Female Combatants in Three Civil Wars
How do the dynamics of female recruitment play out in actual civil wars? A potentially fruitful first step in evaluating the theoretical claims put forth in the preceding chapters is to trace the patterns of female recruitment in multiple contemporary rebellions. In the preceding chapters, I developed a series of arguments regarding the decisions of rebel leaders to recruit female combatants and deploy them in combat, and I explored the potential implications of this decision in terms of a group’s ability to mobilize human resources and secure support from external actors. In order to probe the plausibility of these hypotheses, and to explore the dynamics driving female recruitment, I present a series of short case studies.
The three vignettes presented in this chapter focus on the PKK (and its allied militias) in Turkey and Syria,1 the LTTE in Sri Lanka, and ZANLA and ZIPRA in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. These cases are chosen in part to reflect sociocultural and geographic differences that might also account for variations in women’s participation. The PKK’s ongoing separatist rebellion, for example, is located in various contiguous Muslim-majority states in the Middle East, and the vast majority of its fighters are members of the Kurdish minority group. The LTTE’s decades-long civil war took place in a small, Buddhist-majority state in South Asia, where members of the primarily Hindu Tamil minority engaged in a violent secessionist struggle against the Singhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government. Last, ZANLA’s and ZIPRA’s interrelated anticolonial rebellions occurred in a Christian-majority sub-Saharan African state under white minority rule. The memberships of both armed resistance groups were drawn from the majority black population of the country. However, ZANLA recruited more heavily from the Shona-speaking population and operated out of bases in Mozambique and Zambia while ZIPRA recruited primarily from the Ndebele-speaking population and operated almost exclusively from bases in Zambia.
Despite the geographic and cultural variations among the conflict settings, social norms related to women’s roles and status in society are similar across the cases to the extent that, in each, women have historically been excluded from positions of power, have been viewed as subordinate to male family members (particularly fathers and husbands), and have experienced systematic marginalization in their access to social, educational, and economic opportunities.2 Thus, in none of these cases does societal gender equality or women’s level of political empowerment convincingly explain the leaders’ decisions to recruit, train, and deploy thousands of women as guerrilla fighters.3 Rather, prevailing social gender norms more likely served as strong deterrents against the large-scale mobilization of female fighters.
The vignettes included in this chapter are not intended to serve as direct assessments of the hypotheses presented in chapters 1 and 2. I rely on the quantitative analyses presented in the two following chapters for that purpose. These brief case studies are instead intended to illustrate the validity of the arguments put forth in the previous chapters and to highlight how various elements of the arguments apply to a set of a historical examples. While case-specific factors undoubtedly played important roles in determining the presence and prevalence of female combatants within the aforementioned rebel movements, the case studies highlight the importance of both resource demands and the group’s ideological orientation in determining the leadership’s attitude toward female recruitment. In addition, the cases help highlight the manner in which the leaders of the organization utilized the presence of female combatants to garner additional strategic benefits once women had been integrated into the movement. They therefore provide preliminary support to the primary arguments set out in the previous chapters.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party
The PKK, with an ideology deeply rooted in radical Marxist-Leninism, closely adheres to the expectations I outlined early in the book. In line with the arguments I put forth in chapter 1, the PKK boasts a high prevalence of female combatants: by most available estimates, they constitute more than a third of the PKKs combat forces (Marcus 2007). Women have been active participants in the PKK since the earliest days of the movement; however, the proportion of women in the organization was initially quite low, and female combatants only came to represent a substantial portion of the group’s fighting force several years after the onset of the conflict. For instance, only two women, Sakine Cansiz and Kesire Yildirim (the wife of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan), were reportedly present at the organization’s founding meeting in 1978 (France24 2013; van Bruinessen 2001, 106).4 By the time large-scale violence erupted in 1984, numerous female combatants served in the PKK, many of whom joined explicitly to escape the restrictions and expectations placed on them by traditional society (e.g., forced marriage) (Özeren et al. 2014; Tezcür 2015, 258). Yet the number of female guerilla fighters in the PKK appears to have only reached its current levels some time in the mid-1990s.
The combination of political ideology and resource demands largely accounts for the expansion of women’s participation in the group over time. Consistent with the arguments presented in chapter 1, women’s recruitment into the PKK was partly facilitated by the revolutionary ideology of the organization, which called for a radical (violent) reorganization of social and political institutions. Importantly, however, the following discussion also demonstrates the potentially endogenous nature of group ideology and its instrumental use in conflict. While the Marxist ideology of the PKK helps explain women’s presence at the onset of the conflict and their inclusion (in small numbers) throughout the early years of the armed struggle, the leadership’s (i.e., Abdullah Öcalan’s) attention to gender egalitarianism and women’s rights as an aspect of that broader ideology only becomes apparent later in the conflict. Specifically, it appears that the rapid expansion of the conflict in the early 1990s encouraged a sharp increase in the proportion of women combatants in the PKK.
Ideology and Egalitarianism
The leadership of the PKK has (at least rhetorically) made women’s rights a central component of its political message, particularly in recent years. In one of the dozen or more essays available on the group’s website that elaborates the PKK’s perspective on women and gender equality, Abdullah Öcalan (2015a) declares that “the level of woman’s freedom and equality determines the freedom and equality of all sections of society.… Liberated woman constitutes liberated society.” In another essay, Öcalan (2015b) more fully articulates the underpinnings of this gender egalitarian ethos:
I have often written about … the ability to divorce from the five thousand years old culture of male domination. The female and male gender identities that we know today are constructs that were formed much later than the biological female and male. Woman has been exploited for thousands of years according to this constructed identity; never acknowledged for her labour. Man has to overcome always seeing woman as wife, sister, or lover—stereotypes forged by tradition and modernity.
Both statements reflect a (rhetorical) commitment to women’s rights and gender equality. However, what is most interesting about the latter is that it reflects more than a commitment to societal equality or a vague claim to support women’s rights. Rather, it incorporates language and ideas that are central to contemporary notions of gender egalitarianism, particularly in its recognition of the distinction between the social construction of gender and biological sex. Moreover, it explicitly acknowledges the historical subjugation of women and insists that men must alter both their behaviors toward women and their core attitudes and beliefs regarding women’s status in society. While such positions would not necessarily be seen as revolutionary in the context of most contemporary Western cosmopolitan societies, they are fairly striking given that they emanate from the leader of an armed movement located in a predominantly rural and underdeveloped region of the Middle East where traditional gender norms are deeply embedded.
While skeptics might charge that such statements are purely superficial and not indicative of any real commitment to egalitarianism, there is at least some evidence that the PKK has made a concerted effort to translate this rhetoric into policy and practice. Within the organization at least, it appears that rank-and-file members have increasingly internalized the leadership’s gender egalitarian message. Both male and female PKK guerrillas appear to have become increasingly aware of the impact of traditional social structures on women’s opportunities, become better able to recognize entrenched gender inequalities, and in some cases have begun to adopt the language of women’s rights (van Bruinessen 2001, 105–106). In terms of policy applications, the PKK and its allied factions have imposed laws banning polygamy, child marriage, and unilateral divorce. Laws ensuring equal inheritance between male and female heirs have also been imposed in areas liberated by the PKK, and therein women now frequently serve in positions of political leadership (Bengio 2016, 38–39).
Paul White (2015, 146–149) further claims that since the early 1990s, the PKK has transformed itself into a “feminist organization” through encouraging women’s leadership and the establishment of autonomous women’s organizations at every level of the movement. It is also worth noting that PKK-allied Kurdish factions, such as PJAK in Iran and the YPG in Syria, have adopted similar positions on women’s rights and implemented similar policies.5 Consequently, the available evidence suggests that the group’s Marxist ideology—albeit one that has been strongly shaped by Öcalan’s own interpretations and beliefs—has exerted a powerful influence on the prevalence of female combatants in the movement as well as the positions that they fill and the status they enjoy. Yet, as I discuss in the next section, resource demands also help explain women’s participation in the PKK. Moreover, the role of the group’s ideology, particularly its attention to gender equality, in recruiting female combatants is not necessarily independent of the influence of resource constraints: the two factors jointly determined the growth in numbers of female fighters in the group in the early 1990s.
