Until women are afforded their rights, global progress and prosperity will have its own glass ceiling.
— HILLARY CLINTON
Like Sisyphus, women have been rolling a rock uphill for millennia. Our victories, while significant, have invariably been tempered by backlash as well as hampered by cultural and religious dogma. Today, I believe that women are poised, at last, to reach the summit. Given the rapidly changing status of women, an optimist could even suggest that women are at a tipping point when age-old oppression is seen as damaging to the economy and the health of the community and its opposite—emancipation—is seen as the prescription for prosperity.
How these coming changes play out will differ from place to place. The women of Afghanistan have found their voices and are demanding change. The women of Liberia have banded together and elected a female president for the first time in 2005 because their lives were in danger in the hands of the men who were running the country. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a place where it’s more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier, women are organizing a Silence Is Violence campaign and breaking a taboo that has historically demanded that they keep the abuse in their lives a secret.
A vast collection of knowledge and learned ways of dealing with particular circumstances inevitably feed a tipping point. One of them is changes in language itself. Language matters. It creates a response, sets a scene, delivers legitimacy. Calling the widespread rape, murder and displacement of a people “ethnic cleansing” lets its perpetrators off the hook. To call it what it is—genocide—makes them bear some responsibility. When the adage “boys will be boys” is applied to a carful of racist young men hurling insults at Aboriginal women walking on the roadside, it cultivates acceptance. Saying that you are acting in the name of God can be either a blessing or a curse: feeding the poor and caring for the sick in the name of God is one thing; being denied an education and health care in the name of God is another. Dismissing violence as cultural rather than criminal excuses the act. Until we call crimes against women (and humanity) by their true names, we’ll not only fail to stop the violence against women that is endemic throughout the world, we will be endorsing it.
Circumstances also contribute to a tipping point. For example, traditionally women in Saudi Arabia had never attended the Olympic Games as athletes. They were not allowed to attend athletic events at home and were discouraged from playing competitive sports. During the buildup to the London Olympics in 2012, the absence of Saudi female athletes began to get a lot of attention. The pressure from probing media increased almost daily. The Olympic Games are a place to showcase national accomplishment; denying women the chance to participate became too big a stain for the Saudi kingdom to wear. It caved in, and with weeks to go before the opening ceremonies, two female athletes—one in judo, the other in the eight-hundred-metre track event—were added to the Saudi Olympic team. Other Gulf States, such as Qatar, followed suit. When those women walked into the Olympic Stadium in London, they made history. They became part of a growing collection of circumstances that are contributing to the tipping point for women.
It’s not just “firsts”—first governor general, first cabinet minister, first chair of the board, first firefighter—that clear the way for women, it’s a sea change in attitudes about the treatment of women. Stories about underage girls being forced to marry or become prostitutes are no longer dismissed as “the way those people live.” They make headlines, go viral, wind up on YouTube. When a fifteen-year-old child bride named Sahar Gul was rescued in 2011 by Afghan police from a home that was a torture chamber—the girl said her mother-in-law had pulled out her fingernails with pliers—the news made headlines in the foreign press. Gul had been married off to a man twice her age, and soon after the nuptials, she was told she had to become a prostitute to bring money home to her new husband’s family. When she refused they beat her, pulled out her hair, burned her with cigarettes, cut off pieces of her flesh and locked her in a windowless toilet. The neighbours called the authorities after hearing her crying and moaning day after day.
Even a short time ago, Gul’s story would likely have been ignored, first by the police, as it would have been seen as a domestic issue and nobody’s business, and then by the media, who would not have been alerted by the police or the neighbours. During the Taliban regime, the atrocities committed against women and girls in Afghanistan were shockingly brutal. One eighteen-year-old girl was in labour for forty days while the Taliban forbade medical help because she was a woman. Her family tried to help her with hot compresses that burned her abdomen and endless concoctions that made her sick. When Dr. Sima Samar at last was able to travel to the girl’s home, she did a Caesarean section to save the girl’s life and remove the fetus, which had been dead for most of the forty days. Afterwards, Samar said to me, “Losing the baby wasn’t the worst thing that happened to that girl. I had to do a hysterectomy because all the reproductive organs were infected. Now she’ll be relegated to be someone’s slave because she cannot bear children.”
There was almost no media attention on the fate of Afghan women at the time, most assigning editors concluding that what was happening to them was “someone else’s culture, none of our business.” For most news agencies, the women became a story only after the Americans toppled the Taliban after 9/11.
Although Sahar Gul’s husband fled before the police arrived, her in-laws were arrested and charged. And in a sign of the times in Afghanistan, Noorjahan Akbar, of Young Women for Change, named the Internet café that the organization opened on International Women’s Day in 2012 after the girl, to honour her and keep her story alive. Reporting the story is one thing. Naming a café after her so that her story will never be forgotten is an example of how women’s issues have taken on a new status in places where it seemed as if such change would never happen.
The international community has historically been cowed by accusations that by protesting injustice and abuse they are interfering in someone else’s culture. By suggesting that rape was an inevitable consequence of war, they normalized it. In the guise of a message from God, oppression of women seemed acceptable. Diplomats and activists were silenced by thugs who’d hijacked their culture and their own religion for political opportunism, and bowed to the finger-wagging of self-appointed guardians of cultural and religious codes. While endemic mistreatment still goes on in many places—which country would tell a Saudi Arabian prince that his oil was not wanted as long as his country lashed women for driving—at least women are winning the public relations war on oppression and subjugation.
