Women and the War on Terror

Women and Total War

Modern wars are fought against civilians. Whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was around one civilian death to every 10 military deaths, by the end of the century this proportion was the other way round. More than half of all deaths during the Second World War were civilian deaths, around 37 million people. ¹ As the twentieth century developed, so developed the weapons of war, which were designed to target the mass of the population. In the 1920s and early 1930s, there were attempts internationally to prohibit aircraft from being developed as bombers. This was in recognition that any military bombardment from the skies would target civilians indiscriminately (see Kershaw, 2004). The hope that this could be prevented died with the bombing of civilians in Guernica by German and Italian planes during the Spanish civil war in 1937. Many of the most remembered events of the Second World War involved aerial bombardment: the London Blitz, Dresden, and the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The writer on war, Gabriel Kolko, describes the process:

Warfare in the decades since the Second World War has reinforced this point, with high civilian casualties and ever more deadly aerial warfare in Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The effects of modern warfare on women have been dramatic. Women are of course a major part of any civilian population, often the majority in wartime. But their role as mothers and carers intensifies during wartime. They are usually primarily responsible for keeping their children safe and for procuring food and shelter, both often extremely difficult in times of war. Often they are refugees, fleeing with their families from war zones, having to deal with death and injury in the family and having to care for children severely traumatized by the events they have witnessed. This in itself puts enough of a burden on women, but in modern warfare women are supposed to work outside the home as well. During the First World War, the number of women in industry increased by 36 per cent in Britain, 29 per cent in France and 40 per cent in Germany (Kolko, 1994). While women were usually paid far less than the men they replaced, their wages were sufficient to allow them to cope with inflation, rising rents and food shortages better than they might otherwise have done.

During the Second World War, Britain became the first country to conscript women into national service. Single women and childless widows between the ages of 20 and 30 were made liable for military service from the end of 1941, and had to either join one of the women's services of the army, navy, and airforce or be directed into industry. The age was lowered to 19 in 1943 (Gardner, 2004). Pressure was put on married women to go out to work even when they had children and the proportion of married women working increased from 16 per cent in 1931 to 43 per cent in 1943 (Summerfield, 1984). Because the state needed mothers to work, childcare was provided on a scale never seen before. In Birmingham, there were ‘children's hotels’ where they stayed overnight while their mothers worked (Summerfield, 1984). The number of nurseries rose from 14 in October 1940 to 1,345 by July 1943 (Summerfield, 1984).

The experience of work outside the home was double edged: it gave women new freedom and independence, while at the same time imposing a high level of legal and social regulation upon them, ensuring that they became part of the ‘war effort’. Total war requiring the involvement of all sections of the population acted as a midwife of social change for many women, showing how war can have a radicalizing effect on people as well as a traumatizing one. The effects of conscription and other consequences of war break down traditional family structures and attitudes to women, leading to women playing new roles. However, the experience of the Second World War demonstrates that there is a struggle to establish these new roles as permanent, as a return to peacetime also meant the closure of the nurseries and the ending of work for women in many male-dominated industries.

Rape: The Hidden Casualty of War

The following is testimony from the notorious My Lai massacre in Vietnam:

The scene could be repeated in countless accounts of wars throughout history, where rape is a recurring theme. Conquering armies have taken it as their right to abuse women. Sexual aggression has been bound up with military aggression. Some women, as in the case of My Lai, were killed. Others suffered ostracization from their families who regarded them as defiled. ³ A particularly moving account is that of a Berlin woman, whose diaries recording her experiences during several months in 1945 were recently published. She describes the systematic rape of women in Berlin by the invading Soviet army. She also shows the various means by which women tried to cope with this daily horror: for example, by finding one soldier who would protect them from further rapes by larger numbers of men, or by trying to hide and protect young women who were still virgins (Anonymous, 2006).

Rape becomes a weapon of war, a means of further degrading an invaded or a conquered population. It cannot be seen as an aberration in wartime but as an integral part of the way in which soldiers operate, encouraged at certain times both by officers and commanders, and more generally by the ideology surrounding militarism and war, which encourages views of women as objects of less significance than men. Women are seen as the property of men, and rape is seen in the same way as the destruction of buildings, as an assault on the enemy's property.

