---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 09:39:36 -0500
From: APIC <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Africa: Women in Post-War Reconstruction
Africa: Women in Post-War Reconstruction
Date distributed (ymd): 990930
Document reposted by APIC
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +economy/development+ +security/peace+
+gender/women+
Summary Contents:
This posting contains excerpts from the report of a conference
in Johannesburg in July on "Women in the Aftermath of War and
Armed Conflict." The pre-conference announcement can be found
at:
http://www.wits.ac.za/fac/education/aftermath
The full conference report is available in the web version of
this posting at:
http://www.africapolicy.org/docs99/aft9909.htm
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Women in the Aftermath of War and Armed Conflict
A Report of a Conference
by Meredeth Turshen
------------------------------------------------------------
For additional information on the conference and related
workshops, you may contact Meredeth Turshen, Department of
Urban Studies and Community Health, School of Planning and
Public Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903;
Telephone: 732 932 4101 X681; Fax: 732 932 0934; E-mail:
[log in to unmask]
The Co-Chairs of the African Women's Anti-War Coalition, which
also met after the conference, are Anu Pillay, University of
the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg ([log in to unmask] or
[log in to unmask]) and Codou Bop, Women Living under
Muslim Laws ([log in to unmask])
----------------------------------------------------------
The conference on "The Aftermath: Women in Post-war
Reconstruction" was held 20 to 22 July 1999 in Johannesburg,
South Africa. It gathered together 75 activist and academic
participants from 16 African countries and from national and
international nongovernmental organizations as well as United
Nations agencies; guest speakers came from Croatia, Haiti,
South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Professor
Colin Bundy, Vice-Chancellor and Principal at the University
of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and Joyce Piliso-Seroke,
Chair of the South African Commission on Gender Equality,
welcomed participants. Yasmin Sooka, a human rights lawyer who
chairs the Human Rights Violations Committee of the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Judge Albie
Sachs of South Africa's Constitutional Court delivered keynote
addresses. The Ford Foundation, the International Development
Research Centre (Canada), and the Royal Netherlands Embassy
(in South Africa) funded the conference.
The primary purpose of the conference was to develop a gender
analysis of post-conflict recovery and rebuilding. Gender is
an English word that does not translate well into other
languages. We used it to talk about power relations between
women and men as well as the roles women and men are
socialized to play in family, community, and national life.
Many speakers confirmed that gender roles can shift
dramatically in times of conflict (including armed struggle
and liberation wars) and under authoritarian and fascist
regimes. These shifts often challenge power structures,
especially patriarchal power structures, and they can
destabilize interpersonal relations between women and men and
between generations. ...
Some power shifts in gender relations give women new
opportunities to train, learn skills, and imagine new-more
equal-relations with men as comrades, fighters, and lovers.
Yasmin Sooka, Albie Sachs, and Thandi Modise (Deputy President
of the ANC Women's League) all described ANC comrades as
breaking out of old molds during the anti-apartheid struggles.
Sondra Hale, professor of anthropology and women's studies at
UCLA and a guest speaker, described a near-idyllic world
within the Eritrean People's Liberation Front-so paradoxical
at the heart of armed conflict.
Speakers also talked about women stepping into violent roles
traditionally played by men-women who became accomplices to
rape, murder, and torture. These are not examples of power
shifts, though they may involve changes in gender roles. Women
who participated in the genocide in Rwanda and women who were
instruments of state violence and partisan violence in South
Africa were not changing or challenging the relative power of
women and men. In these situations, women were instruments of
an old order. ...
The speakers raised several questions: why are the positive
gender shifts so fragile? Why in many cases are women's new
economic, social, and political roles unsupported and so
easily denied? Why are their war "gains" reversed in the
aftermath of armed conflict and is the reversal inevitable?
...
Five Thematic Workshops ...
Violence Against Women [see full report]
War as Loss and "Gain" [see full report]
War/postwar Shifts in Gender Relations [see full report]
New Identities of War
The fourth workshop on identity continued the work mapped out
by Martina Belic of Croatia and Lepa Mladjenovic of Serbia.
Sheila Meintjes (University of the Witwatersrand), one of the
South African conference organizers, asked about constructions
of masculine identity in war and peace. The South African
sociologist Jacklyn Cock has shown how women contribute to the
construction of wartime masculinity, even quite traditional
women not overtly engaged in the war effort. Tina Sideris, a
South African psychologist who has worked with women survivors
and victims, especially Mozambican women refugees, asked about
alternate male discourses: can we think beyond conscientious
objection and community service alternatives to military
service? Military structures also imbue the identity of
peacetime services-for example, public health workers may
carry military rank, and some nursing services are violently
hierarchical.
Workshop participants considered a range of issues: gender,
ethnicity, and race; women's solidarity across ethnic and
religious lines; psychosocial and political models of healing;
and the roles in healing of truth and reconciliation
commissions, international tribunals, and national courts.
They concluded that identities are not singular or fixed in
time and space, but multiple, gendered, and contextual. War
decimates men's as well as women's identities, and men may
have fewer alternative empowering identities to draw on (for
example, has recent work on fatherhood provided men with a
positive identity in the way that new thinking about
motherhood has done?). Women's and men's identities are not
defined in binary opposition to each other, nor is women's
empowerment a zero-sum game. We should look at how alternative
identities are created (for example, by examining aspects of
lesbianism).
