Mira had been waiting by the window all night, knowing her childhood friend had been taken away. When she heard the rustle in the garden, she rushed outside with her husband, and together they gathered up their battered lifelong friend. Mira bathed Eva, made her strong tea and cradled her head while she vomited the wretched contents of her stomach and then collapsed. The next morning Eva left the village. She didn’t come back until the conflict was over.
I visited her again during the war and after the war was over, as well. Although she had reunited with her family and together they returned to Berak, the men responsible for the crime were still roaming the streets of her village, still gloating when Eva walked by. The last time I saw her, in 2005, she told me she still wonders why she was spared. Cradling a new grandchild in her arms, she repeated the comment she’d made when I left her in 1991: “I’ve always wondered why God didn’t take me when he took my Bartol. I think I must have been left here to be the witness for the women.”
It took me the usual three months to get the story to our readers. But after it was published, they took up the torch for these women, and in the form of thousands of letters to the editor, they demanded that the United Nations do something about it.
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This was rape as a form of genocide. In the rape camps, many Bosnian women were assaulted until they became pregnant. The Serbian soldiers, known as Chetnicks, viewed systematic rape as a way of planting Serbian seeds into Bosnian women and therefore destroying their ethnicity and culture. It wasn’t enough that the women felt their families would reject them because they had been raped, a shame to Islam. The women’s suffering was twofold, just like that of the women of Rwanda and Congo in the years that would follow.
I often wondered what made Eva tell her story when others were too afraid to speak. She told me that in her opinion the vanquished need a face and a name. Atrocities need a date and a time. Telling the truth is the only way to heal. “It’s not enough to say, ‘You raped me,’ ” she said. “When I say it happened, where it happened and what my name is, it makes the rape something to be responsible for.”
But even with worldwide attention on the mass rape of women in the Balkans, and the enormous pity for them and fury for the perpetrators that resulted, the stigma of being raped stuck to those women. One of the problems with stopping the scourge of rape in zones of conflict and post conflict is eradicating that stigma. What everyone needs to understand is that these women and girls are just like everybody’s mothers and daughters. They are women who had jobs to go to, mortgages to pay; their children, just like the children of their rapists, just like our children, also got croup and forgot to do their homework or ducked out of doing family chores. They had friends over for dinner, took holidays, went to the park, watched over their kids on the swings, the seesaws, the jungle gyms.
But somehow when we hear stories like Eva’s or stories about the women in Rwanda or Congo, we turn the victims and their attackers into “others.” We listen to foolish remarks such as “They’ve been at this for centuries; let them kill each other.” Or “They always treat their women like this; it’s not my business.” Perhaps it’s a way of separating ourselves from something we feel powerless to stop. But we do have power. We can write letters to the United Nations to demand action. We can speak up when others dismiss these atrocities as cultural or religious or worse—none of our business. It took a brave collection of women from Bosnia to do something about rape. They took their dreadful stories to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. They risked being rejected by their families by telling their stories to the world. But they gave the international tribunal the tools to do what courts and governments have avoided throughout history. It made rape a war crime. In 1998, the Yugoslavia War Crimes Tribunal, also in The Hague, made rape and sexual enslavement in the time of war a crime against humanity. Only genocide is considered a more serious crime.
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I believe the shift in thinking about the role of women and the issues that women deal with in the first decade of the third millennium will go down in history as a turning point for civilization. Issues, such as sexual assault, that had been buried, denied and ignored suddenly began to be explored in groundbreaking research papers and to figure in legislative reform.
Two books published in the spring of 2011 brought facts to light that might have put the international community on alert against the mass rape in Bosnia, Rwanda and Congo. In one of them, At the Dark End of the Street, Danielle McGuire exposes a secret that had been held for sixty-five years. It’s the story of the iconic Rosa Parks, the tiny, stubborn woman who defied the Jim Crow segregation rules in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to comply with a white man’s order to move to the back of the bus. That solitary act of defiance was the catalyst that in 1955 gave rise to the civil rights movement. But McGuire’s research brings out a more astonishing piece of the story. For ten years prior to her famous bus boycott, Rosa Parks was an anti-rape activist.
Parks began investigating rape in 1944, collecting evidence that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against black women. That evidence was ignored. All these decades later, McGuire is the first to tell what she calls “the real story—that the civil rights movement is also rooted in African-American women’s long struggle against sexual violence.” And she argues that given the role rape played in the lives of women—that it was ongoing, that it fuelled the anger and powered the movement as much as the Jim Crow laws did—the history of the civil rights movement needs to be rewritten. She sees the infamous Montgomery bus incident as an event that was as much about women’s rights as civil rights. As McGuire eloquently writes, “It was a women’s movement for dignity, respect and bodily integrity.”
Gloria Steinem agrees. In a review of McGuire’s book, Steinem wrote, “Rosa Parks’ bus boycott was the end of a long process that is now being taken seriously. What Rosa Parks did was expose [to the leaders of the civil rights movement] the truth about sexual assault as well as the widespread ugliness of rape as a tool to repress, punish and control women during the civil rights movement. Her work was meant to be a call for change in America. And yet until the fall of 2011, hardly anyone even knew about it.”
