Ascent of Women (25 page)

Disney says, “Women mobilizing to stop war is our last best hope.” Referring to the ever-increasing number of civil wars going on in the world today, she stresses that “we have been moving closer to perpetual war every day. One thing we’ve never tried, never given a chance to, is women’s leadership. Women don’t have magic in their chromosomes. But women do the work of peace. We do the living and carry out the dead and care for the sick and educate the children. Women are much more reluctant to go to war.” The lesson of the film, she feels, is that it lets people know that you really can make a difference. “If you choose to lean into the answers, instead of backing away from the fray, you can do anything.”

Liberia is certainly not trouble-free. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won a second term as president, by a hair. The country wobbles
on the stability scale. Rape, although much reduced, is still a problem. But the women know they made a difference, and, says Disney, “they are living proof that moral courage and non-violent resistance can succeed, even where the best efforts of traditional diplomacy have failed.”

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One victory doesn’t secure emancipation. Vigilance is the lot of women if they want to maintain equality with men. Look at Israel, for example. Ultra Orthodox (or Haredi, those who “tremble before God”) men are actually making women sit in the back of the bus and chastising women who aren’t dressed modestly in public. This kind of behaviour started in 2010 on buses that run through Haredi neighbourhoods, but two years later it has escalated to neighbourhoods all over Jerusalem, and every woman is fair game, not just women in the Haredi community. The Haredim have been accused by non-Orthodox Jews of blacking out women’s faces on billboards, barring women from speaking at the podium at conferences, even spitting on an eight-year-old girl because they deemed her to be immodestly dressed.

In a case that became the talk of Israel, a woman pediatrician, Channa Maayan, was being awarded a prize from the ministry of health for a book she wrote about hereditary diseases common to Jews. She attended the event with her husband, and they were told that they would have to sit apart, as women and men could not sit together. Then the official in charge said she was to stay seated and send a man to the stage to collect her prize. This in a country that boasts women pilots in the air force, women in parliament and even as chief of the Supreme
Court, a country that once had the irrepressible Golda Meir as prime minister.

Another sign of the times for women: in May 2011, three women—Jody Williams from the United States, Shirin Ebadi from Iran and Mairead Maguire from Ireland, all of them Nobel Peace laureates—came together to collectively tackle one of the most intransigent problems that women face—sexual violence in zones of conflict and post conflict. These laureates are part of a new force in the world called the Nobel Women’s Initiative, which was established in 2006 by Williams, Ebadi and Maguire, along with the late Wangari Maathai (Kenya), Rigoberta Menchú Tum (Guatemala) and Betty Williams (Ireland). In 2012, they were joined by the laureates Leymah Gbowee (Liberia) and Tawakkol Karman (Yeman) and honorary member Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma).

The three who initiated the May meeting were looking for strategies to end the scourge of rape and gender violence in conflict, which is one of the ugliest stories in the world today. Monsters are gang-raping women as a strategy of war in Congo, Darfur and Zimbabwe, among other places, and getting away with it. This despite the attention of a high-powered collection of notables such as Stephen Lewis, Hillary Clinton, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the playwright and activist Eve Ensler, among others; despite the unprecedented step taken by the UN Security Council on June 19, 2008, when it declared rape a strategy of war and a security issue. Rape has horrendous personal consequences for women and their families, but it also undermines whole economies. For example, food production in Congo dropped by 70 percent starting in 2004 because traditionally the women are the planters of seed, tenders and harvesters of produce, and they have
been sexually assaulted so brutally and so often they are too wounded to go to the fields and when they’ve healed enough to work again they often won’t because they are too afraid of being assaulted again. The World Food Program has to supply food from an already strained international aid budget. What’s more, the consequences of sexual depravity affect everyone: when the caregivers are unable to cope, the children are left to their own devices, and their health and nutrition suffer. The level of violence that the victims endure is almost unspeakable—paraded naked in the town square, assaulted vaginally with a broken beer bottle, having a breast mutilated with a machete, being gang-raped by soldiers eight and ten times a day, some of the victims newborns, others eighty years old.

