Gender Violence in Peace and War

Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, Cecilia M. Salvi

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813576190
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Human Rights

Reports from war zones often note the obscene victimization of women, who are frequently raped, tortured, beaten, and pressed into sexual servitude. Yet this reign of terror against women not only occurs during exceptional moments of social collapse, but during peacetime too. As this powerful book argues, violence against women should be understood as a systemic problem—one for which the state must be held accountable.    The twelve essays in Gender Violence in Peace and War present a continuum of cases where the state enables violence against women—from state-sponsored torture to lax prosecution of sexual assault. Some contributors uncover buried histories of state violence against women throughout the twentieth century, in locations as diverse as Ireland, Indonesia, and Guatemala. Others spotlight ongoing struggles to define the state’s role in preventing gendered violence, from domestic abuse policies in the Russian Federation to anti-trafficking laws in the United States.    Bringing together cutting-edge research from political science, history, gender studies, anthropology, and legal studies, this collection offers a comparative analysis of how the state facilitates, legitimates, and perpetuates gender violence worldwide. The contributors also offer vital insights into how states might adequately protect women’s rights in peacetime, as well as how to intervene when a state declares war on its female citizens.    

Part I

State Violence, Gender, and Resistance

1

Subaltern Bodies

Gender Violence, Sexual Torture, and Political Repression during the Greek Military Dictatorship (1967–1974)

Katerina Stefatos

This chapter analyzes the sexually related torture and abuse of dissidents during the Greek military dictatorship (1967–1974). It shows how sexual torture and terrorization during interrogation and incarceration functioned as a tool of repression and as part of a state-sponsored project of control, regulation, and rehabilitation of “incorrigible,” politically active women. In Greece, the 1967 coup d’état initiated a prolonged period of political persecution, social oppression, and incarceration, with communists and leftists or even just politically active, progressive citizens becoming the chief targets. For both men and women (but especially women), the colonels’ regime employed calculated mechanisms of torture and abuse based on patriarchal and nationalistic narratives that carried gender-specific markers. Although political violence and state terror against dissidents was not a new phenomenon, state-sponsored violence and sexual torture during the junta were organized and implemented as official state practice, systematized and scientifically performed by agents of the police and armed forces, specially trained torturers, and high-ranking officials.

In this chapter, I focus on the gender dynamics of torture and the micro technologies of power and terror within the interrogation and police centers of the junta period, as the power relations and the nationalist ideology of the military system were effectuated in these places (see Foucault 1991). I investigate the cases of torture and interrogation as a corollary of a nationalist, anticommunist rhetoric and ideological framework, which facilitated and legitimized torture, sexual abuse, and humiliation. I discuss in some detail the physical, sexual, and psychological machinery of terror, the practices of torture against both men and women (mostly young women). In addition, I set the role of the torturers and perpetrators of abuse within the backdrop of extreme militarism and intensified masculinization. Understanding the victimization of the Greek dissidents sheds light on the sexual and institutionalized parameters of the torture of women and men, the nature and ideological framework of the junta, the implications for the state and its proxies (military, police, Greek Orthodox Church, medical establishment, and the judiciary), and the hierarchical system of gender relations. To make my case, I draw on the narratives of junta dissidents, including oral testimonies, memoirs, and archival sources. I conclude with a brief discussion of the construction of political and gendered subjectivities, providing snapshots of resistance, survival, and agency within this state-sponsored, nationalist project of political repression and sexual terrorization.

Contextualizing Terror: The Sites and Practices of Gender Violence

Within a few hours of the military coup, on April 21, 1967, the majority of the political leaders of the Left, Center, and even the Right were arrested, including members of the Greek intelligentsia. According to the 1968 Amnesty International Report on Greece, in the first days of the coup, 8,270 citizens were detained; on the barren, remote island of Yaros alone, political exiles numbered more than six thousand, including approximately 250 women.1 In addition, a significant number of dissidents were detained and imprisoned without a trial, interrogated, and tortured. According to James Becket, the American attorney representing Amnesty International (of London) in Greece at the time, at least two thousand people were tortured (between 1967 and 1969), this being a conservative estimate (1997, 31).