Why didn’t we know this before? Why has so much history involving women been either ignored or suppressed? How is it that the stunning facts Rosa Parks gathered were never published at the time? And would the world have changed had the information been available sooner?
The rape of black women as an everyday practice of white supremacy wasn’t the only revelation in 2011. The other book, Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, is a collection of essays edited by Sonja Hedgepeth, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, and Rochelle Saidel, executive director of the U.S.-based Remember the Women Institute. As I read the book, I had to put it down from time to time to catch my breath. With all the documentation and literature of the Holocaust, all the memorials and reminders, how can it be that this appalling information about the gang-raping and sexual abuse of Jewish women has been left out until now? No one knows how many women and girls were sexually assaulted while they were isolated in ghettos or incarcerated in concentration camps, and no one ever will. Some women were murdered, and others chose to remain silent, as rape carries a stigma even in the chambers of death: even though a woman was raped, she was “having sex” with the enemy. The authors refer to this kind of shame as the most effective of all social weapons. And they say that women caught in war zones invariably face “a dilemma of fatal inclusion or unbearable ostracism.”
The men who raped these women in Nazi concentration camps were obsessive about keeping records—of inhuman medical experiments performed, of the elimination of men, women and children in the gas chambers or by shooting or hanging. But they kept no list of who was raped. There is not a word in the vast accountings of the Nazi regime about the sexual assault of women and girls. The story is simply missing. Seen as sexual objects as well as a biologi
cal danger by the Nazis, Jewish women were the target of sexual depravity and rape. And yet their story was suppressed. As the essays in this important book show, the survivors shared details before the trials at Nuremburg, but not a word was spoken during the trials.
In an interview with me, Gloria Steinem said, “The judges at Nuremberg didn’t want crying women in the courtroom. And some Jewish historians didn’t want to admit their women had been sexually assaulted and/or denied it had happened. It’s taken sixty years for that to come out.” She believes that the floodgates began to open when rape became a war crime and told me that women owe a debt of gratitude to Navi Pillay, the judge who made that historic ruling at the International Criminal Court. Because of her, and the recent work of other scholars and activists in the public sphere, the crime of rape is no longer seen as either inevitable or the fault of women.
“Think about Bosnia, Rwanda and Congo,” Steinem said. “If we had acknowledged what happened to Jewish women in the Holocaust or black women in the civil rights movement, we’d have been better prepared for what happened in Bosnia, Rwanda and Congo. It’s not about war, it’s about genocide. To make the right sperm occupy the wrong womb is an inevitable part of genocide. The publication of these books is a warning to the world that sexual violence is a keystone to genocide, and they make it clear that today there’s a shift in the sense that rape is now noticed and even taken seriously. That wasn’t true before.”
As the researcher Brigitte Hlbmayr points out in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, “Unlike the cases in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia where rape was used as a strategy of war, sexualized violence was not an inherent part of the genocidal process during the Holocaust. Instead it was part of the continuum of violence that resulted from genocide. Rape was not an instrument of genocide, but was the byproduct of intentional annihilation.”
Like the judges at Nuremburg, film directors and publishers have hesitated to expose the brutal truth about rape. But that too is changing. Lynn Nottage was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, aptly titled Ruined, which chronicles the plight of women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Pulitzer citation hailed Ruined as “a searing drama set in chaotic Congo that compels audiences to face the horror of wartime rape and brutality while still finding affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness.” The play tells the story of Mama Nadi, the proprietor of a local establishment that acts both as a shelter for women who’ve been damaged or “ruined” by the civil war and a bar/brothel for the nationalist and rebel soldiers who keep it raging on. Always the shrewd businesswoman, Nadi sides neither with the women she shelters nor with her militant patrons until the war outside closes in and there are choices to make and truths to face.
Two years later, a film called Incendies (Scorched) became another example of the new truth-telling. Adapted from a play by Wajdi Mouawad, a Lebanese-Canadian writer, and directed by the Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2011, even though it takes the audience where few have dared to go before with a story in which twins fulfil their mother’s dying wish. They travel to the Middle East, where they discover they were born of rape by the man who ran the prison where their mother was incarcerated. That man turns out to be their brother as well as their father. It is a searing and courageous tale of the humiliation of rape, the will to survive and the scorched-earth patterns of rapists.
Whether committed inside or outside a war zone, rape punishes women twice. First they suffer the physical abuse and then the never-ending memory and shame, which threaten and retreat like tidal surges throughout the rest of their lives. Justice can only come from acknowledgement and the conviction of the perpetrator.
That’s what the girls in Kenya are counting on. And when they stand in the dock in a Nairobi court in late 2012, magistrates from around the world will be buffeted by the hot winds of change that have blown from Africa.
TWO
Scriptured Oppression
Religion has been misused politically not only in Afghanistan but in every other part of the world.