Case in point: on March 31, 2009, the international community did a major about-face that altered the course for women in Afghanistan, as well as for the men who oppress them. At a NATO summit meeting on the war in Afghanistan in Strasbourg, France, Hamid Karzai announced that he had signed the Shiite Personal Status Law, which rolled back the gains women had made in Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted. Among other draconian measures, the law blesses marital rape, accepts child marriage and forbids wives to leave their homes unless the right to go to work has been written into their marriage contract. It stripped women of custody of their children after divorce and of the ability to inherit property. Article 132 (3) stated, “The couple should not commit acts that create hatred and bitterness in their relationship. The wife is bound to preen for her husband, as and when he desires.”
Shiite Muslims make up about 20 percent of the Afghan population; they are mostly Hazara, the most persecuted tribe in Afghanistan. But Shiite women have been vocal about the need for change. They are often first to register for literacy classes and take every opportunity to upgrade their skills. So the passing of such a law was a blow to their new emancipation. They, like most Afghans, had presumed that Karzai would let the issue float: he’d claim in public that the retrograde measures were being discussed, even taken seriously, but would never table such a law. In fact, behind the scenes Karzai was being pressured by the fundamentalists to sign the Shiite law. But here he was meeting in Strasbourg with the very people who had committed troops and funds to get his country back on its feet and announcing a return to the dark ages. The reaction was swift and excoriating. The Guardian newspaper reported that it was Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, who spoke first. “If you support that,” he told Karzai, “we can’t support you.” Leaders from the international community lined up to condemn the Afghan president and to stand together on the line that Harper had drawn in the sand.
Why did Karzai choose such an inopportune moment to make his announcement? Given the history of the international community’s response to women’s issues, you’d be hard pressed to accuse him of misjudging his audience. In the past, the United Nations in particular had turned a blind eye to equally ridiculous pronouncements and edicts. There was little other than lip service about improving the lives of women and girls to suggest that the men and women Karzai consulted, accepted bailouts from and paraded around as his pals would stand in his way. But they did. And Karzai backed down, first saying that the version of the law released to the media was different from the one he had signed, then that he had signed the law without ever reading it.
Most people wondered how the president could have made such a blockhead decision in the first place. Afghans said it was all about the upcoming presidential election. Karzai’s numbers were dropping, and there were two or three credible candidates who could maybe have beaten him. He’d crunched the numbers and then had done what power-hungry people do (or are forced to do when extremists and warlords are holding the key to power): he attempted to sell out women to win over the fundamentalist vote that would secure an electoral win. But for once the tactic backfired.
It was a first on a number of fronts: the international community had, for the first time since the insurgency in Afghanistan began, refused to be bullied by the argument that says “this is our culture and is none of your business.” Referring to the various international treaties, mostly under the auspices of the United Nations, that Afghanistan has signed—covenants and conventions that protect the rights of women and girls—progressives demanded that the Afghan government honour them. Pressure from inside the country to heed the Afghan constitution, which also protects the rights of women and girls, also increased.
Karzai was caught off guard; when he’d given a sweeping amnesty to the war criminals in his country, for example, the international community and his own citizens had mostly succumbed to the old dodge “there’s nothing I can do.” Not this time. Women in Kabul marched in the street. Media reports showed men throwing rocks at them, but a ring of policewomen moved in to surround the marchers and keep the men back. The protesters demanded a meeting with Karzai when he got back from Europe. They got it. At the meeting they demanded changes to the Shiite Personal Status Law. They didn’t get all they asked for—the law is still a thorn in the side of anyone who seeks fairness and justice—but Karzai did amend it. For example, under the law, a girl was deemed mature and marriageable at her first menstrual period, which could be as young as nine or ten years old. The age of maturity for boys was set at fifteen. Amendments changed the girls’ legal “marrying” age to sixteen. Karzai also agreed to change the law forbidding women to leave the home. They can now leave for work or school or medical treatment without having previously signed a marriage contract allowing such trips.
It wasn’t the end of the rights debate, of course, but it did herald the fact that by banding together (as the women in Senegal did to end female genital mutilation and the women in sub-Saharan Africa did to turn the tide of HIV/AIDS), Afghan women could alter their own destiny.
~
Indicators of grassroots change in attitudes toward women’s rights had been cropping up in unusual places throughout the first decade of the new century. Since 1999, the second brutal civil war had raged in the West African nation of Liberia. One corrupt dictator, the infamous Dr. Doe, had been replaced by another—the psychopath Charles Taylor. The usual complement of horrors had overtaken the country: mass raping of women, abducting children and turning them into child soldiers, a campaign of torture, dismemberment and killing that paralyzed the people with fear.
In 2002, when it seemed as if the civil war would never end—and Liberian women figured they’d sacrificed their entire lives to the carnage and bloodletting of conflict, to the fear of being raped in the ongoing violence—a young woman named Leymah Gbowee, who had become involved with two nascent regional peace movements, had a dream in which she saw women of both the country’s major religions, Christianity and Islam, coming together as an unstoppable force with a plan for peace. Soon after, she gathered Christian women together to start a conversation about how they might contribute to moving the peace talks forward. Then a Muslim woman arrived at the meeting, asking how she could become involved. The two religious groups had known plenty of discord, so the first step was to settle their own differences. They talked through each issue and discovered that misinformation and suspicion were largely responsible for keeping them apart. Solidarity followed.
Calling themselves the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, and armed with nothing more than the courage of their convictions, the women, under Gbowee’s leadership, made signs, donned white T-shirts and went to the fish market every day for months in 2003 because they knew that Charles Taylor, the president, drove by every morning in his motorcade. Their signs told him that he had to negotiate a peace and stop the violence. The protests were ignored.
