The War Against Women
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War and Its Sequel
Historically, women have long been counted among "the spoils of war," free for the taking; but, in our own time, women in large numbers have also been pawns in deliberate military and political strategies intended to humiliate the men to whom they "belong" and to exterminate their ethnic groups. (Think of Bosnia.) The Amnesty report traces the wholesale violence against women in Côte d'Ivoire to December 2000 when a number of women were arrested, raped, and tortured at the government's Police Training School in Dioula—because their presumed ethnicity and political affiliation allied them with the opposition. According to Human Rights Watch, this was but one of many such cases incited by government-sponsored propaganda before the civil war even began.
No man responsible for any of these crimes has ever been brought to justice.
Next door in Liberia, by the time fighting ended in 2002, 1.4 million Liberians had been displaced within the country. Almost a million others had fled. In a country of three million people, that's one in three citizens gone. At least 270,000 people died. That's nearly 10% of the population. And here again the easy targets were women. A World Health Organization study in 2005 estimated that a staggering 90% of Liberian women had suffered physical or sexual violence; three out of four had been raped.
Typically, ending the war did not end the violence against women. A study in preparation by the International Rescue Committee—the organization for which I currently work as a volunteer—and Columbia University's School of Public Health concludes, "While the war officially ended in 2003, the war on women continued."
Well over half the women interviewed in two Liberian counties, including the capital city, Monrovia, had survived at least one violent physical attack during an 18- month period in 2006-2007, years after the conflict had officially ended. Well over half the women reported at least one violent sexual assault in the same period. Seventy-two percent said their husbands had forced them to have sex against their will. A 2003 IRC study among Liberian refugees in Sierra Leone found that 75% of the women had been sexually violated before they fled their country; after they fled, 55% were sexually assaulted again.
For women, war is not over when it's over.
Women Like Me
Countless women will never recover from the assaults they suffered during the war. I met many such women in Liberia.
On a visit I made to Kolahun, in Lofa County, where fighting had been heavy, one showed me her scars: a series of parallel horizontal ridges starting just below one ear and moving toward the throat. Some guerilla in Charles Taylor's army had locked this whisper of a woman against his chest and slowly, inch by inch, laid open the flesh of her neck in ribbons of blood. But that wasn't all. Taylor's men had broken all the fingers of her left hand so that they now point backwards at seemingly impossible angles. They slammed her back so forcefully with rifle butts that one leg and one arm (the one with the useless hand) are now paralyzed. She can still walk, leaning on a homemade wooden crutch; but that leaves her without a good arm, and she can't carry anything on her head, having lost the ability to balance. She has five children, some of them fathered by rape. The soldiers held her a long time. How many raped her she cannot say.
In the tiny village of Dougoumai I met a woman people refer to only as "the sick lady." She lay on a bed in a one-room mud-brick house. As I came in, she managed to sit up with great difficulty, using her twisted hands to move her swollen, useless legs. Her sister says she was captured by a militia fighting against Charles Taylor and gang-raped repeatedly by ten men. Nobody can say how long they kept her. They rammed their gun butts into her back—evidently a common technique—paralyzing her legs. She cannot walk. They smashed her hands. She cannot hold anything or feed herself or comb her hair. Her mother and two sisters, who luckily survived the war, feed her by hand, their lives too now dominated by the consequences of the violence done to this woman.
Recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) surveyed surviving women in Lofa County, the center of Charles Taylor's operations. More than 98% said that, during his war (1999-2003), they lost their homes; more than 90%, their livelihoods; more than 72%, at least one family member. Nearly 90% of them survived at least one violent physical assault; more than half, at least one violent sexual assault. No one inquired about the number of women now caring for the permanently disabled.
In Sierra Leone, where terrorizing the civilian population was the main tactic of war, the violence against women and children was, as Human Rights Watch has reported, even more brutal. All parties to the conflict committed countless atrocities. Official reports document appalling crimes: fathers forced to rape their own daughters; brothers forced to rape their sisters; boy soldiers gang-raping old women, then chopping off their arms; pregnant women eviscerated alive and the living fetus snatched from the womb to satisfy soldiers betting on its sex. A brother is hacked to death and eviscerated; his heart and liver are placed in the hands of his 18-year-old sister who is commanded to eat them. She refuses. She is taken to a place where other women are being held. Among them is her sister. She sees her sister and other women murdered. Their heads are placed in her lap. These crimes, which violate primal taboos, aim to destroy not just individual victims but a whole culture as well; yet the individual victims are important in their own right, and in most cases they are women and children.
