Women and Militant Wars

The politics of injury

Swati Parashar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415827966
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134116133
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores women's militant activities in insurgent wars and seeks to understand what women 'do' in wars.

In International Relations, inter-state conflict, anti-state armed insurgency and armed militancy are essentially seen as wars where collective violence (against civilians and security forces) is used to achieve political objectives. Extending the notion of war as 'politics of injury' to the armed militancy in Indian administered Kashmir and the Tamil armed insurgency in Sri Lanka, this book explores how women participate in militant wars, and how that politics not only shapes the gendered understandings of women's identities and bodies but is in turn shaped by them.

The case studies discussed in the book offer new comparative insight into two different and most prevalent forms of insurgent wars today: religio-political and ethno-nationalist. Empirical analyses of women's roles in the Sri Lankan Tamil militant group, the LTTE and the logistical, ideological support women provide to militant groups active in Indian administered Kashmir suggest that these insurgent wars have their own gender dynamics in recruitment and operational strategies. Thus, Women and Militant Wars provides an excellent insight into the gender politics of these insurgencies and women's roles and experiences within them.

This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of critical war and security studies, feminist international relations, gender studies, terrorism and political violence, South Asia studies and IR in general.

1 Women, wars and gendered subjectivities

DOI: 10.4324/9780203628669-1

The ‘woman' question in war

For women as much as for men, the experience of violent conflict, as with social life, is not built upon a single discourse.

(Moser and Clark 2001)

I have always been fascinated by the Indian war epic, the Mahabharata and its many lessons about war and human nature. Draupadi is the central female character: born a princess and won as a bride by Arjuna in an archery contest; ordered (by her mother-in-law) to serve as a dutiful wife to all her five sons equally; gambled and lost by her husbands in a dubious game of dice with their Kuru cousins; humiliated in the Kuru court amidst an attempt to strip her naked; abused and called a whore; her sons mercilessly killed in the battle; her journey to heaven cut short because of her greater love for Arjuna among all her husbands (Uberoi 2005). This is the Draupadi who is well ‘known’, partially admired, grudgingly accepted. She is not projected as the ideal role model for Indian women in what remains a highly patriarchal society. Which woman who flaunts her sexuality and has five husbands, is argumentative, does not suffer in silence, talks truth to power, asks questions of those who claim themselves to be protectors and upholders of truth and virtue, and goads her husbands towards revenge and war, can serve as an ideal of womanhood? She was an angry woman who wanted her husbands to revenge her humiliation, she wanted her hair washed in the enemy’s blood, she wanted war and not reconciliation and she offered to fight in the war (Badrinath 2008). Draupadi’s story is the quintessential ‘woman’ question in war that feminist IR must grapple with, urgently and with all its complexities.

Wars have become more complex, more lethal and in an ironic way more inclusive. Wars have entered our homes, schools, market places, cinema halls and allow us no time to prepare. When scholars argue that wars have decreased in frequency (Newman 2009; Goldstein 2011), they do not necessarily account for the changing nature of war and its intrusion into the very private spaces of human existence. Christine Sylvester reminds us, ‘Sadly, the practices of violent politics show few signs of letting up, giving up, or relinquishing a hold on the imaginary of international politics and over the lives of so many people caught by it’ (2011a: 1).

Gender identities are more crucial to wars today which involve a large number of actors in varying roles. This is demonstrated most poignantly in the documentary My Daughter: The Terrorist, made by the Norwegian film maker, Beate Arnestad (produced by Morten Daae). It was shot in 2005–2006 (released in 2007) when the filmmakers had access to two trainee women suicide bombers (Black Tiger cadres) of the Sri Lankan Tamil guerrilla group, the LTTE. The documentary captures the relationship between a mother, Antonia and her guerrilla daughter, Dharshika. Talking to the interviewer whose face we do not see in the documentary, Antonia laments, ‘the war and we lived together … we lived inside war, we could not separate ourselves from the war.’ The experience of war was uniquely gendered for the widowed woman, Antonia, whose husband was brutally killed and the daughter, Dharshika, who chose to channel her grief at her father’s killing by joining the guerrilla group.

The story of Niromi de Soyza is also not the typical war story we ‘know’ especially about how war treats ‘women’. Niromi, a small framed, well educated and employed, Australia based Tamil woman has an ‘authentic’ war story straight from the war zone with ambushes, dead bodies, AK 47s and SMG rifles in it. She calls herself an ‘ordinary, middle class, Catholic Sri Lankan Tamil’, who served in the first female contingent of the LTTE. Niromi provides her readers with an account of her war experiences, her daily life as an LTTE fighter in Sri Lanka in her book, Tamil Tigress (2011). Niromi is neither a celebrated war heroine nor an injured, despondent war ‘victim’. She chose to opt out of the war after nearly a year of fighting and left the LTTE for a different life overseas, first in India and then when she migrated to Australia with her family (Parashar 2013).

