March 2, 2002
She Holds the Earth
by Suzanne deVeuve
from the goddess...
the editor's note
by Stephanie Hiller
Making
peace
President Bush and his associates in the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI all probably feel that the war in Afghanistan, coupled with heightened security and surveillance measures, has had the effect of preventing subsequent attacks. If we take them at their word &endash; not giving credence to various allegations that they participated in a conspiracy of some sort with the suspiciously absent bin Laden &endash; we might agree with the 70 or 80 percent of Americans who supported the war. As the salesman in the shoe store said to me in October, "These terrorists are not very nice people. War is the only thing they understand."
As a teacher, I am often caught up short by a student who has just conquered the playground by whipping his adversaries who, perhaps, were taunting and tormenting him for some time before he let his fists fly. I have a young freshman now, a girl, who got suspended after attacking another girl who had been harassing her. Was that the right thing to do? "Well, she stopped bothering me," said my student, a tiny, quiet, pretty little thing who lives in a big handsome house in Petaluma, California. Economic deprivation was not the cause of her violent response.
You've got to show them who's boss, goes the old line, and the common wisdom supports that view. But the Left argues that economic inequality, globalization, and the oppressive behavior of America in Iraq and elsewhere, are the real cause of the problem.
War is not the answer, they say, and certainly we can all agree! Violence produces more violence. Nothing is solved with a big stick. What we need to do is provide for people, make sure their needs are met, and war will go away. But what to do in the meantime, when the stalker arrives in the dark of night?
Back in Afghanistan, victorious tribal warriors have gone on a spree to punish the Pushtun people. Because the Taliban were Pushtuns.
These guys did not declare war on the Pushtuns, nor publicly vow to avenge years of oppression by them. The men of warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, a Northern Alliance commander whose 3,000-man army, Junbish-e-Millie, now rules much of the country's North, have simply been moving into refugee camps and raping the women.
Like the Serbian women raped in Bosnia and subsequently rejected or killed by their husbands, most of these Afghan women are too afraid and ashamed to talk about being raped. But Nazu, a Pashtun mother of 10, was willing to describe to a reporter from the Boston Globe what happened to her, and to her girls.
Five heavily armed Junbish soldiers burst into their modest compound in Balkh, 12 miles west of Mazar-e-Sharif, tied up her disabled husband and raped her daughters multiple times and finally herself in front of him.
It is to get back at the men, apparently, that these hideous acts of violence are performed. And how are we to stop them, if not with violence?
"Violence has become a luxury the human species cannot afford if we are to survive," writes Vandana Shiva. Although these uneducated Junbish soldiers may not perceive any connection between their behavior and the threat of nuclear annihilation, we understand that ultimately these are but degrees of the same type of vile and destructive behavior which has cost women their families, their homes, their dignity, and their lives -- and which threatens the future of all life on this planet. Toyomi Hashimoto in "Hellish Years after Hellish Days," describes how the roof caved in on her and her three-year old son when the bomb fell on Nagasaki. The torment which ensued would be beyond belief if we hadn't seen Hiroshima Mon Amour or read about the suffering and destruction in other stories. (Do people even see these movies anymore? In video games, when characters "get nuked", they just disintegrate &endash; painlessly. Is this what kids think nukes are about?) She tells her terrible story with the spare objectivity of one for whom praise and blame would be an unnecessary luxury. "On the way to the well, we had to pick a ghoulish way through a field of human bones."
Hashimoto's son developed cancer, but he survived. Another son, born later, did not. Her husband committed suicide in despair. She supported the family for years doing whatever odd jobs she could find. "My work was arduous, and I was weak. Occasionally I fainted on the job." No health insurance was provided. Yet her "determination to keep on going was strengthened by the births of two more children." Ah, the women!
"Though we have suffered, our family has, at least in part, survived. There are many others for whom the atomic-bomb sickness remains a constant source of pain and despair…
"Young people today," she concludes, "have been fortunate enough never to experience war. But they must not forget. It is the duty of those who have lived through the hells of the atomic bombings and the years of agony following them to proclaim our experiences so that war and its evils can be recognized for what they are and abolished from the earth." (Itals. mine)
Hashimito's story is published in the brilliant collection, Women and War (1988) edited by Daniela Gioseffi. In essay after essay, poem after poem, women's voices speaking from the belly of their life experience tell us in no uncertain terms that women loathe violence, that life suffers dreadfully at the hands of violence, that violence is unjust and cruel and it must end. Yet the violence continues. Tapes of Richard Nixon released this week included this remark made at the height of the Vietnam War: "I don't give a damn about the deaths of civilians."
Who is the barbarian here, who the hero? Also last week Israeli soldiers marched into a refugee camp outside Ramallah, burning homes, wounding and slaughtering residents. Israelis claimed they were seeking to root out Palestinian terrorists in this manner. Meanwhile a Palestinian woman turned herself into a bomb and blew herself up. Said the KPFA reporter, speaking from Ramallah, this action by a woman, so unusual, may be seen as an indicator of the depths of frustration experienced by the Palestinian people.
How will it end is the question. Will we go on differentiating between various types of violence as if they were not all the same basic behavior? Must we have cops and prisons to "maintain the peace"? Is there another way to stop the violence?
We all know that Vandana Shiva is right. The psychic Anamika (see our interview with her) says that our evolution from this lower-consciousness state of violence and greed is inevitable. She believes that the level of consciousness on this planet has risen sufficiently to prevent us from blowing ourselves up; that every prayer and ritual circle, and every positive gesture, all have the cumulative power of holding back the tidal wave of violence much the way the little boy stopped the flood by putting his finger in the dike. By our work and our will, we may hold back the deluge of destruction until society evolves new modalities and institutions based on the principles of cooperation and love.
May it be so! The situation is so difficult that divine intervention seems the only hope for the world. But in the meantime, we must all do whatever we can to further the cause of peace. Next week I go to New York to join 35 other women in the Millionth Circle Initiative 2005, a new organization dedicated to seeding and connecting circles throughout the world. MC 2005 is working to bring the circle format to the United Nations' Fifth Conference for Women in 2005. And AWe will be there! Because we believe that (barring a council of angels) peace can only occur &endash; and can only be maintained &endash; if the women speak and are heard.
As Leslie McIntyre puts it, "Until women are free from oppression, no one is free." Until women are honored (cherished, protected), peace will not come to the world.
How to accomplish that? With a prayer and a purpose. We must not forget, and we must never give up. Since we cannot know the outcome, we must act on faith &endash; faith that She will support our action, and Her Fates will be kind.