and post-war societies. They reveal how official inattention to women survivors of systematic rape severely undermines those women's chances to take a meaningful role in post-war political life. They trace the connections between local and international police officers' collusion with brothel owners and pimps, which creates a post-war political culture that sustains, not uproots, misogyny. They provide the hard evidence demonstrating that a government that invades another country in the name of women's liberation shows its true colors when it passively accepts its local allies' patriarchal policies.

Thus, feminist human rights monitors are teaching us how to develop the observational and analytical skills that will equip us to hold accountable those seemingly enlightened, respectable, modern officials when they act to entrench the patriarchy in wartime and in the post-war order they deceptively label "peace." Don't be put off by the report format, the modesty of the authors, or the lack of snazzy graphics on the cover. Human rights reports by feminists provide teachers, students, and activists with information and skills we need now more than ever.

To find out more about what feminists inside human rights investigatory organizations are uncovering, visit the publications sections of their websites: Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org); Amnesty International (www.amnestyusa.org; International Alert (www.internationalalert.org/women). Links to the feminist arms of human rights groups are posted on the website of the United Nations women's advocacy office, UNIFEM, devoted to news about women in war and post-war societies (www.womenwarpeace.org).

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The new war zone
The ubiquitous presence of guns and light weapons has changed the definitions of "war," "victim," and "perpetrator"

By Vanessa Farr

EVERY MINUTE, SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE around the globe, is killed by a gun. The victim may have been walking down the street in Rio, Brazil; fleeing from armed guerillas in Goma, Eastern Congo; or sitting in a living room in Indianapolis.

The portability, affordability, and utility of small arms and light weapons have changed the arenas in which wars take place as well as dramatically increasing the lethality of violence perpetrated in the domestic sphere. In drawing in women and children as both victims and perpetrators of deadly aggression, such weapons have forced us to think differently about who properly constitutes an actor and who a victim of armed violence.

In war zones, easily accessed lethal weapons involve women and children in conflicts in new ways. Increasingly, they are becoming adept members of militarized forces and participating actively in the perpetration of violence. As nontraditional fighters, women, girls, and boys subvert deeply entrenched traditions about how and by whom wars are waged. Their new roles are creating an extraordinary philosophical challenge for war-affected societies and a logistical nightmare for humanitarian, relief, and development agencies that try to manage the effects of armed conflict.

In places that are not at war, children and young adults dramatically alter our perception of what constitutes safe spaces when they mount lethal assaults with guns at schools, malls, and playgrounds. Innocents are caught in the crossfire of gang violence on the streets, while in homes, improperly stored small arms result in more lethal accidents, and readily available weapons used in domestic violence kill people in ever-increasing numbers.

Ubiquitous small arms, in other words, have given rise to a large-scale destabilization of social and cultural constructs about what constitutes a "war zone" and what constitutes a space that is "peaceful and safe." The question is, how can we most effectively analyze this destabilization and find answers to the issues it raises?

Despite the best efforts of a broad-based and organized civil society movement such as the International Action Network on Small Arms to set in motion this work, it will be difficult to impose, without better knowledge of small arms' broad-ranging effects, the kind of far-reaching legislation that is needed to curb the problems of weapons proliferation and misuse. More effective control mechanisms will not be possible without better data, and in particular, data that has been disaggregated by sex, age, location, ethnicity, and other such informative variables.

We need to know more about how small arms, whether they are used in war zones or in gun-saturated societies, affect citizens, peacekeepers, and aid workers, as well as those who misuse weapons. The production of this evidence and the policies it will lead to presents an urgent challenge for feminist peace activists. If we wish to develop a humanitarian perspective that focuses on people's security and safety--one that can replace the current domination of a (militarized) disarmament and arms control approach to the problem--we have to make significant contributions to the collection and analysis of this new data, and we have to do it now.

WHY IS OUR INTERVENTION so urgently needed? While formal studies are few, and have tended to focus on men or boys, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests women and girls are also impacted by guns. Males and females are differently affected by the proliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons--during and after conflict as well as in non-conflict zones. Traditionally, however, women's views on guns are not taken seriously. It is up to feminist activists to ensure, while research on small arms and light weapons is in its infancy, that questions are asked and evidence is collected in a systematic and inclusive way that will benefit women and men alike.

We need to learn who is impacted by proliferation and misuse and to figure out why certain members of society resist misusing weapons, and how they can be assisted. Better information on unconstrained or poorly monitored weapons trading will contribute to the global feminist struggle against gender-based violence and benefit campaigns against the arms trade and gun violence, especially those run in support of the UN Program to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All its Aspects.

While it is important not to oversimplify our interpretation of gender differences, to date, some solid evidence has been amassed that indicates women, men, girls, and boys have dissimilar attitudes to the widespread availability of guns. Even in countries not at war, men and boys own, use, and die from small arms in far larger numbers than women and girls. In violent societies with a high prevalence of small arms, gun use is intertwined with culturally condoned expressions of masculinity, especially among young men and boys, who regard guns as a powerful means to establish their place in the social hierarchy through displays of ostentatious, aggressive virility. In addition to using guns to prove their masculinity to other men, young men also form a significant amount of their gender identity in their intimate relationships. In societies characterized by machismo, young men often believe that "guns make the man," and think it is possible to "become a man" through violence towards their female partners.