The Nobel women invited 130 activists from all over the world to meet in Montebello, Quebec, to find a way to stop this increasingly horrific violence against women. They had a wealth of experience in lobbying, protesting and building public awareness: Jody Williams received the Nobel Prize for her work in banning land mines; Mairead Maguire was one of two women (the other was Betty Williams) honoured for establishing peace in Ireland; and Shirin Ebadi is the Iranian woman who dares to continually speak out for the women of that country. The conference, held in an old log building surrounded by gently rolling hills, had a we-can-do-anything buzz from the moment the delegates arrived. Rose Mapendo had come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which had been recently named the second most dangerous place on earth for women (Afghanistan is in first place). A woman or girl is raped approximately every forty-eight seconds in Congo. Mapendo stood up to reply to a comment made from the podium and then, as though the floodgates
opened, she began to tell her terrible story. She’d been attacked by one of the roving militias in her country; she had witnessed the murder of her husband, the rape of her daughters and finally had been gang-raped herself. It was apparent that she had not planned to relate her experience, but the memories she’d been harbouring had overpowered her reserve. She looked so alone and vulnerable when she began talking, wringing her hands, the sound of her voice rising and falling as she described some details that brought back the terror and others that reduced her to tears. Excruciating pauses punctuated her account.

“I’m a survivor of genocide. It’s enough goodness for me to sit with women who make a commitment to make a difference.” She stopped talking for a moment, trying to gain control of her voice as she choked on tears. Every one of us was on the edge of her seat, trying to send vibes of support to her. She began again. “It is hard to speak, but I choose to do this. Nobody can change my past. We learn from the past and from that we can change the present and future.

“Women can stand up for other women. I believe when women come together, something happens because we heard the testimony. Some people don’t believe the rape or sexual violence, don’t believe it is true—but it is true. I spent sixteen months in the death camps, under the gun twenty-four hours, seven days a week. At the beginning I was with my husband and children. They tortured the men, killed all of them, left the women. They said they couldn’t waste bullets on women. We talk about rape—”

She paused again. One woman stood up and slipped an arm around her, and Rose continued. “We had no help. I thank the people who take action. The first step is raise awareness. Tell
people this is true. Encourage the victim to speak out. Without our voice, nobody knows what is true exactly. That they raped women in front of their children. And take the life of husband. That they take their children and raped them in front of the mothers. How can you do that horrible thing to someone?

“My happy today is the women. Unite is power. To push the elephant together—nobody can do it herself. Empower those women, empower them to stand up. Culture makes women feel they are in shame. I am a victim. I believe I can help another victim. Because nobody knows what she’s been through. Nobody can change outside, can change what’s inside. It’s not your fault to be raped. Not your choice. You can speak out, let it go—don’t keep it inside.

“We are powerful. We can come together [and] make a difference today.”

Her story, and the courage it took to tell it, brought the roomful of women to their feet in thunderous supportive applause. She stood for several minutes perplexed by the outpouring of affection and sympathy and pride, not knowing what to say. Her call for women to come together to create a force of change, when she herself was so emotionally wounded, galvanized the participants to absolute solidarity.

Several more women shared their stories then—none of them seeking pity, all of them putting a face on an atrocity, a fact with an accusation. Binalakshmi Nepram from India was one. She leaned into the microphone and tried to make eye contact with every woman in the room as she described the little-known facts of wretched brutality in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, where ethnic conflict is raging and women are being targeted by the Indian military. It’s one of those places the
government describes as “disturbed”—a code word, says Nepram, for merciless crackdown. But the military and the police sent to Manipur aren’t into finding solutions, she said, but into punishing the people who live there.