Today's Wars

The War on Terror, or ‘long war’ as it has been more accurately renamed by the US administration, began in response to the terrible events of 11 September 2001, when al-Qaida killed around 3,000 people in the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Its first theatre of war was in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world and one whose recent history included civil war and war with a major military and imperial power, the Soviet Union. The causus belli was the harbouring of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida by the repressive Islamist regime of the Taliban, which had come to power some years earlier, welcomed by some for bringing a respite from war and civil turmoil.

Taliban treatment of women soon became a major ideological plank of the case for war. Laura Bush, first lady of the US, made a remarkable radio broadcast from her ranch in Crawford, Texas, during which she declared that ‘the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women’. Displaying the double standards that so mark the arguments for the War on Terror, Mrs Bush made the following claim:

How could any civilized society not stand up against tyrants who threatened such torture for wearing nail polish? A reasonable question, but one that was not addressed by Mrs Bush to governments elsewhere that practiced torture and imprisonment against women, for example Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Cherie Blair joined in, launching a campaign to improve women's rights in Downing Street, headlined by one newspaper as ‘Cherie Blair in campaign to liberate Afghan women’. ⁵ Mrs Bush's husband returned to the theme the following year in the run up to war in Iraq, when he told the New York Times that ‘The repression of women [is] everywhere and always wrong’ (Quoted in Viner, 2002). While it might seem churlish to point out that the US has failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to its constitution and that this particular president has repeatedly supported attacks on abortion rights and choice, as well as cutting off funding to international family planning organizations that were involved in abortion advice or counselling, the high-minded aims of liberating Afghan women by bombing them has also failed in its own terms.

A report issued five years after Laura Bush's fine words about rescuing Afghan women from poverty and oppression showed that little had changed. ⁶ True, women had been granted formal equality with men under article 22 of the new constitution and when the new parliament formed in 2005, women exceeded the quota of 25 per cent of MPs. But those improvements on paper were not matched in practice.

Some forms of violence against women, such as honour killings, have risen, and security for women in many provinces is worse than in 2001. There has also been ‘an astronomical rise in cases of self immolation’, high rates of child marriage, trafficking and prostitution, and kidnap. It is estimated that between 60 and 80 per cent of all marriages in Afghanistan are forced, and 57 per cent of girls are married before the age of 16. Access to clean water, healthcare, education and jobs remain problematic. Female illiteracy is estimated at 85 per cent. Only 19 per cent of schools are designated as girls’ schools.

Reconstruction aid has been promised but virtually none of it is aimed at redressing the huge social and economic problems that would also address many of the problems facing women. The aid industry is corrupt, with most donor funds going to Western contractors. Military expenditure currently exceeds that of development and reconstruction by 900 per cent. ⁷

It was much harder to make the same argument about Iraqi women in the run up to war there. Iraq was a brutal dictatorship but a society where women played a more public role. Iraq had the highest representation of women in political life of anywhere in the Middle East and high levels of education for women. So the argument for invasion was posed in very different terms: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction in the form of biological and chemical weapons, which constituted a threat. The US and its allies rapidly won the war, although events showed the weapons of mass destruction that were the pretext for war did not exist. Regime change was carried out in the name of the Iraqi people, but they were the last people to benefit from the invasion. As in Afghanistan, misery also awaited the women of Iraq following their ‘liberation’ in 2003.

At least 400 women and girls as young as eight were raped during or immediately after the war, Human Rights Watch reported in July 2003. Because of the stigma attached to rape, the actual number of rapes is undoubtedly much higher. ⁸ One in five people live in a community affected by landmines and unexploded ordnance. Increased unemployment and decreased social welfare have led to more women engaging in sex work, and lack of law and order have led to human trafficking and exploitation of children for sex. ⁹

Shortages of water and electricity have remained throughout the four years of occupation. Health outcomes are among the poorest in the region, with rises in the number of estimated illegal abortions. In April 2005, a report showed that Baghdad doctors had noticed increased deformities in newborn babies, possibly as a result of mothers’ exposure to radiation from weapons using depleted uranium following the first Gulf War in 1991. ¹⁰

