[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Women and African wars

[Patrick Bond]

The War against Women
War against Women in Africa

February 18, 2008 By Ann Jones
Source: TomDispatch


Kailahun, Sierra Leone -- Greetings from a war zone that's not Iraq. And 
not Afghanistan either.

 

I'm checking in from West Africa, where I've been working with women in 
three neighboring countries, all recently torn apart by civil wars: 
Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire. The Iraq debacle has 
monopolized attention and obscured these "lesser" wars -- now officially 
"over" -- but millions of West African women are struggling to recover. 
For them, the war isn't really over at all, not by a long shot. This is 
the war story that's never truly told. Let me explain.

 

Surely you remember these conflicts. Liberia's war came in three 
successive waves lasting 14 years altogether, from 1989 to 2003. Sierra 
Leone's war started in 1991 when guerillas of the Revolutionary United 
Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone, trained in Liberia, invaded their own 
country. The war drew many players and lasted until January 2002, a 
decade in all. In Côte d'Ivoire, a civil war started in 2002 when 
northern rebels attempted a coup to oust President Laurent Gbagbo, but 
by that time the international community had decided to act to prevent 
any further destabilization of the region. French, African, and later UN 
peacekeepers stepped in and a treaty was signed in 2003.

 

So, officially, these countries are no longer "war zones." Accords have 
been signed. Peacekeeping forces are on duty or close at hand. The UN 
and international aid agencies are assisting "recovery." Some arms have 
been surrendered; some refugees have returned from exile. Some men are 
making mud bricks and building huts to replace the spacious houses of 
embossed concrete and tile that once graced towns and villages 
throughout the region. Officially, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte 
d'Ivoire are now designated "post-conflict zones," but they are so 
fractured, so traumatized, and -- especially in the cases of Liberia and 
Sierra Leone -- so devastated and impoverished that they cannot be said 
to be securely at peace either. Sierra Leone has replaced Afghanistan as 
the poorest country on the planet and, like Afghanistan, it is a nation 
of widows.

 

Visit one of these countries and you'll see for yourself that, at best, 
real peace will take a long, slow time to come. The destruction in 
Sierra Leone's Kailahun District, for instance, is as shocking as 
anything I ever saw in the devastated Afghan capital, Kabul. UN 
officials and an array of international aid organizations like to use 
the term "post-conflict" for such places in such moments. It sounds 
vaguely hopeful, even if it designates a desperate place embarked on a 
difficult period of "recovery" that may or may not be recognizable after 
a decade or two, or even a generation or two, as peace.

 

That's what our leaders don't bother to mention (possibly don't even 
grasp) when they talk blithely about war and peace as if they were 
simply opposite sides of the same coin, attained with equal ease with a 
heads-or-tails flip. Any fool can start a war swiftly with a shock and 
awe assault -- as George Bush did from the air in Iraq or the RUF did on 
the ground in Sierra Leone -- but peace is no sudden acquisition.

 

Just last month, the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague resumed 
proceedings begun last June against Charles Taylor, the charming 
American-educated sociopath and former president of Liberia. Taylor 
faces 11 charges for war crimes related to matters including terrorizing 
civilians, murder, rape, sexual slavery, amputations, and enslavement. 
These atrocities were committed not against his own country but against 
his neighbor. It was Taylor who backed RUF rebels as they terrorized the 
populace and augmented their numbers by abducting civilians.

 

Both Taylor and RUF leader Foday Sankoh reportedly received tactical 
training in Libya from Muammar Gaddafi, who aimed to disrupt the West 
African region. Yet these wars were largely not about ideology or even 
politics. They were about greed, about the power to control and exploit 
the natural resources of the region -- Liberia's primal rain forests and 
especially Sierra Leone's "blood diamonds." Political scientists and 
military historians may eventually advance other theories to explain 
these wars -- though they'll be hard pressed to find any redeeming 
features, any "just cause" -- but West Africans will tell you that they 
took place simply because a few "bad, bad men" craved power and wealth. 
When Foday Sankoh's RUF forces invaded Sierra Leone, they numbered no 
more than 150 men, but what they started laid waste to a promising country.

 

Here's what I want to remind you of, though: When you think about these 
men who start wars, remember what they've done not to soldiers on either 
side, but to civilian populations -- especially to women. Today, it is 
civilians who are by far the most numerous casualties of war. Each 
successive conflict of recent times has recorded a greater proportion of 
civilians displaced, exiled, assaulted, tortured, wounded, maimed, 
killed, or disappeared. In every modern war, most of the suffering 
civilians are women and children.