Resource Demands and Conflict Intensity
In chapter 1, I identified resource demands as a central factor explaining rebel leadership’s decision to recruit and deploy female combatants, especially in large numbers. In the absence of a fundamentalist or orthodox religious ideology, rising resource demands incentivize rebel groups to recruit women and to deploy them in combat roles. The PKK’s recruitment patterns largely conform to this expectation. While women had been present in the movement since its inception, there is little indication that the group included more than a handful of female operatives in its armed wing until the early 1980s. By that time, women routinely participated in the group’s combat activities, though in fairly small numbers. However, beginning in the early 1990s, the gender composition of the PKK underwent a dramatic change, and the number of women fighting for the PKK rapidly increased (Tezcür 2015, 258). By as early as 1993, female fighters composed upward of a third of the rebel combat forces, and that number has remained remarkably consistent over time (Marcus 2007, 172–173; White 2015, 140–142).
While numerous factors potentially explain the rapid growth of female fighters in the movement’s ranks, the timing of the change appears to correspond to a number of interrelated factors, including a shift in the PKK’s recruitment strategy, which increasingly targeted university students and urban centers, as well as an increase in Öcalan’s use of rhetoric related to women’s rights and gender equality. Ideology, which is largely a static factor, would seem to be a poor predictor of the change in the rate of women’s participation in the movement. However, it appears that Öcalan’s commitment to gender egalitarianism—or at least his reliance on the rhetoric of gender equality—increased during the conflict. Notably, as the conflict lengthened and escalated, Öcalan increasingly made clear his belief that women’s participation was vital to the success of the revolution (Celebi 2010, 108). Aliza Marcus (2007, 173), for instance, observes that the jump in the PKK’s recruitment of female fighters coincides with Öcalan’s more vocal stance on women’s rights and his assertion that the liberation of women was a core responsibility of the revolution.
As with many rebel movements that include female combatants, women’s issues were largely dismissed in the early years of the rebellion, and female members were generally treated as an indistinct component of the larger guerrilla organization. Despite the increasing presence of women in the PKK, their efforts to raise gender issues, discuss women’s rights apart from national liberation, or organize a separate female movement were viewed by the leadership as potential threats to the group’s cohesion. By late 1992, however, the leadership had constructed a separate women’s organization within the PKK (Celebi 2010, 108).6 This decision appears to have been made partly to address the interests and concerns of the group’s growing number of female members. However, some observers maintain that expanding the group’s recruitment capacity was Öcalan’s primary motive for both the construction of a women’s organization within the PKK and the impetus for more explicitly advocating the group’s commitment to women’s rights (Celebi 2010, 108–109). Thus, the decision may have been driven as much by strategy as by ideology. Though, given the presence of women in the organization in its earlier years, it would be difficult to dismiss these actions as strictly instrumental.
These changes in the group’s rhetoric, recruitment strategy, and organizational structures regarding female members correspond to periods of increasing resource demands imposed on the PKK. While best characterized as a low-intensity conflict throughout most of the 1980s, by 1992 the conflict had escalated to a full-blown civil war, resulting in thousands of battle-related deaths per year. It was in the context of this rapid intensification of the conflict that the PKK’s leadership actively embraced the large-scale recruitment of female fighters. This relationship is borne out by the data presented in figure 3.1. The figure presents the estimated number of battle-related deaths (y-axis) produced in each year of the conflict (x-axis) (Lacina and Gleditsch 2005; UCDP 2018). The dotted vertical lines that cross the x-axis at 1990 and 1993 represent the window of time during which most sources suggest that the PKK began to dramatically increase the number of female combatants within its ranks.7
Overall, the figure suggests that the timing of the increase in female combatants in the PKK corresponds to a window of time during which the costs of the conflict—and by extension the resource pressures faced by the PKK—were rapidly increasing. Specifically, the annual number of deaths attributed to the conflict increased from about eight hundred in 1989–1991 to more than four thousand in 1993, representing a five-fold increase. While not all of the causalities captured in the figure were borne by the PKK, the sharply increasing intensity of the conflict during the period likely imposed substantial resource demands on the PKK.8 Most notably, given the high rate annual deaths, the group faced intense pressure to replace troops lost in combat in order to resist defeat at the hands of the Turkish military forces.
Figure 3.1 presents a general picture of the rising conflict costs during the window in which female recruitment by the PKK increased. However, a more detailed accounting of the conflict further highlights the correlation between rising resource demands and female recruitment. Beginning in the early 1990s, the number of confrontations between the PKK and the Turkish military rapidly increased, troop losses skyrocketed, and some of the group’s units were forced to relocate outside of Turkey (Marcus 2007, 142). The group’s ability to mobilize resources briefly increased in the early 1990s as a result of the combination of access to territory in northern Iraq following the Gulf War, a series of popular uprisings in towns along the Iraqi and Syrian borders, and growing Kurdish resentment of the brutality of Turkish counterinsurgency tactics. However, its power peaked by 1992, and thereafter the group lost ground to an expanding counterinsurgency campaign mounted by the superior forces of the Turkish military (Tezcür 2015, 259).
Figure 3.1 Annual battle deaths during the PKK insurgency
Sources: Data on battle deaths from Lacina and Gleditsch (2005) and UCDP (2018)
It was also during this period that PKK violence against civilians peaked. Based on data from the Global Terrorist Database (START 2016), there were roughly 80 terrorist incidents attributed to the PKK in 1989; however, that number rose to more than 350 by 1992.9 Similarly, according to data available from the UCDP (2018), the PKK was directly responsible for approximately 70 civilian deaths in 1989, but that number rose to more than 200 in 1992 and to over 400 in 1993.10 I reference these figures because the use of terrorism and intentional attacks on civilian targets is indicative of the resource stresses imposed on the PKK. Prior studies have repeatedly demonstrated that violence against civilian targets increases when rebels face increased competition for resources, declining military capabilities, or mounting troop losses (see Hultman 2007; R. Wood 2014). Coupled with the observation that the counterinsurgency campaign against the PKK was intensifying during this time period, it is reasonable to infer from the sharp increase in terror and anticivilian violence during this period that the PKK faced substantial resource constraints, and that these pressures provoked the leadership to consider new strategies by which to ensure its survival and expand the rebellion. That it was during this window of time that the PKK sought to dramatically expand women’s participation in the movement suggests that it might have viewed this effort as one strategy through which to accomplish those goals.
As noted above, while present in the ranks from the outset, women constituted a fairly small number of the PKK’s combatants in the 1980s. However, by 1993 they made up at least a third of the group’s combat forces. The timing of the influx of female combatants into the PKK is therefore largely consistent with the predictions of the arguments presented in chapter 1. Specifically, resource pressures incentivized the group to search for alternative resource mobilization strategies in order to ensure group survival. The revolutionary Marxist ideology of the PKK and its stated objective of radically altering the existing social order, which partly explains the presence of women in small numbers in earlier stages of the rebellion, posed no deterrent to the leadership’s willingness to meet their recruitment needs by incorporating larger numbers of women into the group’s fighting force. Rather, the existing ideology facilitated this decision and likely created the opportunity for Öcalan to more explicitly highlight the centrality of women’s rights and gender equality in the group’s ethos. The explicit focus on gender equality, while perhaps present in some vague or nascent way early on, appears to have rapidly developed in the same window of time during which the group was recruiting larger numbers of female combatants. This implies that the ideological evolution may have been at least partly instrumental, reflecting Öcalan’s efforts to mobilize more troops.
Media Attention, Propaganda, and External Support
The use of female combatants as a propaganda tool represented a primary component of chapter 2. As I argued, highlighting women’s participation is often intended to attract greater attention from external audiences, increase audience perceptions of the legitimacy of the group’s cause, and induce greater sympathy for the movement and its troops. Importantly, these factors are typically not drivers of the group’s initial decision to recruit female combatants; rather, these potential benefits are generally realized only after the group has already begun incorporating women into its fighting force. Nonetheless, the decision to include women in the group’s public outreach and propaganda materials represents a clear strategy intended to influence audience attitudes and assist the group’s efforts to mobilize support and resources.