The main sites of incarceration and abuse of women during the military junta were the Yaros concentration camp, the Alikarnassos prison camp in Crete, the Averof and Korydallos Prisons in Athens, the Greek Military Police (ESA) headquarters, and the Security Police Headquarters (Asfalia), both of which were in the center of Athens, along with numerous specifically designated and designed interrogation centers, camps, prisons, and police stations.2

The torture and sexual abuse of political activists, both male and female, was not just tolerated but officially regulated and exercised in a quite scientific way by specially trained agents. The officers, soldiers, and servicemen of the armed and police forces were exposed to anticommunist propaganda and nationalist rhetoric; added to this, the young recruits of the Military Police were often themselves abused as part of their training at the Military Police Training Center. Within this hypermasculine and militaristic culture, notions of nationalism and anticommunism facilitated their transformation into official torturers (Haritos-Fatouros 2003, 38–65).

The victims of gender violence were, in most cases, politically active women, not limited to communists or leftists, but also centrists or even those of a more conservative political background, as well as students, workers, and professionals. Gender violence and torture during the junta had a strongly sexual nature; the process of sexual torture in particular was transformed into what one of the female political inmates in the Mechanics School of the Argentine Navy (ESMA) described as a “diabolical ceremony” (Actis et al. 2006, 61). In Greece, young women, usually students, were sexually victimized in the specifically designated unit of the Security Police, the so-called Special Students’ Division (Spoudastiko). But both women and men were sexually humiliated and assaulted: besides rape or attempted rape, women were victimized by genital penetration with objects and water and electroshocks in the genitals; men suffered excessive beatings, electroshocks in the genital area, and anal penetration with objects.3

Normalizing Torture: The Construction of Female and Political Otherness

The sexual terrorization of women was a state project that was ideologically envisioned and materialized through distinctive practices and strategies that targeted both the political and gender identities of dissidents. Political otherization was a critical first step in creating the conditions that would allow victimization.

State rhetoric defined communism as an “infectious disease” as early as the mid-1930s during the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941). But as the anthropologist Neni Panourgiá (2009) explains, during the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) it became more pronounced and set the basis for the persecution of the Left. The civil war intensified the process of “othering” of the Greek left, and it was reactivated and ethnicized in junta rhetoric to justify persecution, incarceration, and torture. Within the nationalist discourse, the persecutors of leftists excluded themselves from accountability by saying that they were not targeting fellow Greeks, but “Slavs” and potential traitors. Since communism was equated to a contagious foreign disease originating from the Eastern Bloc (Bournazos 1997, 110–112, 116–120), communists and perceived communists were seen as a “miasma,” a political and ethnic “other,” an enemy of the state. During Amnesty International’s investigation of torture in Greece, Minister of the Interior Stylianos Patakos denied the existence of torture, apparently because the victims were communists and, therefore, not Greek: “You force me to say it. The Greek Government has to protect its people against its communist enemies. A communist is not a Greek. We must put our own security first” (Amnesty International 1968c). Similarly, the designation of communists as “subhuman” (ypanthropoi) appears in the public pronouncements of Patakos; when asked by a group of European Socialist MPs about the condition of political prisoners in the Yaros concentration camp, he said they were not human political prisoners but brutes and beasts (Clogg 1972, 146).4 Panourgiá, in her insightful analysis of the construction and reproduction of the leftist as an “alien,” a “radical Other,” the “internal danger,” and traitor to the nation, argues that the metaphors of “biomedicine” (e.g., miasma) and “pestilence” situate the leftist outside the healthy national body (Panourgiá 2009, 106, 114); through these metaphors and discourses, “the process of extermination of the communist” is materialized and naturalized (Panourgiá 2008, 417–418). Finding the “pharmakon” or cure for the disease calls for the use of all applicable remedies: execution, torture, incarceration, humiliation, forced impregnation, and mutilation (see Panourgiá 2008, 418; 2009, 106).

Women Dissidents: Motherhood, Sexual Torture, and the Nation

In the context of male nationalist politics, historian Wendy Bracewell argues, “Women . . . can act as a convenient internal ‘other’” (1996, 32). It was in fact this alienation of women and the institutionalization of their political, ethnic, and gendered “otherness” within the Greek nation that became the basis for both their oppression and their redemption.