Perhaps the worst crime of the bad, bad men has been turning children—mostly boys—into armed guerillas as bad as themselves. In his bestselling autobiography A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah vividly describes his life as a boy soldier. Separated from his family by the war, he was captured by soldiers in the army of Sierra Leone, trained to fight, kept high on drugs (as all soldiers were), and forced to kill. When boy soldiers begin to rape and murder girls and women willingly at the instigation of men, civilization has collapsed.
Crimes Against Women
In recent years, every kind of horror has been inflicted on girls and women in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire because they are female. If females were a particular ethnic group—Albanians, let's say, or Tutsis—or if they espoused a particular religion, as did Bosnian Muslims, we could recognize what goes on as a kind of "gender cleansing" or mass femicide. But we don't speak of crimes against women in that way. When did you last hear someone speak of "crimes against women" at all?
Interviewed for a TV documentary on mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a smiling guerrilla says he's "made love" to many women. The interviewer asks if all the women were willing, and he laughs. He admits that many fight him, and he says—still grinning—"If they are strong, I call my friends to help me." Despite his use of euphemisms, he knows just what he's doing. When the interviewer labels his love-making "rape," he typically insists that rape happens in wartime and that when the war is over, he won't do it anymore. The state of war excuses men's crimes against women because rape—so the claim goes—is something that just naturally occurs in war.
The war against women in West Africa and elsewhere is different from other wars—whether driven by ideology, politics, greed, or personal ambition—in that every faction, every side, makes war on women. They all abduct and rape and force women to labor. They all murder women. In West Africa, only the Civil Defense Forces (CDF) in Sierra Leone refrained for a considerable time from rape. They were traditional hunters, recruited by the government to defend their own areas from the rebels. Their customs kept them from sexual intercourse, believed to deplete a warrior's power, and they operated close to home, where they were known; but, as the war went on, they, too, began to act like all the other fighters. Their initial restraint was important, however, offering evidence that rape does not have to be something that "just happens" in war, but is instead an elective, wildly popular choice.
After war, in the "post-conflict" era, even some international peacekeepers have joined the war against women. Human Rights Watch and others have documented cases of rape by peacekeeping soldiers in West Africa, but none have been prosecuted. Perpetrators are simply repatriated or moved to a new post. Human Rights Watch also reports on the widespread practice among peacekeepers of using children who have turned to prostitution to survive. (There are few other options for girls who have been orphaned or rejected by their families, and many of these child prostitutes had already been used as sex slaves during wartime.) But apparently the peacekeepers recruit many girls themselves.
Here in Kailahun District, the place where the Sierra Leone war started and ended, women are upset and angry about the sexual exploitation of their adolescent daughters. Parents in this part of the country—many of them war widows—take seriously the advice to send their daughters to school, which costs more than most can easily afford. If a girl student becomes pregnant, she is required by law to drop out. (Consider the impact on a small village struggling to recover from war of the loss of even a few prospective teachers, nurses, or social workers.) If the father of the expected child is a fellow student, he can continue his studies, denying all responsibility. Often, however, it's not the boys who are to blame. Many still-virginal girls drop out of school early to escape predatory teachers, and women report that the incidence of teen pregnancy drops when peacekeeping forces leave town.
Even then, however, rape and child rape continue, largely unabated. It's hard to tell with certainty just how high this is, because raped women and girls are normally too shamed by the crime to report it. In war time, it was somewhat easier because they had so clearly been forced by armed men; with the war "over," rape once again becomes a woman's own fault. Nonetheless, angry parents in this region of Sierra Leone, increasingly report child rape to authorities. Here in Kailahun District, women mobilized to force the local magistrate to hear the case of a 7-year-old rape victim. The magistrate, apparently related to the admitted perpetrator, had prevented prosecution by postponing his trial, again and again.
