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WOMEN & WAR:
IMAGES OF GENDER AND CONFLICT
IN A TUMULTUOUS WORLD
Sanam Anderlini
Director, Policy Commission
Women Waging Peace
Anita Sharma
Director, Conflict Prevention Project
Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars
Lisa VeneKlasen
Executive Director, Just Associates
JEREMY WEINSTEIN, Moderator
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
5:00 p.m. - 7: 00 p.m.
1750 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
[TRANSCRIPT PREPARED FROM A TAPE RECORDING.]
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PROCEEDINGS
MR. WEINSTEIN: My name is Jeremy Weinstein and I'm pleased to welcome
you here on behalf of the Center for Global Development to one of our development
matters events, an effort on the part of the Center to bring development issues to a wider
audience, with different approaches, different methods, different artistic, visual, and
informational approaches to getting out the word about what's happening in other parts of
the world to the community in Washington and beyond.
For those of you who don't know about the Center, the Center was founded just
over two years ago to focus in particular how the policies of rich countries affect the
prospects for development in poor countries.
Again, this is a bit of a change of mindset for Washington where so much of the
focus is on what poor countries should be doing to improve their own prospects. So in
that respect, the center focuses its analytical work, in particular, on what rich countries
are doing on issues ranging from aid to trade to migration, to the environment and
security.
The Center was founded just before 9/11 and our president, Nancy Birdsall, in
particular, after the events of 9/11, saw an increasing integration of development and
security issues, an integration that's increasingly having its impact on the minds of policy
makers in Washington and beyond.
And in that respect the Center began to do some work, some work which has
culminated in the release of a report that was available to you outside, "On The Brink,"
which focuses, in particular, on the challenges posed by weak and failed states, states, in
particular, in conflict, for U.S. national security but also for the security of people in
those countries that are experiencing conflict, and so it's very nice for us, having
launched that report only two weeks ago, to bring this photo exhibit to you today.
The title of the exhibit is Women In War, the photographer is Jenny Matthews,
and let me just tell you a little bit about the exhibit before I introduce our very
distinguished panel to offer some thoughts as a way of generating some conversation
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with you, and we're looking forward to your comments as well.
Jenny Matthews is a documentary photographer working with Network
Photographers, and she's been working on this worldwide project on women and war
since 1982, traveling extensively in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and
I think you can see represented in this series of photographs the diversity of places but
perhaps the commonality of experience that not only women, but women and men, and
people living in countries experiencing conflict have shared over the course of the two
decades and beyond, that Jenny has been working on this project.
These photographs have been compiled into a book and published by the
University of Michigan Press, and I hope you saw that this book was displayed in the
lobby and there's some information for you there on how to order a copy. We'd like to
thank Action Aid which has helped to put together this exhibit for lending the
photographs for us so we could bring them to you tonight.
Just before I introduce the panelists, I wanted to offer just one personal comment.
As I walked around to look at these photographs---and that's as someone who works quite
directly on these issues, not just in a policy context here, in Washington, but also
someone who works on the ground in many of these countries---I have sort of an
ambivalent relationship with photography when I'm in the field. This is in the sense that
very powerful images are captured here under a microscope about the way people live in
experiencing conflict, with very real stakes for them.
These are things that affect their lives. I think the most striking photographs for
me were those of Goma and Bukavu over on the right-hand side.
I spent some time in a refugee camp on the Congo border and remember standing
there with my camera, as people were making their way outside of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo in 1998, carrying all of their worldly possessions on their back.
They had walked sometimes a thousand miles or more from their homes in the eastern
Congo. Some of them had typewriters on their shoulders.
They had whatever it was that was in their hut or their home, carrying it with
them, and I stood there with my camera, sort of incapable of using it, in part because I
felt such ambivalence about being an outsider who could capture those pictures with my
camera and take them back home, and what would I do with them and their experiences
when I got back home?
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At the same time now walking through this exhibit, I feel the powerful impact of
being able to capture those images and bring them to you today and hopefully to broader
audiences to really make the case that these are people just like us who are in unfortunate
circumstances but with very real consequences for how they live their lives. I imagine
and hope that some of our panelists will speak to these issues of how you capture these
experiences and make them real, at the same time respecting the difficulty of the
circumstances in which people live around the world.
We have a truly stellar and distinguished panel here today. I was very happy to
agree to moderate it because these folks on the panel here today are both friends and
colleagues of mine, and it's a nice pleasure to be able to moderate a discussion where you
know everybody on the panel.
And so let me just say brief words of introduction about our three panelists and
then they'll speak for about five to seven minutes each, perhaps a little bit longer, but we
also hope to reserve some time for a conversation with you about some of the issues that
this exhibit raises.
Our first speaker will be Sanam Anderlini who joined Women Waging Peace as
the director of the newly-formed Policy Commission in 2002, with the goal of producing
15 field-based case studies on women's contributions to peace processes.
I think some of these were made available out front, I hope so, but if you haven't
seen their recent work that's come out on Sierra Leone and El Salvador, in particular on
the role of women in the demobilization process, it's really top-notch field work and
really merits a close read on the part of all of us in the Washington policy community.
Sanam has a long and distinguished set of experiences before she came to Women
Waging Peace--- they're nicely summarized in her bio--- and so I encourage you to take a
look at her background and some of her publications in the past.
Anita Sharma is the director of the Conflict Prevention Project at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars, and prior to this, Anita has held positions, most
recently working in Iraq with the International Organization of Migration but also on the
ground in Kosovo. I think she also has a personal experience with some of the issues that
are represented in those photographs and I hope that will come to light in her comments.
And last but surely not least, we'll hear from Lisa VeneKlasen, who's the
executive director and cofounder of Just Associates, and who I understand has a previous
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interaction and perhaps relationship with Jenny Matthews from her work in Latin
America.
Lisa has a long set of experiences in social change and, in particular, in
participatory and community-based work in Central America, in Africa, and in the United
States. Before starting her own organization, Just Associates, she was most recently at the
Asia Foundation where she designed and conducted an advocacy capacity-building
program with advocates from across the developing world, focused on global women in
politics, which is bringing issues of women to light in participatory political processes
just as we're thinking about women in the context of conflict today.
So I'm happy again to welcome you here and to hand it over to Sanam to start us
off.
MS. ANDERLINI: Thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation. I have
to tell you that I was told not to prepare notes cause it was going be a informal
discussion, but it's really a pleasure to be here, (and also because Lisa and I share a
building but we never get to talk), so it's extraordinary to be on a panel outside of our
building together.
I wanted to just briefly tell you what Women Waging Peace does and then give
you some sort of brief comments in terms of why we promote women's involvement in
peace processes, which is basically the mission of the program.
Waging has a network of 300 to 400 women peace builders in conflict areas
around the world. I sometimes say to my friends that anywhere in the world where
there's trouble, I have people that I can stay with, and they're really wonderful people
cause they're the peace builders.
We also, as Jeremy was saying, started this research project, the Policy
Commission, because we wanted to document how women contribute to different aspects
of peace processes around the world, and to show that these aren't just anecdotal stories,
that one person comes and says I did such and such, that actually the work that these
women are doing is important and it makes a difference, and it should be supported by
the international community.
Also what we believe in is that it's important for the women to be linked up and
connected with the policy making world, the international community and their own
national policy makers.
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Amongst the work that we do with our members is that we bring them over to
Washington, we bring them over to New York, we try and connect them up and get them
to meet the key decision makers and show that when you think about, you know, experts
in a conflict area, whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or Liberia, or anywhere in the world,
these women know what's going on, know what's needed. They have their finger on the
pulse in terms of what's going on in the community and they are probably amongst the
most dedicated in terms of wanting to make peace and make sustainable peace, because
unlike the international community, they don't have an exit strategy.
So they're the ones who are going to be living through it and it's important to
support their work.
Now I sort of wanted to answer three questions as we get the discussion going.
One is often we're asked why women: why do you think it's important to have
women? and the answers we give fall into three or four categories.