Context, strategies, and available resources all shape our
understanding of violence as well as our comprehension of the
parts our identity being violated. The group reconsidered the
meaning of violence against women. Understanding violence
against women as private and individualized is a formalistic
response. This is a crucial point for the whole conference,
and it also affects our understanding of feminism. Accepting
that violence is socially and structurally produced and
sustained can result in politically transformative responses.
High levels of violence as in war can hide the effects of
gender violence, which predates war and continues in
peacetime. As Anu Pillay, a South African conference organizer
said, "There is no aftermath for women."
Healing is a multi-dimensional process and needs a
multi-pronged approach. Healing is also anchored in a context,
and approaches developed by one society are not necessarily
appropriate for others. Women are not just victims of war, as
some aspects of their experiences are empowering and can be
used as a resource for healing and transformation. Healing
should not become an additional burden for women: their role
must be recognized as a resource, just as women's resilience
must be acknowledged. Women's roles in the survival and
reconstruction of society should be identified and
documented. We need to empower women's access to different
points of healing and to cultural resources. We should also
plan for future generations because one consequence of war is
that violence leaves scars and shapes the identity of future
generations. War's impact is felt beyond immediate survivors
and can become part of a people's identity (for example, being
Jewish or South African or of a "race"). ...
State-society Relationships
The fifth theme, the relation of state to society in the
aftermath, was tied to one of the main conference objectives,
which was to develop policies and strategies to influence the
process of democratic representation of women's interests in
the aftermath. The South African example, as presented by
Thandi Modise, is exceptional in Africa because a strong state
emerged from the anti-apartheid struggle. More typical is a
weakened state after civil war, or a state with few resources,
or in the case of Somalia, no state at all. What are the
chances of transforming gender relations in state and society
in these varied circumstances?
The participants believed it necessary to ensure the
representation of women and women's organizations in peace
negotiations. They pointed out that women living in exile had
a role to play and a special contribution to make. The group
noted that women's expectations in the aftermath differed
according to their experiences and engagement in the
conflict-for example, some women were combatants or had
sustained male combatants; many were refugees and internally
displaced while others remained in urban or rural areas.
Participants emphasized the importance of post-conflict
demilitarization of society (not just demobilization of
combatants) in establishing a culture of peace, and they
identified constitutional and economic issues as part of
integrating gender into post-war reconstruction strategies and
policy. They considered new legal and service structures such
as legal reform of women's access to land and access to public
health services.
The identification of all stakeholders-internal and external,
public and behind the scenes-and naming what each stands to
gain from peace are necessary if women are to participate
effectively in the peace process. Internal stakeholders
include warring parties; political parties and opposition
groups; combatants (male and female); organs of civil society
(for example, women's groups within refugee camps and
internally displaced persons' camps; traditional groups in
rural and urban areas, including religious communities); black
marketeers; illegal traders in guns, drugs, and prostitutes;
and exiled intellectuals and groups. External stakeholders
include companies and corporations, arms and drugs dealers,
international mafia, and mercenaries. Regional players include
peacekeeping forces and peace brokers, and international
players include UN peacekeepers, the UN Department of
Political Affairs, the Security Council, NATO, OAU, IMF, and
the World Bank. Key countries are (usually) the USA, France,
UK, and members of the European Union. The media (local and
international) may also be stakeholders. ...
The group made the following recommendations: that there be
full participation of civil society at the negotiating table,
that government transparency be ensured, that user friendly
institutions be created, that checks and balances be
instituted, that the efforts of groups like the African
Women's Anti-War Coalition be recognized, that all policy
reflect a gender perspective on all issues (not just women's
issues), that all laws to protect women and children be
respected and enforced, that independent women's organizations
formulate a women's manifesto at country level and present it
to their governments, that there be new mechanisms to train
women leaders, that research and theorizing on gender and the
interrogation of ideologies of gender be encouraged, and that
women be encouraged to find governmental allies (women in
government and women in civil society).
The following demands were made to governments (North and
South): end conflict; exhibit utmost transparency; enforce all
laws that protect women and children and establish relevant
statutory structures for monitoring and protecting their
rights; recognize the efforts of organizations of civil
society such as the African Women's Anti-War Coalition (which
should have observer status or some representation); reiterate
AWAC's Dakar recommendations; and take responsibility for
reconstruction.
Additional demands were addressed to international agencies
and northern industrial governments: acknowledge your role in
conflict; compensate war victims; prevent new conflicts; find
mechanisms to implement and evaluate implementation of
gender-specific guidelines and policies; give a gender
perspective to the work of early warning monitoring
organizations; and identify allies abroad to lobby on behalf
of women at the national level (for example when
representatives from their countries pay diplomatic visits-or
other way around).
For the organizations of civil society working with
governments, the group recommended that they focus on the work
of reparation, justice, social reconstruction, and the
prevention of renewed conflict. A specific recommendation was
made regarding funding: that funding be sought to enable AWAC
to insert itself in the dialogue to end specific crises such
as the current one in Congo-Kinshasa.
Regional Workshops
On the last day of the conference, three regional workshops
were convened covering southern Africa, western Africa, and a
combined group for eastern and central Africa. Their purpose
was to create regional networks that could map the way
forward. The need for regional solutions to problems of the
aftermath is directly tied to the ways war and armed conflict
have developed and spread throughout the continent. Conflicts
are clustered and spill over into neighboring countries. Arms
and combatants move from one country to another. Even
liberation movements are supplied by criminals trafficking
arms and drugs-and of course sex, or rather women. ...
************************************************************
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