Female Combatants in Conflict and Peace

Challenging Gender in Violence and Post-Conflict Reintegration

Seema Shekhawat

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349560738, 9781137516558
• eBook ISBN: 9781137516565
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

This edited volume illuminates the role of women in violence to demonstrate that gender is a key component of discourse on conflict and peace. Through an examination of theory and practice of women's participation in violent conflicts, the book makes the argument that both conflict and post-conflict situations are gender insensitive.

1

Women in Combat: Identifying Global Trends

Carol Mann

The active presence of women in any form of armed combat has been considered an anomaly, indeed a state of perversion. There are several reasons for this. Throughout history, hegemonic masculinity has been constructed and performed through exclusive access to armed aggression and warfare: recourse to violence has been considered the supreme male prerogative, even the most gendered of all privileges. When women challenge this by staking their claim on these seemingly unalienable rights – be it within rigid, state-authorized parameters or a social insurgency – the very structure of patriarchal society is undermined.

This chapter will attempt to present different approaches to the conceptualization of the choices female combatants make when they engage in revolution and insurgency. Other forms of protest – demonstrations, passive resistance, aiding fighters – will remain outside my main considerations as I shall dwell on direct involvement in guerrilla and rebel movements, and compare these with female engagement in the regular military. I am interested in the political and personal decisions made by these women; coerced enrolment into sexual slavery constitutes a separate category, devoid of agency and therefore outside the present discussion.

I shall start with an analysis of women’s participation in the military establishment, sketch the historical and postcolonial background and review some of the ethical problems. Because of its sheer influence and ubiquitous presence since 1945, the United States (US) military model will be discussed in the context of the globalization of war that today affects even the remotest guerrilla movements. I will then describe the framework in which combatants operate, examine the different taboos they infringe, assess the motivations for joining and attempt to evaluate the success and failure of their varied commitments. I will comment on the recourse and in some cases the instrumentalization of feminism by various guerrilla movements since the 1980s, a pivotal point – much exploited by the media – especially when discussing groups as different as the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) and the Kurds in Syrian Rojava. Even the Islamist Daesh (ISIL, the self-proclaimed Islamic State) in Syria and Iraq are mobilizing through a peculiar perception of female combat, grounded in a politicized interpretation of religion.

Women with guns, legal and illicit

Firstly, we need to distinguish guerrilla formations from other configurations where women perform as combatants, namely the regular army and the police that allow their members to legally resort to extreme violence. These operate as agents of the state, famously defined by Max Weber as having the “monopoly on violence.” Problems facing female recruits in the military are interesting because they intersect with those encountered by their counterparts who have chosen to fight on the side of insurgency, namely that which considers violence as a source of legitimate empowerment for women. Here, legitimacy and legality find themselves at loggerheads because of gender stereotyping displayed by the regular army, which is reluctant to allow women in direct combat and danger zones. This reticence can be found principally in the West and most regions that were once colonized by Western powers, in particular in South America and parts of the African continent.

It has to be stressed here that this was never the case in the Communist bloc, as even before 1917 women took up arms in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Balkans. This was to have consequences in all Marxist revolutionary groups the world over, and explains the presence of female combatants in formations from the Vietcong and the Indian Naxalites to the FARC in Colombia and those in Kurdistan today. Although the USSR did not colonize these parts of the world, its ideological, covert and overt geostrategic influence could not be underestimated from an instructive postcolonial perspective, especially when understanding the mechanism of female empowerment in revolutionary movements within cultures where patriarchal values are solidly entrenched.

The military as a contradictory model

If women were admitted throughout history in battle zones as paid providers of sex and basic health care and food (see Bertolt Brecht’s famous play “Mother Courage”), officially taking up arms has been taboo. From the First World War onwards, as the organization of wars and armies became increasingly complex, the military industry opened up career possibilities for women so as to free up a maximum number of men. To reassure the paterfamilias, total chastity was demanded from (unmarried) female recruits as it initially was for other lesser professions (school teachers, librarians, nurses, etc.). This confirmed the total separation between sexual services and other tasks hitherto undertaken by women on the frontline, a process that had started in the mid-19th century when the sexuality of the male military (forcibly heterosexual) was henceforth strictly regulated. Just like the British Empire, previously the US Army implanted brothels around military bases.¹

The feminization of the omnipresent US Army has influenced that of the military in all regions of direct and indirect influence, including the most unlikely, such as Saudi Arabia and the police force in Afghanistan.

Female military often deal with civilian populations (namely other women and children) on the presupposition of natural gender affinities. In 2010, the American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization command launched the “Hearts and Minds” strategy designed to gain Afghan adherence and enthusiasm. Central to this was the presence of female military. These single, urbanized young women in their early 20s were supposed to have “natural” affinities with local rural women, mostly mothers of at least five children,² despite the age and experience gap between them. This essentialist, biology-based policy was doomed to fail, and only reflected the rigidly conservative backbone of the military establishment.