With the exception of a handful of other movements (e.g., the LTTE), the female combatants of the PKK have arguably received more international attention than almost any other female fighters. As I noted in chapter 2, the international media have devoted substantial attention to the “badass women” of the PKK and their participation in the group’s conflict with ISIS. Based on the results of a search via LexisNexis, nearly four hundred English-language newspaper articles and newswire stories about the PKK (and its allied militias) published between 2010 and 2017 explicitly referenced female combatants in their titles—a rate of roughly fifty articles per year.11 Notably, stories of Kurdish female guerrillas appeared not only in online and print news article but also in the pages of popular magazines, including fashion publications such as Vogue, Elle, and Marie Claire.12 The prevalence of articles referencing Kurdish female fighters highlights the salience of the topic among (predominantly) Western readers.
The case of the “Angel of Kobane” stands out as a particularly illustrative example of the effect that images of Kurdish female fighters have exerted on external audience interest and attitudes toward the conflict. In late 2014 and early 2015, the Kurdish YPG and ISIS forces engaged in a series of brutal battles for control of the city of Kobane, which is located on the Turkish-Syrian border. During the months-long fighting, a series of stories and accompanying images of a young Kurdish female sniper who had reportedly killed more than one hundred ISIS terrorists emerged on Twitter and Facebook. The story of the heroic peasant-girl-turned-combatant named “Rehana” was shared thousands of times on social media and became a symbol of resistance to ISIS throughout the region (BBC 2014a; Del Re 2015, 91). Moreover, the image of the young female combatant and her heroic narrative focused the attention of tens of thousands of external social media viewers on the conflict in Syria.
The story’s explicit focus on an individual female fighter and her personal story—including a discussion of her preconflict life as a law student in Aleppo and her father’s death in the conflict—closely adheres to the gendered media narratives I discussed in chapter 1. It provides personal information about the subject and attempts to rationalize or explain the motives for her unexpected and seemingly exceptional participation in combat. As such, it is partly intended to (or may have had the effect of) garnering sympathy and attention for the fighter and, by extension, for the rebel group for whom she fights. Interestingly, as if to underscore the impact the narrative exerted on the conflict, ISIS’s propaganda wing began (falsely) reporting that its forces had captured and beheaded Rehana, which in turn sparked a counter campaign by online supporters of the YPG to demonstrate that she was alive and well (Hall 2014; Varghese 2015). Coverage of this story in Western media further spread this narrative to a wider audience.13
The effectiveness of images of female guerrillas in attracting attention and soliciting support has not been lost on the PKK’s leadership. The organization has long used the female fighters within its ranks as a way to encourage both domestic and international support. The presence of armed women among the contingents of guerrilla fighters that distribute propaganda material and recruit new members in Kurdish villages exerts a powerful influence on local observers. Consistent with anecdotes from other conflicts regarding the power of female combatants to boost male recruitment, reluctant Kurdish men were reportedly “shamed into action” when they realized young women were fighting with the PKK (Marcus 2007, 172). Young women, on the other hand, were often emboldened and empowered by the knowledge that women could directly participate in the rebellion alongside men. This projection of power had an enduring effect on some women, and many joined the PKK after meeting female fighters or seeing their images on PKK propaganda material (Gunes 2012, 120; Marcus 2007, 172–173; Tezcür 2015, 258).
The PKK and its allied militias in Syria and Iran have also routinely employed digital media, including their own websites, to explicitly highlight the prevalence of female fighters within the movement, showcase the sacrifices made by these fighters, and emphasize the groups’ support for women’s rights.14 The official website of the PKK includes links to Öcalan’s numerous essays on the topics of gender equality and women’s rights, each available in English. The website of the YPG is also available in English and features numerous photos, videos, and stories of its female combatants. For instance, in one English-subtitled video posted on the website, a young woman named Delila recounts her experiences fighting for the group on the Rajo front, explains her motives for taking up arms, and asserts her (and her comrades’) willingness to persevere in the fight for her people’s freedom. Another English-subtitled video profiles a group of female fighters of the YPJ, an all-female PKK-aligned militia, battling ISIS in Raqqa, Syria. This video was originally produced by the international news agency Agence France-Presse and thus highlights the manner in which rebel groups often utilize sympathetic press coverage to help frame the movement and its goals. The website also includes a glossy eighteen-minute documentary-style English-narrated and subtitled video that explains the YPJ’s association with the YPG and provides an overview of the group’s goals and ideology. Most notably, it intentionally directs viewer attention to the group’s focus on advancing women’s rights and gender equality in the region and provides interviews with several YPJ members, who explain their motives for joining the movement and their understanding of the group’s ideology and goals.15
These organizations also use social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to focus audience attention on women’s participation. The Twitter account for the YPG (@DefenseUnits) currently has more than 60,000 followers, while the account for the YPJ (@DefenseUnitsYPJ) has more than 50,000 followers. On Facebook, the (seemingly) official page of the YPG Press Office counts more than half a million followers. As with the other information platforms used by these groups, the Facebook site devotes substantial attention to the presence and roles of the female combatants in the organization.
Sympathetic NGOs have also used traditional and digital media to highlight the prevalence of female combatants in the Kurdish forces. Among the most visible of the groups advocating on behalf of the Kurdish rebellions is an organization called The Kurdish Project. This nonprofit organization positions itself as a “cultural-education initiative” devoted to raising awareness about Kurdish culture among Western audiences.16 However, a substantial amount of the information included on the group’s website is devoted to the presence of female combatants in the various armed Kurdish organizations, particularly the YPG/YPJ. The organization also supports Females on the Frontlines, a website explicitly devoted to Kurdish female fighters.17 The website is dominated by a short, highly polished video (with accompanying soundtrack) that is reminiscent of Western military recruitment commercials. The video closes with text asserting that the Kurdish female fighters bravely risk their lives each day to protect others, break gender norms, and fight for equality. The site also includes information on the prevalence of female fighters in the Kurdish forces (broadly defined), including a graphic comparing the proportion of the female combatants therein to the proportion of female troops in the national forces of several countries. Based on the statistics reported, the Kurdish forces contain the highest prevalence of female combatants in the world. A section of the website entitled “Meet the Women” includes photos, brief biographies, and quotes from various women purported to be members of the Kurdish forces. In addition, the website asserts that Kurdish female fighters routinely communicate with the world via social media and invites users to send a text or video message to these women via a hashtag provided on the page or through links available on the page.
The information presented on these websites is consistent with the arguments made in chapter 2 regarding the group’s efforts to highlight the presence and participation of female members through its propaganda materials. As I argued, this effort is intended to assist the group in establishing its legitimacy and attracting the sympathy of external audiences. The PKK and its allied militias have made a concerted effort to attract attention and sympathy from external audiences. Particularly, the PKK’s designation as a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union has placed substantial constraints on the movement. For this reason, it has for years endeavored to be removed from these governments’ official lists of terrorist actors. The PKK’s effort to highlight the presence of female fighters and its advocacy of gender equality and women’s rights are, in part, intended to challenge the dominant narrative that it is a brutal terrorist organization and to promote a counternarrative in which it is a legitimate political actor that supports democracy, human rights, and women’s rights.
Importantly, there is some evidence that this propaganda offensive is succeeding. First, it is worth noting that, despite its close connection to the PKK, the YPG has never been added to these lists of terrorist organizations. Second, numerous scholars, activists, and some policymakers in the United States and the European Union have called for their governments to reconsider the PKK’s terrorist designation, particularly in light of its role in the fight against ISIS. A petition to remove the PKK from the U.S. terror list, posted on the White House website, gathered more than 33,000 signatures, and a similar position posted on the UK Parliament’s website garnered 6,000 signatures.18 While it is difficult to establish a causal link between the group’s (and its allies’) frequent use of women in its propaganda materials and the apparent support it has gained among international audiences in recent years, the general relationship is consistent with argument in chapter 2.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
While not as prevalent among the LTTE as among the PKK, female combatants nonetheless represented a substantial portion of the LTTE’s fighting force. Estimates of the proportion of female combatants in the group vary, but most sources suggest that, at peak, female fighters constituted between 15 and 30 percent of the LTTE fighting force, with the former probably representing a more realistic estimate (Alison 2003, 39; Gonzalez-Perez 2008, 62; Stack-O’Connor 2007a, 45). As with the PKK, ideology partly explains the high prevalence of female combatants in the LTTE. Unlike the PKK, the LTTE did not overtly fuse Marxist ideology and nationalist beliefs. Nonetheless, it cultivated a revolutionary nationalist ideology that played an important role in facilitating female recruitment, particularly as the conflict intensified in the late 1980s. Moreover, as I discuss below, the LTTE was particularly adept at utilizing the presence of female combatants to garner support and sympathy from domestic and foreign audiences.