What happened next astounded everyone, including the women. They decided to take their placards to the Presidential Mansion, where they chanted their demands for peace; their bold stand became the talk of the country. And it worked. Taylor was persuaded to attend the peace talks with the rebel leaders being held in Ghana, and the women followed him there just in case he changed his mind.
When the peace talks in Ghana broke down, the women staged an unforgettable scene. Linking arms, they circled the building where the negotiators were deadlocked and announced that they were taking them hostage on behalf of the women of Liberia. They vowed that they would not budge until a peace accord was signed. When commissionaires were sent to physically remove them, the women stood their ground and threatened to shed their clothes if the guards tried to send them away. It was a curse of nakedness on all those men, and the consequences of such a curse are formidable in Africa: men who are exposed to that curse are considered to be dead. No one will cook for such a man, or marry him, or do any kind of business with him. The security men left the women alone.
The next day, with the peace accord still elusive, the protesters announced a sex strike. No woman would allow her husband to have sex with her until the peace agreement was signed. They encouraged all the women of Liberia to join the protest, and a massive number did—sending messages via cellphones and runners to let their sisters in Ghana know that the sex strike was taking immediate effect.
A mediator came out at that point to negotiate with the demonstrators, who agreed to give the men two weeks to get the talks to the finish line. At the top of their list of demands was that the men at the table stop talking about the political appointments and rewards and access to the country’s resources that they anticipated in the aftermath of the agreement and start talking about how to implement a lasting peace. To the astonishment of many, exactly two weeks later the peace treaty was signed, and Charles Taylor went into exile. UN troops were deployed to maintain the peace, and the women went home.
An army of women had confronted Liberia’s ruthless president and rebel warlords and won. But the women didn’t stop there. They went to work on the election campaign that brought Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to power as the first woman to head the Liberian state. Leymah Gbowee helped lead an army of women that ended the war in her nation and in the process emerged as an international leader who changed history. In a classic case of non-violent action, she and the women of Liberia reversed the power equation.
Gbowee would eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her efforts, but the event that led to that international honour might have been missed except that the American filmmaker Abigail Disney heard about the commotion and turned it into a widely released and praised documentary called Pray the Devil Back to Hell. When I asked Disney where she got the title for the film, she explained: “Leymah said at one point in our discussions that Charles Taylor was such a fake religious guy he could pray the Devil out of hell. My director said these women were praying him back.”
The film has been seen in thirty-two countries on all seven continents (including Antarctica, on a docked cruise ship). The story it tells has inspired the women’s movements in Bosnia, Georgia and Cambodia. It’s influenced how the UN understands women who are trying to be heard at peace negotiating tables. And it’s having an impact on the vital importance of women’s voices being taken seriously in ending conflict.
Disney says, “Women mobilizing to stop war is our last best hope.” Referring to the ever-increasing number of civil wars going on in the world today, she stresses that “we have been moving closer to perpetual war every day. One thing we’ve never tried, never given a chance to, is women’s leadership. Women don’t have magic in their chromosomes. But women do the work of peace. We do the living and carry out the dead and care for the sick and educate the children. Women are much more reluctant to go to war.” The lesson of the film, she feels, is that it lets people know that you really can make a difference. “If you choose to lean into the answers, instead of backing away from the fray, you can do anything.”
Liberia is certainly not trouble-free. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won a second term as president, by a hair. The country wobbles on the stability scale. Rape, although much reduced, is still a problem. But the women know they made a difference, and, says Disney, “they are living proof that moral courage and non-violent resistance can succeed, even where the best efforts of traditional diplomacy have failed.”
~
One victory doesn’t secure emancipation. Vigilance is the lot of women if they want to maintain equality with men. Look at Israel, for example. Ultra Orthodox (or Haredi, those who “tremble before God”) men are actually making women sit in the back of the bus and chastising women who aren’t dressed modestly in public. This kind of behaviour started in 2010 on buses that run through Haredi neighbourhoods, but two years later it has escalated to neighbourhoods all over Jerusalem, and every woman is fair game, not just women in the Haredi community. The Haredim have been accused by non-Orthodox Jews of blacking out women’s faces on billboards, barring women from speaking at the podium at conferences, even spitting on an eight-year-old girl because they deemed her to be immodestly dressed.
In a case that became the talk of Israel, a woman pediatrician, Channa Maayan, was being awarded a prize from the ministry of health for a book she wrote about hereditary diseases common to Jews. She attended the event with her husband, and they were told that they would have to sit apart, as women and men could not sit together. Then the official in charge said she was to stay seated and send a man to the stage to collect her prize. This in a country that boasts women pilots in the air force, women in parliament and even as chief of the Supreme Court, a country that once had the irrepressible Golda Meir as prime minister.
Another sign of the times for women: in May 2011, three women—Jody Williams from the United States, Shirin Ebadi from Iran and Mairead Maguire from Ireland, all of them Nobel Peace laureates—came together to collectively tackle one of the most intransigent problems that women face—sexual violence in zones of conflict and post conflict. These laureates are part of a new force in the world called the Nobel Women’s Initiative, which was established in 2006 by Williams, Ebadi and Maguire, along with the late Wangari Maathai (Kenya), Rigoberta Menchú Tum (Guatemala) and Betty Williams (Ireland). In 2012, they were joined by the laureates Leymah Gbowee (Liberia) and Tawakkol Karman (Yeman) and honorary member Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma).