In the few places where gender-disaggregated studies of firearms-related violence are being conducted, the evidence is growing that guns play a significant part in the perpetration of violence against women, either in the home or in public spaces nearby. In contrast to the popular perception that guns are mostly used against women by strangers in random acts of violence, such studies show weapons to be particularly dangerous if they are accessible at home, to someone known to the victim--regardless of who owns the weapon or whether it was acquired as a form of protection. These studies challenge the myth put out by manufacturers and the pro-gun lobby that owning a gun is a good form of security: A recent study of mortality among women who purchased handguns in California revealed that owning a gun increases a woman's chances of being killed by her intimate partner by a staggering 50 percent. As small arms availability increases, it is also becoming more common to hear accounts of other forms of gender-based, gun-related violence, including sexual assaults where a weapon is used to rape a woman or terrify her into submission, even if she is not actually shot.

WOMEN ARE NOT JUST VICTIMS, however. Women caught up in the horror of uncontrolled gun violence, wherever we are, are taking steps to curb its effects, such as lobbying for better international and national gun control measures and supporting one another across international borders to implement controls; peace-building at the local, national, and regional levels; and establishing systems of early warning and response. Our resistance is creative and varied, including protest marches; increasing our knowledge and awareness of how to take an active role in weapons collection and the monitoring of weapons destruction; protesting against small arms production, export and import; and participating in community and family decision-making processes where matters of security are decided. Drawing from our considerable experience in campaigning against violence against women, we are insisting on the right to be heard and demanding that gun misuse be described in terms that are gender-aware and responsive to the needs of women caught in the crossfire of male bravado in societies saturated with weapons.

We are fortunate, as a community concerned with women's safety, that the conceptual frameworks and methodologies for research on the human security impact of small arms are only now in the process of being developed. From the outset, all of us who are concerned with this issue can play a part in ensuring that the work now in progress is gender-aware and focuses not only on the most visible victims of gun violence, young men, but also on the particular suffering and resistance of women and girls.

Many feminist peace activists argue that the theoretical frameworks through which we currently conceptualize violence actually support the suppression of evidence of that violence. When a society focuses on brutality in a fragmented way and classifies it separately by "type" (elder and child abuse, domestic violence, gun violence, rape, torture, war), it prevents us from recognizing how ubiquitous violence is and viewing it in its full enormity. This is exacerbated when we are urged to acquire the means of committing violence and told that this is a form of self protection. On the contrary, when we are convinced to condone it, we are implicated in the perpetuation of small arms misuse.

Framing gun violence as "abnormal" can hide the fact that trauma is experienced by many, if not most, women in their daily lives, and that this trauma is exacerbated when weapons are easily available. This framework prevents us from seeing that armed conflict is not anomalous but takes place on the extreme end of a continuum of violence. It hides the fact that the abuse of women (and other oppressed people) in times of peace is only a less intense expression of the full-scale violence that erupts in times of war--which means that war is not so much an aberration as an exaggeration, in organized form, of the violence, often facilitated by prolific guns, that exists even in non-warring societies.

Once we recognize that even "normal" societies victimize women, children, the elderly, and non-mainstream men, we can shift the ways we conceptualize long-term peace-building work. There is a common thread between "everyday" violence and the "unspeakable" extremes of violence seen in conflict situations, which derives, to a large extent, from the prevalence of gender ideologies and technologies such as cheap, easy-to-use small arms and light weapons, which glorify aggression as an appropriate expression of power or protection.

This essay about research on small arms is also intended as a call to resistance: We are all, regardless of location, profession, ethnicity, or class, harmed by the misuse of these weapons, so we should all rally to curb their effects. Working to prevent gun proliferation is a logical next step in the global movement to resist violence against women. Raising a feminist voice on the subject of small arms and their impact has the potential to unite our efforts as anti-violence activists, because prolific weapons remind us that violence is part of all our lives. Current discourses and practices underpin this violence through the funding of weapons development, manufacture, and sale and the refusal to engage with global efforts to control arms proliferation. We need to resist such practices as well as arguments that gun ownership offers security. Activism against the proliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons could deepen our solidarity as women who reject all forms of violence wherever it occurs--whether in societies caught up in armed conflict or in those that are supposedly at peace.

For a useful collection of papers, see the Woman's Portal of the International Action Network on Small Arms (www.iansa.org).

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Anti-war in the heartland
Feminists have been organizing for peace around the US-not just on the two coasts

By Frieda Gardner

HERE IN SOUTH MINNEAPOLIS, I often live in a warm and purposeful peace and justice "bubble," surrounded by like-minded friends. I buy food at the local coop grocery, browse at the remaining independent bookstores, get the best of the bad news from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now over a non-NPR community radio station, and enjoy the broad mix of people in my neighborhood. In 90-percent white Minnesota, the Twin Cities contain most of the state's immigrant, minority and/or people of color--African, Native, and Mexican Americans, Hmong, Vietnamese, Somali, Ethiopian and Oromo, among others.

Needless to say, my bubble routinely pops me out into the world of smiley, imperial America. I live down the road from the country's largest mall (the size of 48 football fields); a brand new prison opened last year across from the Minneapolis City Hall; and a slick, anti-tax, Bush-approved Republican governor, said to represent the prosperous suburbs that ring the Twin Cities, chips away at welfare, education, and our highly publicized air and water quality. Meanwhile, Minnesota ranks right down with Alabama in the per-capita arrest and conviction rate of its 3.5 percent African-American population. In recent years, Minnesota's strong populist tradition has been diluted by its racism, overly friendly relations with corporations like Target and 3-M, and the economic blowback from US adventures in Vietnam and South America. It's not at all clear that the liberal Paul Wellstone, who voted for both the Afghanistan war and Patriot Act I, would have re-taken his senate seat last year, had he lived.

What follows is a report on some of the anti-war activity in Minneapolis-St. Paul in 2002-2003. Being neither a historian or sociologist, I have no idea whether the level and quality of local protest activity represents other American cities of roughly 2.5 million people. I do know that, in addition to 10,000 lakes, we have more than 10,000 do-gooding nonprofit organizations in Minnesota and who knows how many other left-leaning groups.

