Twelve hour fast in Galway to end all wars !.
galway |
anti-war / imperialism |
news report
Wednesday August 16, 2006 13:23
by Margaretta D'Arcy - Women in Media & Entertainment with Consultative Status at the UN (ESOC)
margaretta at iol dot ie
Women of the world confront the nations of the world
"Let the Women of the World confront the Nations of the World," -- petition sent to Kofi Annan.
All photos were shot during the last hour of the fast
On Tuesday August 15th, from midday to midnight, in the midst of intermittent deluges of rain, a group of women, including writers, poets, & artists, took part in a vigil/fast beside the statue-group of Oscar Wilde and his Estonian namesake, at the top of Galway's Shop Street. We surrounded ourselves with placards saying, "Stop Bush! Women, use your power to take the power and End All Wars -- sign the Petition!" Also -- "Men sign! to show solidarity with women." The petition itself read --
PETITION to Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations: we demand, as an immediate priority, that you call an emergency meeting of all NGO Women’s Groups that are committed to ending war and the tools of war, and to the relief of the victims of war, in order to implement the UN resolutions already passed which state that women must be accorded their rightful share in all combat-solving negotiations and post-war compensation – bearing in mind that women and children make up the greatest number of victims of war, and grassroots women carry the greatest burden of rebuilding war-torn society. You yourself have said that the UN has never been so weak: the way to strengthen it is to implement what has already been agreed, and to let the NGO Women’s Groups deal directly with the Security Council.
LET THE WOMEN OF THE WORLD CONFRONT THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD.
The response was amazing, and perhaps for the first time ever, Oscar Wilde was upstaged. It truly was a UN list of signatures -- holiday visitors from Japan, Korea, Belgium, France, Poland, Slovakia -- and (predominantly) the US. Some of the Americans were extremely emotional and said, "This is what we should be doing back home." There was much debate about the "silence of women" and the current cop-out whereby women seem so often to be inhibited from even using the word "woman" because everything nowadays has to be genderless. We were surprised by the number of young men who said, "yes it is time women took over." The only hostility we met came from a Northern Irish man who shouted "Up Israel! Smash Hizbollah!" On previous similar occasions we had found a vocally hostile reaction from Israeli tourists, and we were warned this week that there were a lot of Israelis in town. One such group of (religious orthodox) came and read the info -- which included a Lara Marlowe article from the IT about Israeli atrocities -- they made no comment and gave us no hassle -- it could have been because we had no men in our group ... The whole experience opened our eyes to greater possibilities -- while marches and rallies are very good for mobilizing support, a small informal group of women with home-made placards, no political affiliation and no shouting, can reap a positive response from what may seem to be a stereotypical conservative public. We just wish that more groups of women, relaxed and friendly and conversational, would try the same thing as ourselves, and do it on different days (not just Saturday afternoon) in many different places.
Eilis de Burca
Mother & daughter from the USA.
Home is where the tea set is ?
printable version
Digg this
del.icio.us
Furl
Reddit
Technorati
Facebook
Gab
Twitter
View Comments Titles Only
save preference
Comments (10 of 10)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10five !.
"women and children make up the greatest number of victims of war"
Is there some reliable source of information that backs up this and explains it a little more? I guess there are more women and children in the population than men? Are women and children killed disproportionately in wars? Also it should be noted that wars can create new opportunities for women (e.g. in Eritrea women gained expanded roles and education, and a similar effect has been observed in the Nepalese Maoist movement and in the Colombian FARC forces).
Women should be thankful for wars as they get increased responsability???
Why are "women and children" lumped into together? Are women 'adult children'? This is a connection that the Victorians were keen to promote as a way of diminishing women as rational beings, and still this nonsense is propagated by essentialist 'feminists'.
On another level, many children are also male, so if we were to follow this ridiculous measuring, who is to say whether more females are killed in war than men, and who cares? A human being is a human being.
to answer the couple of questions above.
"Women and children account for almost 80% of the casualties of conflict and war as well as 80% of the 40 million people in world who are now refugees from their homes. It is one of the unspoken facts of militarism that women often become the spoils of war, their deaths are considered collateral damage and their bodies are frequently used as battlegrounds and as commodities that can be traded. "
"Women and girls are not just killed, they are raped, sexually attacked, mutilated and humiliated. Custom, culture and religion have built an image of women as bearing the 'honour' of their communities. Disparaging a woman's sexuality and destroying her physical integrity have become a means by which to terrorize, demean and 'defeat' entire communities, as well as to punish, intimidate and humiliate women," according to Irene Khan of Amnesty International.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1219-26.htm
"Women and children have replaced men as the greatest casualties of war, and are often used as deliberate targets, says a leading women's rights advocate.