One is that, well, typically, in conflict situations they represent over 50 percent of
the population. So in a case like Rwanda, after the genocide, 70 percent of the
population were women and they literally rebuilt the country and it's important to think
about what, you know, who it is that you're bringing services to.
In Afghanistan apparently they were 65 percent of the population. So, you know,
we need to think about why it's important to include them, and if they're the majority,
that's important.
The other of course is that, you know, they have rights, and their rights must be
included, and as victims, it's important to think about them, and so when I talk about
women as victims, I often preface it by saying, you know, women are victimized and they
are very deliberately victimized in civil wars. They are deliberately targeted for rape,
they're deliberately targeted to spread HIV/AIDS in communities, and these are things
that we must recognize as strategies of war.
It's not enough to write reports as some very well-known organizations in this
town have done, to say in the Sudan, you know, da, da, da, what's going on, and there's
rape going on. No, rape is really something that we should be watching out for because it
has a very deliberate goal at the end of it, and in the case of somewhere like Rwanda, ten
years after the genocide people are still dying because they were deliberately infected.
And what I say is that they're victims but they're never passive victims, and I
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think some of these pictures really capture that sense that, you know, whatever has
happened to these women, they are still doing what they were doing before, which is
looking after their kids, breast feeding or, in the case of Grozny, cleaning up the streets
and wanting to live back there again.
In refugee camps, in communities that are devastated, wherever you go, the
women are still doing the work that they were doing beforehand and they will continue
doing that. It's sort of islands of peace in some of the most horrendous situations.
So we mustn't just focus in on their victimhood. We must focus on their agency
as well, and support that agency, and it's important to have their voices heard. And then
finally, looking at it in terms of peace building and reconstruction, and I think Iraq is
proving to--- showing us on TV every night, it's really messy, difficult work, and if we
just exclude over 50 percent of the population, it doesn't sound like a very clever strategy.
So we need to bring in as much of the talent and as much of the resources that
exist. It's like they're an untapped resource, not something to be exploited but certainly
something to be drawn on and supported.
Now which women? A few years ago, when I used to talk about this, people
would say, "Oh, yes, Margaret Thatcher, she was a really good peace builder, wasn't
she?" Or, you know, you name it--Golda Meir.
Again, what we try and focus on are women who are coming through civil society
who are basically very often ordinary women who've been caught up in extraordinary
times. In Liberia, for example, there was one woman that we worked with who was a
school teacher and the war broke out, and at some point she just got frustrated and she
said, I've had enough of this, I've had enough of people hiding in the bushes and trying to
eat grass, and she brought her friends together and they decided that they wanted to get
women involved in the peace negotiations, and they decided to put an ad on the radio and
started a women's movement basically around peace issues.
So what was really inspirational for me was, she was a school teacher, a war
started, and she just took on this other role and went forward, and I think that that's really
important to recognize. They exist everywhere, and I think Anita, when she talks about
the Iraqi situation, can probably give you more examples of people coming through civil
society and taking on this role and really feeling that it's their responsibility. It’s a belief
that they have to have something to say, and I think again from an international side, we
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have to support that.
That's one side of it. The other side of it, and I think in the pictures again we see
it, is women who've been involved in fighting--now in a lot of these cases you get women
who were part of liberation movements, whether it's in Central America or South Africa,
people who joined liberation movements because they believed in the goals of those
movements. And we have, again, cases where these women have played a key role in
how those societies have transformed afterwards and brought about development and
democracy, and their work needs to be supported. I can later on tell you a little bit about
some of the work that we've done on South Africa and the work of women there.
And then just very quickly, in terms of what are the kinds of things we do.
Jeremy mentioned the work that we did on Sierra Leone and El Salvador, and looking at
the role of women in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, and I'll be very
brief.
One of the things that we're finding is that when you talk about DDR, very often
the reintegration aspect of it gets kind of short shrift from the international community
because they go in, you know, it's very short-term programs, to disarm and demobilize
people, but, really, it's the reintegration which takes a long time. And the longer the war
has gone on, the more difficult it is for these fighters to reintegrate into normal life again.
And who gets to deal with the brunt of that? It's basically the women and the
communities again, and what we're finding is that across the world, when they go back
into the communities, it's ad hoc or some sort of work that women are doing to help
reintegrate them. In places where--and increasingly we see this--where there have been
child soldiers, again, it's women who are really taking on the responsibility of helping
these children get back into their sort of normal lifestyle.
And there was a picture from Sierra Leone which I found interesting. In the case
of Sierra Leone, 80 percent of the women and girls who were in the fighting forces were
actually abducted, and they were forced into sexual slavery, they were looking after the
camps, and they were also involved in the fighting. They had multiple roles.
But their role as fighters was never recognized, so they were left out of a lot of the
programming that existed, and one of the things that we're saying is that look, you need
to support them because they were involved and they're now being doubly victimized. If
they're having kids and they're being marginalized, the mothers are being marginalized,
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what's going to happen to those children?
Those children are going to be the next cycle of violence in these countries, so we
must support these people.
And thirdly--and this is one of the things that's coming out in the case of northern
Uganda--is that in northern Uganda, when the Resistance Army releases children, they
very rarely release the girls, and part of the reason for that is because the girls are running
the camps and feeding them and looking after the soldiers.
So in a way, they're sort of the Halliburtons of the guerilla forces, and while we
focus on the need to get the guys with the guns, and they're the dangerous ones, we
should also look at what it is that enables these guys to survive. And if it's young girls
who've been abducted, then let's try and get them out because they need the support that
we can give them, and it would also weaken the the guerilla forces.
So in a way, it's looking at these pictures and sort of trying to understand it from a
different perspective. Instead of just seeing a refugee woman that's a victim, let's look at
what she's doing in the context that she's in, and that's the picture that we're trying to
portray in the reports that we're doing.
As I said, the reports were out there. I think somebody picked them up, I didn't
bring that many, but they are on our Web site, and we have summaries like this that are
also on our Web site. Colombia's one of the most recent ones that we had out, and in the
case of Colombia, what we've documented was that since the collapse of the peace talks,
the group that has really galvanized and mobilized, and is sort of trying to push for a
return to negotiations, are women's groups in the community.
Again, they're really taking the lead and they're at the forefront, and we want that
to be recognized, and we believe that they have a role to play like in many other places.
I'll stop there and I'd be happy to answer questions later.
MS. SHARMA: I'd like to say thank you to Jeremy for agreeing to moderate the
panel as well as Christina for organizing it. I actually prepared remarks and I prepared
way too many remarks, that would last much longer than five to seven minutes, and that's
why Jeremy was glancing at me when he was saying to keep it brief. The reason why I
decided to sit down and write, and having said that I wrote down a lot, I probably won't
read too much of it, was because I've been focusing a lot on Iraqi women and the role that
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they are playing in the political process as we look toward the hand-over in just a few
weeks, as well as how the women are going to be organized in January for the upcoming
elections.
And so I needed to take a step back, kind of remove myself a little bit from the
Iraqi women's issues and think about the role of women a bit more broadly, and so that's
why I started to write.
Having said that, again, I probably will focus more on Iraq. But the Conflict
Prevention Project and the Woodrow Wilson Center has made the focus of women's
issues one of our pillars within the project, and we actually do quite a lot of work with
Women Waging Peace.
Because women tend to be overlooked so much in both the conflict prevention
process as well as post-conflict reconstruction, or if they are considered, as Sanam was
saying, it's as a victim to the conflict, and I was just going through these statistics and,
you know, rightly so.
Some of the photos deal with the victimization of women, but it's true in terms of
the horrific things that women have to go through, including rape and forced subjugation,
and then ostracization after that.
Since the end of the Cold War, when 90 percent of the victims are civilians, most
often women and children, that's why we tend to really focus on women as the victims,
and I was looking through some of the statistics.
In Rwanda, it's reported that as many as 500,000 women were raped during the
'94 genocide.