Nationalist Ideology and Women’s Rights
Tamil autonomy from the Sri Lankan state represented the primary motive for the LTTE’s rebellion, and this goal was reflected in the LTTE leadership’s nationalist ideology. The group’s leadership publicized the systematic political exclusion, social discrimination, and violence perpetrated by the Singhalese-dominated government against the country’s minority Tamil population in order to mobilize support for national independence. As is common among nationalist groups, the LTTE cultivated an independence narrative that drew inspiration from the (supposed) grandeur and power enjoyed by the Tamil community prior to its incorporation into the modern Sri Lankan state, and it incorporated symbols of Tamil history and culture in its political messaging and propaganda (Hellman-Rajanayagam 1994, 54–56).
While espousing a broadly nationalist ideology, the specific political belief structure of the LTTE was more complex. Velupillai Prabhakaran, the group’s longtime leader, blended nationalist goals with a belief system that called for the revolutionary restructuring of traditional Tamil society. Notably, the LTTE’s ideology called for the rejection and disestablishment of inegalitarian and oppressive traditional social structures, including the caste system and practices and laws that limited women’s rights and opportunities (e.g., dowry and marriage laws) (Alison 2009, 126; DeVotta 2009, 1035; Hellmann-Rajanayagam 1994, 69–70). As with the PKK, some skeptics have claimed that the group’s advocacy of women’s rights was largely rhetorical and did not reflect a deep commitment to gender equality (Herath 2012, 57). Yet, in the areas the LTTE controlled, the group sought to implement policies that expanded legal protections and rights for women (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2008, 7; Stokke 2006, 1027). In this sense, the LTTE’s ideology of revolutionary national liberation shared some similarities with Marxist-inspired ideologies like those that guide the PKK. In spite of the occasionally leftist tone adopted by Prabhakaran, there is little evidence he was ever committed to Marxism (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 1994, 56, 68; Staniland 2014, 152).
The prevalence of women in secular nationalist movements like the LTTE underscores two points made in chapter 2 about the relationship between ideology and the gender inclusivity of rebel movements. First, a Marxist-inspired ideology is not a prerequisite for female combatants; however, the large-scale recruitment of female fighters likely requires a willingness on the part of the movement’s leadership to challenge traditional social structures as well as the authorities that seek to defend them. This feature is largely absent in—and antithetical to—armed movements that espouse religious ideologies, which typically seek to preserve or re-establish such traditional structures. Second, and related, the role of women in the LTTE illustrates the ambiguous influence of nationalist ideologies on women’s participation in armed groups. For groups that blend revolutionary beliefs with nationalist goals, the inclusion of female fighters is a natural extension of their efforts to reorder society. Yet, for nationalist groups whose ideologies focus on the preservation or reconstitution of traditional social orders, such as those that blend religious beliefs into their nationalist views, the inclusion of women would seem largely inconsistent, if not antithetical, to their beliefs. Consequently, nationalism as a broad class of ideologies is poorly predictive of women’s participation.
While non-Marxist, the LTTE’s revolutionary ideology partly explains the prevalence of female combatants in the movement. Indeed, both the LTTE’s advocacy of greater rights for women and the inclusion of women in its ranks can be traced to the earliest days of the conflict (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2008, 6). Like the PKK, however, the apparent intensity of the group’s commitment to gender equality as well as the proportion of female combatants in its ranks increased over time. Thus, ideological factors most likely established the overall willingness of the movement to recruit women, but other factors account for the growth of women’s participation over time.
War-time Resource Demands
In a similar fashion to the PKK and in line with the arguments outlined in chapter 1, resource demands appear to have played a significant role in shaping the LTTE leadership’s decision to recruit larger numbers of female combatants. Conflict-induced resource pressures may also have deepened the group’s rhetorical commitment to women’s rights. Neil DeVotta (2009, 1035), for example, asserts that the gradual push for gender equality by the LTTE leadership corresponded to the group’s need for fighters. More generally, several scholars have observed that the group’s effort to recruit female fighters in substantial numbers began in response to the difficulties it faced in locating sufficient numbers of male recruits, which resulted in no small part from escalating violence and displacement in many Tamil-majority parts of the country (Alison 2004; Hellmann-Rajanayagam 1994, 70). This explanation for the increase in female combatants in the group conforms to the criticisms lodged by some feminist scholars who have sought to explain the LTTE’s recruitment of women and position on gender equality as instrumental rather than ideological (Herath 2012, 57). In other words, these skeptics claim that the need for troops drove these decisions rather than any real commitment to gender egalitarianism and women’s rights.
While numerous sources have linked the LTTE’s increased reliance on female combatants to the group’s need for additional recruits, it is useful to explore this hypothesis more thoroughly here. As noted above, women have participated in the LTTE since quite early in the movement; however, the extent of their participation has varied substantially over time but generally followed a trajectory of increasing integration. According to Margaret Gonzalez-Perez (2008, 61), the LTTE began recruiting women in 1979—before the onset of large-scale violence. However, prior to 1984 women were not included in the group’s fighting force, and female recruits were largely confined to noncombat support roles such as nursing, logistics, and intelligence (Herath 2012, 171; Stack-O’Connor 2007a, 45). In that year, however, the LTTE created its first female combat unit, and it began training women at its bases in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu in 1985 (Alison 2003, 38–39).
While nontrivial numbers of female combatants were recruited into the LTTE as early as 1984, and women entered combat as early as 1985, the overall proportion of female fighters remained relatively low until the end of the decade (Alison 2003, 89; Alison 2004; Stack-O’Connor 2007a, 48). Given their fairly small numbers, these initial female combatants were often viewed as interlopers whose contributions to the group’s goals were frequently questioned by male troops. As such, they felt constant pressure to prove their capabilities to the leadership and their male counterparts (Herath 2012, 171). There is, however, some indication that women’s participation in the LTTE increased during the late 1980s. One such sign is the founding of the “Black Tigers” in July 1987 (Hopgood 2005). Female fighters have constituted a substantial portion of this elite, highly trained, and extremely lethal suicide force since its inception (see Herath 2012, 135–138; Stack-O’Connor 2007b, 52–53). During the same year that the leadership created the Black Tigers, it also established the first all-female training camps in Jaffna, and within two years the women’s unit had its own leadership structure (Alison 2003, 39; Stack-O’Connor 2007b, 50). This suggests that the LTTE’s leadership increasingly recognized the strategic value of female combatants during this period and had begun to see them as an integral part of the organization’s fighting force.19
Beginning in 1990 or 1991 the proportion of female fighters in the LTTE dramatically increased (Alison 2003, 39; Gonzalez-Perez 2008, 61; Schalk 1994, 166–167). In addition, the number of women promoted to more senior roles in the organization and the rate of women’s participation in the Black Tigers increased after 1991 (Hopgood 2005, 67–68). By the early 1990s, women had become so common in the LTTE that they became viewed as a “normal part of the revolutionary family” (Herath 2012, 171). It is from this period (and continuing until the insurgency’s demise) that women constituted upward of a fifth of the group’s combatants.