 

In many wars, maimed and dead civilians are counted (if at all) merely 
as "collateral damage" -- like the estimated 3,000 innocent citizens who 
died in the initial American bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. In the West 
African wars, civilians became the designated targets. Foday Sankoh 
intended to conquer Sierra Leone, but having only 150 fighters, he 
resorted to forcible recruitment. Like Charles Taylor's forces in 
Liberia, Sankoh's destroyed whole villages, murdering most of the 
residents and taking away only those who might serve them as soldiers, 
porters, cooks, or "wives." Again, many of the dead and most of the 
abducted were women and children.

 

And here's a little-known reality: When any conflict of this sort 
officially ends, violence against women continues and often actually 
grows worse. Not surprisingly, murderous aggression cannot be turned off 
overnight. When men stop attacking one another, women continue to be 
convenient targets. Here in West Africa, as in so many other places 
where rape was used as a weapon of war, it has become a habit carried 
seamlessly into the "post-conflict" era. Where normal structures of law 
enforcement and justice have been disabled by war, male soldiers and 
civilians alike can prey upon women and children with impunity. And they do.

 

So I'm writing to you, here in "post-conflict" West Africa, from an 
active war zone. I'm writing from the heart of the war against women and 
children.

 

Counting Casualties

 

Listen to this report from Amnesty International. It describes the least 
of the West African wars, the relatively short civil war in Côte d'Ivoire:

"The scale of rape and sexual violence in Côte d'Ivoire in the course of 
the armed conflict has been largely underestimated. Many women have been 
gang-raped or have been abducted and reduced to sexual slavery by 
fighters. Rape has often been accompanied by the beating or torture 
(including torture of a sexual nature) of the victim... All armed 
factions have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate sexual violence 
with impunity."

Human Rights Watch points out that "cases of sexual abuse may be 
significantly underreported," because women fear "the possibility of 
reprisals by perpetrators... ostracism by families and communities, and 
cultural taboos."

 

The Amnesty report documents case after case of girls and women, aged 
"under 12" to 63, assaulted by armed men. The more recent and 
thoroughgoing report by Human Rights Watch records the rape of children 
as young as three years-old. During the civil war, women and girls were 
seized in their village homes or at military roadblocks, or were 
discovered hiding in the bush. Some were raped in public. Some were 
raped in front of their husbands and children. Some were forced to 
witness the murder of husbands or parents. Then they were taken away to 
soldiers' camps to be held along with many other women. They were forced 
to cook for the soldiers during the day and every night they were 
gang-raped, in some cases by 30 to 40 men. They were also beaten and 
tortured. They saw women who resisted being beaten or killed by a simple 
slicing of the throat.

 

Many women were raped so incessantly and so brutally -- with sticks, 
knives, gun barrels, burning coals -- that they died. Many others were 
left with injuries and pain that still linger long after the war. Many 
who had been scarred as girls by "excision" or FMG (female genital 
mutilation) were literally ripped apart.

 

The Amnesty report coolly says: "The brutality of rape frequently causes 
serious physical injuries that require long-term and complex treatment 
including uterine prolapses (the descent of the uterus into the vagina 
or beyond)" -- one has to wonder what lies "beyond" the vagina -- 
"vesico-vaginal or recto-vaginal fistulas and other injuries to the 
reproductive system or rectum, often accompanied by internal and 
external bleeding or discharge." It notes that such women usually can't 
"access the medical care they need." Some still find it hard to sit 
down, or stand up, or walk. Some still spit up blood. Some have lost 
their eyesight or their memories. Some miscarried. Many contracted 
sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. No one knows how many of them 
died, or are dying, as a result.

 

And many are still missing, perhaps dragged across borders when rogue 
militias from a neighboring country went home. Perhaps slaughtered along 
the way.

 

War and Its Sequel

 

Historically, women have long been counted among "the spoils of war," 
free for the taking; but, in our own time, women in large numbers have 
also been pawns in deliberate military and political strategies intended 
to humiliate the men to whom they "belong" and to exterminate their 
ethnic groups. (Think of Bosnia.) The Amnesty report traces the 
wholesale violence against women in Côte d'Ivoire to December 2000 when 
a number of women were arrested, raped, and tortured at the government's 
Police Training School in Dioula -- because their presumed ethnicity and 
political affiliation allied them with the opposition. According to 
Human Rights Watch, this was but one of many such cases incited by 
government-sponsored propaganda before the civil war even began.