Now as Sanam pointed out, what's probably less known is after the conflict ended,
the numbers of women who then participated and won seats in the electoral process was,
I think it was 49 percent, which is actually higher than 45 percent, which is Sweden, so
that's an amazing story which doesn't get told too much.
But in Bosnia, as we know, women were deliberate targets of rape, and that was
part of the ethnic cleansing that took place.
Then the organization that I worked for, the International Organization for
Women, talks about the profiteering from women and the trafficking of women. It grew
about 50 percent between '95 and 2000, and as many as 2 million women are trafficked to
a nice sum of between 5- and $7 billion, and so it's actually starting to overtake drugs as
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the traffic commodity of choice.
Then on the other side, if we look at the victimization of women, then there's the
other side of the coin, which is the women as inherently more peaceful argument, and
that if women ran the world then we wouldn't have war. I think as Sanam pointed out by
mentioning some of the women rulers, that's not necessarily the case.
I think that as women go into institutions, they change the institutions, and one of
the things we can talk about might be efforts within the international community, in
particular, within the United Nations, to address the role of women in peace building and
the peace process.
There was a landmark decision, actually a landmark resolution called 1325, which
is a U.N. Security Council resolution, which called for including women in all aspects,
everything from the way that women are included in the political aspects, back at
headquarters within the United Nations, to the importance of what's called gender
mainstreaming in peacekeeping missions.
A two-pronged approach. The importance of including local women and
supporting local women's issues, but then also, on the other side, looking at institutions
like the United Nations and trying to make sure that women are included in more senior
posts.
I think that as women get more involved in these institutions, then they start to be
changed as well, so I think that gets to the Margaret Thatchers or the Benazar Bhuttos of
the world.
But there is, as we see from these photos, another in between, and that's the role
of women as soldiers and combatants, as something that Sanam was talking about, and I
was particularly struck by one of the photos back there which was looking at Iraqi
women in the early '90s on the tanks. That's definitely an issue that you don't really see
too much of in Iraq.
Right now, in particular, I mean, there's a small branch of women who are being
trained as part of the security forces but then, again, it's a very small percentage.
My work in Iraq started out when I took a leave of absence from the Woodrow
Wilson Center, and I was doing work with the International Organization for Migration
on rehabilitation activities. One of our projects was helping to start up women's centers
and giving them a voice, and the fact that they wanted to be trained in conflict resolution
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skills, and also political skills.
Now women, as I was saying from the photo back there, unlike Afghanistan,
women played a very large role in Iraqi society, even before Saddam Hussein. And
unfortunately, some of their rights, as well as men's rights, when Saddam destroyed civil
society, he also took away a lot of rights from women as well.
But that said, women were engineers, they were teachers, they were doctors and
lawyers. What they were less involved in was the political aspects of life, and so one of
the things that we're trying to do now through my work at the Wilson Center is encourage
and support the role of women in the political processes as they start to get more
involved, and especially in January.
I'll just give you an anecdote, though, to illustrate the dichotomy between the
facts on the ground and then the reality, both here, in Washington, and within other
capitals. As Sanam was talking about, the importance of recognizing that, that women
have so many different roles, both in terms of, in everyday society but then more acutely
during war and during peace building. And then just how easy it is to forget that or push
it to the side, or say it's an important issue but then when other important issues come up,
they kind of push it away.
For example--and I'll use Iraq again--in April of 2003, soon after the fall of
Saddam Hussein, the women were organizing and they said, you know, we want a place
in the new government, we deserve it, we've been here, we have the skills, we have the
capacity.
Very few women took part in the creation of the new government and if you
remember, there were only three women who were put on the Iraqi governing council. I
was at a meeting a year later, at the Council on Foreign Relations looking at Iraq one year
after, and one of the items that came up--and actually I was out of probably about twenty
people, there were three women, I was one of them, and I raised the point that the
governing council which was a creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority, had
gotten it wrong in its composition in that it was focusing a bit too much on sectarian
differences as well as not getting the gender balance right.
And I said, you know, in the next case, as we work toward selecting the people
for the electoral commission, as we support candidates for the interim government, we
really need to think about getting this right, and the representative of CPA who was very
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high up and had the direct ear of Ambassador Bremer said right, right, you're in Iraq,
okay, that's an important issue, right. Women. Next?
And then the comment--it never came up again for the rest of the, you know, two
hours of the discussion. I just say that to illustrate that although so much has taken place
and I think understanding the importance and the role that women do play, the State
Department, U.S. State Department actually has an initiative now, and a woman's office
completely devoted to women's issues. So it has grown in importance and as I was
talking about, within the United Nations there are definitely efforts to mainstream gender
practices.
But we still have a long road to hoe, and much farther to go as we go through this,
and I think the photos are an excellent reminder to those of us who work in Washington
and who maybe sometimes get to out into the field and see the realities.
But just understanding how all people's lives are affected, and women, in
particular, in the different roles that they play and how we might be supportive.
And so that is the work that we're doing. I think I'll save the rest of my 20 or so
pages of notes for the discussion but I think most of you or some of you got--I didn't
bring enough copies, I know that--some of the work that we've been doing at the Wilson
Center, which lays out some of the specifics in terms of how we see that women can be
more than victims in the role that they're playing in the political process as well as peace
building efforts. So again, thanks for having me.
MS. VENEKLASEN: Thanks for coming and thanks to the Center for Global
Development for organizing this. It's really nice to see and listen to my colleagues. Even
though we are in the same building, we don't get to talk to each other.
I share Jeremy's ambivalence about photographs because what's behind all that's
happening in these photographs are so complex, and hidden, and it's so important for us
as American citizens to know about it because we have some influence on the things that
happen in the backdrop.
But at the same time, I appreciate Jenny Matthews' work so much because,
particularly when you're sitting in Washington and you're reading the Washington Post,
it's extraordinary how protected we are, as Americans, from the realities of war and
conflict. And then hidden by two roles, not just one, is the role of women in those wars as
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victims, as casualties, as perpetrators, as my colleagues have talked about, the many
different roles that women play.
So I so appreciate the very graphic and vivid representation of that.
I realized, when I was looking at the book, that I realized that I met Jenny
Mathews in 1982, in Nicaragua, when I was working with the Sandinista government in
rural Nicaragua in an adult literacy project connected to grain reform and particularly
with women's groups.
And it was my first encounter and very close experience with war. When I think
back on it, I think about how war has changed so much in the last 25 years, but it was a
war that was a very idealistic liberation struggle that succeeded in overthrowing a 60year dictatorship.
So my colleagues in government were, in those early years, very idealistic, very
young, and there were many, many women in leadership positions, and I remember the
excitement of seeing one of the lead comandantes, commanders, whose name was Dora
Maria Taijez. She was very famous, she was probably 29, and she was one of the leaders
in the guerilla struggle.
And as I worked in Nicaragua, I got to know the other sides of the liberation
struggle, and also came up against the experience of the encroaching, what became
known as the contra war. Over a period of years, with U.S. government support, a
paramilitary group, mostly former national guards of the previous regime, but also many
peasants who'd been disaffected by what had happened in Nicaragua joined, and war took
on a new face in the region.
And it was a profound experience because women were, their lives were torn
apart in so many different ways. They watched sons and daughters going on either side,
where they had just gotten over the trauma and the loss of one war, where there had been
a lot of hope, and that was sort of lost very quickly, and just looking at the pictures made
me realize what a powerful moment that was.
And then I thought of the pictures we've seen recently in the newspaper and I
thought of the Abu Ghraib prison, shall we call it a scandal? And particularly the images
of women, and again I thought of Dora Maria Taijez when I looked at Brigadier General
Karpinski and the pictures of the women--I wanted to remember their names--Megan
Ambuhl, Lindy England, Sabrina Harmon--and I think if Jenny had continued this project
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to the present moment, we would add that to this picture of war, this very, very complex
picture of women and women's roles in conflict, in war.