Domestic violence—wife-beating, marital rape, emotional abuse, torture, economic deprivation, and the like—is common. Impoverished women with many children to feed have no choice but to endure "normal" levels of violence. But as in wartime, habitual violence invites the thrill of excess. Just the other day, a man in Moyamba District killed his wife and cut off her head.
Bad Men Make Good
For bad, bad men, terrorizing civilians holds advantages—beyond the immediate gratification of the rush of power. Such acts can land them important posts in government. When atrocities become sufficiently conspicuous and horrific—such as the notorious amputations of arms and legs in Sierra Leone—the international community steps in to initiate a peace process. Usually they bring to the negotiating table all the bad, bad men who have been causing so much trouble and buy them off with positions of power in a new "interim" or "transitional" government. Witness, in another part of the world where women are notoriously badly treated, all those well-known warlords the Afghan people wanted tried for war crimes who somehow wound up in President Hamid Karzai's cabinet, or—after elections advertised as democratic—in parliament.
Foday Sankoh had been condemned to death for treason when he was summoned to just such peace negotiations. From them, he emerged as the head of the government commission in charge of managing Sierra Leone's natural resources, including the diamonds that financed his war. Charles Taylor, while committing mayhem and rape in refugee camps for displaced persons, was elected president of Liberia. Voters seemed to figure, as battered women often do, that the best way to stop the man's violence was to let him have his way, though this is a path to certain disaster.
Bad, bad men are quick to learn from the rapid advancement of their brothers elsewhere. Laurent Kunda in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), widely recognized as a prime candidate for trial before a war crimes tribunal, is now said to be jockeying for a high position in the government of the DRC in exchange for laying down his arms. The current rapid descent of Kenya into "tribal warfare" owes much to the same theory. Raila Odingo, having lost a clearly suspect presidential election, exploits genocidal violence with good reason to hope that international intervention will usher him into office by the back door.
Although UN Security Council Resolution 1325 calls for women to be included in all peace processes, they are rarely invited to the table. With men in charge of governments almost everywhere, the fearful fascination with bad, bad men continues and the perverse preference for predators trickles down. In Sierra Leone, ex-combatants were rewarded with motorcycles. The theory was that violent young men would be less dangerous if they could serve a useful purpose and make some money carrying passengers on brand new highly-chromed bikes in a country where most cars had been torched. The result? Every public square in the dodgiest districts of Sierra Leone is now dominated by a motorcycle gang consisting mainly of young men already surely skilled in the sexual exploitation of girls. Perhaps in the end, the transport scheme will work out; but in Sierra Leone most women and girls still walk.
Here in Kailahun District, women tell the story—possibly apocryphal—of an old woman who was huddled over her cook fire when RUF rebels entered her village. She was frying some tasty frogs. Rebels surrounded her, peering into the pot to see what she was cooking, and one of them said: "We are freedom fighters of the Revolutionary United Front. We have come to save you from the government." The old woman—unafraid—replied: "Then you must go to the capital. The government is not in my pot." Women in Kailahun District tell that story over and over, and they laugh every time. They are so proud of that lone, bold, old woman who told those rebel men off. That's the spirit of survival, still alive in them, though they must know that the rebels probably shot the woman and ate her frogs.
[Note on sources: A number of the reports discussed in this piece, all PDF files, can be read on-line:
Amnesty International, "Targeting Women";
Human Rights Watch, "'My Heart Is Cut': Sexual Violence by Rebels and Pro-Government Forces in Côte d'Ivoire;
The World Health Organization;
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the UN Fund for Population Activities, "Women's Reproductive Health in Liberia, The Lofa County Reproductive Health Survey";
Human Rights Watch, "'We'll Kill You If You Cry': Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict";
UN Resolution 1325.]
Writer/photographer Ann Jones is working as a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) on a special project for their Gender-Based Violence (read: Violence Against Women) unit called "A Global Crescendo: Women's Voices from Conflict Zones." Her blogs about the project can be found by clicking here. She is the author, most recently, of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books), a report from another war that's not over.