Less than ten blocks from my house sits one of the newest and smallest of those nonprofits, the Babylon Arts and Cultural Center, a storefront operation on a street alive with Mexican restaurants and groceries, Muslim markets, nail salons, clothes shops, and a scattering of bilingual used car lots. Meg Novak is part of the collective that runs Babylon. She's 29, partnered with an Iraqi man who's in American as a political refugee, and the mother of three-month-old Salaam (as in "Peace"). She comes from a small Minnesota town and a conservative family but has made her away around a lot of this country, as well as to Cuba in 1995 for a youth festival and to Iraq in 2002 with the peace and justice witness group, Voices in the Wilderness.

Of her Iraq trip, Novak says,

Joining a Voices in the Wilderness delegation enabled me to carry out a program called "Art Across Borders." We believe art can both inspire and help to sustain social activism. And we wanted to show people in America some of the work being done in Iraq, in order to make human a people who've been demonized by our government. Sure, there was plenty of censorship in Iraq, but also a very diverse population of artists, and of course the US sanctions brought them together for conversation and mutual support. We brought gifts of oil paint and canvas, as well as 25 pounds of strings for the Iraq symphony--a gesture of solidarity. Some of the work we saw had been painted on the back of food boxes. Our show is now traveling throughout the states, and we think it helps break down barriers between peoples.

Photo by Marilyn L. Humphries

All during the build-up to war, Babylon promoted street theater. I participated in one such event which, in a season full of anger and fear, turned out to be both moving and calming. Babylon asked us to wear black, and we carried cardboard cutouts of small coffins and leaflets telling stories about the harm that had come to Iraqi citizens during the period of US sanctions. Our march into downtown Minneapolis was solemn, a rare invitation to grief and quiet reflection. About 30 of us, accompanied by slow drumming, walked in measured steps down the sidewalk, offering our leaflets to people who often looked first startled, then sad. Of the 50 or more demonstrations I attended in 2002-2003, this is the one I remember best.

Another group I've long worked with and admired is Women Against Military Madness. Above all else, WAMM is an activist organization. Founded in 1982 by a group of white, middle-class women mostly in their 60s, who used their Christmas card lists to solicit early membership, WAMM has set up forums, conferences, and speak-outs on a huge range of issues. However, much of the education and empowerment of its membership has taken place on picket lines, at demonstrations outside corporations and military facilities. Its slogan is "Never a meeting without an action!"--even when that action is sitting down to write 50 letters to a congressperson.

One of the most notable organizational features of WAMM is its fluid motion from idea to action. If Donald Rumsfeld turns up in town for a lecture and someone calls up proposing a demonstration, WAMM's director has the authority to sign on right away as sponsor and get the news out immediately via e-mail and website. There's no need to call a meeting of the board of directors, and no elaborate consensus apparatus. "Our emphasis has always been on the practical. If there's going to be a fight, let's have it after the demonstration," says Polly Mann, a founding and still very active member, now 84.

Most of WAMM's founders were veterans of anti-Vietnam War protest, and Mann calls their feminism "instinctive." "We'd experienced the male control of other peace groups, so we decided that men could be members but never be on the board of directors." And so it has been for the last 21 years. "When we started out, " says Mann, "our activity represented a kind of privilege--kids gone from home, enough money for groceries, some free time to do what we wanted." WAMM has an office, three phone lines, and a budget. These simple facts, and organizational openness to whatever the course of events is bringing to light, has made it both harbor and catalyst for local activism, particularly that initiated by women.

Long-time member Marie Braun, 68, helped bring WAMM into the thick of protest against the Iraq War. Braun's influences include a "strong union man" father, Catholic peace and justice figures like Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day, the civil rights movement, and those early WAMM activists who visited Vietnam and returned to bear moral witness to the war. From the start of the Gulf War in 1991, Braun worked with various WAMM committees and other organizations to protest first the war itself, then the US sanctions, and what became the regular and often unreported bombing campaigns of "no-fly" zones and other areas said to harbor illegal weapons (of mass destruction, and others).

In 1998, Braun joined a group sponsored by the International Action Center that traveled to Iraq to bring medicine and medical supplies. In four days, she visited hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, Red Crescent offices, students and teachers at the University of Baghdad, and Iraqi families. Meeting people whose lives her government had damaged and finding out about the effects of things like the depleted uranium in US bombs, she became one of the witnesses she had so long admired. Iraq became her passion.

Soon after Braun's return home, she helped to found the Twin Cities Committee to Lift Sanctions (TCCLS). Legally, this committee could not be a part of WAMM, since tax exempt nonprofits are prohibited from lobbying and from promoting or participating in illegal activities. Any US citizen can fly to Iraq, but if you buy anything whatsoever while you're there, you're subject to a million dollars worth of fines, up to 12 years in jail, and $250,000 in "administrative fees," even if you are never brought to trial. In addition to fund-raising and lobbying, TCCLS sponsored hundreds of talks about Iraq to various groups around the region. It organized demonstrations, letter-writing and phone campaigns, and made lots of contacts, especially with local church groups-encouraging them, for example, to hold candlelight services to mourn dead Iraqi children.

One of TCCLS' most successful methods of keeping Iraq alive in public's mind involved setting up a weekly vigil on a bridge over the Mississippi that links the Twin Cities. The vigil became an important organizing tool. The number of people gathering on the bridge every Wednesday during rush hour increased week by week, and the vigil became the place to get information, network, hold fasts, mark anniversaries like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, meet friends, hand out the leaflet "Ten Reasons for Not Going to War in Iraq," and plan for the next event. When the BBC showed up to film the vigil in March 2003, the bridge was jammed with 1400 people.