And it makes me again think about the causes, and the nature of war, and
inequality, exclusion, and power are the three words that I think about so much when I
look at these pictures. At one point in time so many wars were fought over land, and
today the struggle in Zimbabwe where we work with a number of colleagues, and have
over the years, I also had the opportunity to live and work in that country, is about land.
That's such a complicated struggle and what's happened with women in that story is
really invisible, again, with women who are systematically raped by the marauding
bands, and systematically victimized, so that they are, their capacity to fight is weakened.
At the moment we're working with Just Associates, we're working with trade
unions, and a lot of women trade unionists. In particular, we're working in the former
Yugoslavia, and again it makes me think about women and war because the project
where we thought we would have a very quick process of leadership work, helping the
trade unionists engage on economic issues, especially global economic processes at the
national and global level.
We discovered how men and women both are so traumatized by that experience,
and that beneath the surface is such latent anger and sometimes overt anger, frustration,
sadness.
A level of trauma that really lessens people's capacity to act and rebuild, and I
think it's something we really need to think about as our governments engage in
democracy building.
The impact of war is so difficult for women, and for men, to overcome
emotionally. Particularly where there've been systematic rapes as there have been in
many conflicts, the children that women are left with, their tasks in raising those children,
their sense of alienation and withdrawal are all so difficult, such difficult obstacles to
overcome as they reconnect, rebuild their communities.
And this is very true in the former Yugoslavia where the anger is latent but it's
interesting because the way that the economic development process is being carried out-and it's one that's a very rigid, sort of austerity model--has created short term, as we're
told by the key global economic institution, we're told short-term problems that include
35 percent unemployment, homelessness, lack of health care, lack of schools, in a region
16
that once had those things.
And it's interesting how that scarcity folds into the trauma in such a way that
women's anger comes out and they support nationalist tendencies, the radical nationalist
agenda that was the original cause of the war. Milosevic.
And so I think it's something we need to think about in terms of the economic,
emotional, political, social dimensions of war, and the nature of inequality and exclusion
and how power is so dynamic and feeds on itself in a negative way.
And then I just wanted to say, to think about those things in terms of the role of
our own government, the things that we can do to help change engagement in the world
to lessen inequalities.
But also in our own country--and I was thinking if Jenny were here, she'd
probably want to add a panel to a series of photographs about Southeast D.C., where 13
young people have died so far this year. Violence is endemic and inequality, it's
different, and conflict has changed over the years as I said at the beginning.
When I first went to Central America it was a liberation movement, and it was
about ideology and it was about state power. And today, while that is still true in some
cases where battles are fought, like Chechnya, over sovereignty and independence, many
of the battles are just about resources--access to land. "Conflict diamonds" I think is one
of the best examples of a high level of what some people in the region call gang warfare.
Even using the images of rap stars. Tupac Shakur is a very sort of revered image and
face in Liberia.
So I think what I'm trying to say is there are historical webs, and they're economic
and political and social, intricately linked causes, that sit at the backdrop of each of these
pictures, yet the experience itself is psychological, it's personal, it's traumatic, as well as
all those other things, and I think that's important to keep thinking about as we connect
with these pictures.
Thanks.
MR. WEINSTEIN: Well, I think those were a terrific set of comments to get us
started this evening, and again we appreciate you being here and want to create some
opportunities for you to participate in this conversation.
I think we'll make this session a little bit different than most of the panel
discussions we have in Washington in the sense that we'll welcome your comments as
17
well as your questions. So don't feel forces to add a question mark to the end of your
comments, such as Do you agree with me? in order to get your comment there. In fact
we'll welcome your comments today and we'll invite the panelists to respond, when
appropriate, but, really, we want to give and provide an opportunity for all of you to
participate, offer some of your own thoughts on the photographs you've seen and some of
the issues that were raised for us today about the role of women in war and the different
roles of women in war, and also I think this very interesting issue put by Lisa on the table
today about how foreign are these images, really?
Southeast D.C. is a great example. Abu Ghraib's an important example, and also
our own prison system might provide an important example.
We do have a microphone cause we want to make sure that people are able to
hear other's comments. So I encourage people to line up behind the microphone and we'll
provide the panelists an opportunity to respond after maybe every three or four
comments, just so we can make enough time for each of you to participate.
So please introduce yourself, let us know your organizational affiliation before
giving your comment. Thanks.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. I'm an independent consultant, and I notice that
you all seem to talk a bit, at least, about the nature of power in terms of the United States
or the West, developed countries in general and what influence they can have on women's
empowerment in not-developed countries.
Since Anita, you mentioned Iraq several times, I was wondering about the
statement I heard recently about the U.S.'s role there, that it's the right message but the
wrong messenger, and that because of the relationship that the United States has with the
Middle East or specifically Iraq now, it's difficult to get much democratization done in
the name of U.S. assistance.
So I'm wondering how you think this applies to women's empowerment projects,
particularly when the U.S. is behind them. Thanks.
MS. LEE: Paulette Lee. I'm an independent communications consultant, and this
bothers me every time I go to a conference on women in development and women in
conflict, and I'm trying to find the answer. Why are women victims? Not why do the
men perpetrate the acts, although that's certainly a valid question. But at the risk of being
18
tossed out, why do women--oh, I really don't want to use the word "allow themselves."
What are women doing about not being victims, about not being raped, about not
being abducted, about not being used for ethnic cleansing?
And if we're going to use an example of gang violence, for example, in Los
Angeles or in Southeast Washington, D.C. or in St. Louis, if we heard that women were
being systematically raped in order to gain control over a neighborhood, what would we
think about that? What would the women there be doing about it?
And I guess my last question is what would Dora Marie be doing if she were
raped, if there were an attempt to rape her? Thank you.
MS. KAHN: Hi. My name is Ruby Kahn. I work at the Afghanistan desk at
USAID. I'm not sure exactly what my question is but I'd like to make a comment.
I was in Afghanistan and they have the Ministry of Women's Affairs, and it seems
to me, in this whole discussion of gender and peace and war, women have to find a
balance in order to be included in the dialogue, because in the sense of the Ministry of
Women's Affairs, I feel like they're excluded, and so what is your experience in finding
that balance?
I mean, like not overdoing it whereas--I mean, look at the audience here, it's
mostly women and you're basically preaching to the choir. Like how do you get those
issues out and be effective in impacting policy? Thanks.
MS. THOMPSON: My name's Ellen Thompson. I'm from Interaction, and I
guess I'm sort of building on her question but I want to "stir the pot" a little bit more.
You know, at Interaction we had a photo contest, and we had 200 photos that I had to
look through and pick. We had a panel of people. But I had to go through all of these
pictures and decide which ones were good, and I thought it was striking, I went through
all of them, just pages and pages, and nothing struck me as much as that picture of the
woman in Chechnya with no arms, well, no hands. That really got me, and it made me-and you're up here saying, well, you know, what really do pictures do?
I've been through a lot of pictures and only one really sort of did it for me, but it
really struck me in a very emotional sort of way.
And I was just wondering, I've spent some time traveling around the U.S. talking
about my experiences abroad and I talk about things like the violence of poverty, and so
forth, and, you know, I stayed at people's houses and I stayed with, you know, average
19
Americans who don't get regular newspapers, or, you know, you can't get a New York
Times in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, if you tried.
And I'm just wondering, how can you be up here with a PhD or an executive
director, and say, well, I don't think pictures really do it because, you know, I can't
imagine preaching a sermon in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, without pictures, and I can't
imagine being able to touch people that I felt without, you know, that sort of thing, and
I'm wondering, What are you doing? How are you touching people, because that's really
what you mean to do if you want to get your voice out.
MR. WEINSTEIN: Why don't we hold for one more round. So if you'll just take
a seat, we'll give the panelists a couple minutes to respond to some of these questions and
then go back to the audience for one more round.
Just taking the moderator's prerogative here to add a little bit on to that last
question, and I think some of the others that have come before.
My own ambivalence is an ambivalence of taking pictures. That comes from my
active engagement in the processes that are unfolding and the feeling that that separates
me from that experience by being an observer who takes those pictures and is trying to
capture that experience.