The three who initiated the May meeting were looking for strategies to end the scourge of rape and gender violence in conflict, which is one of the ugliest stories in the world today. Monsters are gang-raping women as a strategy of war in Congo, Darfur and Zimbabwe, among other places, and getting away with it. This despite the attention of a high-powered collection of notables such as Stephen Lewis, Hillary Clinton, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the playwright and activist Eve Ensler, among others; despite the unprecedented step taken by the UN Security Council on June 19, 2008, when it declared rape a strategy of war and a security issue. Rape has horrendous personal consequences for women and their families, but it also undermines whole economies. For example, food production in Congo dropped by 70 percent starting in 2004 because traditionally the women are the planters of seed, tenders and harvesters of produce, and they have been sexually assaulted so brutally and so often they are too wounded to go to the fields and when they’ve healed enough to work again they often won’t because they are too afraid of being assaulted again. The World Food Program has to supply food from an already strained international aid budget. What’s more, the consequences of sexual depravity affect everyone: when the caregivers are unable to cope, the children are left to their own devices, and their health and nutrition suffer. The level of violence that the victims endure is almost unspeakable—paraded naked in the town square, assaulted vaginally with a broken beer bottle, having a breast mutilated with a machete, being gang-raped by soldiers eight and ten times a day, some of the victims newborns, others eighty years old.
The Nobel women invited 130 activists from all over the world to meet in Montebello, Quebec, to find a way to stop this increasingly horrific violence against women. They had a wealth of experience in lobbying, protesting and building public awareness: Jody Williams received the Nobel Prize for her work in banning land mines; Mairead Maguire was one of two women (the other was Betty Williams) honoured for establishing peace in Ireland; and Shirin Ebadi is the Iranian woman who dares to continually speak out for the women of that country. The conference, held in an old log building surrounded by gently rolling hills, had a we-can-do-anything buzz from the moment the delegates arrived. Rose Mapendo had come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which had been recently named the second most dangerous place on earth for women (Afghanistan is in first place). A woman or girl is raped approximately every forty-eight seconds in Congo. Mapendo stood up to reply to a comment made from the podium and then, as though the floodgates opened, she began to tell her terrible story. She’d been attacked by one of the roving militias in her country; she had witnessed the murder of her husband, the rape of her daughters and finally had been gang-raped herself. It was apparent that she had not planned to relate her experience, but the memories she’d been harbouring had overpowered her reserve. She looked so alone and vulnerable when she began talking, wringing her hands, the sound of her voice rising and falling as she described some details that brought back the terror and others that reduced her to tears. Excruciating pauses punctuated her account.
“I’m a survivor of genocide. It’s enough goodness for me to sit with women who make a commitment to make a difference.” She stopped talking for a moment, trying to gain control of her voice as she choked on tears. Every one of us was on the edge of her seat, trying to send vibes of support to her. She began again. “It is hard to speak, but I choose to do this. Nobody can change my past. We learn from the past and from that we can change the present and future.
“Women can stand up for other women. I believe when women come together, something happens because we heard the testimony. Some people don’t believe the rape or sexual violence, don’t believe it is true—but it is true. I spent sixteen months in the death camps, under the gun twenty-four hours, seven days a week. At the beginning I was with my husband and children. They tortured the men, killed all of them, left the women. They said they couldn’t waste bullets on women. We talk about rape—”
She paused again. One woman stood up and slipped an arm around her, and Rose continued. “We had no help. I thank the people who take action. The first step is raise awareness. Tell people this is true. Encourage the victim to speak out. Without our voice, nobody knows what is true exactly. That they raped women in front of their children. And take the life of husband. That they take their children and raped them in front of the mothers. How can you do that horrible thing to someone?
“My happy today is the women. Unite is power. To push the elephant together—nobody can do it herself. Empower those women, empower them to stand up. Culture makes women feel they are in shame. I am a victim. I believe I can help another victim. Because nobody knows what she’s been through. Nobody can change outside, can change what’s inside. It’s not your fault to be raped. Not your choice. You can speak out, let it go—don’t keep it inside.
“We are powerful. We can come together [and] make a difference today.”
Her story, and the courage it took to tell it, brought the roomful of women to their feet in thunderous supportive applause. She stood for several minutes perplexed by the outpouring of affection and sympathy and pride, not knowing what to say. Her call for women to come together to create a force of change, when she herself was so emotionally wounded, galvanized the participants to absolute solidarity.
Several more women shared their stories then—none of them seeking pity, all of them putting a face on an atrocity, a fact with an accusation. Binalakshmi Nepram from India was one. She leaned into the microphone and tried to make eye contact with every woman in the room as she described the little-known facts of wretched brutality in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, where ethnic conflict is raging and women are being targeted by the Indian military. It’s one of those places the government describes as “disturbed”—a code word, says Nepram, for merciless crackdown. But the military and the police sent to Manipur aren’t into finding solutions, she said, but into punishing the people who live there.
She shared a story from July 2004. A young Manipuri woman was arrested in the middle of the night at gunpoint by Indian soldiers. The next morning her body was found with bullet holes in her genitals, the ultimate form of sexual violence. In an amazing act of defiance and non-violent protest, a dozen women stripped in front of the headquarters of the Assam Rifles, challenging the armed forces to rape them as well.
Nepram told us, “Women in Manipur have joined together for community security and support. They patrol the streets with bamboo torches at night and physically tussle with the armed Indian soldiers to rescue women being held in their trucks.”
Intervention is only possible when people such as Rose Mapendo and Binalakshmi Nepram decide to speak up. There were many moments of despair during the conference but also hard determination to work for change. When asked for plans, women eagerly came forward: provide mobile phones so the women can get help quickly; use Twitter to spread the word and get real-time updates; issue a call to action, form an ad hoc committee; establish reachable goals.
