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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2002
WOMAN AS REASON
After 9/11: what kind of future for women?
by Maya Jhansi Business thrives in the ruins. Cities become piles of
ruins; villages become cemeteries; countries, deserts; populations are beggared;
churches, horse stalls. International law, treaties and alliances, the most
sacred words and the highest authority have been torn in shreds. Violated,
dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth—there stands bourgeois society.
This is it. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture,
philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law--but the ravening beast,
the witches' sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it
reveals itself in its true, its naked form. --Rosa Luxemburg, Junius pamphlet, 1915 Since the September 11 attacks, the world has become a more
dangerous place. Bush's so-called "war on terror" has made the devil's
prophecy of permanent war the permanent condition of life in our new century. As the U.S. military gears up the war machine for another
foray into Iraq, it has raised what should have long ago been buried, the
specter of nuclear war. The scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missiles treaty by
the U.S.; two nuclearly armed countries, India and Pakistan, poised for months
on the brink of war; China's potential nuclear build-up, and the U.S.'s refusal
to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Iraq—all reveal that we have
not left behind the legacies of the bipolar world, even as the U.S. consolidates
unprecedented hegemony over the globe. For women this ominous militarization goes hand-in-hand
with a resurgence of fundamentalist violence and repression in multifarious
forms. Nothing reveals the lie of Bush's "war on terror" better than
the fact that women are no less at risk of death, mutilation, repression and
violence at the hands of fundamentalist terrorists or states than they were
before Bush launched his war. The continuing struggles of Afghan women in the
face of warlordism is evidence of this. While there has been some freedom of movement for Afghan
women in places like Kabul since the fall of the Taliban, for the most part,
they remain afraid to venture out of their houses, and still face serious
obstacles to obtaining even the most basic levels of education and health care.
The Sept. 11 issue of the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION reports
that Afghan women are 50% more likely than American women to die in childbirth.
A survey conducted in Herat province found that less than 1% of pregnant women
received attention from a trained healthcare worker, such as a nurse, physician,
midwife or traditional birth attendant, and that only 35 physicians were
available to treat 793,214 people in the area. Bush's opposition to the Taliban and to Al Qaeda is inspired by geopolitical power games, in which women's lives are of little or no concern. In its efforts to work out an oil deal with Nigeria, the U.S. has ignored the case of Amina Lawal, the young woman whose appeal against a sharia court ruling that condemned her to death by stoning was denied. The National Organization for Women and others are bringing world attention to Lawal's case (See "Women World Wide" on this page). Some have gone so far as to argue that there is a covert
global war against women being conducted by the U.S. and the forces of religious
fundamentalism, working together. In the UN, at convention after convention, the
U.S. has allied with countries like Libya, Algeria, Sudan and even Iran and Iraq
to replace the right to "reproductive health services" with the phrase
"basic health services." The president of the International Women's
Health Coalition, Adrienne Germain, put it this way: "When [Bush] is doing
a war on terrorism, they're the 'axis of evil.' When he's waging a war on women,
they're his allies." This is hardly new or surprising, since the U.S. remains
the only industrialized nation that has not ratified the UN Convention on the
Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW came out of a 1975
international women's conference, and since Jimmy Carter signed it in 1980, it
has been held up and ignored by the U.S. Congress for over 20 years. It
was passed this summer by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and now is
awaiting a Senate vote...again. However, not much has changed for women even in countries
that have ratified CEDAW. The women's movement needs to move beyond the UN.
September 11 has brought to light the necessity of imagining a deeper and more
profound alternative to the destruction, war and havoc that the rulers promise
for us as our future. The militarization of our reality, over the past year
especially, has assumed a certain philosophical stance, a cynicism about the
inability of human beings to conceive of a natural state as other than a state
of war. It seemed "natural" to most that the U.S. would retaliate for
September 11 by launching a permanent war. It seemed "natural" to the
Left that the angry and dispossessed would execute the diabolical attacks on New
York. The U.S. patriot asked "Why do they hate us?" and the Left
answered back that it was only "natural." Calling upon the best traditions of women's anti-war activism, the women's movement must take back the concept of the "natural" from the warmongering male leaders, and offer up for discussion, in Virginia Woolf's words, "the recurring dream that has haunted the human mind since the beginning of time; the dream of peace, the dream of freedom." |
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