 

No man responsible for any of these crimes has ever been brought to justice.

 

Next door in Liberia, by the time fighting ended in 2002, 1.4 million 
Liberians had been displaced within the country. Almost a million others 
had fled. In a country of three million people, that's one in three 
citizens gone. At least 270,000 people died. That's nearly 10% of the 
population. And here again the easy targets were women. A World Health 
Organization study in 2005 estimated that a staggering 90% of Liberian 
women had suffered physical or sexual violence; three out of four had 
been raped.

 

Typically, ending the war did not end the violence against women. A 
study in preparation by the International Rescue Committee -- the 
organization for which I currently work as a volunteer -- and Columbia 
University's School of Public Health concludes, "While the war 
officially ended in 2003, the war on women continued."

 

Well over half the women interviewed in two Liberian counties, including 
the capital city, Monrovia, had survived at least one violent physical 
attack during an 18- month period in 2006-2007, years after the conflict 
had officially ended. Well over half the women reported at least one 
violent sexual assault in the same period. Seventy-two percent said 
their husbands had forced them to have sex against their will. A 2003 
IRC study among Liberian refugees in Sierra Leone found that 75% of the 
women had been sexually violated before they fled their country; after 
they fled, 55% were sexually assaulted again.

 

For women, war is not over when it's over.

 

Women Like Me

 

Countless women will never recover from the assaults they suffered 
during the war. I met many such women in Liberia.

 

On a visit I made to Kolahun, in Lofa County, where fighting had been 
heavy, one showed me her scars: a series of parallel horizontal ridges 
starting just below one ear and moving toward the throat. Some guerilla 
in Charles Taylor's army had locked this whisper of a woman against his 
chest and slowly, inch by inch, laid open the flesh of her neck in 
ribbons of blood. But that wasn't all. Taylor's men had broken all the 
fingers of her left hand so that they now point backwards at seemingly 
impossible angles. They slammed her back so forcefully with rifle butts 
that one leg and one arm (the one with the useless hand) are now 
paralyzed. She can still walk, leaning on a homemade wooden crutch; but 
that leaves her without a good arm, and she can't carry anything on her 
head, having lost the ability to balance. She has five children, some of 
them fathered by rape. The soldiers held her a long time. How many raped 
her she cannot say.

 

In the tiny village of Dougoumai I met a woman people refer to only as 
"the sick lady." She lay on a bed in a one-room mud-brick house. As I 
came in, she managed to sit up with great difficulty, using her twisted 
hands to move her swollen, useless legs. Her sister says she was 
captured by a militia fighting against Charles Taylor and gang-raped 
repeatedly by ten men. Nobody can say how long they kept her. They 
rammed their gun butts into her back -- evidently a common technique -- 
paralyzing her legs. She cannot walk. They smashed her hands. She cannot 
hold anything or feed herself or comb her hair. Her mother and two 
sisters, who luckily survived the war, feed her by hand, their lives too 
now dominated by the consequences of the violence done to this woman.

 

Recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the UN 
Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) surveyed surviving women in Lofa 
County, the center of Charles Taylor's operations. More than 98% said 
that, during his war (1999-2003), they lost their homes; more than 90%, 
their livelihoods; more than 72%, at least one family member. Nearly 90% 
of them survived at least one violent physical assault; more than half, 
at least one violent sexual assault. No one inquired about the number of 
women now caring for the permanently disabled.

 

In Sierra Leone, where terrorizing the civilian population was the main 
tactic of war, the violence against women and children was, as Human 
Rights Watch has reported, even more brutal. All parties to the conflict 
committed countless atrocities. Official reports document appalling 
crimes: fathers forced to rape their own daughters; brothers forced to 
rape their sisters; boy soldiers gang-raping old women, then chopping 
off their arms; pregnant women eviscerated alive and the living fetus 
snatched from the womb to satisfy soldiers betting on its sex. A brother 
is hacked to death and eviscerated; his heart and liver are placed in 
the hands of his 18-year-old sister who is commanded to eat them. She 
refuses. She is taken to a place where other women are being held. Among 
them is her sister. She sees her sister and other women murdered. Their 
heads are placed in her lap. These crimes, which violate primal taboos, 
aim to destroy not just individual victims but a whole culture as well; 
yet the individual victims are important in their own right, and in most 
cases they are women and children.

