Why did Karzai choose such an inopportune moment to make his announcement? Given the history of the international community’s response to women’s issues, you’d be hard pressed to accuse him of misjudging his audience. In the past, the United Nations in particular had turned a blind eye to equally ridiculous pronouncements and edicts. There was little other than lip service about improving the lives of women and girls to suggest that the men and women Karzai consulted, accepted bailouts from and paraded around as his pals would stand in his way. But they did. And Karzai backed down, first saying that the version of the law released to the media was different from the one he had signed, then that he had signed the law without ever reading it.
Most people wondered how the president could have made such a blockhead decision in the first place. Afghans said it was all about the upcoming presidential election. Karzai’s numbers were dropping, and there were two or three credible candidates who could maybe have beaten him. He’d crunched the numbers and then had done what power-hungry people do (or are forced to do when extremists and warlords are holding the key to power): he attempted to sell out women to win over the fundamentalist vote that would secure an electoral win. But for once the tactic backfired.
It was a first on a number of fronts: the international community had, for the first time since the insurgency in Afghanistan began, refused to be bullied by the argument that says “this is our culture and is none of your business.” Referring to the various international treaties, mostly under the auspices of the United Nations, that Afghanistan has signed—covenants and conventions that protect the rights of women and girls—progressives demanded that the Afghan government honour them. Pressure from inside the country to heed the Afghan constitution, which also protects the rights of women and girls, also increased.
Karzai was caught off guard; when he’d given a sweeping amnesty to the war criminals in his country, for example, the international community and his own citizens had mostly succumbed to the old dodge “there’s nothing I can do.” Not this time. Women in Kabul marched in the street. Media reports showed men throwing rocks at them, but a ring of policewomen moved in to surround the marchers and keep the men back. The protesters demanded a meeting with Karzai when he got back from Europe. They got it. At the meeting they demanded changes to the Shiite Personal Status Law. They didn’t get all they asked for—the law is still a thorn in the side of anyone who seeks fairness and justice—but Karzai did amend it. For example, under the law, a girl was deemed mature and marriageable at her first menstrual period, which could be as young as nine or ten years old. The age of maturity for boys was set at fifteen. Amendments changed the girls’ legal “marrying” age to sixteen. Karzai also agreed to change the law forbidding women to leave the home. They can now leave for work or school or medical treatment without having previously signed a marriage contract allowing such trips.
It wasn’t the end of the rights debate, of course, but it did herald the fact that by banding together (as the women in Senegal did to end female genital mutilation and the women in sub-Saharan Africa did to turn the tide of HIV/AIDS), Afghan women could alter their own destiny.
~
Indicators of grassroots change in attitudes toward women’s rights had been cropping up in unusual places throughout the first decade of the new century. Since 1999, the second brutal civil war had raged in the West African nation of Liberia. One corrupt dictator, the infamous Dr. Doe, had been replaced by another—the psychopath Charles Taylor. The usual complement of horrors had overtaken the country: mass raping of women, abducting children and turning them into child soldiers, a campaign of torture, dismemberment and killing that paralyzed the people with fear.
In 2002, when it seemed as if the civil war would never end—and Liberian women figured they’d sacrificed their entire lives to the carnage and bloodletting of conflict, to the fear of being raped in the ongoing violence—a young woman named Leymah Gbowee, who had become involved with two nascent regional peace movements, had a dream in which she saw women of both the country’s major religions, Christianity and Islam, coming together as an unstoppable force with a plan for peace. Soon after, she gathered Christian women together to start a conversation about how they might contribute to moving the peace talks forward. Then a Muslim woman arrived at the meeting, asking how she could become involved. The two religious groups had known plenty of discord, so the first step was to settle their own differences. They talked through each issue and discovered that misinformation and suspicion were largely responsible for keeping them apart. Solidarity followed.
Calling themselves the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, and armed with nothing more than the courage of their convictions, the women, under Gbowee’s leadership, made signs, donned white T-shirts and went to the fish market every day for months in 2003 because they knew that Charles Taylor, the president, drove by every morning in his motorcade. Their signs told him that he had to negotiate a peace and stop the violence. The protests were ignored.
What happened next astounded everyone, including the women. They decided to take their placards to the Presidential Mansion, where they chanted their demands for peace; their bold stand became the talk of the country. And it worked. Taylor was persuaded to attend the peace talks with the rebel leaders being held in Ghana, and the women followed him there just in case he changed his mind.
When the peace talks in Ghana broke down, the women staged an unforgettable scene. Linking arms, they circled the building where the negotiators were deadlocked and announced that they were taking them hostage on behalf of the women of Liberia. They vowed that they would not budge until a peace accord was signed. When commissionaires were sent to physically remove them, the women stood their ground and threatened to shed their clothes if the guards tried to send them away. It was a curse of nakedness on all those men, and the consequences of such a curse are formidable in Africa: men who are exposed to that curse are considered to be dead. No one will cook for such a man, or marry him, or do any kind of business with him. The security men left the women alone.
The next day, with the peace accord still elusive, the protesters announced a sex strike. No woman would allow her husband to have sex with her until the peace agreement was signed. They encouraged all the women of Liberia to join the protest, and a massive number did—sending messages via cellphones and runners to let their sisters in Ghana know that the sex strike was taking immediate effect.
A mediator came out at that point to negotiate with the demonstrators, who agreed to give the men two weeks to get the talks to the finish line. At the top of their list of demands was that the men at the table stop talking about the political appointments and rewards and access to the country’s resources that they anticipated in the aftermath of the agreement and start talking about how to implement a lasting peace. To the astonishment of many, exactly two weeks later the peace treaty was signed, and Charles Taylor went into exile. UN troops were deployed to maintain the peace, and the women went home.
An army of women had confronted Liberia’s ruthless president and rebel warlords and won. But the women didn’t stop there. They went to work on the election campaign that brought Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to power as the first woman to head the Liberian state. Leymah Gbowee helped lead an army of women that ended the war in her nation and in the process emerged as an international leader who changed history. In a classic case of non-violent action, she and the women of Liberia reversed the power equation.
Gbowee would eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her efforts, but the event that led to that international honour might have been missed except that the American filmmaker Abigail Disney heard about the commotion and turned it into a widely released and praised documentary called Pray the Devil Back to Hell. When I asked Disney where she got the title for the film, she explained: “Leymah said at one point in our discussions that Charles Taylor was such a fake religious guy he could pray the Devil out of hell. My director said these women were praying h
im back.”
The film has been seen in thirty-two countries on all seven continents (including Antarctica, on a docked cruise ship). The story it tells has inspired the women’s movements in Bosnia, Georgia and Cambodia. It’s influenced how the UN understands women who are trying to be heard at peace negotiating tables. And it’s having an impact on the vital importance of women’s voices being taken seriously in ending conflict.
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.”
~
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 herse
lf. 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.
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