That doesn't, in any way, invalidate the importance of pictures for using--to
spread messages about what's happening in other parts of the world, and as Lisa makes
the case, also at home, or on the part of the United States.
I guess the question that I wanted to put to the panelists with respect to that issue
is how do we help people get the right messages from pictures, and when I ask that
question I think about Robert Kaplan's article, The Coming Anarchy, which was in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1994, and described West Africa, and other parts of the world in
which governments were coming apart.
It was sort of a Hobbesian world, if you think back to the political theorist,
Thomas Hobbes, where everyone was out for themselves, and sometimes when you look
at the pictures that we see here, while some of them express agency and the like, if you
think back to, say, the Rwandan genocide on the front page of the New York Times, and
other photos, it creates the perception among policy makers, one, that the behavior that
you're seeing is irrational, and two, that perhaps it's something where intervention can't
make a difference. That we are getting ourselves into a situation where there's no
20
effective agency on the part of outside actors, and in fact the danger is so dramatic, that it
begins to, one, make us feel that we need to put these pictures at a distance, and two,
incapable of acting in response to them.
And so I think there is a challenge that's raised for us and I'd be interested in the
panelists' responses to how, when you use pictures, you get the right messages across.
MS. SHARMA: I'll start because I just want to tee up on something that Jeremy
said, and when he talked about Kaplan's book, immediately, my former boss, her words
came to mind, and one of the reasons why conflict prevention as a discipline was started
was after the genocide in Rwanda, ten years ago, and then the failure of the international
community to respond, kind of in the heyday of the post Cold War kind of euphoria, in
that now we're a global community and there will be no more war, and then all of a
sudden you see the Rwandan genocide as well as the failure to act in the Balkans.
But it's this notion that anarchy just comes, the coming anarchy, or civilizations
just clash, and these things kind of happen in a vacuum, whereas it's actually that war is a
deliberate choice. These are rational actors doing irrational things which we might
consider irrational but yet they have a very targeted purpose, and I think what Jeremy is
talking about in terms of when you see the snapshot of the photos, to a certain degree it
looks like it's completely irrational.
I mean, why would you chop off the hands of people, not only women but people
in Sierra Leone? Well, they're doing it for a very targeted reason. They are raping for a
targeted reason, and I'll get back to the issue of rape in just a second.
To answer Miriam's question, I agree that the message of democracy or the
message of women's rights is now in jeopardy because the United States has so much-the dislike and the antipathy toward the United States in Iraq is just immeasurable.
And so unfortunately those issues, in particular the women's issue, which was a
home-grown initiative, that was encouraged by the international community, in
particular, say, for example, the United States or the United Nations. People can point to
that, or Islamists, who wouldn't have supported it anyway, and can say, look, you know,
this women's center is set up by USAID money.
You know, it represents the infidels, and therefore, we must shut it down. And so
that is a challenge and I think that's pervading all of Iraq right now, this question of
insecurity, and getting back to something that I said earlier, the sense of insecurity,
21
women feel it even more acutely, not because they're passive victims.
I'll take issue with that because I don't think women are passive victims. The
photos show this. They show women taking up arms. They show women caring for their
children. What happens is that women are expected not only to, in some cases, take up
arms and protect the family, but when the men leave to go fight, the women are in control
of the villages in cities, et cetera, and they might not have the wherewithal or the ability
to protect themselves.
I mean, I don't want to get too much into do women ask for it if they are raped,
that's a bit--that doesn't really deserve comment--but I think in no way are any of us
suggesting that women are simply passive.
And then finally, in terms of the question in Afghanistan, I think there's a real
difficulty in striving to have that balance between getting women engaged into all aspects
of the process versus creating this nice women's ministry in which the women go off
there, or even we face this in Iraq, you have your women's center --a do your sewing or
think about your women's issues and you should be happy; you know?
I think the challenge is integrating women into all aspects of the society. One of
the things that the women are pushing for in Iraq is not only getting a women's ministry,
which they did, which was newly created, but then also including women in the higher
positions in the posts, so that women's issues are integrated, not in the sense that, as we
talked about earlier, that women are inherently going to care more about women's issues.
That might not be the case, and so you have this question of tokenism, and I think the
fact that was mentioned before, the fact that we have so many women in the audience, I
think the challenge is also to get men on board because you need men who are going to
be strong women's advocates as well, and then to have them push the agenda, push the
issue.
I think, unfortunately, for so long, and this is something that we talked about in
one of the reports, is that women's issues are considered a soft issue.
It's easy to push it aside, especially when you think about security. So you could
say, okay, well, how can you think about women's issues in Iraq or Afghanistan right
now? We have to be concerned about the security situation.
Until you realize that women's issues can equal the harder security issues, then I
think you'll get more men involved in the process because they'll get involved in hard
22
issues rather than the softer, ones. But I think getting, bridging it out, so that it's not only
a women's issue, it's a men's issue as well, and so they're engaged in all of the aspects of
the--they're stakeholders.
MR. WEINSTEIN: I want to stir the pot a little bit more, I like that metaphor,
before handing it over to the other two panelists, because I think this question about
gender mainstreaming and what the U.S. should be doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and
beyond, in terms of women's roles, is an important one that we should take seriously.
But one of the issues that comes to mind, and I heard Jessica Mathews, the head
of the Carnegie Endowment speak about this earlier, is we've already talked with these
pictures about the merging of foreign and domestic challenges. These are things that are
reflected in our own behavior as well, and there's no doubt that there's that integration on
women's issues as well.
What does it mean for the United States to require or ask of Iraq and Afghanistan
50 percent representation or 25 percent representation when we can barely put women in
Congress in the United States or in senior positions in the executive branch.
Jessica Mathews expressed her own very strong ambivalence about such
requirements being put on other countries with different cultures when, in a truly
democratic culture, although some might question that here in the United States, we're
not making progress on that front nearly as much as we ought to be, and so it's a
challenge, again, of the messenger, not just a challenge of the sort of imperial and empire
America, but also a challenge of the question of what are the messages reflected by our
own internal politics that make it difficult to be effective advocates for these issues
abroad.
MS. ANDERLINI: I'm going to jump in with some comments, and for some of
these I'm talking on my own behalf, so they are personal views.
On the question of the U.S. being the wrong messenger with the right message,
one of the things that I feel coming from the region is that what we now see and what
people in that region particularly feel, is that the U.S. has really--all it's valued is
promoting its interests, its hard-edged economic interests. It's all in its own national
interests in the region, with no interest in promoting its values, and that's what people
want. I mean, this might sound really naive and optimistic, but honestly, you know, the
message of democracy--justice, freedom, liberty--all that sort of stuff is what people want
23
in those areas and places where there's dictatorship, and if only we could put that front up
and center, and really go with that, and allow people in those regions to take the lead in
terms of how you do that, it could work.
On the question of the women's issues, you know, the problem of the backlash is
fundamental. I mean, in Afghanistan, it happened during the Soviet era.
So the backlash question is a very real one but I don't think we can step back from
it. What we have to do is engage with the women in those regions, and with the men, and
take the lead from them in terms of how do you do it, and sometimes how you do it is not
by saying it.
Don't say it, just go ahead and do it. Focus on specific issues and work on it.
Don't just go on with the rhetoric of women's rights, women's rights. Just take it issue by
issue and do it gently, in a way. I think that's one approach.
And working with men is really, really important.
In Cambodia, Mu Sochua who's the minister for women's and veterans affairs,
once told me that she was working on HIV/AIDS and basically went to the men in the
village and had programs working with men in the villages because they're the fathers,
they're the brothers. It's their own daughters and so forth, and making them aware and
concerned about the fact that this is what is going on, you have a responsibility, it's
important in terms of whether you're engaging in prostitution, whether you're selling your
own daughters, whatever it is, get the men on board because that's really, really
important.
So we need to balance it in every community. That I think, that's very important.