— DR. SIMA SAMAR, chair of the Afghanistan
Independent Human Rights Commission
Do you remember at what point in your life you realized that something was amiss, and that society played a huge, mostly negative, role in reinforcing gender bias? I remember the late, great Norma Scarborough, founder of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League, telling a story about the exact moment when she realized there was an unfair playing field for women. There was a contest in her community—a spelling bee, if I recall correctly. Norma was nine years old, smart as a whip and something of a tomboy. She won the contest and then watched the contest organizer switch the prizes for first and second places so that she would get the doll carriage and the boy who came second would get the bike. “I wanted the bike,” she’d roar every time she told the story, to the delighted recognition of her audience. That was the event that introduced her to the thorny topic of sexual equality.
I experienced a similar aha moment. I was ten or eleven years old, picking through the mail scattered on my mother’s kitchen table. Christmas was just around the corner, so most of the envelopes contained holiday greeting cards. I read each one, often having to decipher the grownup handwriting conveying Christmas wishes. In some cases, there was a family photo tucked into the card; in others, the face of the card itself featured the family. It was fun to see kids I knew, all dressed up and grinning for the ubiquitous family portrait. But about halfway through the pile, I came across a card that stopped me. What was going on here? In the photo on the front of the card, the father was sitting in a big comfortable armchair, leaning back, holding a pipe in one hand and looking totally relaxed and self-satisfied. The mother was sitting on the edge of the sofa across from him, leaning forward, as though she was ready for flight. She was flanked by young boys in the same pose. Another boy, standing behind the sofa, was leaning forward too. All of them were staring at the man in the easy chair as though he was some sort of deity: the adoring family gazing at the patriarch. It shouted male power and female subservience, the father’s benevolence, the mother’s angelic devotion. To be fair, it was the style in the 1950s to create family portraits in Father Knows Best fashion.
The Christmas card was supposed to express feelings of peace on earth. It didn’t for me. Instead it raised a red flag that has being flying in my consciousness ever since. I still have that card tucked away with my late mother’s keepsakes. I look at it from time to time just to remind myself about where women have been and how much further we have to go. As Agnes Macphail, the first woman to be elected to the Canadian House of Commons, declared in parliament on February 26, 1925, “I don’t want to be the angel of any home. I want for myself what I want for other women—absolute equality. After that is secured, then men and women can take turns at being angels.”
To “love, honour and obey” was the mantra for most North American women at the time that Christmas photo was taken. Historically women had to accept various religiously or culturally sanctioned acts all over the world—marital rape, female genital mutilation, foot binding, honour killing, polygamy and a dozen other miseries that defined their status. Women everywhere existed in financial purdah, and when their husbands died or otherwise abandoned them, they realized they had no right to the man’s income. Even today, a conservative estimate suggests 30 percent of the women who dwell on this earth are subjected to daily violence, are forbidden to work or leave their homes without a husband, brother or son to escort them, or go to school or wear what they want to wear or dance the way they want to dance or speak up the way they want to speak up. Half of the population in places like Pakistan, Congo, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia—and numerous other countries—are still subjected to state-sanctioned, culturally condoned misogyny.
How did women become second-class citizens in the first place? Why is it that the international community still excuses t
he abuse of women and denies them equality rights in the name of culture and religion? And how is it that women continue to step boldly forward in one instance and slide two steps backward in the next?
Many fine minds have turned to the question, particularly during the second wave of feminism, picking up on the work of thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, who shed light on the dark roots of women’s presumed inferiority.
The theory that biology is destiny belongs to Beauvoir and comes from the blockbuster book she wrote in 1949, The Second Sex. Her meticulously researched argument suggests that men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them as “the other.” Man sees himself as the subject of life and woman as the object: he’s essential, she’s not. Women’s inferiority is taken for granted. Although Beauvoir writes that biology is not enough in itself to explain how women became “the other,” it does account for the fact that women and men have never shared the world in terms of equality. She accuses men of creating a false aura of sanctity around women as an excuse to organize society without them, preserving them in the domestic sphere. And she writes that the religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination.
Although they were rarely included in the mid-twentieth-century discussions about women’s oppression, Middle Eastern women were also contributing to the debate. At about the same time as Beauvoir published The Second Sex, Doria Shafiq was challenging the legal, social and cultural barriers for women in Egypt. A feminist, poet and political activist, Shafiq called for a woman’s right to vote and to run for political office when she founded the Daughters of the Nile Union in 1948. When she was refused a job at Cairo University because she was a woman, she became editor of The New Women’s Magazine, which gave her a platform for the reforms she wanted for women. She led a paramilitary force of Egyptian women to resist the British at the Suez Canal and called for a boycott of Barclay’s Bank when it refused to let women open bank accounts. But Egypt in the 1950s was no place for gender reform. In 1957, Shafiq was placed under house arrest by President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime. For eighteen years she was forbidden to leave her home; her magazines were closed, her name was banned from the media and her Egyptian writings were destroyed. In 1975, she committed suicide. By then there was hardly a trace left of the work she’d done. Women in Egypt are trying to resurrect her story today.
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