Women and War<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Prasenjit Maiti

 

“All oppression creates a state of war” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex).

 

And in war oppression of women is to the fore: rape becomes a military tool of dominance, agression and projected power.

 

Worst Victims

Among the worst victims of any war are women as they have been traditionally picked out by the dominant male power as the most vulnerable civilian enemy targets during military engagements. You actually succeed in subverting the very basis of your enemy’s virile power if you succeed in violating the enemy’s woman. Then rape becomes disguised military destruction as you also inevitably destroy the enemy’s morale and legitimacy and his masculine, fighting qualities in the process. Any war necessarily leaves behind a trail of devastation in its bloody wake as noticed in widows and mothers who have lost their sons and sisters who have lost their brothers and daughters who have lost their fathers in action.

 

We read about such feminine suffering in the epics and war novels and watch movies, admire paintings and listen to music that deal with related themes. But reality is perhaps always more disturbing than art. Prisoner of War camps, the handling and exploitation of comfort women by soldiers in combat, Nazi and Japanese battle atrocities against women during the Second World War, the collective memory and killing fields of Vietnam – they all bear grim testimony to the fact that woman, being a most ordinary civilian and, therefore, a non-military subject, nevertheless becomes a most prominent military target during invasions.

 

War times are insane moments in human history when the exercise and passage of civilised law and order and governance — let alone good governance

— are temporarily suspended to encourage widespread plunder, inhuman brutalities and mayhem.

 

Impact of Mass Violence

We have to look into the possible impact of mass violence against women and the violence this triggers off as a dangerous chain reaction, with mindblowing consequences. Children suffer, dependents suffer, the service sector of the economy suffers and the entire domestic ethos of a given people may even be destroyed with the destruction of women – not necessarily in the physical sense – and their sanctity in war. Woman has always been the weaker, fairer other in the context of both martial and masculine hegemony. It becomes convenient, therefore, on the part of fighting men to attack and appropriate the women first and, in this logical process of culmination, to eventually appropriate the otherness of the enemy’s territoriality with a kind of xenophobic frenzy because the woman, in the final assessment is a man’s property and nothing much else

(according to the dominating male discourse). The enemy is not only then brought to his humble, submissive knees but the very core of his dignity and sanctimonious moral values is also simultaneously ripped out and violated in public. Just recall the Court Scene in the Mahabharata when Queen Draupadi, who was even menstruating at that point of time, was manhandled — without any effective protest whatsoever — before her famous and macho husbands and all the royal elders. Lord Rama fought with Ravana and ultimately killed him over the issue of a single woman – however, Rama also asked his wife Sita to prove her (unspoiled) chastity by entering into a circle of fire once the war was over. Therefore, Rama had fought the war not to prove his affection for Sita but to prove his unfaltering machismo.

 

Double Jeopardy

It is true that wars have been declared because of women — recall Helen of Troy — and wars have been instigated by women like Cleopatra. But it is an even greater truth that women have always been exploited and finally destroyed during combat. A woman faces a double jeopardy during war — she has to suffer as a woman and she has also to suffer as the symbol of pride, prestige and property of her man. Invading armies have been traditionally given the license to gang rape women, often before their helpless men at gunpoint – this not only results in distorted sexual gratification for the invaders but also effectively breaks down the enemy’s final vestiges of any meaningful resistance. So the Women and War interface would come across as both a gender and a humanitarian issue to which international Institutions and NGOs should accord immediate and topmost priority. They must help formulate agreements like the historic Geneva and Berne Conventions. This would at least constitute the first faltering step toward a better human civilization and a Brave New World in this most insecure new millennium.

 

Prasenjit Maiti is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Burdwan University, India.