On the question of women's victims, why are they victims, I think Anita answered
it, but I would say one thing. In El Salvador, there was a woman fighter who had been
raped. She was a victim of gang rape, and at some point she went and hunted down the
guys that had raped her and killed them. So that was your answer, whoever it was that
was asking about that, just in terms of how innocent people can take action if they want
to.
On the question of the ministry of women's affairs and the balance, and how you
go about dealing with that, ghettoization is really a key problem everywhere. I mean, in
any institution that we look at, there's the women's bureau, women in development
bureau, and women's international stuff, and it's as if that works to empower the rest of
24
the world.
And I think that there are many sort of issues that we have to deal with, but one of
the really big problems is that we, both as women, and as men, and institutionally we're
still not valuing the different approaches that women bring to these issues.
Even as women we don't value it, and in the West, I think this is even a bigger
problem than in developing countries because in developing countries the differences are
so apparent, the discrimination is so apparent, that when you talk to women they say, the
men are like this and the women are like that. You know, we do it like this and the men
are like that.
A few years ago, I did a publication for Unifem, and I was interviewing 15
women from around the world who had been involved in peace negotiations, and all of
them--you know, Guatemala, Cambodia, Middle East, you name it--everywhere I talked
to, and when I'd say, you know, what do you think? How do you think you're different?
They'd say, you know, we're better at listening, we're better at empathizing. These things
came out in every single interview.
I then went and interviewed the secretary for Northern Ireland, England, and the
first thing she said: My being a woman had nothing to do with why things worked. And I
said okay, what do you think it was? Well, I'm working class and I could relate to them,
and in the past they always had these upper class--you know, the Brits always had some
aristocrat, and it was my working class background that really made me bond. And I
said, okay, so what do you think-- how do you think you did things differently? I was
really good at listening, I was really good at empathizing, I was really good on
compassion.
She was not willing to admit that this could have had anything to do with the fact
that she might have been a woman.
Now this is anecdotal, we don't have enough research to show the differences,
but, it comes out so often, and I think that in the process of trying to go for gender
equality and to get to wherever it is that women want in the West, we have never really
valued the differences we bring. Institutionally, what happens is that one generation of
women who went ahead had to become like the men, and, in a way, the army pictures, to
me, show that.
Here are these women who went into this incredibly male-dominated, masculine,
25
militarized environment, and they just become as bad as the guys. We can't blame them,
individually, for what they've done. That was the environment they were in, apart from
the fact that who knows who ordered and allowed this sort of thing to happen.
But we need a critical mass of women to go in and we need women to understand
and appreciate the approaches that they bring and the differences that they bring, and we
need the men to also understand that women just see things differently. Maybe we see
things differently, maybe we have different approaches. Let's put it all on the table and
see what works best.
I'll end with an example of that from a study that I did on South Africa, looking at
how women influence the security sector reform process. Now security sector reform is
an area that women rarely touch. It's just way too out there in terms of military issues,
and it's not something that women like to get involved in.
But in South Africa, because the women had been involved in the guerilla forces
as fighters, and because they were involved in the political struggle, they took on board
everything, they wanted to engage in everything. They fought to get 50 percent
representation in the negotiations, and on security issues, they were really out there, and
one of the things that happened was they said, you know, when we talk about security,
what does that mean? What does the word security mean?
And one of the women who was in parliament, at one point they wanted to do a
defense review to see what the country needed, and she was the head of the parliamentary
committee on defense, and she said, you know, let's go ask the people. So they had a
two-year consultative process where they went out and they asked all sorts of people,
what do you think the country needs?, what is security? and they came back with
different meanings.
People were talking about security as walking down the street, security as safety,
security as having water, security as having a clean environment, security's having access
to education for my kids.
And basically it was human security issues, and that became the centerpiece of
South Africa's national security framework, and I think it's important to recognize those
sorts of differences, and in the case of Iraq, when we had a conference here, again, on
these hard-edged security issues, we were talking about how they recruited people for the
new Iraqi army and for the police and so forth, and there was a woman who was a
26
member of Sadr City Council. Sadr City is a very poor area of Baghdad and she said,
you know, I'm on this council, it's a neighborhood council, and we all know who lives in
this neighborhood, we know each other. And we told the CPA that you let us vet who
should come into the police forces, who should come into the army, because we know
these guys.
We know who was a Saddam guy and who wasn't, and they didn't accept our
offer. I mean, sorry--how stupid can you get? These are people who know about these
things. So it's tough. So let's bring in all the different ideas and see what works, and
recognize that, you know, different perspectives bring--well, it's richer as opposed to just
keeping to the narrow focus. The narrow focus hasn't worked for us. Thanks.
MS. VENEKLASEN: I suppose there's very little left to say but I do think I just
want to pick up on Jeremy's point about how do we help people get the right message
with photographs. I'm not sure how we communicated that these photographs weren't an
invaluable way to communicate about women and women in war.
I think the challenge is, as Jeremy said, How do you get the right message? How
do you help people draw the right message? And I think particularly an American
audience, that is somewhat, as I said, protected from the realities of these things, so that
sometimes there's a tendency to think, oh, those poor people are always fighting over
something. Or oh, those people over there, they're just hot-blooded. They fight.
There is that tendency, and then it's just so messy out there. And I think it relates
to the question about why are women victims.
I think there's a tendency, as Americans, to individualize most sort of situations of
poverty, and injustice. That--how come they didn't do better? Or how come they didn't
generate more money? Or why aren't they producing more food? Or why did they fight
each other like that?
And it goes, that tendency to individualize goes with also a tendency toward
historical amnesia where things happened yesterday but we don't--you know, when we
think of Rwanda, we think of the former Yugoslavia, we think of Iraq. We don't think
about what was happening 20 years ago and what the role of the U.S. government was,
and who Saddam Hussein was in relationship to the U.S. government, and the historical
sort of roots of what we see in these pictures.
And I think one of the things we have to help ourselves as American citizens
27
understand better, both in our country and around the world, is the nature of inequality
and the systemic nature of inequality, and what is systemic discrimination, and what is
the other side of discrimination which is subordination.
And that's where I think women's experience gives us particular insight. What is
it to live, have children with, and love someone who perpetrates violence against you?
These are complex social relationships where the power dynamics are shaped by
institutional barriers, lack of access on an institutional level, by socialization, by
ideology, by what we consider to be options. These are all--we are manufactured by
these experiences, and to some extent we work as individuals against these barriers, but
it's really through organizing and working together, that my colleagues have talked about,
that women have been able to make a difference in their countries.
And I think what's important is in many of these countries women are making a
huge difference. Women in Uganda make up over 35 percent of parliament. There's a
quota system, something we couldn't image in this country, a quota requiring a certain
number of women in decision making.
If anyone were to suggest it in this country, it would be considered outrageous.
Interestingly enough, Rwanda, partly as a result of the conflict, and a whole other range
of factors, is--I believe it's about 40 percent--49?--49 percent, women in decision making.
So these are sort of complex pictures where you see women in different roles but women
fighting back.
There is another picture, and I think you see glimpses in the faces of these
women, of the emotions and the energy behind fighting back. But the experience of war
is an individual and a systemic one, and challenging, the causes and the consequences of
it are about organizing and changing the way decisions happen, and the systemic
exclusion in the socialization that goes with that.
So I think that's a really important thing and I think what's interesting is that Dora
Maria, as a young woman, had a very difficult experience in the dictatorship, and her
response was to join the liberation movement.
But she had a very clear sense that it was about building collective alternatives
and collective power as well as changing individuals.
MR. WEINSTEIN: We're happy to go back to the audience for a couple more
questions and do one more round of this. So if people will line up behind the
28
microphone, perhaps we'll take three or four more questions and then go back to the
panelists for some final comments, and be done by 7:00 o'clock.
