Robyn Hofmeyr was part of a small team which set out to make a film about women in war. They visited four regions: South Africa, Uganda, Israel and Palestine, and Bosnia. These are the survivors’ stories
Our journey began in the Nkomanzi district of Mpumalanga where we heard the stories of displaced Mozambican women and rural South African women who, with the help of the Masisukumeni Women’s Crisis Centre, were reconstructing their lives after the trauma of war and trying to deal with the high level of rape and domestic violence in the area.
Horrific stories poured out as the women talked passionately in siSwati and then the translator translated their words into English. One woman told how Renamo soldiers forced her to kill her baby and eat it. Other women talked about their experiences of rape and abuse, and the failure of the system to convict the perpetrators.
At a recent international conference Johannesburg, Joyce Seroke, chair of the Commission on Gender Equality, was one of many women who raised questions about women’s experience in war, their survival strategies and hopes for a different world. “Men create the wars, and then shuttle around negotiating fragile peace agreements. Women constitute less than 1% of United Nations peacekeeping missions. Yet women and children constitute 80% of those forced to abandon their homes as a result of war. And it is invariably women who are called upon to pick up the pieces.”
Women at the conference had given us some pointers to understand- ing how women could deal with these issues. They agreed there was no “one” healing process.
They recognised that there has been great progress in creating structures that protect or represent women, like the Office on the Status of Women, the Commission on Gender Equality, a women’s charter and so on, but asked, “How do we give all this paper some metal?”
As Tina Sedaris, clinical psychologist at the Masisukumeni Women’s Crisis Centre, said: “There is a third level which is almost hidden, and that is the social relations of power which are not transformed by simply having women in government. How does the Constitution penetrate the privacy of the family? There are entrenched discourses of domination and subordination between men and women, and that encompasses everything – beliefs, religion.”
We travelled to a small town called Gulu, in northern Uganda, 200km from the Sudan border. For the past 10 years, as the rest of Uganda has moved toward economic and political stability, the northern districts nn of the country have been affected by a brutal conflict.
Thousands of women and children are victims of a vicious cycle of violence, caught between a brutal rebel group and the army of the Ugandan government. The rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is dedicated to overthrowing the government of Uganda. >From what we can gauge of the situation, the rebels have almost no support from the local Acholi people.
The rebels attack the civilian population, raid villages, loot, burn, rape, mutilate and slaughter. After each raid they take some of the living, mostly young children, who are forced to carry heavy loads – those who protest often attempt to escape, or cannot keep up and are killed. Sometimes they are forced to kill one another or kill a parent or relative.
The captives are brought across the border to the LRA camp in Sudan. The LRA is supported by the Sudanese government. Estimates of children abducted range from 8 000 to 12 000 in the past 13 years. Some 2 000 children have managed to escape and return to Uganda.
World Vision is one of the NGOs that works with these young girls and boys in the area. Our guide and host, James, took us to meet three women who had escaped from Sudan and had just been brought by the Ugandan army to the Ugandan Children of War Project.
The three women, two young and one older, sat on a bench staring blankly ahead. The three were dusty, one woman had a torn shirt where a bullet had grazed her blouse and skin.
One of the young women, a 16-year-old girl, had been given as the “fifth wife” to an older rebel soldier and told if she looked unhappy she would be shot.
The older woman had left her children behind with her family and was abducted en route to visit her sick mother in another village – she was forced to carry a 50kg bag of sugar on her head: “I had to survive for my children.” She overheard the rebels talking: “If this women drops this bag, kill her.”
nThe woman walked through the burning heat, she went without water and food, she stood in the pouring rain as young traumatised female rebel soldiers stripped her naked and taunted her – the bag of sugar never left her head.
Josephine escaped when they came under attack from the Ugandan army.
The story that broke our hearts was the story of a 13-year-old Josephine, who had been at the centre for a few months. She had been abducted when she was 11, forced to be a soldier – cannon fodder – and sent to the frontline. She was shot at numerous times, got lost in the desert, nearly died of thirst, tried to drink her own urine – someone eventually found her hiding behind an anthill. She cried out for her commander like a child cries for her father. The person told her: “No use crying for him, he is dead.”
They came under attack – she was hit in the stomach by a grenade, her intestines fell out. She tried to bind them together with her clothing. The only thing that kept her going was her thirst and a will to survive. She tried to drink her blood and passed out. When she came round and saw Ugandan soldiers, she forced herself to speak. They gave her water, but she couldn’t drink it because it tasted of blood.
The motto of the trauma centre is forgiveness, reconciliation and love. I wondered about that. Sometimes children at the centre are confronted with the perpetrator – young children who were forced to kill. How do you forgive the death of a parent or friend?
A counsellor, Florence, said: “We show the children how the person who killed was forced to do so, they too have their own pain. It’s a long process, but we find when the children accept what has happened they start to heal.”