The eight months preceding the war in Iraq were filled with anger and apprehension, of course, but also with heady excitement. Marie Braun saw the growing number of protesters as the result of years of political work. She recalled a day in deep winter when there'd been only seven people on the bridge. "You have to be tough in this business!" she said, laughing. "You need to keep the faith in quiet times, keep working, go where your heart is. We had new groups forming every week; we had to be ready." Braun was there to foster the emergence of the Iraq Peace Action Coalition, which at its height included 39 organizations, and to organize the large number of volunteers who worked the phones in the WAMM office.

Into the midst of this pre-war activity came Heather Foster, who, at 22, went from being a Hamline University service learning volunteer to office manager to WAMM director in four months. Foster moved into WAMM's office in time to handle final planning for what turned out to be a 10,000-person Stop the War march to the state capital in October. It followed by two days the deaths of Paul and Sheila Wellstone and was part of a day of massive, worldwide protest against Bush's war plans.

A calm, clear, soft-spoken presence, Foster knew computers, a little about finances, and, it turns out, a lot about getting things done. Among the biggest of WAMM's projects during this time involved lawn and window signs. Initially, WAMM had ordered 100 durable, two-by-four foot, white and maroon signs that proclaimed "Say No To War in Iraq."

To long-time lefties like me, putting up one of these signs up is almost a reflex. But between September 2002 and March 2003, WAMM sold or gave away 10,000 signs (plus 2,000 smaller versions), many to people for whom advertising their political conviction was an act of bravery. Even the "peace" neighborhoods aren't monolithic. To go outside and post a big, bright sign was to start a conversation or even a fight with potentially hostile neighbors. For over five months, WAMM's phones rang from morning till night with requests, some from people in the suburbs who were uneasy about picking up signs in "inner city" Minneapolis. But they came, and while they were there, they asked about where they could find a nearby vigil, and when the next demonstration was, and how close Iraq was to Israel, and what could they tell their neighbors about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. They talked about how terrible it was to hear about the "shock and awe" campaign, and how they thought about our family members in the reserves, and they worried about all the money being diverted away from our unemployed.

By the time the war began, WAMM had doubled its membership, mostly from among sign-buyers; what the delighted local press called "the sign wars" ensued. Signs reading "Liberate Iraq! Support Our Troops!" began to show up, though in modest numbers. People also brought their "Liberate" signs to the Wednesday bridge vigils, where TV cameras gathered to witness the conversations and await something dramatic. But the best drama during this time was mostly unseen, and occurred between neighbors hashing out questions generated by 9/11, the US war on terrorism, and American unilateralism--issues about the use of American economic and military power far older than this particular war.

To Heather Foster, the signs showed WAMM at its best, "getting conversations going and helping people with critical thinking about connections they're not used to making." But the Iraq war acted like a pressure cooker on WAMM, as on all anti-war organizations. There was too much to do, and too few paid staff:

It was like moving from a family dinner to one with 40 additional guests. We did a great job, but it left us with some hard questions. How to avoid tightened hierarchy when your numbers grow? What systems help to keep a sense of chaos at bay? How to make use of new members? And how to move new members from passion about the injustice of this particular war to understanding and the ability to engage with the systems which generate our wars?

Since WAMM cannot sponsor illegal activity like civil disobedience, when I decided to do a protest jail day, I went straight to the Anti-War Committee (AWC). Founded in 1998, the AWC evolved partly as an alternative to WAMM. "We've learned so much from WAMM. But a lot of us couldn't see how to fit into it," says 30-year-old organizer Jess Sundin.

Not that it's in any way bad organization. But its organizational culture was centered around people who were older, more homogeneously white, and middle-class. We wanted a place for young people to experiment, try out new tactics. And a place where working-class people would feel more at home. Also, more color, excuse the pun, more singing and humor, and a more feisty attitude. One more thing: We were inspired by the anti-globalism protests in Seattle and wanted to practice civil disobedience.

Like most of the young women--30s on down--I spoke to about organizing, Sundin's "feminism" comes with quotes. She prefers "feminist" as an adjective rather than as a noun. Her model of in-depth feminist thought is bell hooks. To Sundin,

The point is to be complicated about feminism, or "women's liberation." The grid of gender/race/class, along with some socialist analysis, works best for understanding how the world works. You have to be able to see how America as an empire with a powerful military machine set back Iraqi women 50 years during the sanctions period.

"Dying-in" for peace. Photo by Marilyn L. Humphries

Though a member of the Iraq Coalition, the AWC also staged independent demonstrations and rallies in parts of the Cities inhabited by Somalis, people from the Middle East and Native Americans. It sponsored bus trips to the big demonstrations in Washington and New York, which always began with big send-off parties, as well as to "no new nukes" protests in Nebraska and anti-School of the Americas protests in Georgia. When it came to civil disobedience, the AWC showed impressive organizational skills. At my first training session, I was amazed to discover that the AWC had not only lots of good advice about nonviolence but also volunteer lawyers and a bail fund. Trainers presented a variety of scenarios to think about--sneaking inside the building, chaining oneself to a railing ("the cops hate that, because they have to use equipment to break the links"), keeping mobile given the positioning of police. They were prepared.

Many individuals and groups resisted the war in cooperative, inventive ways that nonetheless required long hours of not-very-inspiring labor-endless meetings, getting leaflets to the printer, learning how to use a sound system. Here are just a few more items:

* In April 2003, protesters tracking AlliantTech's production of depleted uranium shells walked onto company headquarters property posing as an "inspection team." They were arrested for trespass and ultimately found not guilty, by reason of their consciences.