Figure 3.2 Annual battle deaths during the Sri Lankan Civil War
Sources: Data on battle deaths from Lacina and Gleditsch (2005) and UCDP (2018)
The advent of female fighters in 1985, the expansion of their roles and numbers in the late-1980s, and the substantial increase in their numbers around 1990 correspond to periods of sharp increases in the intensity of the conflict and increased resource demands imposed on the group at those moments in time. The variation in the intensity of the conflict is demonstrated in figure 3.2, which presents the annual number of battle-related deaths during the Sri Lankan Civil War between 1984 and 2008.20 As with the PKK data in figure 3.1, the dotted vertical lines represent the window of time during which women began entering the LTTE in large numbers. The timing of the initial wave of LTTE female combatants corresponds to the first major escalation of violence in 1984. As the conflict moved from a localized insurgency in the late-1970s and early 1980s to a full-scale civil war in 1984, small numbers of female LTTE members began to occupy combat roles alongside their male colleagues. Based on the information presented in figure 3.2, the first substantial escalation in the conflict since the outbreak of large-scale violence occurred around 1987. That the group began to recruit and train more female combatants in 1987–1988 and chose to create the Black Tigers in that period is consistent with the resource demand hypothesis forwarded in chapter 1: as the conflict escalated and resource demands increased, the leadership encountered strong pressures to adopt new recruitment strategies in order to sustain the movement.
Not only was the conflict entering a more intense phase during the late 1980s, which required the LTTE to mobilize more troops in order to avoid defeat, the group also suffered numerous setbacks that required it to develop new war strategies and to redouble its recruitment efforts. The LTTE enjoyed substantial support from India beginning in mid-1983; yet, that support evaporated in 1987, and the Indian government instead redirected its support to the rival Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) (Staniland 2014, 155, 165–166). This change weakened the LTTE by depriving it of critical resources; worse still, it strengthened one of the group’s primary competitors for recruits and resources. Relations between the Indian government and the LTTE further eroded following the arrival of the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) in 1987. As the IPKF attempted to disarm the militant Tamil forces, the LTTE launched a series of attacks against the peacekeepers. This opened up a new front in the conflict that proved extremely costly for the LTTE. In 1987 alone, the LTTE lost almost 10 percent of its forces (Stack-O’Connor 2007a, 47). By the end of the year, the IPKF had virtually expelled the LTTE from Jaffna; by late 1989, Indian troops had pushed the Tigers out of their remaining urban strongholds and into the jungle (Staniland 2014, 165–166).
At the same time that the LTTE was losing ground to the IPKF, the capabilities of the Sri Lankan military were rapidly expanding as a result of the implementation of a draft a few years earlier. Moreover, the LTTE, and Tamil militant groups more broadly, experienced persistent recruitment challenges resulting from the government’s harsh counterinsurgency tactics, which targeted Tamil males for detention and interrogation and generally depressed the supply of available male recruits (Stack-O’Connor 2007a, 48). The growth of female fighters in the LTTE in the late-1980s therefore appears to correspond to a period of intensifying human resource demands and likely represented a strategy through which the group attempted to meet its recruitment demands.21
The IPKF withdrew from Sri Lanka in 1990, but the three-year, multisided war had depleted the LTTE. The withdrawal of Indian troops created opportunities for the LTTE to expand (or re-establish) their control over Tamil areas in the north of the country. However, during this period they also faced competition from the EPRLF, which had been trained and armed by the IPKF during its years in Sri Lanka. The EPRLF exercised control over portions of the east of the country and had rapidly expanded the number of troops under its command through a mass conscription campaign in the waning days of the IPKF’s presence (Staniland 2014, 164–168). While the LTTE managed to dismantle the EPRLF’s military operations by early 1990, the intracommunal fighting was brutal and bloody, requiring the LTTE to mobilize additional resources during a period in which it had already face substantial resource demands just to ensure its survival.
The LTTE emerged from this period battle-hardened, led by a skilled and experienced leadership, and largely uncontested as the militant force of Tamil nationalism. However, it was also depleted and eager to acquire the resources to expand its military operations. A ceasefire between the government and the LTTE collapsed in 1990, and by July 1990 a second phase of the war, commonly known as Eelam War II, was underway. The conflict escalated rapidly, resulting in nearly six thousand deaths in 1991—a 50 percent increase from the previous year. During this period the LTTE rapidly expanded its military apparatus and its state-building efforts. The rapid expansion of female combatants represented an important part of that effort.
Media Attention and Diaspora Support
As with the PKK, the female combatants of the LTTE received substantial attention from the media. Also like the PKK, it appears that the LTTE’s leadership was acutely aware of the effects armed women could exert on audience attitudes toward the movement and its goals. As such, it sought to highlight the presence of female combatants in the organization and their sacrifices as a way to engender support and sympathy and to establish the legitimacy of the movement. The LTTE’s efforts to highlight women’s contributions to the group were also intended to promote support from the Tamil diaspora community, whose financial contributions were critical to the LTTE’s twenty-five-year insurgency. As Alisa Stack-O’Connor (2007a, 48) argues, highlighting the inclusion of women allowed the Tigers to signal to both their domestic and international audiences that the group was representative of the entire Tamil nation and therefore more legitimate than its more exclusive and ideologically narrow competitors. Similarly, Miranda Alison (2009, 125) contends that the LTTE employed female fighters in part to demonstrate that the organization was an all-encompassing mass social movement rather than a violent extremist group. The leadership therefore sought to use the image of female combatants—and their unexpected and presumably exceptional participation—to soften the group’s image and construct a more legitimate narrative than the one promoted by the Sri Lankan government.
Where most rebel movements appear to recognize the strategic value of female combatants after the fact, the leadership of the LTTE was acutely aware of the propaganda benefits of female combatants from quite early in the conflict (Brun 2005, 66–67; Stack-O’Connor 2007b, 97). For instance, the group’s leadership produced a website that included accounts of the history and activities of its female guerrillas (Cragin and Daly 2009, 46). In addition, beginning in the early 1990s, the LTTE published the magazine Cutantirap Paravai, which highlighted women’s role in the liberation struggle (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 1994, 69–70). The leadership also invited the press to interview select female combatants with the intention of allowing the media to juxtapose the personal stories of the female fighters with the abuses committed by the Sri Lankan government and the IPKF (Stack-O’Connor 2007a, 48). In line with the observations in chapter 2, female LTTE fighters appear to have frequently received positive and sympathetic coverage in media accounts. As noted in other conflicts involving female fighters, media coverage of women in the LTTE was apparently rarely negative and tended to portray female combatants and suicide bombers as victims rather than violent killers (Stack-O’Connor 2007a, 48–49). Even though the LTTE had become notorious (both domestically and internationally) for its reliance on terrorism (including suicide bombings), media attention to female combatants tended present the group and its members in a more positive, sympathetic light. Thus, the leadership’s willingness to allow journalists to interview female combatants is likely indicative of its awareness of the potential benefits associated with raising public awareness of women’s participation in the group.
The LTTE also sought to draw international attention to women’s participation through the production and distribution of propaganda films (Brun 2005, 66). In a similar manner, in the early 1990s the LTTE International Secretariat in London published Adele Ann Wilby’s (1993) book Women Fighters of Liberation Tigers, which provided a vivid illustration of women’s participation in the LTTE.22 As the leader of the LTTE’s women’s wing, the Australian-born Wilby offered a somewhat embellished and glorified account of the group and its female cadre. However, this is expected, given that in all likelihood the intention of the publication was to cast the group in a more positive light. The book should therefore be interpreted as a work of LTTE propaganda at least as much as an academic resource (Schalk 1994, 176). In the mid-2000s, the leadership also permitted the filming of My Daughter the Terrorist, an internationally distributed documentary by filmmaker Beate Arnestad that focused on the experiences of two young female members of the Black Tigers.23 While arguably more objective than Wilby’s account, the film nonetheless humanizes the group’s female participants and ultimately casts them as sympathetic figures by explaining the background of the conflict, highlighting how the women think about their decision to join the group, and interviewing their family members. In this sense, it exhibits many of the frames employed by the media that I discussed in chapter 2.
These examples, as well as a wealth of previous research, suggest that the LTTE routinely utilized the presence of female combatants in an attempt to cultivate a more sympathetic and positive image for the group and to generate support for its cause. As with the PKK case, it is difficult to draw a causal connection between the use of female fighters in rebel propaganda and the ability of the group to secure external support. However, there is some evidence that the presence of female combatants provided strategic benefits to the LTTE, specifically its ability to sustain or expand its troop size and its ability to secure (or increase existing) support from a transnational constituency.