The healing process is a long, slow, painful process. Children with homes to return to hesitate to do so, fearing rebels’ reprisals against their families and ostracism by community members who blame the children for complicity in rebel atrocities. For some there is no healing, only pain and fear, HIV/Aids, sterility, phobias.
Our next journey took us to the women’s peace movement in Israel and Palestine. We wanted to see what women were doing on the ground to bridge divides and work for a real peace.
Bat Shalom, an Israeli women’s peace group, and their Palestinian partners, the Jerusalem Centre for Women, are known as The Jerusalem Link: A Women’s Joint Venture for Peace.
The formation of the Jerusalem Link was the result of intensive discussions between Israeli and Palestinian women. Both sides had very little information about the other and the intention was to work together on the basis of certain political principles to ensure the good for both sides; that both peoples have the right to live in Palestine/Israel.
The Jerusalem Link principles are based on non-violence, with a common goal of peace, equality and human rights. Both groups seek to bridge the political conflict through personal alliances and humanitarian interventions. At times the alliance is strained, but they share a vision of peace.
Both groups try and shape the work they do with a feminist vision and have to confront the patriarchal societies they live in. One Palestinian women told us: “We are also as women misused in our own society. When we come to speak about social justice for development, they [the men] tell us, ‘Oh, don’t start with it, we have so many other things, the national solution, the national liberation is much more important than social liberation.'”
The first thing our fixer, Gina, did when we arrived was to brief us on a sensitive use of terminology. I was left wondering whether to refer to Israel when talking to Israelis and Palestine when talking to Palestinians, or occupied territories, or Palestine/Israel or Israel/Palestine. This set the theme for what I perceived to be an extremely divided land – divided by religion, language, land, culture, perceptions and viewpoints. It seems all too familiar.
At a demonstration in Tel Aviv, Israeli men and women were protesting against compulsory conscription. We spoke to some of the women. They spoke about patriarchy and how the military enforces patriarchal roles.
The next day we drove to the dusty Palestinian town of Hebron. Gina pointed out the small, poor Palestinian villages that dot the hillsides, their presence dwarfed by the large and prosperous Jewish settlements nearby. They tell the story of a country as divided as South Africa – the Palestinians even refer to their territories as Bantustans.
Hebron is one of the oldest towns in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s a holy city – holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians, the burial place of the patriarch Abraham. We pick up Kawther, a fiery Palestinian journalist, who told us: “The city of Hebron is divided into two parts: Palestinian and Israeli. There are 40 000 Palestinians living in Hebron. Four hundred Jews live in the centre of the city, protected by 5 000 soldiers, meaning each person is protected by 12 soldiers. The Palestinians cannot move around the town freely – sometimes you find 100 barriers in the city centre.”
Kawther took us to meet Nazeeh, a Palestinian woman. Nazeeh lived in a house with her third husband and his children. Above her house is an Israeli army rooftop station.
Her husband gives us permission for her to tell us her story. Her constant source of anguish has been her relationship with the rooftop soldiers. They have spat at her, urinated on clothing on her washing line, thrown rubbish and bullet cartridges into her courtyard where her children play and once even exposed themselves.
Kawther and Bat Shalom have collected evidence and lodged complaints. They have spoken to the Israeli soldiers. They have also put up wire mesh to prevent the soldiers from throwing things into the yard.
Nazeeh spoke of the trauma of constant harassment. She confided that the tensions women suffer in Hebron are often made worse during curfews, when some of the men are stuck inside and get edgy, taking out their frustrations on their wives and children.
The next day we spent time with Gila Svirsky, director of Bat Shalom. We travelled to Anata, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
Along the way Svirsky pointed out the different settlements: “Here is a Palestinian area separated from another Palestinian area by an Israeli settlement. For the past 32 years Palestinians have applied for and been rejected in their efforts to get construction permits. Palestinian people have land and they are not allowed to build – they are only allowed to live in what exists.”
Arabia, a soft gentle Palestinian women with four children, has had her house demolished twice. She had applied endlessly for building permission. One night the bulldozers arrived: the authorities threw tear gas into the windows and started the demolition process.
Arabia suffered a nervous breakdown. Bat Shalom came to her assistance. Israeli and Palestinian women together rebuilt her house. Arabia has declared the house a house of peace, but she still lives in fear of the authorities.
On to Bosnia, where we immediately experienced the warmth of Bosnian hospitality. Melida, our guide and translator, had brought us each a red rose and a big hug with the words, “Welcome to Sarajevo!”
Sarajevo lies in a valley, with high green mountains surrounding it. Before the war the city was an ethnic microcosm of Yugoslavia – a city of Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Turks and Jews. Sarajevo’s rich heritage of six centuries took a pounding from Bosnian Serb firepower during the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995.
