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Women and Bloodshed: The Fury of War, the Struggle for Survival

Candi Cross - 2/13/2006

A procession of girls and women fall to their knees upon a deafening howl. The commandant has called them to order by striking a whip against the urine-soaked wall and screaming so loud, the hounds at her feet whimper in angst. The naked girls and women are not unruly. They merely plead for a piece of bread she waves over their noses and cadaverous, cracked lips. Their bodies are almost invisible now they’re so malnourished, brittle bones protruding from a thick coat of filth. Two women polish her combat boots with their tongues. Another desperately leans against the commandant’s curvy body in a sheer act of association, woman to woman. This only deepens the madness in her eyes and she laughs in ecstasy. She knows no empathy. Her pressed green uniform is adorned with badges of honor for the Reich’s cause. She tosses the bread to the dogs then pounces on the women’s backs and bald heads. This shall be their last stroke of pain before being pushed into the death chamber. She enjoys every minute of her power over them as the next group is rammed into the cell.

This scene fragmentarily echoes from a painting by artist Judy Chicago, who created a series of 200 pieces called The Holocaust Project. After exploring settings of concentration camps and mass gravesites for seven years with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, Chicago openly declared that the world had turned “shamefully unbearable” once she gained a greater understanding of it. Still, she summoned the strength to paint, photograph and document her discoveries in a compelling body of work that bows to no comparison. Each painting tells a repulsive story, but the victimized women and children were real. So were their satisfied torturers whose lipstick and manicured nails glistened.

“There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocities in exchange for a little power and privilege,” notes foreign correspondent and Amnesty International Global Award recipient Chris Hedges. While speaking on the temptation of brutality in his book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Hedges also theorizes “women are less able to identify with and be seduced by war and the allure of violence.”

The vicious Samurai Daughters of Japan, the female gladiators of 17th century Switzerland, and the machete wielders of Rwanda, who maimed innocent people on a daily basis, may have lashed out at such speculation. But with 20 years of experience in covering wars and their aftermath in Kosovo, Vietnam, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, and other conflict zones, Hedges’ point is warranted. “Disproportionate violence against innocents is a way to make a statement. It is part of war’s perversity that we lionize those who make great warriors and excuse their excesses in the name of self-defense,” says Hedges, who admits a past addiction to the “energy, camaraderie, and heroism” exhorted by war. “Enemies are lumped into one indistinguishable mass. They are as faceless as we are for our enemies.”

Can women be so indifferent to humanity? Have they led wars and brandished guns, knives, swords, bombs, crossbows, and chemical weapons for the same reasons men have over time? As the bearers of life, do women equally aim to rape it and destroy it? Do they abduct other women, authorize house burnings, kill or displace entire communities on impulse or to promote their own ideals, morals and superiority? The answers may be unearthed through first examining the deeds of the opposite sex.


Hear the evil, see the evil

Over a thousand years ago, an angry militia of Bulgar swordsmen collided forces with the foot soldiers of the Byzantine Empire. The soldiers used flimsy axes that their sisters, mothers and daughters made for them. According to archaeologists, these women were the caretakers of the land, their families’ royalties and the children. The men slaughtered each other senselessly while the women were forbidden to fight. Once the soldiers were all dead, the triumphant swordsmen marched straight to the villages for their enemy’s women. That battle began the thrust into a millennium of mass destruction, bloodshed, genocide, and the victimization of women and children across continents, century after century.

The reasons male totalitarians have waged war remain the same over time: revenge, greed, religious convictions, colonial conquest, ideology, and domination. And more recently pioneered by the United States, a new era has witnessed what political scientists define as “wars of philanthropy”—good will military excursions such as the interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia. As illustrated in the essay collection, Militarized Zones: Gender, Race, Immigration, and Environment, the results of these good will interventions amount to brutal assaults on womankind. Military-sponsored rape, forced prostitution, maiming, and the displacement of millions of women exist during each round of building up the nation’s reputation as the "superpower," strictly defined by global military supremacy.