At minimum, the expansion of female recruitment almost certainly allowed the LTTE to field more troops than it otherwise could have, thus promoting its survival and its ability to challenge the regime. Heavy fighting in 1990 and 1991 severely depleted the LTTE’s forces; nonetheless, it managed to maintain fairly consistent troop numbers over this period of time, suggesting that it was able to rapidly replace the losses sustained during this period (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 1994, 40–41). Other sources suggest that the size of the LTTE’s combat force increased in the early to mid-1990s (UCDP 2018). Given that the group apparently increased the number of women in its ranks during this window of time, its ability to maintain (or perhaps expand) its combat force indicates a level of success for the leadership’s gambit. Indeed, one source reported that in 1991 more than three thousand women were fighting with the LTTE, representing a substantial increase over the number of female troops present in the mid-1980s (Schalk 1994, 166). The rate of reported women’s casualties also increased over this period, rising from only a handful a year in the mid-1980s to 79 in 1990 and to more than 200 in 1991 (Schalk 1994, 166). This suggests that women were taking on more of the burden of fighting and subsequently paying higher costs. Assuming women’s participation continued at a similar rate for the rest of the conflict, the number of female fighters in the 1990s allowed the LTTE to field a more durable force capable of presenting a more formidable challenge to the Sri Lankan military.24
The increased commitment of financial resources by the diaspora community also corresponds to the period during which women’s roles rapidly expanded and the group began utilizing them in its propaganda. The loss of Indian support in the late 1980s pressured the group to locate alternative resource streams. In response, during the early 1990s the LTTE sought to expand the funding it received from the Tamil diaspora in Europe and North America (Högbladh, Pettersson, and Themnér 2011; Staniland 2014, 166).25 This strategy appeared to be successful; since that time period, the financial resources flowing from the Tamil diaspora community to the LTTE have arguably represented the group’s most important source of external support. Indeed, some estimates suggest that the LTTE’s annual revenues from diaspora fund-raising exceeded $80 million annually during some years of the conflict (Byman et al. 2001; Staniland 2014, 177; Wayland 2004). Owing to its heavy reliance on diaspora support, the LTTE devoted substantial efforts to fundraising among this community, including engaging in coercion of Tamil business owners. Nevertheless, propaganda consistently played a central role in soliciting donations from Tamils abroad.
As noted above, Tamil propaganda featuring female combatants was intended to shape the perceptions of audiences abroad as well as at home. This included using the symbol of the female fighters as part of their effort to sustain financial support from the Tamil diaspora (Brun 2005, 66–67). As I discussed in chapter 2, rebel groups often seek to achieve support from abroad by exploiting feelings of guilt and shame among members of the community living in relative comfort overseas while their co-ethnics sacrifice and suffer in the homeland (e.g., Adamson 2013; Wayland 2004). Highlighting women’s contributions to the war represents a particularly effective strategy for inducing a sense of guilt among members of the diaspora, particularly male members. As an example, a 1991 issue of Cutantirap Paravai featured a letter from a young female soldier to her brother living in Canada. In the letter, the woman pointedly rejects her brother’s request for her to emigrate and asserts that Tamil women must suffer and sacrifice because of his cowardice (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 1994, 70).
The audience to which the piece was directed was not explicitly identified. However, the context of the publication suggests that it may have been intended to induce a sense of guilt among members of the diaspora community into supporting the group by asserting that while they were living comfortably abroad, women (sisters and daughters) were fighting and dying to defend and liberate the Tamil community in Sri Lanka.26 The tactic used in the letter therefore appears quite similar to rebel groups’ well-established use of the presence of female fighters as a way to shame reluctant men into joining the rebellion. In both cases, the assertion that a woman would be willing to risk her life while a man sits on the sidelines (sometimes in another country) is intended to directly challenge the target’s masculinity and call their courage into question. For men in the diaspora, joining the rebellion may not be a viable option; however, committing some portion of their (relative) wealth to the cause represents one way in which they can attempt to assuage some of the shame and guilt they feel for allowing women to fight the war on their behalf.27
Establishing a causal linkage between the visible presence of women in the LTTE and the group’s ability to secure or sustain domestic and/or international support is challenging. Nonetheless, there is ample evidence demonstrating that the LTTE frequently relied on the symbolism of its female fighters in their domestic and international propaganda efforts. It is possible, however, that the growth in the prevalence of female fighters and the expansion of LTTE’s diaspora fundraising success are both products of the same unobserved process. Paul Staniland (2014, 166), for example, asserts that the group’s ability to raise funds from the diaspora community was a function of its organizational structure. If the organizational structure of the group also accounted for the increase of female combatants, then the covariance in the proportion of female combatants and diaspora fundraising may be epiphenomenal.
There is some evidence that the organizational structure of the LTTE evolved during the late 1980s and early 1990s as it struggled to manage resource strains and attempted to govern the areas over which it exerted nominal control (Mampilly 2011, 108–111; Staniland 2014, 169). Yet, the large-scale inclusion of female combatants most likely represented a strategic dimension of this process of organizational change rather than simply a by-product of it. While it would be incorrect to assert that diaspora support was in any way caused by the expansion of female combatants in the LTTE ranks, it is reasonable to believe that their increasing presence and the frequency with which the LTTE utilized female fighters in its propaganda efforts assisted the group in expanding such support and maintaining it over the subsequent decades. In other words, female fighters likely enhanced the group’s ability to generate such resources even if they were not directly responsible for them.
Factions in the Zimbabwean War of Liberation
By some estimates, women constituted upwards of 30 percent of the rebel fighting forces of ZANLA and ZIPRA, the respective guerrilla armies associated with ZANU and ZAPU. However, most scholars assert that this figure is significantly overinflated and likely includes all women who supported the movements, including those that had no formal affiliation with the guerilla forces (Geisler 1995, 551; Kriger 1992, 191; O’Gorman 2011, 57).28 More realistic figures put the proportion of female combatants in the movements’ armed wings at closer to 10 percent (Geisler 2004, 51; Lyons 2004, 159–160).29 Regardless of the specific numbers, by the end of the conflict and the termination of white minority rule in 1979, thousands of female combatants had fought in the Zimbabwean War of Liberation.
While both factions included female fighters and appear to have recruited them at similar levels, the two groups differed markedly in terms of the manner in which they organized and deployed female guerrillas.30 ZIPRA organized its female combatants into a separate women’s battalion, which was rarely deployed outside of the group’s camps on the Zambia-Rhodesian border, thereby significantly limiting women’s exposure to combat (Alexander and McGregor 2004, 88; O’Gorman 2011, 57). Nonetheless, members of the women’s battalion received military training, and some were armed, which occasionally led them to participate in combat. This most commonly occurred when Rhodesian military forces attacked the camps (Alexander and McGregor 2004, 91). By contrast, ZANLA’s leadership chose to incorporate its female combatants into existing battalions; as a result, its female guerrillas were more frequently engaged in direct confrontation with Rhodesian forces, especially in the final years of the conflict. While ZANLA typically deployed its female fighters in combat support roles (carrying weapons and ammunition, evacuating wounded male soldiers, conducting reconnaissance, etc.), the nature of the guerrilla conflict often led them into armed encounters with Rhodesia troops (Geisler 2004; O’Gorman 2011; Chris Johnson 1992, 160–162).31 Consequently, it is clear that female guerrillas directly participated in combat during the Zimbabwean Liberation War.