* The Quaker group Friends for a Non-Violent World organized and nurtured a number of neighborhood peace groups. FNVW began a "Peace in the Precincts" program, designed to move people from their neighborhood organizations into the state's Democratic party caucuses in time for the presidential elections.

* At the K-8 alternative Southside Family School, the students holding anti-war signs and banners walked with teacher Susan Oppenheim to the nearest highway overpass, then later they joined thousands of high school students at a rally.

* At the Minneapolis Technical and Community College, two students, Danielle Prior and Kelly Harrington, who had recently started a woman's group called Sisters for Social Justice, ended up sponsoring MTCC's 400-person anti-war walkout.

* Activist film maker and poet Ellen Hinchcliffe decided that the antiwar movement needed to make people aware of Iraqi suffering in the "post-war" era, so she put together a cheap video from interviews with visitors and footage brought back from Iraq. "There's no point in giving up just because we didn't stop the war. People need to remember how much worse it might have been if we hadn't been around exposing the lies."

One of the most daring and inventive changes to take place on the Twin Cities peace and justice scene came at the very height of the Iraq war, when WAMM hired Paulette Sankofa as director. At 52, Sankofa stands midway between the generation of WAMM's founders and the youngest of its recent directors. She has two masters degrees (one in divinity from Eden University in St. Louis, the other in international relations from Webster University); a wide range of job experience (most recently as coordinator of the Community Center for the Excellence of Women's Health); and strong and complex ideas about the inter-relations of militarism, sexism, and racism. Her father, a former Pullman porter, took her on civil rights marches when she was young, and she herself participated in both civil rights and anti-Vietnam war actions during her high school and college years.

An ordained Methodist minister, she considers her work at WAMM part of her ministry, a way of living the words that she speaks.

We have to dig deep when we talk about "peace." And "justice" can't be just a tag word either. The antiwar movement in America won't get any kind of peace if it doesn't engage the issues that matter to people of color. There really will not be any 'peace' without racial and economic justice. I know WAMM has worked on racism over the years, but it's not something you "do" and then go on with other issues. We need to re-examine terms like "solidarity" and "nonviolence" in terms of racism. And we need to remember that being in coalition should mean more than calling up the Somali Justice Center for five minutes of speech time at our next rally. Working on racism has to be ongoing, and it has to be both internal and external. I don't want to be a novelty on the peace and justice scene. My job is to disturb those cozy cliques that have built up. I'm here to stir the pot.

For example, being against military recruitment in the public schools has been an unquestioned concept inside WAMM for many years. At an Intercultural gathering, over soup and sandwiches, a young African-American woman described the importance of JROTC to her family--how it helped provide stability and discipline for a young brother, and how JROTC promises to provide job skills young women don't get in high school. Suddenly, middle-aged, white WAMM members had to reshuffle their decks. Maybe the next meeting of the subcommittee on school recruitment will have some new members and some new ways of talking about how militarism affects our lives.

So, there's been no "post-war slump" in activity at WAMM, even though the phone no longer rings all day long. Still, in the WAMM office, down the hall, and across town, at meetings of all the organizations I've discussed, activists feel the challenge and pall of the upcoming presidential elections. Some sign up with Peace in the Precincts; others vow to give their vote only to a candidate who recognizes America's imperial designs; some keep on with what they're already doing, refusing distraction. One activist said to me,

Remember, since we're not going overturn the incredible power that's entrenched itself, just take the election as part of our agenda, another occasion to get our messages out--about the lies that got us into the war, about the homeless people who died of exposure to the cold in Minnesota last year and the economic system who put them on the streets. We've learned so much about making ourselves heard.

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Living room terrorists
Rates of domestic violence are three to five times higher among military couples than civilian ones

By Catherine Lutz

WAR ALWAYS COMES HOME, even when it seems safely exported. We now have indications that the new wars of pre-emption and empire-building are bleeding back already onto our shores. The evidence is not just in the 10,000 ill and mangled soldiers returning from combat, but in troubling new clusters of domestic violence in the military as well as ongoing efforts to shield military batterers from justice. Just as individuals, families, public infrastructure, and the international reputation of the US will be paying the price of the ongoing debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades, women partnered with soldiers will face increased rates and levels of violence far down the road.

The spotlight was focused on this problem during 2002, when the bodies of five women, each the current or recently separated wife of a soldier at the army's Fort Bragg, were discovered in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Shalamar Franceschi had her throat slit; Marilyn Griffin was stabbed 70 times and her trailer set on fire; Teresa Nieves and Andrea Floyd were shot in the head; and Jennifer Wright was strangled.

They are only a few of the hundreds of women who have been killed or permanently disabled by soldiers--often their husbands or partners--in recent years around the approximately 1600 domestic and overseas US military bases. Even in the best of times, rates of domestic violence are 3 to 5 times higher in military couples than in comparable civilian ones. Last year, Yale University researchers reported their finding that male veterans who had been in combat (a relatively small subset of all veterans) were more than four times as likely as other men to have engaged in domestic violence.

Despite the prevalence of such crimes, the murders in North Carolina became objects of intense media attention: Reporters and film crews flew in from all over the country and from as far afield as Japan and Denmark. This was in part because the killings were clustered tightly together, but also because several of the killers had recently returned from the war in Afghanistan. But the media has moved on to other things--Michael Jackson most globally momentous among them--and the many murders and murderous assaults around the country that have followed those at Fort Bragg have been ignored.