The mental response for women who have been attacked in one of these instances or fear such an assault is plainly “constant defense mode”—even the most cold-blooded of female leaders usually, says Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst. “Because of their outside forces shaped by men, women intuitively defend themselves or their children at any cost,” says Bolen, the author of many books on psychology and spirituality including the best-selling perennial classic Goddesses in Everywoman. Competitive, individualistic males "direct their leadership positions towards humiliating the enemy or ‘other side’ and they have to win, which causes them to literally destroy a problem rather than logically solve it.” Bolen also points out that recent suicide bombers who were women possibly took on the role of “masculine hero,” proudly willing to die for a cause once they were stripped of primary sustenance by men in some way.

A tradition of women’s skewed use of power can be traced before suicide bombers and Britain’s 18-year ruler Margaret Thatcher, who some natives call the "iron fist" for waging an unjustified war against Argentina. In defense of territory, militant queens of 14th century Portugal ordered public beatings of Spaniard boys and men. The infamous warrior queen Boadicea led an uprising partially backed by Celt female generals who slaughtered 70,000 Romans. Only a few years ago, Amnesty International reported that scores of women were paid by government officials in China to carry out "strike-hard" campaigns on crime. They directed labor camps in which Tibetan women were drugged, disfigured, gang-raped and burned with soldering irons for petty offenses such as complaining about taxes and stealing groceries.

Despite this herstory of abusive women, most female leaders throughout time wreaked havoc upon enemy groups quite small in number and their reigns were short. The ones who softened the face of leadership and fought relentlessly to improve humankind far outnumber them.


A woman's world

Listed as “World’s Most Popular Politician” by the Guinness Book of World Records, former Prime Minister of Pakistan Motharma Benazir Bhutto maintains that women who institute violence are the exception to a timeless rule. The first woman to lead a modern Islamic nation, Bhutto is no stranger to thick, convoluted power. “I can say from my experience that women have an innate recoil from war and violence. Although women are capable of taking hard decisions, they are not, in my view, as quick as men to resort to violence to resolve disputes,” says Bhutto, who is currently president of the Pakistan People’s Party. “Every woman will calculate the cost of war in human lives, whereas men often tend to abstract the ravages of war and conflict into a cold statistic.

“Women are closer to the rhythms of the earth we battle over than men. A woman leader will look for every resort to peaceful solutions before she scorches the earth she feeds her children from.” Bhutto holds fast to a plea for universal peace, even after her father, also a prime minister of Pakistan was hanged and her husband remains in prison after two years for his democratic beliefs.

Today, women constitute 14% of world legislators. These leaders are far more responsible for forging and maintaining peace with rival nations rather than coldly shunning it. From Emma Bonino of the European Parliament for Italy and Sri Lanka’s President Chandrika Kumaratunga to Mo Mowlan, Minister for the Cabinet Office of UK and Speaker of Georgia Nino Burjanadze, contemporary women leaders are tackling the disparities with force. Their efforts span from territories populated by refugees, amputees, starving children, and hospitals packed with girls who have deteriorated organs poisoned by toxic agents. With the realization that 200 million girls worldwide have no education, female elders may fight for their improvements through a deep sense of desperation and empathy. No matter where they are positioned in the world, the new wave of women leaders unites with common goals: social development, environmentalism, healthcare, and human rights.

Bhutto says, “As nurturers, women have the capacity to lead humanity from global despair caused by the destruction of entire cities.” Dare love and generosity be included in the same equation with power? "Women leaders have a tradition and an historical legacy of creating a sense of family community and unity; they have a management style that is consensual rather than authoritarian."


End the suffering

In 1928, exhausted by the death and destruction of the First World War, 63 nations signed an international treaty formally rejecting war. As evidenced in photojournalist Jenny Matthews' book Women and War, such a document seems nonexistent. Thousands of refugee tents line roads as often as rest stops in many corners of the world. Children as young as nine tote around artillery in Libya. A skeletal woman whose village was destroyed by bombs collects leaves for her children to eat. These are the real images of war usually replaced by the government's patriotic shots of saluting soldiers and holiday talent shows in the desert.

