Or: how to evaluate the experiences of others and recognize them in our own experiences by listening to other women’s testimonies
For Hagar Rolev, a boundless heart…
On the day of her death
I feel completely overwhelmed, so fraught by emotions is my encounter with Women in Black from all over the world…
The fourteenth conference of the international network of Women in Black was held in Valencia (Spain) under the scorching sun and the sweltering heat of August 2007, its participants having gathered there from all over the world. A vigil was also held, involving over 400 women. Women struggling for life in mourning and silence. Diverse and different voices were heard. Various stories were being told in different voices… and we identified them within one another…
Views on versatile topics and on women’s spaces filled with women’s voices:
“War cannot be separated from its gender dimension”, Cynthia Cockburn, (London).
“Crossing boundaries is extremely difficult. it is my duty to belong to every peace movement, along with all those who opt for peace. We are being silenced. The absence of women from all spheres of life is silence. It is patriarchy that ignores us, suppresses us and keeps silent about us.” Ivet (South Africa).
“I want to be the voice of those who have no opportunity to be heard”, Mother Theresa, (Columbia, Organizacion Feminina Popular).
“Our space also belongs to others. And we are not afraid to admit that, at times, we are also scared”, Maria Anita (Italy.)
“We would like you to tell us in what way you won your freedom and how you opted for non-violence”, women from Iraq.
“Women in Black mean action,” Dona (India).
“Our discourse is one of dislocation, exclusion and dissent, we are subversive of the dominant logic. Our new ethics have to be women’s ethics. We would like to demilitarize the language, we need a new imagination and we have to take ourselves as a starting point.”
“The process of globalization – a war that does not belong to women. We women travel through space in our thoughts, whereas the men have to draw boundaries in order to feel safe inside them. In the collective masculinized memory, women are invisible. Collective memory is built on ignorance about the other. Physical violence is femicide, colonialism is rape, racism is sexism. In order to oppose the war strategy, we have to get to know the subdued, to catch others’ looks and thus reach ourselves. It is the white man who intervenes to feminize the women and reduce the to their imposed gender roles. Women desert violent societies. Men amputate our wings. The women are migrants – those who are constantly on the move are not immigrants, for they have settled somewhere. The forgotten conflicts have not been forgotten by the people who still live in them”, Mireia Forel, (Seville).
“There is also masculinicide, the killing of men. It is aggression and violence towards men, who are the victims of militaristic regimes, which force them to go to war”, Elena, (Russia).
“We have a long history of mutual relations, from which Women in Black came into being”, Luisa Morgantini, (Italy).
Mariseli from Malaga thinks that there are three pillars of women in Black , those being: feminism, antimilitarism and lesbianism. A discussion ensued about lesbians: about their exclusion, inclusion, separating…
“Exclusion is a political phenomenon imposed by the group of people who are in power, by the authorities. Separatism is the need of a group that does not hold power” , Lepa Mladjenovic, Belgrade.
The need to be separate is the right of women to set themselves apart in a society, it is the lesbians’ right to differentiate themselves from other women. The lesbians live differently, because our lives are set in patriarchy. For me, being a lesbian means to actively oppose war. None of is the enemy of another. We are here to change the world. It is difficult to be free. Lesbianism is not a nationality, it is a way of life. You cannot be free as a woman unless you are free as a nation. We are not merely men and women, there are also some other categories in between “, Rauba (ASWAT, Palestine).
A very important topic that the women discussed referred to pre-conflict situations, to ongoing conflicts, to post-conflict situations and to all conflicts that have fallen into oblivion. They also discussed transitional justice, on the methods that have been applied so far and also about new ones, about those which are created by women…I was torn by guilt feelings, because I do not live in a conflict, but in a post-conflict situation, longing to understand the experiences of those women who are still living in ongoing conflicts…
On Colombia, and on post-conflict situations: “A process of legalization of war is under way, which is called para-militarism. There is no peace process for us. Para-militarism has never been in opposition to the authorities, but rather an armed force that did what the state was unwilling to do openly. There is no justice for the victims. They want us to forgive and to forget. Peace cannot be achieved by the silencing of the victims. What is happening at the moment is the legalization and legitimization of a war, conducted by the state. The armed conflict does not end in peace, but in the silencing of the victims. – that is the state strategy in bringing armed conflicts to an end.”