Many in the general public and media wondered if the murders might have been the result of the soldiers' combat trauma. Army brass immediately suggested that the stress on the soldier of deployment was to blame, particularly as it created what they called marital problems. This argument had the advantage of supporting their requests to Congress for more money for a larger military, while also maintaining the hygienic fiction about combat required if one is to reach recruitment goals. In both media and military accounts, the solder was the victim, and his murdered wife in one sense was the sign of his sacrifice and his pain. After the murders, army officials ordered an investigation. Its conclusions: The couples suffered from "marital discord" and "family stress." At most, gender appeared briefly in the analysis when it was noted that soldiers, perhaps qua men, have difficulty "asking for help" from service providers available on installations like Fort Bragg.

In an earlier formal directive to military commanders, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had said that "[D]omestic violence is an offense against the institutional values of the military." But cases from the ritualized abuse at the navy's Tailhook convention to the ubiquitous and virulent misogyny of everyday "humor" in the military to the 1993 public testimony of dozens of women cadets raped at the Air Force Academy (56 rapes are currently under investigation there) all indicate that domestic and other forms of violence against women are not anomalies. Rather, they are at the center of the rationale and methods of war. The military as an institution promotes the idea of heterosexual male supremacy, glorifies power and control or discipline, and suggests that violence is often a necessary means to one's ends. Taking a life already requires that soldiers violate the most basic precept of human society. In a military increasingly forced or even willing to bend international codes of conduct in prosecuting wars, soldiers may absorb an attitude that they are above the law at home as well.

ALTERNATIVE, MORE ADEQUATE EXPLANATIONS come from the people who work daily providing services to women being attacked or threatened by their partners and by the women themselves. They focus on what should be obvious--that there is no workplace more supportive of a masculine identity centered in power, control, and violence; that there is little institutional incentive to rid the service of men who batter, since the military puts its war-making mission above all others; and that the military's toxic effects on rates of violence against women continue apace in "peacetime" as well as in wartime. Moreover, the military attempts to retain soldiers despite their crimes when they see them in terms of training costs that can range from $100,000 to $500,000 per person and more.

The Miles Foundation and STAAMP (Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel) are the two organizations working most visibly on the issue of military domestic violence at the national level, while virtually every domestic violence shelter and service provider in the country deals with women who have been assaulted by active duty soldiers or veterans. These groups know that the immediate pre- and post-deployment periods are the most dangerous for women: Their partners fear losing control as they prepare to leave and attempt to reassert it when they return. Christine Hansen of the Miles Foundation has said that her group could "tell what units were being deployed from where, based on the volume of calls [for help] we received from given bases." She notes that soldiers may also attempt to exert control at home in response to their workday experiences: They are among the most supervised and tightly controlled workers in the United States.

While the military has attempted to learn of, count, and root out same-sex, private sexual behavior in the services, it is for some reason stymied when it comes to the much more visible problem of domestic violence. The army in 2000 reported that 1,213 domestic violence incidents had been recorded by their military police in 2000. This is a drastic undercounting of the actual incidence of this crime, given the strong disincentives to report it: Victims fear retaliation by the perpetrator, of course; but many also believe that reporting the crime will "destroy his career" or, paradoxically and apparently much more realistically, that it will not be taken seriously at all. Of the over 1200 cases, the army reported only 29 that resulted in court-martial or civilian court prosecution for the accused. They had no record of what happened in 81 percent of the military police reports, or in any of the 12,068 violent incidents reported to post family services that same year.

A 2003 investigative report in The Denver Post by Amy Herdy and Miles Moffeit that examined military and civilian documents, including hospital, police, and court records, showed that all branches of the military have systematically ignored the problems of domestic violence and rape. They have failed to investigate or prosecute offenders, failed to provide protection to the women involved, and in fact often intimidated or even prosecuted the victim herself. Batterers are often given light administrative punishments, such as anger management classes, and go on eventually to be promoted and given honorable discharges.

Even men who murder their partners have not been pursued. When Tabitha Croom was killed and her body found on Fort Bragg in 1999, investigators found strong probable cause that her special forces boyfriend, Forest Nelson, was the perpetrator. (He was the last person seen with her before she disappeared; a neighbor saw him load a large sheet-covered object in his trunk that night; he failed a polygraph test; and he had a previous history of attacks on her and on a former wife.) But Sergeant Nelson continued to work in a psychological operations battalion for the next 2-1/2 years, when he separated from service. The case was closed mere months after the multiple Fort Bragg murders and after assurances that domestic violence prevention was a key army goal. While Croom's case was reopened by the army after the attention brought to it by The Denver Post, no charges have been filed these several months later.

Nelson's military unit works under the banner, "Win the Mind, Win the Day." This is clearly the military's strategy not only for engaging the "enemy without" but the "enemy within." That enemy is any woman (or anyone else) who would threaten the recruitment, "unit cohesion," and budget goals of the US military.

IN A DISREGARD FOR LAW that runs parallel to the batterers', the Department of Defense has consistently failed to respond to congressional directives meant to deal with domestic violence, a problem that has been evident for several decades now. In 1988, for example, the department was told to report soldiers' crimes to the FBI; it has not yet complied. Even after the Fort Bragg murders, the Pentagon continues to stonewall efforts to open up information sources about the problem of domestic violence in the military and its cover-up.

Domestic violence is typically defined by the boundary of the heterosexual family. As conceptions of family and appropriate sexuality have shifted in most parts of society, that boundary has expanded to include intimate partners, although the military still lags behind in doing so. When I visited US military base communities in several Asia-Pacific countries this fall, however, I began to sense some of the disadvantages even of that extended definition, although we know how much more deeply emotional wounds cut when the abuse is by a trusted family member. Many women activists in these communities spoke about the problems of prostitution, rape, and other forms of violence, and about local government and US military tolerance and support for it. This complicity, Suzuyo Takazato of Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence told me, has been meant to deflect violence from "good" local women onto the "bad" ones who, out of poverty and other forms of coercion, become prostitutes. But Koreans in the hundreds of thousands rallied in protest around the Internet-circulated image of the desecrated body of a prostituted woman, Yoon Kum-I, killed by a GI in 1992. The list of offenses kept since then by the National Campaign for the Eradication of Crime by US Troops in Korea does not distinguish assaults on women by their relationship to the man who attacked or killed them.