She shared a story from July 2004. A young Manipuri woman was arrested in the middle of the night at gunpoint by Indian soldiers. The next morning her body was found with bullet holes in her genitals, the ultimate form of sexual violence. In an amazing act of defiance and non-violent protest, a dozen women stripped in front of the headquarters of the Assam Rifles, challenging the armed forces to rape them as well.

Nepram told us, “Women in Manipur have joined together for community security and support. They patrol the streets with bamboo torches at night and physically tussle with the armed Indian soldiers to rescue women being held in their trucks.”

Intervention is only possible when people such as Rose Mapendo and Binalakshmi Nepram decide to speak up. There were many moments of despair during the conference but also hard determination to work for change. When asked for plans, women eagerly came forward: provide mobile phones so the women can get help quickly; use Twitter to spread the word and get real-time updates; issue a call to action, form an ad hoc committee; establish reachable goals.

The statistics reported and the stories told led the participants to form the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict, joining organizations and individuals already working on this file to make a coordinated effort for change. On the final day, the three Nobel laureates issued a statement: “Together we will demand bold political leadership to prevent rape in conflict, to protect civilians and rape survivors,
and call for justice for all—including effective prosecution of those responsible.”

~

It’s shocking to hear reports from states like Manipur, reeling in violence in a country that’s said to be the fastest-growing democracy in the world. Congo is also a place of extraordinary violence but one that the international community tends to ignore. I’d travelled to North and South Kivu provinces in December 2009 to write about how Congolese women were managing. Aid workers had said they were hiding in the forest because the roving militias had burned their villages, chased off their men, raped them and stolen their livestock.

Getting there was a story in itself. The east side of the country is so dangerous that all the humanitarian agencies except Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had left when I was there. But even MSF, known for its fearlessness, was taking exceptional precautions to keep its staff safe. For example, in getting from point A to point B, they used what’s called a “kiss” manoeuvre. To get from Goma, the capital, to Kitchanga, where I wanted to go, they sent a vehicle from both directions to meet at the middle and transfer the goods, the personnel or, in this case, the journalist. Each truck also carried a person (known to the team as “the donkey”) who stayed on the walkie-talkie, reporting their location every few minutes. As we drove on the rutted, spine-jarring road to Kitchanga, one of the MSF staff told me about the children who’d been sexually assaulted, most of them so traumatized that they were barely coherent.

The next day I met one of them, ten-year-old Siffy (not her real name). Her enormous round eyes were soul-piercing as she
told me about the men who raped her and left her for dead in the forest. Her story came in fragments. Her mother, Pascasie, had searched frantically for two days after Siffy went missing, but it’s hard to find a lone child in the African bush. At last Pascasie ran into a hunter who said he’d seen the girl’s body and would lead her there. Siffy was lying on her back, as still as the air, her arms spread, her skin covered with mosquito bites. Then her mother saw her take an almost imperceptible breath. Siffy wasn’t dead.

The merciless attack had left the girl perilously traumatized, but she lived to be an eyewitness to the worst atrocity known to women in a country convulsing with lawlessness. And by all accounts, it’s the women themselves who are poised to yank this pitiless place out of its fifteen-year-old date with the Devil.

Siffy’s conversation with me shifted between a deluge of facts and childlike requests to play. “The monsters are outside,” she told me, her eyes still showing fear. “They want to kill us. They hurt me. I want to go home. But we can’t go there now.” She’s not even a teenager yet, this child of Congo, a place where girls as young as she is know the difference between gang rape (one woman raped by many men), mass rape (all the women in the village raped) and re-rape (women raped again and again). “The monsters tortured my mother,” Siffy said. “They took our food. I’m afraid of the monsters. They are still at my home in Kalembe.”

Then she switched the subject with such telling facility that I knew she could only recount pieces of it at a time lest her young mind take flight. A dazzling smile washed away the pain that had clouded her face while she spoke of the monsters, and she pulled me into play—she loved doing high-fives.