Most IR war scholars do not consider the war stories of Antonia, Dharshika and Niromi as credible sources of analysis of the Sri Lankan war. Instead, they would rely on obscure quantitative data and variables explaining the nature of civil wars or theorising about other aspects of war where common people are not significant actors and institutions and states alone are the repositories of war knowledge. The irony is that these women and their communities know more about the ‘international’ and have experienced the ‘international’ on their bodies in war zones, and after the war, in a number of ways (Parashar 2013). Women are the raison d’etre of specific national, ethnic and even religious projects, but, ‘they are often excluded from the collective “we” of the body politic, and retain an object rather than a subject position’ (Yuval Davis 1997: 47). What are the specific gender stories about women that we associate with wars?

1 Women: As victims and survivors

War’s women have been all too familiar ‘women’. The linkages between women’s victimhood and their peaceful nature have been very strongly drawn. The largest numbers of victims of war and militancy, especially in protracted conflicts are women and children, who suffer violent deaths, displacement, trauma, emotional and physical problems as they reconstruct life in conflict zones (Moser and Clark 2001; Manchanda 2001). In fact, warring sides choose ‘soft targets’ to attack the enemy and often label the death and injuries (experienced by unarmed women and children) as ‘collateral damage’. Areas frequented by women and children, including schools, places of worship, religious shrines and markets are subjected to a great degree of violence. One estimate says that approximately 10 per cent of violent deaths in the Iraq war since 2003 have been women.¹ This has been highlighted in feminist scholarship where women have been presented as suffering victims of conflicts and militant attacks, or as women’s groups, which stand in opposition to conflict and militarisation (Cockburn 2007).

2 Women: as peacemakers and anti-war activists

Some scholars have argued that a more peaceful world is possible only when man-made wars and militarised masculinity are rejected and women realise their full potential in an environment of equal opportunities. Mia Bloom, for example, believes that women are ‘more peaceful in their attitudes toward international conflict [than men] and more disposed toward moderation, compromise and tolerance’ (2005: 142). This is aligned with the much debated view that maternal instincts in women are naturally inclined towards peace. Sarah Ruddick (1989) contends that feminist politics is consonant with the practice of peace making and indeed can catalyse a latent peacefulness in maternal practices focusing on the protection and nurturing of children. Ruddick’s work has been cited by feminists to justify the relationship between motherhood and peace, and women’s ‘natural’ aversion to war and violence. This view not only endorses male notions of ideal femininity but also questions feminism’s commitment to interrogating essentialised gender norms. It further ignores the invocation of motherhood and its sacrifices in war making and violence as will be discussed later in this chapter. Megan MacKenzie shares this concern in her work on female soldiers in Sierra Leone (2012). She writes, ‘This presumption about women’s natural role and emotions casts a violent, moralising net over all women in all contexts. Women who do not fit into this mould of the natural, superior, feminised peace-builder are judged, ignored or rendered delinquent’ (MacKenzie 2012: 112, 113).

There is no doubt that feminist scholarship has brought into focus the notions of negotiation, good offices, mediation, articulation, multi-track diplomacy and other such methods of peaceful resolution of conflicts. Betty Reardon (1993) suggests that feminist and peace research projects have much in common and they should be merged. Christine Sylvester on the other hand cautions against this merger arguing that women’s relationship to peace is diverse, like that of a mother and the woman warrior (Sylvester 1987). I want to build on Sylvester’s argument and propose that an understanding of women’s war time activities is critical to understanding the role they can play in building peace and in conflict resolution.

3 Women: as repositories of cultural and national symbols

Women are presented as the cultural bearers of national identities and they are presented as the raison d’être of wars and violent militant projects. Militants ‘protect’ them or ‘liberate’ them from the confines of tradition or from ‘unholy’ influences and cultural invasions (Cohn 2013: 29). The state, on the other hand, also presents its logic of protecting women from militants and the structural and physical violence they unleash. Afghanistan is a contemporary case in point where veiling and unveiling women has been an important gender discourse in the post-9/11 context of the ‘war on terror’ (Shepherd 2006). Writing about the unveiling of women in colonised Algeria, Frantz Fanon draws attention to women as cultural symbols of nationalism_

The occupying forces, in applying their maximum psychological attention to the veil worn by Algerian women, were obviously bound to achieve some results. Here and there it thus, happened that a woman was ‘saved’, and symbolically unveiled…. The occupier’s aggressiveness, and hence his hopes, multiplied ten-fold each time a new face was uncovered.