 

Perhaps the worst crime of the bad, bad men has been turning children -- 
mostly boys -- into armed guerillas as bad as themselves. In his 
bestselling autobiography A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah vividly 
describes his life as a boy soldier. Separated from his family by the 
war, he was captured by soldiers in the army of Sierra Leone, trained to 
fight, kept high on drugs (as all soldiers were), and forced to kill. 
When boy soldiers begin to rape and murder girls and women willingly at 
the instigation of men, civilization has collapsed.

 

Crimes Against Women

 

In recent years, every kind of horror has been inflicted on girls and 
women in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire because they are 
female. If females were a particular ethnic group -- Albanians, let's 
say, or Tutsis -- or if they espoused a particular religion, as did 
Bosnian Muslims, we could recognize what goes on as a kind of "gender 
cleansing" or mass femicide. But we don't speak of crimes against women 
in that way. When did you last hear someone speak of "crimes against 
women" at all?

 

Interviewed for a TV documentary on mass rape in the Democratic Republic 
of Congo, a smiling guerrilla says he's "made love" to many women. The 
interviewer asks if all the women were willing, and he laughs. He admits 
that many fight him, and he says -- still grinning -- "If they are 
strong, I call my friends to help me." Despite his use of euphemisms, he 
knows just what he's doing. When the interviewer labels his love-making 
"rape," he typically insists that rape happens in wartime and that when 
the war is over, he won't do it anymore. The state of war excuses men's 
crimes against women because rape -- so the claim goes -- is something 
that just naturally occurs in war.

 

The war against women in West Africa and elsewhere is different from 
other wars -- whether driven by ideology, politics, greed, or personal 
ambition -- in that every faction, every side, makes war on women. They 
all abduct and rape and force women to labor. They all murder women. In 
West Africa, only the Civil Defense Forces (CDF) in Sierra Leone 
refrained for a considerable time from rape. They were traditional 
hunters, recruited by the government to defend their own areas from the 
rebels. Their customs kept them from sexual intercourse, believed to 
deplete a warrior's power, and they operated close to home, where they 
were known; but, as the war went on, they, too, began to act like all 
the other fighters. Their initial restraint was important, however, 
offering evidence that rape does not have to be something that "just 
happens" in war, but is instead an elective, wildly popular choice.

 

After war, in the "post-conflict" era, even some international 
peacekeepers have joined the war against women. Human Rights Watch and 
others have documented cases of rape by peacekeeping soldiers in West 
Africa, but none have been prosecuted. Perpetrators are simply 
repatriated or moved to a new post. Human Rights Watch also reports on 
the widespread practice among peacekeepers of using children who have 
turned to prostitution to survive. (There are few other options for 
girls who have been orphaned or rejected by their families, and many of 
these child prostitutes had already been used as sex slaves during 
wartime.) But apparently the peacekeepers recruit many girls themselves.

 

Here in Kailahun District, the place where the Sierra Leone war started 
and ended, women are upset and angry about the sexual exploitation of 
their adolescent daughters. Parents in this part of the country -- many 
of them war widows -- take seriously the advice to send their daughters 
to school, which costs more than most can easily afford. If a girl 
student becomes pregnant, she is required by law to drop out. (Consider 
the impact on a small village struggling to recover from war of the loss 
of even a few prospective teachers, nurses, or social workers.) If the 
father of the expected child is a fellow student, he can continue his 
studies, denying all responsibility. Often, however, it's not the boys 
who are to blame. Many still-virginal girls drop out of school early to 
escape predatory teachers, and women report that the incidence of teen 
pregnancy drops when peacekeeping forces leave town.

 

Even then, however, rape and child rape continue, largely unabated. It's 
hard to tell with certainty just how high this is, because raped women 
and girls are normally too shamed by the crime to report it. In war 
time, it was somewhat easier because they had so clearly been forced by 
armed men; with the war "over," rape once again becomes a woman's own 
fault. Nonetheless, angry parents in this region of Sierra Leone, 
increasingly report child rape to authorities. Here in Kailahun 
District, women mobilized to force the local magistrate to hear the case 
of a 7-year-old rape victim. The magistrate, apparently related to the 
admitted perpetrator, had prevented prosecution by postponing his trial, 
again and again.

 

Domestic violence -- wife-beating, marital rape, emotional abuse, 
torture, economic deprivation, and the like -- is common. Impoverished 
women with many children to feed have no choice but to endure "normal" 
levels of violence. But as in wartime, habitual violence invites the 
thrill of excess. Just the other day, a man in Moyamba District killed 
his wife and cut off her head.