Desperately underfunded civilian public services--from domestic violence shelters and courts to hospital emergency rooms--do not have the money to deal with the injured and dead women or the returning troops. The military adventure in Iraq creates further problems for women in at least three ways: It takes funds away from prevention and treatment of domestic violence; it increases the demand for such services in the ways just mentioned and through a general militarization and masculinization of the culture; and it continues to legitimate a huge military and an atrophied sense of the public interest--something further exacerbated when the military siphons off several million, often working-class men and women who receive the health and educational benefits that a more fully socialized system of public care would provide for all.

Photo by Marilyn L. Humphries

Since The Denver Post articles, there have been yet more calls for reform of the military's methods for preventing and handling domestic violence and for more congressional hearings. Virginia Republican John Warner will hold full hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee this spring, but will restrict them to the problem of rape at the Air Force Academy. An aide to a key member of that committee claimed that hearings after the Fort Bragg murders had established that in those cases, "there were problems in the marriage either before he left or while he was gone that served as a catalyst [for murder] rather than him just coming home and freaking out," repeating the army's findings that the murders were not part of a pattern of masculine control and militarized abuse. With every failed attempt to get justice for the victims of violence, however, more people may recognize that the problem is in fact war itself and the system of patriarchy and profit it is meant to defend.

The catchphrase "support our troops" is on many lips these days, and the courage and endurance of military family members is widely celebrated. Few in government or media, though, suggest this means anything more than beaming them all good feelings. George Bush served plastic turkey to the troops after having cut back on military pay and benefits, and the tangible and often violent costs of being in a military family continue apace. Like earthquakes, though, moments of tectonic social change often expose buried objects as the ground shifts and opens. So the unprecedented level of military mobilization and interventionism that has gone on in the last several years has suddenly revealed the problem of "normal" military violence against women. It is especially striking that it began to garner that attention in 2002 and 2003, when the issue to which our attention seemed fixed was official, state-sanctioned violence in mortal contest with unsanctioned, non-state violence, or "terror." But terror is a homegrown tactic of patriarchy, its victims not random at all, but our sisters, mothers, and friends. Tens of thousands of these women are working bravely against such terror every day.

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The road from Beirut
From student to refugee overnight. In the one suitcase you can carry, do you pack photographs or an extra sweater?

By Lisa Suhair Majaj

THEY SAY THAT DURING PREGNANCY we absorb cells from our babies into our own bodies: Decades later those cells may still be floating in our bloodstreams. If the past can be so viscerally present within us, perhaps it's no surprise that almost 22 years after leaving Beirut, I still jump at the sound of a car backfiring and cringe at the sight of fireworks blossoming across a darkened sky. Or that a certain shade of gold--the color of the blossoms the day I left Beirut--still inspires in me a subtle sense of sorrow. Perhaps the past is not really past but lives on in the cells of the body unnoticed, stirred to life by the slightest sensory input: a sound, a smell, a taste, a color.

I fled Beirut in June 1982, soon after the invading Israeli army had begun their destruction of Lebanon's Southern towns, but before it had encircled and begun to bomb Beirut itself. The American University of Beirut (AUB), where I was a senior, was abloom with the vibrant colors of a Mediterranean garden. Golden blossoms drifted gently down from the trees, clinging like sparks to the hair of passersby. Then the Israeli army crossed the border into southern Lebanon in its long-expected invasion, and the campus filled with students huddled in small groups, transistor radios pressed to their ears. In the dorms, students stared fixedly at televised images of destruction. Those with families in the South strained for any identifying mark that might transform a pile of rubble to the ruins of their family house, a crumpled human form to the broken remnants of a loved one.

As a Palestinian-American who had lived in Lebanon for four years, I was a full participant in the collective grief yet at the same time felt deeply implicated in the events. On the one hand, US support for Israel had made the invasion possible; on the other, the unwilled presence of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon had provided its rationale. In addition, of course, I was terrified. It was clear that the human cost of the Israeli invasion would be high (most estimates put the largely civilian death toll at 18,000 to 25,000), and that my American passport would not protect me from bombs. As a passport holder with money in the bank, I at least had flight options. But what course of action I should take was far from clear. Should I remain on campus, hoping that the invasion would stop short of Beirut? Leave the city for a safer location? Flee the country altogether? Leaving seemed in some ways a betrayal, but I was vividly aware of how worried my parents must be. (International telephone lines were down, the airport was closed, and I had no way of communicating with them.) I felt completely alone, confronted by a life-and-death decision that no one else could make for me.

Hoping for guidance, I called the US embassy. But the woman who answered the phone was curt to the point of rudeness. "You should not be here," she snapped.

"But I am here," I replied, "and I'm registered with the embassy. Don't you have any evacuation plans for civilians?"

"Sorry, no."

"Can you at least tell me what route out of Beirut is safest?"

"No, I have no advice."

I hung up the phone feeling utterly lost. Now what? My only clear thought was to get money in hand. I set out for the bank, cowering when a plane roared overhead, breaking the sound barrier as Israeli jets routinely did. At the bank I climbed the dirty marble stairs to find utter pandemonium. People jostled and shouted, forgoing any semblance of lines. I pushed my way into the office of a manager my father knew. He greeted me soberly, shaking his head when I told him I wanted to withdraw my entire account. "Not possible," he said. "We are allowing customers to withdraw a maximum of 400 pounds. But because of your father, I will double that." I accepted the crisp bills gratefully.

