Stop the Next War Now (15 page)

Clearly the people of the world, and especially Afghan women, do not need liberating. They need us to rein in our government, and its support of misogynist forces like the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, so that they can continue the difficult task of achieving their own freedom. Our solidarity must enable indigenous struggles to attain freedom by preventing the interference of imperial governments.

In the case of Afghanistan, solidarity can take the form of supporting the work of indigenous women’s rights organizations like rawa. Other important examples of solidarity include the recent anti-Iraq-war movement in the United States and elsewhere, the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine, and the East Timor Action Network. Whether we lend our support to the struggles of women in Afghanistan, or to other peoples oppressed by U.S.-backed governments or military actions around the world, our solidarity with the survivors of “liberation” is the most effective rejection of war.

“Now woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating

herself from emancipation, if she desires to be free.”

—Emma Goldman

GLOBAL WOMEN

FOR PEACE

KAVITA N. RAMDAS

Kavita N. Ramdas is the president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, a U.S.-based grant-making organization.This piece is excerpted from an interview conducted by Gael Murphy on November 29, 2004.

Women are leading the struggle for peace and conflict resolution and see these as clearly linked to their own struggle for the full realization of their human rights. In the post-9/11 world, women outside the United States have been at the forefront of the global peace movement and have been at the table demanding alternative ways in which to resolve conflicts.

War takes a high toll on anybody living within a conflict zone. But the toll it takes on women, children, and the elderly is different. Human Rights Watch and other international agencies estimate that up to 70 percent of the casualties of any war are noncombatants or civilian casualties, and certainly the experience in Iraq bears that out. Women and children who are not supposedly in the line of fire pay a huge price, dismissed as “collateral damage” in military speak. This so-called collateral damage includes the destruction of the infrastructure that enables families to continue living. Women who become the primary providers for their families when their men are at war are now hugely affected.

They’re also vulnerable to sexual exploitation, and in war after war, we see rape used systematically as a weapon. And—as has been well documented in the case of Vietnam veterans—in the aftermath of conflict, even though the women may have been traumatized themselves, it is they who bear the primary responsibility for dealing with men who come back with psychological damage.

Given all the ways in which war affects women, women in most parts of the world see it as self-evident that commitment to a just peace is essential. Women pay a huge amount of attention to the issue of constitution building and to women’s participation in it. Afghan women took great risks to be able to be present at the Loya Jirga, which is a sort of council of elders, and they begged the United States to support them in their demand for a 50 percent representation of women in the Loya Jirga discussions. Our government refused to back them, arguing that even in the United States there was only a 14 percent representation of women in the House and Senate—how could they require that Afghan women should have a 50 percent representation? The Afghan women responded, “Just because you’re backward, why should we be?”

Women in Maheshwar, India, protest the construction of the Narmada Dam, 1999.

© Ian Berry/MAGNUM

Women’s lawyers associations in conflict zones and nonconflict zones are working on ways in which to ensure that women’s human rights are protected within the fabric of those societies. The way in which women are treated in a society can tell you a lot about how that society will choose to deal with conflict.

One Global Fund for Women grantee, the Mano River Women’s Peace Network, is a network of activists from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The Mano River Network is an effort to bring women together at the negotiating table. One of its especially successful efforts was getting regional leaders to sit down for peace talks. The organization is also doing extraordinary work documenting the high environmental costs of war, something that is rarely taken into account.

To women’s organizations in the rest of the world, the women’s movement here in the United States appears to be so disconnected from an understanding that peace and security ought to be central to a women’s-rights struggle. They can’t understand why women in the United States seem to have such a hard time understanding that the so-called war on terror and the unchecked expansion of American militarism around the world are a threat to women’s security. You essentially root out the feminine aspects of any culture as that culture becomes discordantly masculine, and that has huge repercussions on how women are treated.

There is much work to be done to strengthen the notion of a global women’s movement. I think that many women, particularly in the developing world, do not see women in the West as understanding or supporting their struggles. Whether we can stop the next war will really depend, to a great extent, on our ability to build strong connections with women in the rest of the world. Because they can’t do it without us.

If you talk to Israeli and Palestinian women, they will tell you that without U.S. intervention, that situation is not going to be resolved. The United States will only intervene if there is sufficient domestic pressure to do so. The big question for women here is, can we get to a point where we see ourselves as so strongly allied with the international women’s movement that we make it a priority to push for those outcomes?

We would be doing it in coordination with a number of other social movements. What is really exciting to me is the networking and building of alliances across movements. I believe that if the women’s movement wants to do something, it can do so, even if it is unable to do it via existing forums like the United Nations. What if we had a huge convening of social movements to put pressure on our governments, just by pure force and presence? I know we have the capability. Recall February 15, 2003, when the world stood still in protest against the Iraq war.

Women also have to support their sisters in the United States. The Bush administration’s second term is going to be a time when women here will need our global sisters more than ever before. We will need their solidarity, and we will need them to speak up for us in international venues. We will need them to remind the world that America is not monolithic, that it’s not homogenous, and that there are many different perspectives and races and visions inside this country. The more they can talk to and learn from women like us, the more they can take that message and share it with the rest of the world.

EMPOWERING

THE SILENT MAJORITY

NEELA MARIKKAR

Neela Marikkar is a Sri Lankan businesswoman who built Sri Lanka First, a group of business leaders advocating a negotiated settlement between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

For fifteen years, I experienced war while living in Sri Lanka. My husband’s company was devastated when a car bomb exploded outside his office building in 1991. When the Central Bank was bombed in 1996, the building was damaged again. But for me the turning point was on July 24, 2001, when the international airport was attacked and SriLankan Airlines—one of my biggest clients—lost half its fleet.