MR. SHEETS: My name is James Sheets. I'm an attorney here in town with
Weinberg and Jacobs, and I have sort of a passing interest in the laws of war and peace,
and they've undergone a lot of criticism, particularly in the past ten years, as being sort of
an incomplete paradigm in which to interpret violence, to designate actors and how to
understand harm, and so forth, and I was wondering, drawing upon the experiences of
women and gender, knowledge of gender as a construct, what are sort of the "pearls of
wisdom" you could offer in terms of what is violence as is gendered in its execution and
how do women as victims, as agents, and as actors, construct it in a gendered sense?
I mean, what kind a dialogue can we develop to sort of fill in the gaps of what
constitutes, say, a war crime, an illegal act of war, or war harm?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I come from Burma. Fifteen million people suffer
greatly in the authoritarian military region. The military region rape the people, kill the
people, rape the women, set fire the children, set fire the village. So many people suffer
greatly in this authoritarian region. Many people cannot afford to gather two meals a
day. Many people, many women do not get enough food, or many children do not attend
even the primary school. I am one of the victims. My family separated over ten years.
But my country, my people stay in other authoritarian military region.
Our people fight to get freedom but we did not still get freedom. We need
support and help from the people around the world. So how can you help our people to
get freedom? But we stayed to fight to get freedom but we need help and support around,
the people from around the world.
ERIC: Hello. My name is Eric and I work at PACT and I'm also a student
at American University. It's actually quite ironic cause I worked in the refugee camps in
Thailand, I worked with Burmese refugees, and I saw a lot of, you know, the people
fleeing those types of situations, and I'm wondering--well, I'll just tell a little anecdote.
There are all those types of things occurring just over the border, and I asked one
of the refugees I was working with, I was a teacher/trainer and I knew this guy well, and I
asked him, So what would happen if the army were to start winning? and he replied that
we may do the same things to them, or we have a lot of hatred. And so of course I was
thinking about the cycle of violence that would just continue on forever, and I asked
29
some women the same question, but--the other woman I knew, and she said we just want
people, we want to go back to our farms, we want to go back to our villages and just live;
you know.
But I was kind a wondering about how that anecdote--it fits in well with a lot of
what you're saying and I think what you say is very holistic and I appreciate that. But I'm
wondering how war, in the context of war fits in with what you were saying, Lisa, as far
as like the economic situation, and like the former Yugoslavia, how, when things get bad
enough, women and everybody else turn in the other direction and go the other direction
and start dealing with more nationalistic, or even vengeful--how does that play out with
war versus other economic situations, and whatnot? Thank you.
MR. WEINSTEIN: Let's take two more questions and then we'll go back to our
panelists. Oh, I'm sorry. Three. I didn't see the third person in line.
MS. SHERK: I'm Kirstin Sherk. I'm with Planned Parenthood Federation of
America. I'm a senior communications specialist, and my work is actually to translate
what my colleagues do in the field and make it real for Planned Parenthood activists in
this country.
I want to talk about the ambivalence about using cameras, and why it's so
important that program officers and planners, and people who work with programs in the
field, have a link back to translating these stories.
I would like to point out that Jenny rarely seemed to go to a place with--you
know--she just didn't show up with a camera and said, hey, maybe I'll see something.
She went some place looking for a story, and I think often that's, you know, the
advantage of having someone come from the outside, whether it's a writer or a
photographer, is as a program officer, to say, you know, there's something important
going on here and I need someone to tell this story. You know, my colleagues, and
sometimes myself included, we get bogged down in the policy language or the
development language, and we don't know how to just say you've got to meet this
woman, Dora Maria, she's tremendous, she has the most incredible life story, and her face
just lights up when she talks about her kids, and yet, you know, she hunted down the
people who raped her, and that's something that's incredibly compelling, and I would
urge people who are in the position in the field to understand that you should have that
close relationship with the program you do. That's what makes your perspective
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valuable, and you should also take advantage of professionals who can come in and say,
you know, go to the maternity ward because she wants to see pictures, and wants to tell
the story of women in the field and women giving birth, and I think that's something that
we need to--we don't think about and we don't fund for necessarily, but, clearly, Jenny's
photos show that's incredibly important. So no comments needed. I just throw that out
there. Thanks.
MS. KENNEDY: Hi. My name is Kerry Kennedy and I'm a film maker, and I
kind of just wanted to build on top of what she was saying. I'm a development consultant
and a documentary filmmaker, focusing on female ex-combatants, and one thing that I'm
doing, I know that development and photography--there are problems--especially--I work
with both fields and when I go as a development expert, I remove myself from my
camera, photographer, filmmaker persona. I'm going to go in as a filmmaker I wear a
different hat, and both avenues are very, very important. One thing that I'm doing right
now is starting a program, and just, I want to try to bridge this ambivalence and kind of
bridge the divide that we have in these two fields, and just recommend one solution,
which of course I'm biased towards cause it's my project.
But what we're doing now is, I'm working with women in East Timor and
providing the women training with video cameras, so they tell their story, and there's a lot
of information on this on the Web, if you look up participatory community film making,
that allows women that are in these situations to be empowered to tell their own story
with the resources that we're able to provide but we don't have to tell their story for them.
They can do it themselves.
So that's just something to build on top of all these comments you were saying.
SHO: My name is Sho. I work for WorldVision, but I'm not speaking for the
organization. I'm going to be speaking as a woman activist, a native of Burma.
It's very encouraging to hear from Women Waging Peace, and Anita, and also
from Just Associates.
When you highlight the role of normal women, I was actually very surprised that
Ceci spoke up, because she is not political, she was a school teacher, and it's very
encouraging for me, and the other thing I wanted to say is she said how you can help us
or whatever.
We do have an umbrella organization called Women League of Burma. There is
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a Web site, www.womenofburma.org. It's an umbrella organization that composed of
different women organizations from different ethnic groups. As some of you may know,
Burma is a country of multi-ethnic groups, and talking about women being victims,
Women League of Burma, they have reports, you can find it online, licensetorape, and
the other one is shattering silence. It's about rape cases. Several hundred rape cases in
Thai/Burma border area. So I am not asking question but it's more of information sharing
and comments.
And I don't think that women allow our, we women allow ourselves to be victims,
even when you look at the leader, Aung Sun Kyi from Burma, you know, she's a very
strong leader, but even as a woman like her, the, you know, regime can do whatever they
want, and may I say, Ceci, her husband is first cousin with Aung Sun Kyi.
And you can tell--you know, it's not that we allow ourselves to be victims.
Sometimes the system--it's sort of like poverty, you know, urban poverty. Sometimes
people say that poor people are poor because they want to be poor, and there might be
some truth, to some degree; but sometimes it's so hard to get our of that poverty when
you are in this, you know, web. So I just wanted to point out that. And the other thing is
also education of women. Some of you pointed out the importance of women in political
leadership.
I think that it has to be complemented, or what's that called? supported by
education for women, because a lot of women are being sold. I'm speaking from our own
experience, because women, they don't have education, so sometimes people just come
and tell them, okay, we're going to try to get your education or we're going to try to take
you to the cities and, you know, teach you how to make a living.
But most of the women, especially in the villages, in the remote areas, they have
no information.
Sometimes, their desire to get education to go to the city, put them into victims.
So that's all the comments I wanted to make. Thank you.
MR. WEINSTEIN: Thank you. Let me invite our panelists to offer maybe one or
two concluding thoughts each, so we can try and end by 7:00. But we appreciate you
being here and hope that most of you will stick around until the panel ends, given that
we're at final comments. So Sanam.
MS. ANDERLINI: I'll start on the question of--and I hope I got this right--on the
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question of international law and violence and gender issues.
There has been some real development in that area because of the international
tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and the tribunals on Rwanda, and also the
International Criminal Court, and I can't go into the details, I'm not a lawyer, but I'll tell
you things like rape is now considered a war crime. Ordering--you know, the
commander who orders those kinds of actions is now, can be prosecuted. You don't need
to have information corroborated by somebody who's come forward and said that they've
been raped, and so forth.
We've got a new study coming out on the former Yugoslavia case and how
women impacted that and what role they played in changing some of these laws, and so
forth. So it'll be on our Web site, or I'll take your card and I'll be happy to send it for you.