While women's political representation has been, like in Afghanistan, ensured by quota, this has not in turn ensured any improvement in the quality of women's lives. Women won 31 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly, elected in January 2005, because of the quota system. They also won a number of positions in the government formed later that year. ¹¹ However, the government presided over a deteriorating situation with tales of ever increasing violence, estimates of civilian deaths that are higher than the whole military and civilian casualties in Britain during the Second World War, ¹² and failure to attend school. ¹³ Around 38 per cent of Iraqis, questioned four years on from the war, said the situation was better than before the war, while 50 per cent saying it had become worse. ¹⁴ Women's participation in campaigning or political activity is severely limited in Iraq. For example, in February 2004, Yanar Mohamed, founder of the organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq, received a death threat for campaigning against a Governing Council decision to place family law under religious rather than civil jurisdiction. In some areas, women either wear hijab to avoid problems or are told to cover their heads against their wishes. ¹⁵

Women are being killed as a result of the occupation. This description of deaths in Ramadi, in the province of Anbar western Iraq in November 2006, is all too common. ‘A US patrol fired tank rounds, machine gun and small arms fire at “two men who were shooting from the roof of a house”, the [US military] statement said. After the “battle” there were no US casualties but the US patrol found six bodies (five children and a female adult) inside the house’ (Zangana, 2006). International Women's Day 2007 was marked by plans to execute four Iraqi women, the death penalty having been restored in 2004 (Zangana, 2007).

War and Imperialism

The questions of war and racism are integrally connected. The old colonialism and imperalism that dominated in the late nineteenth century through to the second half of the twentieth century had at its heart the implied superiority of the colonizers over those whom they ruled. Democracy naturally did not come into the equation: the British Empire was ruled from London, and its local representatives bitterly resisted handing over their power to the people they governed. While the second half of the twentieth century saw a process of decolonization that left most of the former colonial powers at least nominally independent nations, international developments in recent years have seen imperialism back in the spotlight again. In particular the doctrine of ‘liberal imperialism’ has been resurrected especially since the events of 9/11. Tony Blair has been an especially enthusiastic advocate. His foreign policy adviser, Robert Cooper argued that:

Cooper's view that ‘the weak still need the strong, and the strong still need an orderly world’ might seem to be in contrast to his vehicles for bringing such a benign voluntary relationship about, which include the World Bank and the IMF (Cooper, 2003). However, his views clearly inform the sorts of ‘humanitarian intervention’ that we have seen above which have been so unsuccessful in achieving their goals. The suffering of local populations as a result of the policies of such organizations has impacted particularly hard on women who have to deal first hand with the consequences of greater inequality, attacks on welfare and job losses. After all, the weak only need the strong if they are going to be helped by the strong, not further weakened. If, on the other hand, the need for ‘an orderly world’ overrides caring for the weak, then there is no humanitarian element to the intervention.

Behind the new imperialism is the most militarized power in the history of the world, prepared to use weapons of mass destruction as it did against Japan in 1945. US military spending constitutes more than 30 per cent of all world military spending. Not only is the US top of the league of military spenders, but Afghanistan, Iraq (the two countries it has attacked), Syria and Iran (two countries it threatens to attack) are none of them in the top 15 (figures in Rees, 2006).

Islamophobia in the UK

The War on Terror has cast a long shadow. While the US and British governments have waged war on largely Muslim populations in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the consequences that we have seen above, the rise of racism and prejudice against Muslims in the Western world has been marked. Islamophobia is perhaps the last respectable racism in Europe: in the Netherlands, during the 2006 election campaign, the government party proposed banning women from wearing the burka, even though it is estimated that no more than 100 women in the whole country dressed in such a way. The French government banned the wearing of overt religious symbols in state schools, a move seen as aimed particularly at Muslim girls choosing to wear hijab. The government of the state of Baden Wurttemburg in Germany has a questionnaire for immigrants that includes questions on their attitudes to gay rights (the assumption presumably being that the high proportion of immigrants from Muslim backgrounds in Germany are more likely to be anti-gay than indigenous Catholic farmers.)

In Britain, ministers in the Labour government have changed their attitudes as the war on Iraq has unravelled for them and as they have tried to regain political advantage on the question. Immediately after the events of September 11 2001, the government was careful to stress that British Muslims were not responsible for the attacks and that there should be no retaliation against individual Muslims or their mosques. Although there was an increase in such attacks, it was largely contained. After the London tube and bus bombings on 7 July 2005, however, an atmosphere of greater hostility prevailed among the media and from some politicians. There was an atmosphere of tension with much greater police powers and attempts to erode civil liberties; just three weeks later, a young Brazilian was shot dead on a London tube by police who mistakenly suspected him to be a terrorist.