The statistics reported and the stories told led the participants to form the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict, joining organizations and individuals already working on this file to make a coordinated effort for change. On the final day, the three Nobel laureates issued a statement: “Together we will demand bold political leadership to prevent rape in conflict, to protect civilians and rape survivors, and call for justice for all—including effective prosecution of those responsible.”
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It’s shocking to hear reports from states like Manipur, reeling in violence in a country that’s said to be the fastest-growing democracy in the world. Congo is also a place of extraordinary violence but one that the international community tends to ignore. I’d travelled to North and South Kivu provinces in December 2009 to write about how Congolese women were managing. Aid workers had said they were hiding in the forest because the roving militias had burned their villages, chased off their men, raped them and stolen their livestock.
Getting there was a story in itself. The east side of the country is so dangerous that all the humanitarian agencies except Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had left when I was there. But even MSF, known for its fearlessness, was taking exceptional precautions to keep its staff safe. For example, in getting from point A to point B, they used what’s called a “kiss” manoeuvre. To get from Goma, the capital, to Kitchanga, where I wanted to go, they sent a vehicle from both directions to meet at the middle and transfer the goods, the personnel or, in this case, the journalist. Each truck also carried a person (known to the team as “the donkey”) who stayed on the walkie-talkie, reporting their location every few minutes. As we drove on the rutted, spine-jarring road to Kitchanga, one of the MSF staff told me about the children who’d been sexually assaulted, most of them so traumatized that they were barely coherent.
The next day I met one of them, ten-year-old Siffy (not her real name). Her enormous round eyes were soul-piercing as she told me about the men who raped her and left her for dead in the forest. Her story came in fragments. Her mother, Pascasie, had searched frantically for two days after Siffy went missing, but it’s hard to find a lone child in the African bush. At last Pascasie ran into a hunter who said he’d seen the girl’s body and would lead her there. Siffy was lying on her back, as still as the air, her arms spread, her skin covered with mosquito bites. Then her mother saw her take an almost imperceptible breath. Siffy wasn’t dead.
The merciless attack had left the girl perilously traumatized, but she lived to be an eyewitness to the worst atrocity known to women in a country convulsing with lawlessness. And by all accounts, it’s the women themselves who are poised to yank this pitiless place out of its fifteen-year-old date with the Devil.
Siffy’s conversation with me shifted between a deluge of facts and childlike requests to play. “The monsters are outside,” she told me, her eyes still showing fear. “They want to kill us. They hurt me. I want to go home. But we can’t go there now.” She’s not even a teenager yet, this child of Congo, a place where girls as young as she is know the difference between gang rape (one woman raped by many men), mass rape (all the women in the village raped) and re-rape (women raped again and again). “The monsters tortured my mother,” Siffy said. “They took our food. I’m afraid of the monsters. They are still at my home in Kalembe.”
Then she switched the subject with such telling facility that I knew she could only recount pieces of it at a time lest her young mind take flight. A dazzling smile washed away the pain that had clouded her face while she spoke of the monsters, and she pulled me into play—she loved doing high-fives.
The war in Congo has claimed 5.4 million lives since it began in 1997. The Red Cross says forty-five thousand more die every month. The health system has collapsed. The economy is devastated. There isn’t even an intact road to get from one side of the country to the other, and the DRC is bigger than Europe. June 30, 2010, marked its fiftieth anniversary of independence from Belgium, and for most of those years it’s been convulsed by multiple wars, human rights abuses and appalling suffering.
Congo is the country that Joseph Conrad described in Heart of Darkness. It’s a place with lush but mountainous terrain and topsoil so fertile that you can kick a seed into the ground and have a plant by week’s end. The rush of growth is the botanical equivalent of insanity: banana fronds big enough to shelter a grown man; floral excesses of orchids, lobelias and lilies splashing the landscape in saucy orange, crimson and delicate pink while white datura lilies lift off the lush green vegetation reaching for the sun. The earth is so mineral rich that the hillsides literally sparkle as though studded with broken glass. Endangered mountain gorillas live in Virunga National Park. Thatch-roofed huts are beginning to give way to corrugated steel roofs, but women and girls still carry goods on their heads and gather to wash their clothes in the streams that babble through the villages. The countryside is enchanting. But it is also where the pickaxe of the mining industry has unearthed a scenario so horrible that it suggests the loss of stability has led to madness.
Although the UN says the war is on the wane, there’s nothing to celebrate yet. North and South Kivu have the richest mineral deposits in the world; seven different militias supposedly protect them, armed to the teeth, often drunk and guilty of atrocities against women and girls. The rapes and ongoing war are usually ascribed to ethnic revenge, the fault of the Interahamwe paramilitaries from Rwanda, who flooded into Congo seeking escape from justice after the genocide; or it’s Ugandan and Rwandan militias intent on grabbing the country’s mineral wealth while the West looks on with complicity; or it’s the totally dysfunctional government of DRC’s president, Joseph Kabila, and his equally guilty military. In every scenario, gold, diamonds, coltan (used in cellphones and electronic tablets) and cassiterite (tin ore) are presented as the raison d’être for the militias and, as a result, the cause of the carnage for women. Rape is said to be retribution, an initiation ritual, a torture, a morale booster for troops, a means to humiliate and terrorize the population, a strategy for ethnic cleansing, a weapon of biological warfare for the spreading of HIV.