All over the world there were severe warnings not to visit Sri Lanka because of the danger. Insurance premiums went up. Every aircraft that wanted to land was to be charged $150,000. Every ship that called on our port was going to be charged $100,000. It meant that tourism, one of our key industries, crashed overnight. It meant we couldn’t get our exports out or imports in because ships had stopped calling.

That was a dire situation. We’d had terrible media fallout internationally, so I volunteered to do damage control with a group of people directly affected. While I was working with this group and looking at what went wrong with airport security, I came to the realization that patchwork solutions were not enough. No fence is high enough to guarantee security, so putting up a ten-foot electric fence wasn’t the answer. Bringing in a foreign security company to take care of the airport wasn’t the answer. Going back to the root cause was the answer. The only way to stop terrorism was to stop the war, and the only way to stop the war was to get back to the negotiating table.

The more I thought, the clearer it was that I had to get a group together to start looking at the conflict in our country. July 24 was a wake-up call for the Sri Lankan business community: it was time to get involved and put pressure on our political leaders to put the interests of the country ahead of their party agendas. We called ourselves Sri Lanka First. The idea was that we had to put the country first—not our businesses, not our party agendas. Nothing.

We knew we had to have grassroots support, so we went all out to educate people about the cost of the war and the need for a settlement. The high point of our campaign was a peaceful demonstration. We had advertised widely, asking everyone to step outside at noon on September 19, 2001, and hold hands to let the government know that they wanted peace. It was an experiment. We didn’t know whether anyone would really come out and stand.

I woke up that day thinking, What if nobody comes out? That was a tremendous concern, especially because the 9/11 attacks in the United States had happened just a week before. The whole world was saying, “We’ve got to wipe out terrorism,” and here we were saying, “No, we want to talk. Let’s try to resolve this through negotiation. Let’s not continue this war.”

We took a deep breath and went ahead with the campaign. Out of a population of almost eighteen million, more than a million came out into the streets. It was an amazing sight. They poured out of their homes and offices and stood holding hands for fifteen minutes in the midday sun. The turnout proved to Sri Lanka’s political leaders that our people were committed to peace. We were able to marginalize the extreme voices and empower the silent majority—the moderate voices—by organizing this very simple demonstration. You just had to come out of your building. You didn’t have to hold cards or protest. It was a very gentle display of solidarity.

Not long after the demonstration, the government faced a no-confidence vote, Parliament was dissolved, and we had new elections. A new government won on the peace mandate, and on December 24, 2001, we had a cessation of hostilities. A final cease-fire agreement was signed in February 2002, and it is still holding.

Being an active member of Sri Lanka First has been an enormous personal challenge. My day job is running Sri Lanka’s largest marketing communications company; my night job is working for peace and development. Making time for my family hasn’t been easy. But this experience has been extremely fulfilling—my life is richer, and my heart is more forgiving. I’m grateful for the chance to have contributed in some small way to a peaceful resolution of my country’s devastating war.

Chapter 5

THE HUMANITY

WE SHARE

WE REFUSE

TO BE ENEMIES

SUMAYA FARHAT-NASER AND GILA SVIRSKY

Dr. Sumaya Farhat-Naser, a Palestinian woman, is the cofounder and former director of the Jerusalem Center for Women, a Palestinian organization committed to Middle East peace based on justice, human rights, and women’s rights. Gila Svirsky is a Jewish Israeli peace activist. She was the head of the peace groups Bat Shalom and B’Tselem and a cofounder of the Coalition of Women for Peace.

Although the news has not yet reached the international media, we would like the world to know that women in Israel and Palestine are ready to make peace.

For the past thirteen years, women have been the most vibrant, daring, and progressive part of the peace movement on both sides of our divide. Palestinian and Israeli women have been meeting and negotiating with each other for years, even when the very act of speaking to each other was illegal in Israel and prohibited in Palestine.

These negotiations began in secret years ago in local homes and churches. Then we felt safer meeting in Basel, Berlin, Brussels, Bologna, and other European cities. Today, we meet openly when we can, often in symbolic venues, such as the Notre Dame Center on the border between Palestinian and Israeli Jerusalem.

While there have been dissension and debate, and while we have often held these discussions in painful circumstances, we have always held aloft the common vision of peace. Were it left to us, we would long ago have reached a peace agreement that settles the difficult issues between us.

We women advocate an end to the situation of occupier and occupied. We want to see Israel and Palestine as two separate states, side by side, with Jerusalem the shared capital of both. We desire a just solution to end the suffering of the refugees. We believe that each nation has an equal right to statehood, independence, freedom, security, development, and a life of dignity. And, in a crucial point of agreement, we condemn all forms of brutality, violence, and terrorism—whether by individuals, political groups, governments, or the military. We have had enough of the killing, on both sides. Too many Palestinian and Israeli children are now dead or orphaned or maimed for life. And too many of our own sons, fathers, and brothers have done that killing— for war not only victimizes the innocent but also brutalizes the perpetrators.

As Israeli and Palestinian women, we have tried to educate our own peoples about the validity of both claims to this territory; we’ve worked against our societies’ efforts to demonize the other side. We have promoted dialogue between women, paid mutual condolence calls to the families of victims on both sides, been arrested for protesting actions that violate our national consensus, and spoken out in a clear voice to demand a just solution.