“Post-conflict situations do not exist. Political interests are not the interest of the victims. People are not part of transitional justice. The feminist ethics of care must be incorporated in the legal system Sharon Jones, (London).
“The steps in between a conflict and a post-conflict situations are: the truth, justice and reparations. The truth is achieved once the people have found out what was going on. Justice is achieved when the victims find out the truth about what has happened. Reparations involve giving guarantees that what happened will never happen again, that the violence that provoked the conflict will not be repeated”, Jolanda Agilar (Guatemala).
In Argentina, there was no open conflict, but rather military dictatorships imposed by the USA, the dictatorship of neo-liberalism. For us, transitional justice does include reconciliation, but we do not wish to be reconciled with those who were killing us. We seek justice for all. Transitional justice, as defined by the authorities, is a euphemism for a disguised acquittal of the criminals. It does not involve the protection of human rights. Only when the truth and justice are achieved, will the conflicts end, and reconciliation will only be possible then”, Nora Morales de Cortinjas (Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Argentina).
“Fundamentalist groups are striving for a theocratization of society, instead of democracy, A war against the civilians is being waged, which is not a civil war, because the civilian population is not engaged in the conflict, it is not a belligerent side, they are the victims. The armed forces attack the men, whereas the fundamentalist attack the entire population, especially women. we have an inter-generational transmission of the traumas” Marieme Heli Lucas (WLUML).
“It is not possible to speak about transitional justice as long as a conflict is still going on. The state of Israel was created on the principle of exclusion. Instead of exclusion, we need to have to switch to inclusion. Exclusion is based on walls that are physical, cultural and social. Transitional justice means overcoming those walls, bringing them down, actually. The walls are there to screen away what really happened. The Palestinian crops have been devastated. It is necessary to know the women’s side of history, to uncover the truth about what really happened, what the women did, how they reacted, what happened to the victim and what the slayer has done. You cannot do justice by inflicting injustice. We have to take ourselves as a starting point. Solidarity means working together” Lili Traubman (Israel).
In the course of the evaluation, the women arrived at the following conclusions:
“To strengthen relations among women as an alternative, leading to peace. To make the personal political. To become ambassadors of peace and to speak for those women whose voices are not heard. To support women in the attacked countries and to act as their envoys. To support new hope. To have more mutual empathy . To raise awareness about the non-violent methods of defense.”
“Boycott Israel until the end of the occupation”, Lili Traubman (Israel).
A warm August evening lent space for the voices/recounts of all those others/different women who are out there, elsewhere. We listened carefully, the air was vibrant with our emotions. Their stories were full of sorrow, their voices were sad, the voices of the others and the different. They had come out from under the dust of a hidden women’s history. We wished to sing in those forgotten hushed voices and to speak out. The women of the world spoke…
Afghanistan or how to fathom so much human suffering. The women were crying…
“My son, who was only nine years old, was killed in the bombing. I was home alone and I had to collect parts of his torn body. We could not stay in the refugee camp in Pakistan, because there was no food. During another bombing, the place were my other two sons were working was hit, and they were killed, too. The people who saw that did not inform me, so I don’t know where they were buried” ((Safura, Afghanistan).
“We do not have an address where you can find us, because the fundamentalist would kill us. Rawa is a woman whose voice is not heard in Afghanistan. In the period between 2001 and 2007, 6,000 civilians were killed. The women are the target of Islamic fundamentalist of the Jihad. Every day, 60 to 70 women are killed. Private militias and the lords of war act along with the occupational forces. The fundamentalist are deadly enemies of women” (A RAWA activist).