But who would rape a newborn baby to death for any of these reasons? Who would gang-rape a woman while forcing her terrified children to watch? Why on earth would a pair of soldiers believe that holding a woman down and slicing off her breasts with a machete would help protect mineral deposits? The wretched truth is this: in the absence of civility during the past dozen years of war, the men with the guns have descended into savagery. They bury people alive, draw and quarter their living, breathing captives, burn the villages they come across and rape and mutilate the women and girls.
And yet for the most part, the world is silent. Indeed, mention 5 million dead and hundreds of thousands of gang-raped women and children, and most people will say they had no idea.
Congolese women realize that their path out of this abyss is empowerment. But first they need to heal. Médecins Sans Frontières is on the front line of this war on women and has brought in therapists to deal with a population traumatized and reeling. The psychiatric therapy they bring is as valuable as the battlefield surgery they’re better known for. Christina Henriques from Holland is one of the MSF mental health officers in Congo. She stays in Kitchanga, a village that’s deep in the bush about a four-hour drive from Goma, where she serves women who have escaped their burning villages and hidden in the nearby woods. Almost every one of them has been raped at least once.
Henriques met Siffy last June. “She was severely traumatized. Her reactions were psychotic. The only piece of her own identity she could recall was her age—the number ten. If I asked how many pencils were on the table, or how many people were in the room or how many candies she would like, the reply was always the same—inchumi, the Kenyan Rwandan word for ‘ten.’ It took three and a half weeks of ninety-minute sessions each day before she said her name.”
Henriques had heard Siffy’s story from her mother, Pascasie. It was much like every other story: the militia arrives in a village, they tell the men and boys to leave and shoot those who don’t, then set fire to the thatch-roofed huts, rape the women and girls, steal the livestock and move on. But in this case, Pascasie had received warning that they were coming and ran to the hut she kept in the forest as a refuge, bringing Siffy and her three-year-old grandson with her. The militia discovered their hideout. They told Pascasie they knew she had a pig at home and instructed her to go with two of the soldiers to get it, and to take her grandson with her. They kept Siffy and promised they wouldn’t harm her if her mother gave them her pig. Once they were back at the village, the soldiers whacked Pascasie across the back with a machete and told her to lie down. With her terrified grandson watching, first one then the other raped her. “When I got back to the hut in the woods, my daughter was gone. It was after I’d found her and carried her back to the shelter, washed her and fed her, that I realized she was so traumatized she couldn’t speak. Six days later, we were strong enough to walk to another village. She started to have seizures and panicked whenever she saw men. When I heard about the therapist at MSF, I brought her here to Kitchanga.”
That’s where I met her—at the MSF therapy hut. Henriques handed Siffy a doll. She kept washing it over and over again, telling the therapist that the doll was dirty, that the monsters had hurt the doll. She was sweetly vulnerable and quick to smile, but she suffered from panic attacks and often thought there was someone chasing her. She drooled almost continuously, but when her mother reminded her to hold her saliva, she was able to, for a while. She held her right arm tucked into her side like a bird’s broken wing, but if you played high-five with her and suddenly switched from the left hand to the right, she poked that hand forward, not far, but the delighted look on her face made me think this blameless child might get her life back after all.
After the session, we walked to the hut where she lives with her mother in the woods outside Kitchanga and huddled on the soft earthen floor inside. Siffy had something she wanted to say, and she played with the buttons on her shirt while slowly getting to the point of a story that seemed to weigh like a stone on her shoulders. “There was shooting, a lot of shooting,” she said. “They hurt me,” she said again, as if to reassure herself that someone was listening. “The monsters have guns. They wear uniforms. They are soldiers. There was too much noise.” She stopped talking then. We exchanged another round of high-fives, and she gave me a smile so sweet that it was contagious. Then it disappeared and Siffy leaned forward and said, “I’m still afraid of the monsters. They’re still in Kalembe. Someone needs to make them go away.”
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One woman who came to Henriques’s clinic had witnessed her seven children and her husband being shot by the militia. After that, each of the men raped her in turn and she hoped she would die. When she didn’t, she asked her neighbours to kill her so she could be buried with her family. Another woman was rounded up with the rest of her village while soldiers set fire to their huts. Terrified, the villagers watched flames soar into the smoky sky as the huts burned to the ground. Then the soldiers opened fire. She survived simply because she was at the back of the pack and fell to the ground with the blood of her children and extended family running over her. She lay still until the brutes swaggered out of the village.
On a cloudy morning outside a cabin on the edge of the woods where they live, thirty-five women gathered in a circle with Henriques. They talked about their dreams of escape and the ghastly nightmares in which they relive the atrocities. They described the life of a typical Congolese woman. She does all the heavy lifting: she plants the crop, straps a tumpline to her forehead to carry back-breaking loads of charcoal and wood to sell in the city, she hauls the water and fetches firewood for her family. Yet here in the circle, the women, who were between the ages of twenty-two and seventy-five, told me, “We’re not equal to the men because we don’t wear the pants.” They spoke as one when they said, “We’re seen as worthless.”
But they also wanted to talk about how to change their condition. “No one says, ‘I’m sorry.’ No one apologizes. Husbands rape us, the military rape us, anyone can rape us. When men become soldiers here, they turn into animals. They want to kill us; it’s how men think.” When I asked the men hanging around in the nearby village why this happens, they offered appalling excuses: “Our commanders expect this of us; our women are away in Rwanda; if we don’t rape the women, the other men will think we aren’t real men.”