The presence of women in regular military is on the increase in many parts of the world, something which may have to do with shrinking employment possibilities elsewhere rather than true military ambitions or any kind of patriotic/nationalist motivation (unlike revolutionary movements). The army and police continue to be male dominated.

In the US, 14.8 per cent of the personnel of the army are female,³ about the same as in France, and their tasks are mainly subaltern, away from direct armed confrontation. It is only in 2013 that the US military women were officially allowed on the frontline: one has to add that it was only in 2008 that the first female general, in a novel move, was appointed in the US Army (followed by two more). In Israel, military service is mandatory for both male and female citizens because the country is permanently experiencing low-intensity war, which creates a particularly intense experience for both civilian and military people. Pakistan (founded in 1947, one year before the state of Israel) presents a situation unique in the Muslim world, where female soldiers are appointed to high-ranking assignments. Since 2004 they have been admitted in combat roles in airborne and infantry missions.⁴ North Korea is one of the few places on earth where the women (who according to different accounts represent anywhere between 15 and 40 per cent of the army) are deployed on potential front-line positions, namely frontiers and coastline. It is probable that Vietcong women held comparable assignments, though insufficient research has been done to prove this conclusively.

The presence of women in the military may, in rare cases, reflect their place in the nationalist discourse, including their past activities in revolutionary movements. This represents an astute reconciliatory move. Thus, 26.6 per cent of South African National Defence Force consists of women,⁵ 70 per cent of whom are black, which may serve to honour their participation in liberation movements in the 1970s and 1980s.

The situations depicted above represent the exception rather the rule. Overall, in both the military and the armed rebel configurations, patriarchal prejudice has largely confined women to comparable auxiliary positions. Female recruits in many (though not all) rebel groups often find themselves doing the equivalent of domestic chores in the civilian world, including care and communication with local populations.

As in civilian society, the glass ceiling is a reality even though, in insurgent groups, there is greater latitude for progression and promotion for women that more often than not is reversed with the onset of reconciliation talks.

The socially acceptable freedom fighter

There are circumstances that make unregulated combat acceptable for women, at best for the shortest possible time in some form of national emergency. Such behaviour is validated by the presence of a consensually defined enemy, foreign and/or alien (or perceived as such even though they may live in the same city, as in the case of racist and ethnic confrontations). Whatever the configuration, the place of women remains visibly subaltern to a male chain of command, and, more often than not, does not benefit from social and public recognition. There are some exceptions, especially when the proponent happens to be royal: warrior queens are part of numerous national and religious folklores. Yet these figures of authority (just like the tutelary goddesses of war, whether Athena or Kali), however admirable, inevitably incarnate and reinforce the patriarchal order and bolster gender hierarchies. It has to be said that many historic regal female warriors were only reinstated in the 19th and 20th centuries as part and parcel of the nationalist discourse. This was the only way to legitimate what amounts to deeply subversive behaviour. For instance, the French female national heroine Joan of Arc (1412–1431), who defended France’s claims to the throne under English occupation, was considered, in modern terms, an illegal female combatant and was treated as such. As a result, she was burnt alive for her acts of subversion. It was only in 1920 that she was canonized: her accession to sainthood coincided with the need of the French government to reinvigorate flagging French patriotism after the catastrophes of the First World War.

The female resistant/freedom fighter, halfway between regular army and guerrilla, is an important archetype in modern, in particular Western, history. Nevertheless, one country’s resistance fighter is another’s terrorist. Here, I shall consider two main configurations during the Second World War which, in my opinion, help us construct a conceptual framework for armed female combat today: the resistant on the Western and Allied Front and those on the Eastern European one, especially Communist USSR. In the territories in which they ruled, the Nazis systematically called these opponents “terrorists,” that is to say enemies of state and government, and executed them as such, exerting particularly sadistic cruelty against women, to be replicated by the police torturing guerrilleras under South American dictatorships.

During the Second World War, in Western Europe, female resistance was often enacted through a multiplication of individual acts of escalating heroism that rested on contemporary gender norms, namely nursing or hiding male companions, smuggling children out of war zones, transporting munitions and weapons as well as occasional participation in actual fighting. Women in rebel groups everywhere find themselves doing the same, as an extension of domestic tasks. Resorting to seduction (and playing to masculine sexual vulnerability) is ubiquitous in any struggle against male-dominated military authority (including the most egalitarian of all, the Colombian FARC). Yet it is most dangerous for the women themselves as such tactics reinforce discrimination and distrust once the struggle is over, hence the lack of recognition until today.

