The war against women

The war against women
ANUPREETA DAS

Photographer Sheba Chhachhi's images of women in Kashmir (wives, mothers, daughters, professionals, sisters, victims of rape, refugees) and their accompanying stories, captured in bold, black type, remain etched in your mind long after you've left the exhibition hall. Titled Women's Voices from Kashmir, Chhachhi's exhibition, which is part of a recently-concluded symposium on human security organised in New Delhi by WISCOMP, an NGO committed to looking at security issues from a gender perspective, brings into sharp focus two things.

One: civilians, especially women and children, are the most severely affected in war-related violence. Additionally, the tendency to generalise women as a weak, victimised group which needs to be protected in times of conflict, helps perpetrate their exclusion from the decision-making process, both in times of war and peace.

Wars in the post-Cold War era have become increasingly localised, and more often than not, are fought along ethnic fault-lines, which means that local people get caught amid the gunfire. Chhachhi's photographs bear testimony to this. There is Kunan Poshpora, which is known as Kashmir's ``raped village'' nine years after security forces raped 30 of its women in February 1991. Then, there are women speaking about the economic and social costs of war from refugee camps in the Capital, and glimpses of the emotional hardships suffered by those who have lost a husband, son or brother in conflict.

The 1996 UN Human Development Report estimates that about 75 per cent of those killed in war are civilians, and of the total war casualites, a majority are women and children. Of the nearly 2,80,000 people displaced by last year's Kargil war, 80 per cent were women and children.

This growing realisation of the human cost of conflict -- in terms of the loss of innocent life, habitat, infrastructure and dignity -- has prompted several civil society institutions to re-examine the concept of security. Explains Vibha Parthasarthy of the National Commission of Women: ``Security in the new millennium has to be viewed holistically. Access to food and health services, a safe environment, the provision of human rights and emotional and cultural well-being are integral to the security of any people.''

An organisation like WISCOMP (Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace), for example, looks at security primarily as a `people's prerogative', but through a gender lens. Of course, one could argue that it's nothing but the Guns versus Butter (or Bombs versus Bread, if you find it more relevant) dialogue with a new twist, born out of the old rhetoric that increased defence expenditure necessarily implies a compromise in the budget for welfare measures. If human security means the provision of basic needs and access to social opportunities in an atmosphere of well-being, a gender perspective within this alternative security paradigm is justified because women (cutting laterally across identities of class, community or nationality) are a marginalised group.

While the responsibilities of women -- in keeping families together, providing for the household, raising children and caring for war victims -- have increased in a heightened atmosphere of conflict (insurgency, civil war, border wars in almost all corners of the globe), their voices are often obscured or misrepresented. Also, with rape being increasingly used as a weapon of war by armies, women are especially susceptible to victimisation during wars that are not of their making. Whether one looks at the scale and organisation of rape during the war in Bosnia, or the sexual exploitation of women by rebel armies in northern Uganda in the past decade, rape is intended to defile women and demoralise the `enemy', a brutally skewed assertion of `manhood' and `virility' that is associated with power.

The power trip also extends into the notion that men have to fight wars to protect the `honour' of their women, an idea sustained by the repeated invoking of mythological heroines like Sita and Draupadi. Even when women have taken to battle -- portrayed effectively in Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist, where Ayesha Dharker plays a suicide bomber for a terrorist outfit, or the more euphemistic Dil Se by Mani Ratnam, where Manisha Koirala is an agent of terrorism -- they are usually pawns in a game they have no control over. As one of the women in Chhachhi's photographs says: ``If we become militants, what will happen to the children?''

Either way, women stand to lose the most in situations of violence and conflict, though their experiences are hardly represented in war discourse. This selective interpretation of how armed conflict ravages society, says noted Pakistani lawyer and human rights activist Asma Jehangir, leads to the belief that ``security is not an issue for women. Decisions in circumstances of conflict or peace-time are mostly undertaken by men, which leads to the disempowerment of women.'' Obviously, as long as national security is equated with increasing nuclearisation, militarisation and (a corresponding rise in) belligerence, the idea of human security, which can be regarded as a precursor for human development, will not take hold. ``Women'', says Jehangir, ``are repulsed by the concept of war,'' and if brought into decision-making, would better facilitate the peace process among nations.

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