As in many other rebel movements, the incorporation of women into the groups’ combat forces occurred only over time. At the outset of the conflict, only men participated in combat, while women were deployed only in political, logistical, medical, and other support roles and were denied combat training and weapons (Gonzalez-Perez 2008, 82; Lyons 2004, 157). Leda Stott (1990, 27) notes that when women first began arriving in the guerrilla camps, they primarily performed domestic roles such as washing clothes, preparing meals, and tending to the needs of male guerrillas. Yet, by the early 1970s, the roles women played in ZIPRA and ZANLA had begun to change dramatically, and women increasingly received military training and took on military roles (Lyons 2004, 109–110; O’Gorman 2011, 57; Stott 1990, 27–28). By the end of the conflict, thousands of women were incorporated into the rebels’ fighting forces, many were participating in combat, and a few had attained leadership positions (Chung 2016; Lyons 2004, 105, 157; Thompson 1982, 247). As with the other cases discussed in this chapter, the change in women’s participation in the armed Zimbabwean liberation movements through the 1960s and 1970s appears to have resulted from the combination of the groups’ ideological orientations as well as the resource pressures they encountered as the war expanded and its timeline extended.
Ideology and Reluctant Egalitarianism
Both ZANLA and ZIPRA were supported by communist powers, the former by the Soviet Union and the latter by China. Unsurprisingly, this support also mirrored the ideological orientations outwardly projected by the groups’ leaderships. Interestingly, however, although both groups had adopted broadly Marxist-Leninist political ideologies, by the early 1970s both employed decidedly Maoist ideologies of guerrilla warfare (Kriger 1992, 89–91). Despite the Marxist rhetoric employed by both movements, numerous scholars have questioned the leaders’ commitment to Marxist thought. Instead, these scholars assert that while Marxist ideology influenced some of ZANU and ZAPU’s leaders and the groups employed some elements of socialist rhetoric in their propaganda, Marxist ideas were always “tenuous strands” in their ideologies and typically took a backseat to the goal of national liberation (see Kriger 1992, 95–96).32
While neither group’s leadership was deeply immersed in Marxist political ideology, both groups nonetheless adopted some of Marxism’s revolutionary rhetoric with respect to gender equality and inclusion. This was particularly true in the case of ZANLA, whose leadership believed from early on that women’s participation was important for the success of the rebellion. Influenced heavily by FRELIMO in Mozambique, whose leadership had insisted that women’s liberation was essential for the revolution, ZANU incorporated elements of gender egalitarianism and the advancement of women’s rights into the party’s official political platform (Stott 1989, 20; Lyons 2004, 121, 176–179). High-ranking ZANU officials such as Robert and Sally Mugabe and Naomi Nhiwatiwa frequently asserted the movement’s commitment to gender equality, especially to international audiences, and highlighted (though often exaggerated) the proportion of women in ZANLA as evidence of that commitment (Kriger 1992, 191–192). Moreover, there is some evidence that, like the PKK and LTTE, ZANLA implemented policies that modestly improved women’s rights in the areas that it controlled, including the elimination of the dowry, improving women’s access to education, and severely punishing men who were accused of beating their wives (Kriger 1992, 192–194).
However, other observers, including some former members of the organization, have asserted that the group’s concern for advancing gender equality was largely superficial and motivated more by instrumental than normative interests (Nhongo-Simbanegavi 2000).33 This is reflected in the group’s willingness to vary its attention to promoting gender equality depending on its assessment of the costs and benefits of doing so. While advocating gender equality was consistent with the group’s ideology and proved useful at garnering support from the female population and Western audiences, it also provoked antipathy from many segments of the male population. For instance, many male recruits resented having to take orders from higher-ranking female soldiers, refused to use contraception when engaging in sexual relationships with female recruits, and often expressed concerns that women were poorly suited to combat. Similarly, ZANLA’s efforts to advance women’s rights led to a backlash among men in the communities it controlled (Kriger 1992, 193–196). Consequently, despite initial efforts to address gender equality, ZANLA’s concerns about alienating the communities on which it depended for support curtailed many of its stated goals of women’s liberation.
The discussion above highlights that the groups were highly sensitive to the strategic costs associated with the pursuit of gender egalitarian policies or other challenges to the traditional norms. Moreover, ZANU’s willingness to permit traditional institutions (e.g., the chieftain system) to retain local authority after independence suggests that rebel leaders placed some value on the preservation of culture and tradition (Kriger 1992, 233–234). At the same time, however, the party also adopted numerous laws in the aftermath of the conflict that sought to improve women’s status and rights in society, including those giving women majority status at the age of 18, prohibiting gender-based employment and wage discrimination, granting the right to a share property after a divorce, and providing maternity leave (Kriger 1992, 235). Thus, while the leaderships of ZANLA and ZIPRA were not committed Marxists, neither did they actively seek to reestablish the precolonial social order or reaffirm traditional gender norms or gender-based divisions of labor. If anything, the groups’ attitudes on women’s rights and gender egalitarianism appeared to be highly flexible and contingent on the strategic context.
Resource Demands and Strategic Adaptation
The rebel leaderships’ utilitarian approach to gender issues is also manifest in their decisions to recruit female combatants. In this sense, the groups’ behaviors are very much in line with the arguments presented in chapter 1. Provided that a group’s leadership does not view gender egalitarianism and the erosion of traditional gender norms as inherently antithetical to its political ideology, it should become increasingly willing to recruit female combatants when it experiences acute resource pressures, such as those created by the expansion of escalation of the conflict. In the cases of both ZANLA and ZIPRA, the rate of women’s recruitment and the willingness to deploy female fighters in combat roles increased in the later years in the conflict, particularly as it rapidly intensified in the mid-1970s.
Even though women had occupied noncombat roles in both movements since the outset of the conflict in the early 1960s, they only began to receive military training and carry weapons in 1973 or 1974 (Stott 1989, 27–28; Lyons 2004, 107–110). By 1977, however, thousands of female combatants had either been organized into female-only units within ZIPRA or integrated into existing combat units within ZANLA (O’Gorman 2011, 57; Lyons 2004, 157; Gonzalez-Perez 2008, 82). Moreover, it was at this time that ZANLA’s leadership first chose to officially deploy women in armed combat, representing a substantial revision of the previous policy (Nhongo-Simbanegavi 2000, 56–57).34 Fay Chung (2016), a senior political official in ZANU during the war, contends that Josiah Tongogara, ZANLA’s commander in Rhodesia, first recognized the strategic value of female combatants and began to encourage the recruitment of women and inclusion of women in all aspects of the rebellion, including in positions of military and political leadership.
As illustrated in figure 3.3, the timing of female recruitment corresponds to periods of increasing conflict intensity. The dotted vertical lines that cross the x-axis at 1974 and 1977 represent the window of time during which most sources suggest that ZANLA and ZIPRA began to increase the number of female combatants within their ranks, provide them with training, and (particularly for ZANLA) deploy them in combat roles. For the first several years, the conflict was largely characterized as low intensity, producing only a few dozen to just over a hundred battle-related deaths per year. By the mid-1970s, however, that figure had grown to several hundred annually and to several thousand per year by the late-1970s. In comparison with the intensity of the conflict during its final years, the increase in violence in 1973 appears fairly modest. However, compared to the previous years of the conflict it was substantial, increasing by a factor of ten between 1970 and 1973. Between 1974 and 1977, however, the rate of annual killings increased by a factor of eight, rising to more than four thousand per year. It was during this period that the conflict escalated to a full-scale civil war, requiring the large-scale mobilization of both human and material resources. And it is during this period that we observe a substantial increase in the number of female fighters.
Figure 3.3 Annual battle deaths during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation
Sources: Data on battle deaths from Lacina and Gleditsch (2005) and UCDP (2018)
In addition to the correlation between rising conflict intensity and the increasing rate of women’s participation in the rebel movements, anecdotal evidence suggests that rising resource demands played a central role in the decision of the leadership of both groups to recruit larger numbers of women. By 1972 women were viewed as an essential part of guerilla strategy, and by 1973 they were being trained to fight (Lyons 2004, 107, 157). Chung (2006, 81) observes that this period not only saw an intense escalation of the conflict, but also the entry of women as major players in the liberation struggle. As the shortage of male recruits grew more severe, ZANLA began to encourage women to assume a greater role in the rebellion and began to train them as fighters (Stott 1989, 27–28). Several scholars contend that the realities of the armed struggle, rather than any commitment to social transformation, pressured the leadership to admit women into the rebellion alongside men (Geisler 2004, 50; O’Gorman 2011, 57). While ZANLA’s leadership had initially taken the position that women were not suited to the rigors of guerrilla warfare, they increasingly came to believe that they could not prevail in their liberation struggle without broadening the revolutionary base and recruiting women into the movement (Geisler 2004, 50; Stott 1990, 27). Indeed, Chung (2016) asserts that this period represented a turning point in the war, and, without the participation of female fighters, success would have been much more difficult to achieve.