The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Sahara or the pain because of a forgotten conflict. Please, let us remember and build policies of remembrance as part of the feminist responsibility towards ourselves and our versatile experiences…
Women in Black have offered to us the tender air of love that we breathe together, knowing that we are not alone. Spain withdrew from Sahara in 1974 and ceded us to Mauritania and Morocco. The Moroccan army entered Sahara in 1974, sowing terror. families were split apart. We only wished to flee, in terror before the Moroccan army. We live in refugee camps in Algeria. The occupied territories still exist. There is a wall of shame that has divided our people for thirty years. We don’t want to be forgotten. Whenever a new war breaks out, we fall even deeper into oblivion.” (Activists of Sahara).
Algeria and the story of a Berber woman…
“I have lost hope. The independence of my country has been confiscated. The de-culturalization is a process of destroying memory. “
Peru and the story of the ongoing conflict which is called low- intensity war…
“We seek justice, that sexual violence be incriminated as a crime against humanity, because this has been a systematic infliction of violence.”
Turkey and a few fragments from the Declaration of Conscientious Objectors…
“I am a woman amid a crowd of men, I am LGBT in a crowd of heterosexuals, I am A Kurdish and an Armenian woman in a crowd of Turks…”
Chechnya or the wiping out from history/cleansing from history… Grozny as a modern metaphor of Guernica…
“During the first war Chechnya, the Russian government represented the conflicts as an internal problem. For three years of war, nobody knew what was happening. The conflict was being referred to as the enforcement of constitutional order in Chechnya. I am a librarian. When it comes to suffering, losing someone dear is just the same as working in a devastated city. The center of the city was destroyed, along with 1,200 cultural monuments. Grozny has now become a symbol similar to Stalingrad. The citizens compare the destruction of Grozny with the destruction of the small town of Guernica in the Basque Country. Before the war, there used to be 500 libraries, all of which have been destroyed, together with their ten million books. Wiping out from history, the cleansing of history. A people with historic memory is dead when you destroy their culture /books. Three theaters have been destroyed, three universities and five hundred parks. Cultural centers have also been destroyed. The central library used to have thirty departments before the war, where five hundred women were employed. All of them became victims of violence, because they wanted to protect the books, and they remained at work until the last minute. One woman, whose name was Lida, a librarian, carried on working during the bombing. The citizens came to the library to borrow books, which for them were a source of energy. That woman was assassinated. I am convinced that it is our duty to preserve the books during the war, so that our people could overcome their plight. many have told me that I had been foolish in my attempt to save the books. I not only saved the books that had been dedicated to someone, but also the people. Those books had been written by writers who had a vision of life, who had wanted life to go on. Those were more than books for me, those were living beings. The happiest moments for me were when people came seeking books. Life has now been stabilized, but it is hard, because poverty has struck about 50% of the population. The women of Chechnya are doing their best to improve live in the country. As long as there is life on earth, people will need books. It is important to strive for peace, and books will bring us closer to it. Books bind us together”, Sacita (Chechnya).
One evening was special, when we heard the personal and political story of a cute female clown, who spoke about others in a disguised voice… It was not comical, and although she was laughing all the time, trying to amuse us, it was painful. We could feel her pain as if it was our own, we lived through the same experiences through her words, we shared them in the space we also shared that evening. All of so others and different understood one another, we recognized each other’s voices and stories, we recognized our mutual experiences and found all that deep down somewhere…
“To communicate in a non-violent way, to reject the male concept of communication. Women unite in solidarity, in the memory of the victims, we do not reject our history. The memories of those who have suffered are part of our heritage. It is necessary to give violence a name. The state maintains its power through violence. Every women’s experience ought to be shared with other women. Our bodies bear knowledge of violence, they have the experience of violence. How am I to respect so much pain? You gather tears on your way until you drown in a huge tear. I am lost in my sexual preferences. I do not understand anything she is talking about, but I trust her completely. There are so many voices behind her, although she is alone, that you have to trust her. It is easier to be concerned about a conflict that is going on somewhere else, than a conflict in your own country. What brings us together are remote conflicts, what divides us is conflicts in our own country. You are so colonized that you have to trek and trudge through different countries and leave a trail behind. I am excluded, but you do not understand that because you are not excluded, you are not Basques. My preferences go to a male traitor much more than to the women who adapt. Individuals have to be freed fists, and then the peoples”,The female clown,( the Basque Country).