(Fanon 1965: 42)

Women as repositories of cultural values become the upholders of the ideologies of the warring sides in any nationalist conflict. In other words, women’s bodies and their gendered identities become the territories on which militants and counter-militants wage their war, and play out their ideologies. Religious fundamentalist groups target women as the potential bearers of their ideology by reinforcing religious symbols like the veil and by excluding them from public spaces. The Taliban’s radical Islamist shariah rule in Afghanistan banned women’s education, activism and even physical presence in Afghan society. The misogynist ideology of the Taliban and Al Qaeda subjected women to extreme forms of subjugation and violence (Caizza 2001). States in their anti-militant operations, on the other hand, have the ‘emancipation’ of women on their agenda, claiming the superiority of their democratic and liberal ideology as against the destructive and inhuman worldview of the militants. The national identity is defined in terms of its gendered impositions on women. Nira Yuval Davis reflects how ‘deveiling women in Ataturk’s revolution in Turkey in 1917 to bring about a modern nation state, was as important as veiling them by the Muslim fundamentalists’ (1997: 98).

4 Women: As armed combatants and militants

A third way in which war and gender are linked is the increasing militarisation of women who participate in political violence and support militant activities. Cunningham contends that female involvement with political violence is widening ideologically, logistically, and regionally for several reasons:

increasing contextual pressures (e.g., domestic/international enforcement, conflict, social dislocation) creates a mutually reinforcing process driving terrorist organizations to recruit women at the same time women’s motivations to join these groups increases; contextual pressures impact societal controls over women thereby facilitating, if not necessitating, more overt political participation up to, and including, political violence; and operational imperatives often make female members highly effective actors for their organizations, inducing leaders toward ‘actor innovation’ to gain strategic advantage against their adversary.

(2003: 561–575)

It must be emphasised here, that these three dominant portrayals of women are not mutually exclusive. Women in wars are victims of violence and mainstays of culture and national identity; they may also become perpetrators of violence as combatants or supporters of a militant ideology. Women as perpetrators of political violence are relatively understudied and new feminist approaches are paying attention to this rising trend of women committing violence ‘as the best means to their political ends’ (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007: 4). There is increasing scholarly engagement with women in combat and militant roles and their ‘political labour’ in armed resistance and guerrilla warfare has been accounted for, (see MacKenzie 2009, 2011, 2012; Parashar 2009, 2011a, 2011b; Alison 2008; Roy 2013; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007).

South Asia's en(gendered) wars

Conflicts and wars have a long history in South Asia,² the home to diverse ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic communities. The geographical and political landscape is shaped by the legacy of colonial politics and hostilities and confrontations have been fuelled by diversities to some extent.³ The region has witnessed the formation of three nation states on religious and linguistic fault lines: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Metcalf 2002; Wolpert 2006; D’Costa 2011). The creation of these three states has come about by two major partitions that unleashed the most gruesome violence on the common citizens (D’Costa 2011). Another partition of the island state of Sri Lanka along the ethnic divide has been prevented but at a horrific cost to human lives. This region has also witnessed four interstate wars which at times have threatened to spiral out of control into an all-out nuclear catastrophe.⁴ The low intensity intra-state militant wars (in Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Sri Lanka) have inflicted great deal of suffering on the people. Rupesinghe and Mumtaz (1996) trace the genesis of conflicts in South Asia to the discontent over unequal economic growth and regional disparities that is channelled along religious and ethnic lines leading to violence.

These wars have been gendered in numerous ways and yet gender is a relatively understudied category in intellectual explorations or meaningful analyses. Wars are usually classified as religious, cultural, economic and political, never as gendered. In all the theatres of war in South Asia, rape and sexual violence have been used as war strategies. They are not sporadic violence against women by undisciplined soldiers. In communal riots in India, rape has been used as a mode of terrorising the ‘other’, as during the Gujarat (2002) and Orissa (2008) riots. Rape was also a war strategy in inter-state skirmishes in 1947 between India and Pakistan and in 1971 between East (Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (D’Costa 2011). In Sri Lanka during the final stages of the war and well beyond their comprehensive victory the regular armed forces unleashed a campaign of sexual violence against Tamil women (Human Rights Watch 2013).

Furthermore the militarised states and non-state militant groups in the region have made women’s cultural identities as the most fundamental battle ground to validate their masculinist worldview. Extremist ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series: War, politics and experience
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: when silences speak
• 1 Women, wars and gendered subjectivities
• 2 The feminist researcher and the researched: negotiations of difference
• 3 Kashmir: armed insurgency and the story of women’s silences
• 4 Sri Lanka: continuities and disruptions in the lives of LTTE women
• 5 War, memory and gendered (re)presentations
• Conclusion: women, wars and feminist IR – troubled frontiers and troubling silences
• Appendix 1: transcript of interview with Asiya Andrabi
• Appendix 2: transcript of interview with Rudra
• Appendix 3: transcript of interview with Dr Daya Somasundaram
• Bibliography
• Index