As the session drew to a close, one woman began to sing, her voice soaring into the treetops. Another woman joined her, then another. The Swahili words of the song meant “Thank you for bringing us together.” Soon the entire circle was singing. On the far side of the circle, a woman stood up to dance, then pulled me to my feet to join her. In a moment we were thirty-seven women dancing, singing, rejoicing in one another’s company—their experiences of brutality laid to rest for the moment.
With MSF, I drove farther into the province to Nyanzale, where there’d been a sudden increase in mass rape. At the MSF clinic at the top of the hill overlooking the village, a psychologist named Ange Mpala was trying to work miracles with survivors who were anxious, discouraged and exhausted. She said, “There’s physical pain in the back and the stomach when you’ve been raped. The victims feel dirty and wounded deep inside. They all need treatment within seventy-two hours to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.” But shame kept many away—that and the fear of being found out and rejected by their families.
The worst cases that Ange Mpala sees are the women and girls with fistulas. The result of rape so violent that the wall between the anus or the bladder and the vagina is torn, a fistula allows urine and feces to leak into the vagina; such extensive damage to her body also creates a terrible odour that ostracizes the woman from others. Mpala sends those patients to Goma for surgery.
“Together we need to denounce this,” she said. “Even if a woman doesn’t know who raped her, all the women need to stand up and say, ‘In this place there was a rape.’ They need to break the silence.” Posters declaring “Silence Is Violence” paper the walls of the MSF clinics in Congo. Mpala is one of hundreds of women who have recently called for change: demanding that the UN fulfil its duty to protect by sending in more troops, calling on women everywhere to support the courageous people here seeking change and attempting to persuade Congolese women that stopping violence is a fight they can win.
Such atrocities tend to paralyze the change-makers. No sooner has a law been enacted that makes rape a war crime, and the UN Security Council has finally acknowledged that rape is being used as a strategy of war, than it’s necessary to immediately confront the fact that some depraved humans will bring misogyny to dreadful new levels, no matter the worldwide condemnation they face.
~
A cautionary tale was told at the Nobel women’s conference about the speed at which the gains women make can be lost. In 1996, a peace agreement brought Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war to a close. The conflict had caused thousands of civilian deaths, over 90,000 unsolved disappearances and more than 100,000 cases of sexual violence. After the peace accord was signed, women had become more aware of their rights and some political space had opened for them, says Luz Méndez, the vice-president of the executive board of the National Union of Guatemalan Women. “Inside the women’s movement, we say the peace accords were a marking line. We had more opportunity to speak out, get organized to fight for our rights.” But after the war was over, organized crime and narco-traffickers soon moved in. She says, “Now the bandits attack women just because they are women.”
The violence that the drug traffickers imported with them altered the landscape outside the home, and the old violence against wives and daughters inside the home resurfaced as well. “Women dare not walk on the street today,” Méndez says, “but, worse, the assaults against women have spread like a virus to their own homes.” Although the violence at home is affecting all classes of society, the narco-violence is targeting mainly the lower economic classes on the street—the very women who have to venture outside to get to work. Méndez describes an all-too-common occurrence: a bus is hijacked and driven to a dark place, where all the women are taken out and raped. “Every day we hear one of our colleagues has had a problem concerning violence on the street or in the bus. Violence is impacting our lives very much. We changed the legislation; we have pretty good laws protecting our rights. We managed to create institutions. But this social problem of violence against women hinders our possibility to move and hinders our rights as citizens.”
Eighty percent of the drug-trafficking from south to north goes through Guatemala. Drug money has corrupted state institutions and imperilled the lives of 15 million people. Security and judicial institutions that have been historically weak are worse now that the drug barons have infiltrated them. Gang members cruise around the towns and cities threatening government officials, attacking and terrifying women. But in Guatemala it’s not law enforcement or government institutions seeking ways to keep women safe and defeat the silence and secrecy that causes rape survivors to blame themselves, it’s the grassroots women’s organizations themselves. Women have learned to be patient, to wear governments down with never-ending petitions, to bowl naysayers over with ironclad data. Their tenacity has led to changes one might never have expected, like the announcement in Pakistan in January 2012 that the country’s senate had approved two bills that would better protect women and girls. The bills created harsher punishments for acid attacks on women (more than eighty-five hundred reported in one year alone, according to the Aurat Foundation, a local organization committed to women’s empowerment and citizen participation in governance) and criminalized the tribal law called Bad, the trading of young girls to settle tribal disputes. The bills also reversed the inheritance laws that prevented women from inheriting property. It was a good step forward for a country that the activist Farida Shaheed worries is at risk from fundamentalists. Shaheed knows that extremists are close to the government—sometimes part of it. Like women in Guatemala and elsewhere, women in Pakistan need to stay vigilant to protect their gains.
Gender justice is being examined in developed countries as well. Canada, the United States, Scandinavia, Europe and Australia all made significant strides in equality rights for women in the last half of the twentieth century. But along the way, the rights of Aboriginal women were ignored, just as Aboriginal people themselves were left out of equality equations in nation-building. When Amnesty International accused Canada of overlooking the possible serial killing of Aboriginal women in two reports, one written in 2003 and the next in 2009, they reminded Canadians that violence against Aboriginal women is a long-held and nasty secret. Their plight was the theme of George Ryga’s brilliant play, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, first performed at Vancouver’s Playhouse in 1967. Later adapted as a ballet and translated into French, the play focused on violence perpetrated against the young Rita Joe at the hands of an entitled white society. When she was killed, nobody paid attention—which rang all too true in Canada.
So in 2003, when Amnesty International released its first report, Stolen Sisters, no one was really surprised that it addressed the fact that too many Aboriginal women were missing in western Canada and not enough attention was being paid by the Canadian government. The report opened with the story of a woman whose name had become a symbol of struggle and the miscarriage of justice for the country’s Aboriginal women.