During our interview, Dora Koulmanda, a student imprisoned and exiled during the military junta, noted that women were treated equally with men in the camps and prisons (in terms of deprivation, maltreatment, and the intensity of torture). That said, two notable classifications were imposed by the authorities: “women and children” and “whores” (interview, July 29, 2010), the latter referring to politically active women. The demarcation was employed by the state and articulated in state rhetoric throughout the postwar period and during the junta. Within this nationalist and militaristic framework, the dissident, the enemy of the Nation and the Race, was demonized in the official discourse, with special attention paid to politically active women. In this ideological scheme, female dissidents constituted a double threat: first, to the nation, as political opponents of the regime, and second, to the moral and gender code. Following this logic, the perceived (symbolic) threat to the constituent elements of the ethnos (nation), namely, morality, tradition, and religion, had to be eradicated.

The nationalist discourse of the junta made use of a virgin/whore dichotomy. On the one hand, women were projected as the continuation of the nation; on the other hand, they were considered lesser political subjects and circumscribed within the private domain so they could be monitored. Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov argue that although “women as mothers” are the “reproducers of the nation,” they can also be perceived as possible threats or enemies to the nation (2004, 11).5 Within nationalist and dictatorial regimes, gender nonconformity provides justification for the sexual abuse, political exclusion, and social marginalization of female dissidents. The symbolism and absurdity of this type of juxtaposition is apparent in the torture of women in the Olimpo (Olympus) detention camp during the Argentinean Dirty War in front of statues of the Virgin Mary; the ostensible goal was to rehabilitate these women, while condemning their violation of acceptable social and gender roles (Taylor 1997, 152).

In this framework of analysis, motherhood was considered integral to the traditional and religious values of Greek society, constituting one of the three elements of the national(ist) triptych of homeland, religion, and family. Ironically, while women dissidents were targeted because they had denied the sanctity of motherhood, opting to play an active role in the political arena, they were tortured in such a way as to deprive them of the ability to bear children.6 Concomitantly, children were frequently used as a mechanism of control and power during interrogation to extract information and declarations of repentance from otherwise unrepentant political inmates.

For instance, Natasa (Anastasia) Mertika (married name Tsirka) was pregnant at the time of her arrest but was extensively tortured; when she informed the torturers of her pregnancy, they responded: “What do we care? If it’s going to be like you, it is better off dead” (1974, 17). In fact, she was thrown down the stairs and had a miscarriage the next morning in her cell; she was ultimately unable to have children due to the extensive torture she endured. In a similar way, Aspasia Karra, who was paraplegic as a result of poliomyelitis, was electrocuted on the navel in order “not to give birth to any communist children” (2006, 25). Maria Angelaki recalls that during her interrogation, the torturers kicked her in the genitals and struck her breasts: “They told me that they would torture me in such a way that I would never be able to become a mother. They tore off my clothes, stripped me naked, and then stood around me talking obscenely, laughing coarsely, and threatening me with shameful innuendos or with unmentionable words. They told me that they would subject me to a torture instrument, which they called ‘the little machine’” (referring to torture with electric shock) (1971, 22).

Of course, the Greek case is not unique. Historian Temma Kaplan has discussed the sadistic victimization of pregnant women in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, especially Nieves Ayress, a political prisoner who was brutally tortured in various torture centers and concentration camps of the Directory of National Intelligence, such as Londres 38 and Tejas Verdes, even though pregnant; her pregnancy was the result of gang rape. Interestingly, the doctors and gynecologists present at the interrogation were not only complicit but were experimenting and actively facilitating the torture sessions, making sure they could hear the heartbeat of the fetus for the torture to continue (Kaplan 1999, 7; 2002, 191). The “deployment of medical paradigms” in the words of Allen Feldman—referring to male political prisoners in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland—provided the “medical legitimation for collective violence” (1991, 190). One of the prison gynecologists congratulated Nieves for “being able to bear a child for the motherland” (Kaplan 1999, 7; 2002, 191), but she had a miscarriage due to the extensive abuse and torture.

In these instances, t...