Propaganda, Recruitment, and External Support
While ZANLA and ZIPRA did not utilize propaganda or engage the international media with the same level of sophistication as the PKK or the LTTE, both groups devoted substantial efforts to garnering domestic and international support for the rebellion. In addition to their efforts to mobilize support among the African population in Rhodesia and to secure or maintain support from the governments of bordering states (principally Zambia and Mozambique), they also attempted to garner attention and support from sympathetic anticolonial movements in the West as well as the governments of both socialist and Western democratic states. In many cases, particularly in the West, the dismantling of white settler rule in Rhodesia became subsumed under a broader anti-apartheid movement that sought to liberate all of Namibia and South Africa as well.
Like the other rebel movements discussed in this chapter, the image and presence of female combatants played an important role in the group’s propaganda and recruitment efforts. As Eleanor O’Gorman (2011, 57) observes, ZAPU and ZANU leaders eventually recognized the effectiveness of female fighters as a propaganda tool. As such, as women’s participation increased, both groups included images of female guerrillas in their propaganda materials, including those oriented toward international observers (Lyons 2004, 158). Critical evaluations of the ZANU/ZANLA leadership’s commitment to women’s rights and gender egalitarianism have often asserted that the movement’s efforts to highlight women’s participation in the rebellion, particularly as combatants and in leadership positions, amounted to little more than propaganda directed at external audiences (e.g., Nhongo-Simbanegavi 2000). These critics assert that in reality female guerrillas had to challenge a reluctant male leadership in order to gain a measure of equality with their male counterparts and to be taken seriously as soldiers. Yet, the leadership often highlighted their presence and used the very few women in leadership positions to advance the narrative that the movement was both progressive and had broad social support.
Promoting an image of legitimacy and a commitment to liberal ideals was crucial for the rebel forces in their effort to secure foreign support, particularly among Western audiences (Mazarire 2017). Eastern Bloc states were generally more willing to extend support to the rebels due to their nominally socialist ideology and their strategic utility in the proxy wars being waged against the West, and other developing states were often inherently supportive of the movements’ struggle against colonial domination.35 Western audiences, however, were more ambivalent about supporting such anticolonial liberation movements. Even if Western governments and citizens were not supportive of the white minority government and often condemned their abusive policies and intransigence, they were not necessarily inclined to support armed movements that received assistance from the Soviet Union and China.
Highlighting the presence of female combatants in the ranks represented one way that ZANLA and ZIPRA attempted to appeal to Western audiences, particularly liberal and left-wing political movements and activist organizations in the United States and Europe. While it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of this strategy, it is worth noting that a number of advocacy organizations located in North America and Europe engaged in lobbying, fund-raising, and other forms of activism on behalf of ZANU and ZAPU (Kössler and Melber 2002; Mazarire 2017; Sellström 2002). These included LSM, the African Liberation Support Committee, the Southern African Liberation Committee, and various other groups within the broader anti-apartheid movement. Moreover, as demonstrated by the posters and buttons presented in chapter 2, the image of the female guerrilla became an important symbol in the propaganda materials of these organizations, reflecting the salience of female combatants to those audiences.
Lastly, according to some observers, the presence and contributions of female combatants represented an important aspect of the rebels’ domestic resource mobilization and support effort. The role of women in the Zimbabwean Liberation War was no different. Equally important, however, female combatants facilitated the rebels’ ability to mobilize support among the population more broadly. The tenacity and courage of the female guerrillas led many Zimbabwean peasants to conclude that if women could risk undertaking such difficult work and endure such sacrifices for the liberation of the country and its people, they too should contribute to the war effort in a meaningful way (Chung 2016). This observation is consistent with the arguments put forth in previous chapters: the image of female combatants often represents an important tool for garnering support and sympathy from the local population.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have undertaken preliminary investigations of the hypotheses outlined in the previous chapters by examining the dynamics of female recruitment in three specific cases: the Kurdish PKK, the Tamil LTTE, and ZANLA/ZIPRA in Zimbabwe. Each represents an example of a case in which the presence of female combatants is well documented, which allowed me to conduct a more in-depth investigation of the timing of the decision to initiate or expand the recruitment of female combatants. Relatedly, I am able to broadly link the timing of such recruitment to changes in the conflict-related resource demands imposed on the groups. Finally, I am also able to provide greater attention to the ways in which the groups used the presence of female combatants in their propaganda efforts and explore the potential ways in which such efforts influenced the groups’ ability to secure and maintain support from domestic and international audiences.
The cases discussed above help illustrate the mechanisms articulated in prior chapters and, as a whole, provide additional evidence for the arguments therein. First, while women were present in both the LTTE and PKK from the outset of the conflict, their prevalence and the roles they played increased substantially over time. In the case of the PKK, women appear to have served in combat units from the beginning, but their participation surged in the 1990s as the conflict entered a particularly intense phase and resource demands increased. For the LTTE, women appear to have occupied largely noncombat roles until the mid-1980s, at which point they began to serve in combat in small numbers. As the resource pressures grew with the loss of Indian support and rising competition with the EPRLF, the LTTE appears to have gradually increased the number of women in its combat forces. That number, however, rapidly increased after about 1990, when the conflict entered a new, more intense phase often referred to as the Eelam War II (1990–1995). In ZANLA and ZIPRA, however, women occupied only support roles until the mid-1970s, when resource pressures and a shortage of male troops pressured the leadership to train, arm, and send women to the front.
These case illustrations also highlight the roles that group ideology played in the evolution of women’s participation. As an avowedly Marxist movement, the PKK was minimally constrained by the prevailing social norms of the conservative Kurdish society on which it relied for support. Overturning extant social and political institutions was a core aspect of its ideology, and it therefore was willing to recruit women and deploy them in combat from very early on. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that the PKK’s commitment to women’s rights and gender egalitarianism deepened over time, particularly during the period in which women were being recruited at higher numbers. This suggests the likely possibility that the increase in gender egalitarian rhetoric was at least partly instrumental and represented a way for the PKK’s leadership to mobilize the larger number of female combatants they needed to sustain them in the conflict.
The LTTE followed a somewhat similar evolution, though the group’s adherence to prevailing social values was initially comparatively stronger and the extent of its change was more dramatic. The LTTE did not embrace a Marxist ideology; however, it did adopt some revolutionary beliefs, including espousing greater rights and opportunities for Tamil women. As with the PKK, the group’s use of a gender egalitarian rhetoric grew over time and increased as it sought to bring more women into the movement when it faced an increasing demand for troops. Similarly, while lacking any deep commitment to Marxism or Maoism, both ZANLA and ZIPRA espoused a nominally socialist political platform. Both also employed the language of women’s rights and emancipation in their rhetoric. However, while they eventually deployed women in combat roles, this decision appeared to come later and more abruptly than in the other movements, and only after a steep escalation in the intensity of the conflict.
Last, the cases highlight the specific ways in which the movements utilized images of female combatants to shape the perceptions and beliefs of domestic and international audiences. While the PKK’s leadership appears to have recognized the utility of female fighters in generating additional support from domestic constituencies early on in the conflict, there is little evidence that they explicitly sought to use female combatants to leverage support from international audiences until relatively recently. Since at least the late 2000s, the PKK and sympathetic transnational organizations have intentionally highlighted the high prevalence of female combatants in its ranks to garner attention and sympathy for the group and its cause. By contrast, the LTTE recognized the benefits of highlighting women’s participation quite early, producing numerous videos and publications that showcased female cadres’ dedication and sacrifices in the conflict. It is not clear precisely when during the conflict ZANLA and ZIPRA began utilizing female combatants in its propaganda efforts. Nonetheless, it appears that by at least the mid-1970s the movements (particularly ZANLA) intentionally highlighted women’s roles as fighters and their inclusion (even if modest in reality) in leadership positions to establish its legitimacy and attract external support.