Helen Betty Osborne was a 19-year-old Cree student from northern Manitoba who dreamed of becoming a teacher. On November 12, 1971, she was abducted by four white men in the town of The Pas and then sexually assaulted and brutally murdered. A provincial inquiry subsequently concluded that Canadian authorities had failed Helen Betty Osborne. The inquiry criticized the sloppy and racially biased police investigation that took more than 15 years to bring one of the four men to justice. Most disturbingly, the inquiry concluded that police had long been aware of white men sexually preying on Indigenous women and girls in The Pas but “did not feel that the practice necessitated any particular vigilance.”
The sixty-seven-page report ended with a pointed demand that the government do something about it.
Canadian officials have a clear and inescapable obligation to ensure the safety of Indigenous women, to bring those responsible for attacks against them to justice, and to address the deeper problems of marginalization, dispossession and impoverishment that have placed so many Indigenous women in harm’s way.
Amnesty International included a petition with the report and encouraged all Canadians to sign it on behalf of the Stolen Sisters. It reads:
Young Aboriginal women in Canada are at least five times more likely than other women in Canada to die as a result of violence. Not enough is being done to ensure that these crimes are adequately investigated, or to address the discrimination and impoverishment that put so many Aboriginal women in harm’s way. We, the undersigned, urge the Government of Canada to work with Aboriginal women and Aboriginal peoples’ organizations to develop a national plan of action to stop violence against Indigenous women. Such a plan of action must:
• Recognize the high levels of violence faced by Aboriginal women because they are Aboriginal women.
• Ensure effective, unbiased police response through appropriate training, resources and coordination.
• Improve public awareness and accountability through the consistent collection and publication of comprehensive national statistics on violent crime against Aboriginal women.
• Reduce the risk to Aboriginal women by closing the economic and social gap between Aboriginal and non Aboriginal people in Canada.
The petition got plenty of signatures. But successive governments failed to take action, instead obfuscating, delaying and basically ignoring the issue. For instance, when the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women released its final report on violence against Aboriginal women in December 2011, the Harper government completely ignored the report, as well as the input of the Aboriginal women who had appeared before the committee.
The Native Women’s Association along with the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action took their complaint to the UN. And the UN, in keeping with the resolutions it has written (and rarely acted on) on violence against women, decided in December 2011 to send a team to conduct an inquiry into the murders and disappearances of hundreds of Aboriginal women and girls in Canada, based on violations of the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).*
Relying on the Amnesty International reports, the CEDAW committee noted that in 2008 the Canadian government had failed to live up to its obligations, and had failed again in 2010, stating, “The Committee considers that its recommendation [regarding missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls] has not been implemented and it requests the Canadian authorities to urgently provide further information on measures undertaken to address such concerns.” No information was forthcoming. So CEDAW called for its own investigation into a situation that Canada had refused to acknowledge.
When twenty-three independent experts from around the world came to Canada, a country that prides itself on being a defender of human rights, to investigate a national tragedy that the federal government had ignored, it was strong medicine for “the true north.” Mary Eberts, who acts as legal counsel for the Native Women’s Association says, “This is the first time CEDAW has done an investigation in a developed country. It’s a big black eye for Canada.”
The inquiry wasn’t a criminal investigation; it was more about asking questions and writing a report for the UN. Although their findings have not been made public, it is already known that Aboriginal women in Canada experience rates of violence three and a half times higher than non-Aboriginal women, and young Aboriginal women are five times more likely to die by violence. Aboriginal women in Australia, New Zealand and the United States and much of Central America also suffer from increased violence as well as poorer health and more poverty.
Eberts has no hope for government action even when the UN report does come out because “officials are woefully bad at doing due diligence. Nothing happens because of indifference.” But that doesn’t mean the report won’t have an effect, she says. “Women have to stop relying on governments to make change. Politicians love to talk about change; they talk for years about water quality, about Aboriginals, about the environment. But the resistance to change is endemic. CEDAW doesn’t have the clout to make Canada do anything. But this report will build awareness with Canadians.”
Cindy Blackstock, the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, is preparing for action. “Within the hierarchy of First Nations, women have one of the most sacred roles—we are the life givers. With every generation there comes a chance to make the world anew. We have the possibility as women to truly shape the future, the future of humanity.”
~
During the past decade, women’s rights have shifted from the margins to the centre of discourse in international law after a collection of conferences provided the tools for change: the United Nations Decade for Women, the Vienna Declaration on Violence against Women and the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing. The sea change today is that women are ready to talk, and everyone knows that if you can talk about it, you can change it.
It takes men and women together to make a healthier, safer and more prosperous future. From Molly Melching, the woman who invited the religious leaders to help her group lead the way to ending female genital mutilation in Senegal, to Hangama Anwari, the human rights commissioner who enlisted the mullahs in Afghanistan to reform family law, to Cindy Blackstock, the Canadian advocate for Aboriginal women, to the economists and policy-makers who are calling for the recognition of women’s beneficial impact on wealth making and well-being: all these people are seeking changes that are not only good for women but for men too. They are calling violence what it is. They are tackling inequality where it is. They are finding the courage to stand up to brutality and say, “Never again.”
They are understanding that the ascent of women is good for everyone.
* Like most countries, Canada is a signatory to CEDAW and also to the Optional Protocol, which outlines a process for initiating an inquiry when the CEDAW Committee receives “reliable information indicating grave or systemic violations.”