But there has been some real progress on that and it's largely to do with the advocacy on
the part of women's groups.
On the question of the victimhood and also the role of women in terms of what
happens when they end up sort of supporting extreme nationalistic groups, or so forth, I
think it's important to recognize that women have real multiple identities.
Of course men do as well, it's not that men don't, but somehow, we never talk
about men's fatherhood as a sort of mobilizing force for them to look at peace things,
whereas women, that's a very natural place where women sort of come together, and so
forth.
Women are often caught in a very difficult situation and people who go and get
involved in peace building activities across conflict lines, whether it's Israelis and
Palestinians working together, Huttas and Tutsis, or wherever you look at, Tamils, and
Simalese, it's really dangerous work, because what happens is they're coming out of the
norm of their own sort of identity group, their own ethnic identity, and reaching out to the
other side, and they get ostracized by their own people.
So it's really important to remember the courage that it takes for people to take
those steps, and also to recognize that there are times when they have to--you know, in
the case of Israelis and Palestinians, when there's a suicide bombing, or, on the other
hand, when there's an Israeli incursion or, you know, bombing of Bethlehem, whatever's
going on, people do move back, and so it's an ebb and flow situation.
But the idea, and I think from the international side, what we want to try and do is
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create, make that middle ground wider and larger, and enable more people to come and
feel safe in that space because that's really the way forward.
And then finally on the question of the pictures and so forth, one of the questions
I always ask is, What picture didn't you take? And it's really striking because a few years
ago we were looking for images of women who showed their agency, or, you know, who
looked stronger, basically. We had a women building peace campaign in London, and it
was really difficult to find those pictures, cause somehow they don't look as exciting or
they're not as, you know, as interesting as the ones that look really desperate. I'm not
sure.
But, you know, we went through thousands and thousands of photographs using,
you know, photo agencies, and came up with a few that we thought were nice, and it
really sort of always strikes me--it's a little bit like newspaper stories.
You know, you have the story about knee cappings in Northern Ireland but you
never have the story about how ordinary people get into the streets and say no, we want
the peace to work, and I really think that actually we really need those now because it is
the silent majority who wants that stuff, and if we just keep focusing on the knee
cappings and the rapes and, you know, the violations, that radicalizes people.
Whereas if we hear about what's going on on the peace side, that can actually also
make things better. So journalists have a real role to play in this and we from the
development policy community need to engage with them, and it's a very tough one
because of funding and all the other complexities that come into play. So that's all.
MS. VENEKLASEN: Just a quick thought. I think in response to your question-Eric, is it? Yeah. I think that, really, engaging in conflict work involves having a very
sort of nuanced and complex understanding of power as it takes shape at the visible level,
in terms of the dynamics between groups or the structures that exclude, and this one has
access to water and that one doesn't.
But also the sort of hidden aspects of power over time and the sort of
shame/hatred/anger dimensions. And I think the cycle of violence is partly a product of
that, it's partly the expression of anger and hatred that is the product of being a victim of
exclusion and violence. But it's also the nature of experience around us. I mean, it's what
used to be called imitating the oppressor.
When the experience of people in any context is one of power over, of
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dominance, then that becomes the sort of, once you get access to any little bits of power,
that becomes the way you use it. You use it to exclude or to dominate and control.
And I think conflict is really sparked by scarcity, and the feeling that the pie is
shrinking and if I don't dominate and control, kind of a zero-sum game, I will lose and
you will gain, and so I think in many contexts that I see now, you know, from Zimbabwe
to Rwanda to Serbia, the economic scarcity that people are experiencing in post-conflict
situations is just heaping the conflict so much at the surface, and I think that's where
other institutions that are supposedly working in development are really contributing to
this scarcity, and really seeding these sparks that haven't died, and so I see it everywhere.
And so the conflict is latent, below the surface, and very easily sort of sparked,
and the conflict prevention and resolution efforts that you see sort of are mechanical
overlays of involving people in dialogue without dealing with what's underneath the
tensions.
MS. SHARMA: I just want to say something about ordinary people who do
extraordinary things and I think that's something that we brought up in the last part of the
discussion. In addition to Aung Sun Kyi, I was thinking of Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace
Prize winner from Iran, who was a lawyer, a human rights lawyer, and who then
increasingly started to see the injustices within women's rights inside Iran but did it in a
very low-key way.
She spoke at the Wilson Center last month, and she's not a grandstander. She's a
short little woman, you know, not very charismatic in her personal, the way that she tells
the story, but her story is so compelling, and it's because she is more interested in change
rather than kind of self-promotion.
So these are people who, as we saw from the photos, who are pushed in some
ways to do these extraordinary measures. But the thing is, if you said to them, wow, you
know, I can't believe that you did that, I can't believe that you became that type of
protector, I can't believe you took that extraordinary action in defense of your family,
they would, in most cases, just kind of look at you and say, Well, what else would I do?
You know, what other choice did I have?
So I think about that when I hear, you know, what Jeremy was talking about,
someone like Jenny Matthews, saying, well, how can we promote these ideas because it's
a U.S. imposition, and look, you know, how horribly the U.S. has done in promoting
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women's rights.
Well, let's not hold the U.S. to be the standard to be emulated. I mean, you can
look toward recent elections in sub Saharan Africa. I was doing some research and in
fourteen of those elections women had great gains.
Now some of them are through the use of quotas but in some cases they work and
they're necessary. So I think we discount them kind of out of hand too quickly, because
we say that that's not our, "our" being the U.S. method, and interestingly, going to the last
question, in terms of the type of legalization of engendering women's rights, there have
been numerous and at least three very important international norms that have been put
into place, the first being the convention on the elimination of the discrimination of
women, which is called CEDAW. That was signed by President Carter in 1980 but it still
has not been ratified by the United States.
And I think there are fewer than 14 countries around the world which have not
ratified the treaty and part of the reason goes to--the woman from Planned Parenthood
would understand this--goes to issues relating to the U.S. position, the U.S. government
position on family planning issues.
As well, though, there's a small issue on the use of quotas. But that really tries to
codify human rights and the protection of women in that as well as what I had talked
about with Security Council Resolution 1325, which was passed in 2000, and then we're
getting ready for another anniversary of the Beijing platform for action, and those are real
efforts to codify the importance of including women in the process.
And then just very briefly on education for women, at the risk of sounding too
wonkish or too DC-ish, there's some good studies recently which look at the importance
of including women, both for economic reasons, and that's just a real sound case.
You know, okay, you don't want to have war. Well, what are the things that you
can do? Where I used to work, the Carnegie Commission on preventing deadly conflict,
they found that two of the best ways to prevent conflict are to find jobs for the young
men so they're not idle and wanting to start trouble, and then educate young girls and
young women and help to make them as viable components of the society, and with that
you gain kind of completely, because if you're educating the men, you've given them
positions--sorry--if you're employing the men but if you're educating the women, you're
providing them with so much more in terms of skills.
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As far as the Burma question, unfortunately, I don't have a good answer. I can
just say that within the Wilson Center, we have a program looking specifically at Asia in
which we might be doing something in the fall dealing with Burma, in particular.
I was going to say the time is up so they cut my mike. Some places where you
could go for further information, UNIFEM. Just a few months ago they put a new Web
portal. I think if you go--it's Womenwarpeace.org, and I was just amazed at the breadth
and depth of information that they put on there, because they put gender--well, they put
issues related by country-specific, but then they also go into specific issues, so women in
the DDR process in terms of security, women and HIV/AIDS, women and justice, and so
it's just an incredible resource, so that if people do ask you, well, why do we care about
women's issues or why are they different or how can we have a quota in one place if we
don't have it in others, it just provides you with some really great information.
MR. WEINSTEIN: I hope you'll join me in thanking three extraordinary women
doing extraordinary things.
[Applause.]
MR. WEINSTEIN: And we hope to see you at future development matters
events. So thanks for coming.
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