The atmosphere was such that all Muslims were seen as extremists. It was against this background that Jack Straw, former foreign secretary, decided to single out a small minority of Muslim women in a debate that he must have known would lead to more criticism and even attacks on women who wore traditional dress than had previously been the case. Straw said that women who wore the niqab or face veil made him feel uncomfortable when they visited him in his surgery.

His argument found an echo, not just among those on the political right who can always be relied upon to criticize Muslims, but also among some feminists who too felt uncomfortable with the dress and possibly the attitudes of such women. Deborah Orr, columnist with The independent newspaper, wrote a column in July 2006 headlined ‘Why this picture offends me’ above a photograph of two women in niqabs and full-length robes (Orr, 2006).

The argument put against women wearing such clothes is because, in Orr's words, ‘I find these clothes to be physical manifestations of outdated traditional practices, dating from early Islam and before, that oppress and victimize women, sometimes in the most degrading, cruel and barbaric of ways’ (Orr, 2006). That is surely investing rather a lot of ideological content into a piece of cloth. In reality, Muslim women wear particular clothing for a number of reasons. Many clearly do not identify it as oppressive, but wear clothes for reasons either of cultural custom (Muslim women in Britain wear very different clothes depending on where they come from) or because they want to make a statement. Racism is clearly a factor here. Young Muslim women who choose to wear hijab or the niqab often say that they do so because they wish to identify as Muslims. The wish to do so appears to have grown as Muslims have come under more attack in the West.

So strong expressions of cultural identity can be seen as a response to racism. How should feminists respond to such a development? We should accept that women have the right to choose what they wear and when they wear it. It is wrong for regimes such as that of Iran to insist on women covering their heads in public; it is also wrong for Western society to insist, in the name of secularism, that women should uncover their heads. We can only imagine the outcry if a Muslim MP said that he felt uncomfortable when confronted with a woman in a short skirt and a low-cut top in his surgery. Why then should we accept such a statement from an MP like Jack Straw, who has in the past relied heavily on some of the more conservative elements in the Muslim community for political support?

The question goes further than this, however. How can we make issues of equality and social justice relevant to young Muslim women (and men) if we put up barriers to them? The experience of many Muslims in Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe has been one of discrimination; the largest British Muslim communities, made up of people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, also suffer some of the worst housing, education and job prospects. They also, like other ethnic minorities, suffer overt racial discrimination. Overcoming these disadvantages would help genuine integration and multiculturalism on the basis of equality.

The Anti-War Movement

The anti-war movement in Britain formed after September 11 2001 has been the largest ever such movement. Its 17 national demonstrations in just over five years, plus hundreds of local protests, have mobilized millions of people, with two million turning out to demonstrate in Britain on 15 February 2003. It has been part of an international movement that organized in every continent to stop the war. One of the features of the movement has been the very high number of women involved. The author of this article helped to found the Stop the War Coalition and has been the convenor since then; Kate Hudson is chair of CND; there have been a large number of Muslim women involved locally and nationally; and women trade unionists, peace activists, socialists, poets and artists, have all spoken, organized, and campaigned as part of the movement. (For many different voices from the movement and a general overview, see Murray and German, 2005).

Perhaps the most common view of why women oppose wars is that they put themselves in opposition to militarism and all its values. For some women, this is clearly the paramount issue, although this question is clearly not simply a question of gender. Some women unfortunately embrace militarism: Margaret Thatcher, Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright spring to mind. They have their counterparts in the military machine and in politics. There are other women who feel it is important to take up arms at various times: for example, today there are women resisting militarily in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon. They do so in general because they see no other way of righting an injustice or of opposing militarism. There are also many men who reject the idea that they should fight and who have become part of the peace movement themselves.

With the new anti-war movement, there are at least three other issues that have motivated women on such a scale. The first is the consequence of women's changing position in society, which has led to much greater involvement outside the home. Women are now much more likely to work outside the home, to be educated to the same levels as men, and to be able to speak publicly. The second is the breadth of the movement: although the main focus is on the threat of global capitalism and imperialism, the agenda tends to spread beyond opposition to war to campaigning for equality and justice. This agenda has a special appeal to many women (and indeed to ethnic minorities, who are much more prominent and involved in the current anti-war movement than they were in earlier peace campaigns). The third issue that motivates women is that this is a genuinely grassroots movement, democratic and open. As in most such movements, some of the most oppressed come to the fore. All these have helped the movement thrive and grow, showing solidarity with our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world and creating a remarkable political force.