 

Bad Men Make Good

 

For bad, bad men, terrorizing civilians holds advantages -- beyond the 
immediate gratification of the rush of power. Such acts can land them 
important posts in government. When atrocities become sufficiently 
conspicuous and horrific -- such as the notorious amputations of arms 
and legs in Sierra Leone -- the international community steps in to 
initiate a peace process. Usually they bring to the negotiating table 
all the bad, bad men who have been causing so much trouble and buy them 
off with positions of power in a new "interim" or "transitional" 
government. Witness, in another part of the world where women are 
notoriously badly treated, all those well-known warlords the Afghan 
people wanted tried for war crimes who somehow wound up in President 
Hamid Karzai's cabinet, or -- after elections advertised as democratic 
-- in parliament.

 

Foday Sankoh had been condemned to death for treason when he was 
summoned to just such peace negotiations. From them, he emerged as the 
head of the government commission in charge of managing Sierra Leone's 
natural resources, including the diamonds that financed his war. Charles 
Taylor, while committing mayhem and rape in refugee camps for displaced 
persons, was elected president of Liberia. Voters seemed to figure, as 
battered women often do, that the best way to stop the man's violence 
was to let him have his way, though this is a path to certain disaster.

 

Bad, bad men are quick to learn from the rapid advancement of their 
brothers elsewhere. Laurent Kunda in the Democratic Republic of Congo 
(DRC), widely recognized as a prime candidate for trial before a war 
crimes tribunal, is now said to be jockeying for a high position in the 
government of the DRC in exchange for laying down his arms. The current 
rapid descent of Kenya into "tribal warfare" owes much to the same 
theory. Raila Odingo, having lost a clearly suspect presidential 
election, exploits genocidal violence with good reason to hope that 
international intervention will usher him into office by the back door.

 

Although UN Security Council Resolution 1325 calls for women to be 
included in all peace processes, they are rarely invited to the table. 
With men in charge of governments almost everywhere, the fearful 
fascination with bad, bad men continues and the perverse preference for 
predators trickles down. In Sierra Leone, ex-combatants were rewarded 
with motorcycles. The theory was that violent young men would be less 
dangerous if they could serve a useful purpose and make some money 
carrying passengers on brand new highly-chromed bikes in a country where 
most cars had been torched. The result? Every public square in the 
dodgiest districts of Sierra Leone is now dominated by a motorcycle gang 
consisting mainly of young men already surely skilled in the sexual 
exploitation of girls. Perhaps in the end, the transport scheme will 
work out; but in Sierra Leone most women and girls still walk.

 

Here in Kailahun District, women tell the story -- possibly apocryphal 
-- of an old woman who was huddled over her cook fire when RUF rebels 
entered her village. She was frying some tasty frogs. Rebels surrounded 
her, peering into the pot to see what she was cooking, and one of them 
said: "We are freedom fighters of the Revolutionary United Front. We 
have come to save you from the government." The old woman -- unafraid -- 
replied: "Then you must go to the capital. The government is not in my 
pot." Women in Kailahun District tell that story over and over, and they 
laugh every time. They are so proud of that lone, bold, old woman who 
told those rebel men off. That's the spirit of survival, still alive in 
them, though they must know that the rebels probably shot the woman and 
ate her frogs.

 

[Note on sources: A number of the reports discussed in this piece, all 
PDF files, can be read on-line: Amnesty International, "Targeting 
Women"; Human Rights Watch, "'My Heart Is Cut': Sexual Violence by 
Rebels and Pro-Government Forces in Côte d'Ivoire; The World Health 
Organization; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the UN 
Fund for Population Activities, "Women's Reproductive Health in Liberia, 
The Lofa County Reproductive Health Survey"; Human Rights Watch, "'We'll 
Kill You If You Cry': Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict"; UN 
Resolution 1325.]

 

Writer/photographer Ann Jones is working as a volunteer with the 
International Rescue Committee (IRC) on a special project for their 
Gender-Based Violence (read: Violence Against Women) unit called "A 
Global Crescendo: Women's Voices from Conflict Zones." Her blogs about 
the project can be found by clicking here. She is the author, most 
recently, of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan 
(Metropolitan Books), a report from another war that's not over.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation 
Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and 
opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder 
of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture 
(University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly 
updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's 
crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.]