Because all these forms of resistance lacked a visibly militant component in Western Europe, females are conspicuously absent in the official historiography of both world wars, despite the enormous danger and the fact that many of these women were executed, by the Gestapo, just like their male comrades. The same historical amnesia was applied to Algerian female freedom fighters against French colonialism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Just as in the war two decades before, most of their tasks centred around caring for and hiding armed militants with occasional spectacular actions.⁶ The most notorious include indigenous young women dressed up as fashionable Parisiennes detonating bombs in coffee shops in Algiers. The self-same French who praised women as resisters during the Nazi occupation, 15 years later treated the Algerian equivalents as terrorists. These forms of militancy are continuous with peacetime, but in war conditions are often as dangerous as being on the front line: yet they lack the kudos of handling weapons, which is attributed to men. So when it comes to peace talks, because of the disregard shown universally to non-military resistance, women are doomed to invisibility.

The long-lasting influence of the Communist governments

The difference of attitudes on the other side of the Iron Curtain is important for their impact on female combatants. Here women took part in combat during the First World War and made up a considerable part of the military in the USSR during the Second World War. This had already been the case during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), when Communist Republican milicianas were active on the front line. In other parts of Eastern Europe, the female partisan fighting alongside men was more frequent and is closer to the guerrilla fighter of today. These fighters often had difficulties in asserting their authority on male soldiers and were pushed towards auxiliary positions,⁷ just as they experienced in Spain during the Civil War.⁸ This seems to be an omnipresent problem encountered by combatants unless a specifically egalitarian programme is put in place, such as with the Colombian FARC or in the Kurdish Rojava.

Unlike their contemporaries in the West, the Soviet fighters were granted some form of recognition immediately after the war, but the victory over Nazism, east and west, was presented as a purely male military affair. This seems to be the recurring trope of any military situation, legal or subversive, even when the female presence is numerically dominant, such as with the Naxalites in Nepal or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE): peace and reintegration is inevitably hijacked by hegemonic masculinity.

Nevertheless, Marxist egalitarianism, principally expressed by access to decision-making and combat (rather than purely feminist principles) is where most militant groups have looked for inspiration and guidance. First, as in the 1930s, Soviet-style Marxist Leninism influenced dissident Communist parties and formations (such as the FARC) everywhere. Then Maoism from the 1970s onwards inspired many rebel groups all over the planet, all supporting the Vietcong against the American invasion. These ideologies provided the dominant progressive rhetoric to counter capitalism and imperialism, and in each rebel group, female combatants had, with significant variations, their allotted spaces.

Naturally the end of the Cold War and the alignment of China with world capitalism signified the sharp decline and, in many cases, the end of material and moral resources available to Marxist groups and movements. Cuba provides some support to regional struggles, which is why negotiations with the Colombian FARC are held in Havana. Otherwise North Korea has trained activists all over the world in insurgent movements (Tamil JVP, OLP and Polisario for instance), not in the name of promoting socialism (and therefore women’s rights) but fighting a loose concept of Western imperialism.

In the new millennium, the international scene has changed but local grievances persist. Alternative modes of activism, including those grounded in religious ideology, are now competing with the older forms and women are cast in new roles. I will return to this issue later.

Choosing to join the revolution

Armed rebel ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Women in Conflict and Peace-Making
• 1. Women in Combat: Identifying Global Trends
• 2. Catch Them Young: Participation and Roles of Girl Child Soldiers in Armed Conflicts
• 3. Female Combatants, Peace Process and the Exclusion
• 4. Gendering Conflict Analysis: Analysing Israeli Female Combatants’ Experiences
• 5. Female Combatants in the Syrian Conflict, in the Fight against or with the IS, and in the Peace Process
• 6. Visible in Conflict, Invisible in Peace: Positioning Women in the Militancy in Kashmir
• 7. Victims or Victimizers? Naxal Women, Violence and the Reinvention of Patriarchy
• 8. Gendering Conflict and Peace-Building in Sierra Leone
• 9. Women at War, War on Women: Reconciliation and Patriarchy in Peru
• 10. Gendered Struggle for Freedom: A Narrative Inquiry into Female Ex-Combatants in South Africa
• 11. Challenging the Boundaries: The Narratives of the Female Ex-Combatants in Nepal
• 12. I Want My Wings Back to Fly in a New Sky: Stories of Female Ex-LTTE Combatants in Post-War Sri Lanka
• 13. Demobilized Women in Colombia: Embodiment, Performativity and Social Reconciliation
• 14. Untapped Resources for Peace: A Comparative Study of Women’s Organizations of Guerrilla Ex-Combatants in Colombia and El Salvador
• Index