“During the siege of Sarajevo we were like pigeons – the snipers rained down shells on us, like someone who throws bread crumbs to the pigeons,” said Melida. “We had nowhere to run.”
The next day we drove to Zenica, an industrial town an hourfrom Sarajevo. Before the war, Zenica had a population of about 120 000 -22 000 were Serb by declared nationality and the same number of Croats. When war broke out just 3 000 of each group remained. About 70 000 Muslim refugees arrived in the town. The mixed ethnic make- up of the town was destroyed.
We visited Medica, an organisation set up by women during the war to deal with the enormous number of raped and abused women. Medica believes that women abused by men need to be treated and cared for by women in a women-only centre. The women who go there are cared for physically, mentally and spiritually.
We met Duska, who heads the information side of Medica called Infoteka. She considered herself a Yugoslavian and was reasonable happy living under Tito and what she described as a socialist dictatorship. She never really understood why the war started. “The war in Bosnia was the most stupid thing, there is no logical explanation. Some people are talking about historical things that happened 500 years ago – now we are paying back. Give me break!”
She was shocked during the war to find herself described as a Serb: “Suddenly I was seen as one of them – the ones committing the atrocities.” She grapples with trying to think of how to describe herself now: “I’m confused because I’m a Bosnian, but according to legislation, I’m not in my country. I’m Bosnian but a Serb. I can’t be Bosnian because I’m not a Muslim. But I don’t feel myself a pure Serb. I feel myself Bosnian, with an Orthodox background. I’m not baptised, so I can’t be Orthodox. Sorry, God!”
The staff at Medica are a mix of women – Serb, Muslim and Croat: nothing unusual, they had always lived next to each other and worked together. The war changed everything.
One of the counsellors, a woman with a Serbian surname, described having to deal with her own feelings of identity and belonging. She has to counsel many Muslim women who has suffered terrible abuse at the hands of Serbian soldiers. They hold nothing against her, but she has started to feel the burden of a collective guilt – the guilt of being a Serb.
She doesn’t want to see herself as a Serb, yet she is a Serb. She doesn’t want to identify herself with a people that had committed such terrible atrocities, yet at the same time she doesn’t want to reject her nation – something I as a white South African can relate to.
The women were interested to hear our stories and perceptions, and held South Africa in high esteem. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was often mentioned. Bosnian women felt that they could really benefit from such a commission, that the perpetrators of such massive abuse should be made to account for their crimes. It is difficult for women to begin the healing process when they might still meet the men who raped them, walking around freely as if nothing ever happened.
Melida’s own story threw light on Bosnian women’s experience. She was born in Sarajevo, a cherished only child who lacked for nothing. Her parents were Muslims, but not religious. She went to university, trained as a pharmacist and an economist, fell in love with a fellow academic, married, travelled the world – a charmed life.
After her first daughter was born, her father took ill and died, and when she was pregnant with her second child, her husband died of cancer. With two small children and a grieving mother, Melidabarely got through each day.
One day a friend came over and said: “Don’t go into town today, war has broken out.” Melida stared in horror: “Why?”
She discovered that her house was near the Serbian front line. The Serbian soldiers wanted to split Sarajevo into two – one side for Serbs the other for Muslims. The Serbian soldiers had taken positions on the surrounding mountainside and it was impossible for Melida to escape. Luckily her house had a basement where she moved her bedding, food and a few supplies. Later, while they were huddled in the dark, too scared to light a fire or even burn a candle, there was a massive explosion – a grenade hit the house and it came tumbling down. The basement withstood the attack.
A new life started for Melida – survival. Under cover of darkness Melida made various sojourns to a well for water and further afield, into town, to buy an egg, bread, sugar and other provisions – her identity documents tied to her arm with a scarf, so her mother could be notified if she was killed.
To help her mother and two small children, Melida used her imagination – she sang songs, told stories and took them on imaginary journeys to faraway places. They travelled to Paris and ate ice cream in the shadow of the Eiffel tower, they went to Greece and marvelled at the Acropolis.
The small family spent eight months living in that basement. Surviving the war was Melida’s first victory. If she could survive the war, she could survive anything.
On my return home I fell into an exhausted, relieved sleep. Moments later I was woken by frantic screams – post- traumatic stress syndrome from too many terrible stories, I told myself. The screams got louder and more desperate. I peered out the window. A young girl was standing at my front gate, she had a knife at her neck and a man was tugging at her handbag. It was one of the students we had hired to transcribe our interviews. She was being mugged, threatened at my front gate. I pressed the panic button and the man fled.
We calmed Tuli down and there was still no sign of our security company. We joked about the ironies of feeling safer in those distant war-torn countries than in our own backyards.
War beyond War: Stories of Women in the Aftermath of War is a 52-minute documentary commissioned by the International Development Research Centre. It is available from The Film Resource Unit – call (011) 838-4280