Back on campus people milled about in uneasy groups. There was a car leaving for Syria, someone told me: The occupants were Americans, and there was space for one more. Did I want to go? I wrote down the phone number, but hesitated: I didn't know the people, and I had heard reports of the Damascus road being targeted. (I later learned that the road was bombed the day that car left, killing 57 people, including 4 foreigners.) Another friend mentioned an evacuation convoy to Jounieh; from there, sea transportation could be arranged out of the country. Although the convoy was for scholarship students, he knew the person in charge. This sounded like a safer choice. We went to the bursary office, where the secretary agreed to slip me onto the list. But as she wrote down my name, I felt a strange sense of disassociation. What would it mean to leave? I might live, while others might die?

Back in the dormitory I started packing. We had been advised to take one bag apiece, something we could run with if necessary. I had been in Beirut for four years and had accumulated far more possessions than could fit in one suitcase. As afternoon turned to evening I folded and refolded, weighing the merits of extra jeans over letters, sweaters over photo albums. I fell asleep late and woke early to the interwoven sounds of birdsong and gunfire. Downstairs, the dormitory was still locked. Looking out the glass doors, I felt claustrophobic, trapped without exit in a country under siege, in a moment without a future.

At the cafeteria, our meeting place, rumors flowed freely: A student had been struck by shrapnel; someone had been shot on campus. I waited under the banyan trees until the trucks came, open-bedded vehicles with slatted sides. We boarded, handing our suitcases up. As we started to move I reached out and grasped a flowering branch. The truck lurched forward, and the branch pulled out of my grasp, leaving me with a fistful of crushed petals.

We drove through empty streets, past bombed-out buildings, beneath a birdless sky smudged with smoke. Once, some people called out as we went by, wanting to know whether our village had been destroyed. At the outskirts of Jounieh we stopped in an apparently Phalangist-controlled area, and the Cypriot students, who comprised the majority of passengers on our truck, were told to disembark. When I tried to get off too, a man asked me, "You, you from Cyprus?" I shook my head, and he motioned me back. Confused and frightened, I watched my friends escorted away. Later I learned the story behind this event: A Lebanese ship owner who had been blacklisted by the Cyprus government for smuggling arms via Cyprus to the Israel-allied Phalangists in Lebanon hoped to regain access to Cyprus ports by "rescuing" a group of Cypriot students. At the time, however, I had no way of knowing why some of us were being taken away while others were left on the truck, and so I was simply filled with panic. Where were they being taken? Would any of us be safe?

The truck moved on, much emptier now. We drove through Jounieh to a hotel run by AUB graduates who had agreed to let us sleep on their floor. In the hotel a small television set showed a broadcaster standing in front of a pile of rubble, the remnants of a building in Saida. A young woman slumped on a metal folding chair in front of the TV, the sound of her weeping jagged and low. Later I went outside to watch the explosions down the coast: a stitchery of flame in gold, red, white, sound reverberating a few seconds after flaring light, the way thunder lags behind lightning. My inability to sleep that night was caused by more than the hard tile floor and the restless movements of unwashed bodies filling the hall.

The next day we waited: for Israeli permission to exit the port, for a boat, for news of the Cypriot students. In the early evening, news spread of a boat. But it proved to be a false alarm, and excitement soon changed to apathy. After another long night, we received word, this time accurate, that we would be leaving that afternoon. To prepare for the journey I bought water and crackers, despite the fact that I had had no appetite for days.

At the port we found our boat, the S. S. Eddy: a small, dirty cargo vessel that seemed unlikely to hold us all. We boarded in late afternoon. Behind us, the hills of Jounieh leaned into the harbor, bulwarks of tree and stone whose beauty seemed almost unbearable. As the boat slipped into the twilight, I watched their outlines grow fainter and fainter, till they disappeared into the darkness, signaling that Lebanon was behind us. Bereft, I took refuge at the far end of the boat, staring out to sea. Around us, the darkness became absolute. The only noise was that of waves splashing against the boat.

Suddenly a spotlight came out of nowhere, pinning me down like an insect. I could not breathe. After what seemed like eternity, the light moved on, playing slowly across the ship, pausing at each face to render the shocked, frightened features in stark detail. A voice came out of the darkness over a loudspeaker speaking, as I recall, in English: "S. S. Eddy, S. S. Eddy. This is Israeli gunboat."

What came next was blurred by confusion and fear. Several Israeli soldiers with large, oddly shaped weapons boarded the boat as we stood at attention, passports clutched in our hands. They took four students off board (one, we learned later, was rowed around in the dark in a small boat in total silence for an extended period of time, a weapon pressed to his head). The rest of us were left standing there, rigid with fear. At one point I was overcome by a wave of dizziness and exhaustion, and collapsed. Several hours later I woke to find the ship moving through the dark, the deck around me littered with sleeping bodies.

With dawn, the orientation of the boat made clear where we were headed: Israel. At some point the gunboat pulled close: a massive steel-gray vessel with a surreal purple eye, complete with eyelashes, painted on the side. An Israeli soldier with a loudspeaker ordered us to turn over all cameras on board. If one hidden camera was found, he warned, we would "never reach Cyprus." Fearfully, we complied. Meanwhile, our boat continued its way down the coast, eventually pulling into a harbor ringed with red roofs: Haifa!

As we pulled into port, I could see journalists with television cameras on shore. Israeli soldiers boarded with crates of food: tomatoes and cucumbers, cheese and yogurt and bread. Despite the freshness of the food, I had no appetite. I could see the television crews filming, and could imagine the headline that would accompany those photos: Israeli Army Feeds Starving