Matthews, who has photographed most war zones from the last 20 years, says she will continue to chronicle women's struggles provoked by war. Showing the "deterioration of life" is her personal call for peace. After spending time in Sierra Leone, Guatemala, Afghanistan, and Haiti, for example, Matthews is floored by the strength of women worldwide. "It is phenomenal how women always put their children before themselves, and their hopes and dreams are nearly always for them," says Matthews, whose most recent journey was to Kenya. "In the most difficult circumstances women find ways to survive, to make meals out of nothing, to eke out makeup to feel dignified, to keep clothes clean while living in mud and squalor--women don't give up easily."

Matthews is correct in her statement that women do not resign so easily. A sturdy body of organizations and leaders band together across all regions in solidarity. These are women who consider the plight of all six billion people in the world, not just the members of one group or one nation. Shouting from radio stations and newspapers once forbidden in Burundi, China, and Nicaragua, they demand each person be fed, housed, educated and employed. Women in India, Bangladesh, Ireland, and Senegal pool funds to spearhead massive projects and help each other build restorative empires from the ground up. Canadians, Bolivians, Mexicans and Germans write countless letters each day on behalf of prisoners of conscience. Physicians from Iraq, Sweden, Japan, and France contribute up to 18 hours a day as Doctors Without Borders. Teachers in candlelit attics, trees and buses instruct girls how to read and count in Bosnia, Kuwait and Sarajevo. Whatever the magnitude of action they take, violence once destroyed their communities, and women swear to heal and rebuild them.

Their efforts aren't unnoticed. Photographers, writers, artists, academics and filmmakers such as Canadian Producer Lisa Epner tell the heroic stories and celebrate them. Epner directed PEACE BY PEACE: Women on the Frontlines, a feature film that shows the peacekeeping efforts of women in five countries. The film premiered at the United Nations in October and has gained momentum in universities, film festivals and conferences worldwide. "I get nervous about applying labels to the feminine and the masculine of the human race, but it's important to acknowledge and honor femininity across all spectrums of leadership today," says Epner, who plans to make documentaries in Iraq, India and North Korea this year. "Women can no longer be ignored at the peace table--they are rebuilding entire societies and courageously working for their families and communities, mostly risking their precious lives for the cause."

Men are also fighting and dying for their peacekeeping efforts. As political figures everywhere agree, the world benefits from a more feminine-based structure of power, not simply more women in powerful positions. Joan Holmes, president of The Hunger Project, which is a strategic organization active in over 20 countries, urges that the "war on the planet" is everyone's responsibility to combat. "Women's leadership is critical, but the real issue in political leadership is to work from a partnership model, not a dominant, self-serving patriarchal model," urges Holmes, who has helped improve social conditions for millions of people through healthcare, income-generating, and education initiatives. "Intervention starts with families and the empowerment of individuals to become change agents. There should be no more subjugation of women and girls, and it's every person's responsibility on this planet to make sure that violence caused by the rigid political models of our time ends completely now, not later."

With financial investors from 26 countries who are committed to ending hunger, leadership workshops that have empowered one million people, and dozens of health clinics and HIV/AIDS prevention programs, The Hunger Project is the chief example of what a "superpower" really stands for. As nations tug for the title, what if they raced to become the primary source of eliminating poverty, disease, and homelessness rather than vying for the largest military or nuclear weapon? Wouldn't a nation that is most ecologically, morally and spiritually responsible deserve the prestige for generations to come?

The winds of change are blowing powerfully. The bright green and yellow Samjhota (or "Understanding") Express train again carries passengers from India to Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto's homeland that she longs for. After two years of suspension, the train's motion is the most dramatic progress towards peace between the nuclear-armed rivals ever. Indian and Pakistani passengers embrace each other, weep and laugh as they are showered with rose petals by the railway officials. Bhutto may be touched but not shocked. She stresses that societies who have discriminated against minorities are also venerating them with force and working together: "Tolerant, pluralistic civilization can and must be the new order."