Indira Patel, a steering group member of the Women's National Commission, an advisory body to the Blair Government, will tell an international women's conference in Melbourne tomorrow that 90 per cent of war casualties are civilians, 80 per cent of whom are women and children. A century ago, 90 per cent of war casualties were military men."
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/10/03/1033538723....html
Sorry about the cut and paste but it's best to throw some facts and sources at the argument before the whole thread is derailed in petty arguments. Some things must be taken as a 'given'. Women and Children are more vulnerable in times of war. Shame if that fact pisses people off for all the wrong reasons.
I did actually Google around but couldn't find any hard information. Both the articles you cite are interesting (especially The Age one) because they do completely overturn my expectation, which would be that more men would die in wars. The one actual study with real data that I did find via Google complete contradicts both those articles, so I wonder what data those articles base their (80-90%) figures on
If you click on the "deaths by age and gender" in the lefthand sidebar of:
http://civilians.info/iraq/
then you'll see that of 2066 deaths, 1573 were men/boys and 493 were girls/women.
So, again, is there any hard info to support the above contentions?
Sirs - My congratulations to playwright Margaretta D'Arcy for the recent vigil and campaign in Galway's streets, and I am certain Oscar Wilde would have approved, too. The bravery and commitment of people willing publicly to make a stand against George W. Bush and his war-by-proxy against Syria and Iran - which is what the Israelis re-invasion of Lebanon is about - cannot be praised enough and if Galway's burghers were to do the right thing they would fete such as Margaretta at City Hall for restoring some civic and political pride to Galway. Yes, women and children suffer directly in many ways during war; but Israel-in-Lebanon was not a 'war,' of course, the forces were not equal, for one thing and nor was the civil destruction. What Israel did amounted to a litany of war crimes and they will get away with it only because the US administration plotted these recent events with them some considerable time ago and support them. Instead Bush has made a hames of the business as usual: support for Hezbollah, rightly calling this a victory over Israeli superior forces, has increased tenfold, as has detestation of both the US and Israel among Arabs in the Middle East; the security of Israel is more fragile than ever. Israeli military killed women and children knowingly and indescriminately because they could, and because their claim to victimhood has too long gone unchallenged, thus leaving cowed even the more progressive elements in US politics. (As for the recent 'terror' alerts at British airports, they are, as clear as day, a hoax put out by Blair and Bush to up public anxiety and return some semblance of power into their waning political futures.) Meanwhile, God bless the protestors of Galway. They have guts, which is not a possession to be found on many of our politicians.
I did follow the link you provided and found myself on the Iraqi War Casualties site. Unfortunately, in every sense, the casualty figures you quoted seem to only relate to the time period of March 21 - July 31, 2003.
If you scroll down to the bottom of the index page of the link you gave, there is a further link to Iraqi Body Count which currently lists a minimum and a maximum number of Civilians killed since the conflict began. The numbers at the moment read 40094 minimum and 44621 maximum. Unfortunately for this discussion, they do not list the gender of those killed and they are based on 'reported' killings. Here is the link to save you clicking back and forth... http://www.iraqbodycount.org/index.php
In your original post to this thread, you quoted the following... "bearing in mind that women and children make up the greatest number of victims of war", and asked the following...
"Is there some reliable source of information that backs up this and explains it a little more?"
Just so we are not at cross purposes, seeing 'Victims Of War' and 'Casualties Of War' as one and the same thing. They, I am sure I don't have to tell you so no condescension inferred, are not the same thing. As to where they got the 80% to 90% figures, that too caused me surprise. So I went looking and no doubt had the same experience as you. No hard evidence. No body counts, as such, of women and children casualties.
So first to deal with the 'victims of war' aspect...
The cut and paste below comes from a very informative site, http://www.womenwarpeace.org/iraq/iraq.htm
It goes some way to explaining the plight of women and children in post war Iraq. A suffering many would not see or even be aware of.
"Along with the general insecurity that took hold in Iraq after April 2003, Human Rights Watch reported in July of that year that at least 400 women and girls as young as eight years old had been raped during or immediately after the war. Underreporting due to the stigma against victims of sexual violence likely means that the real figure was much higher. Insecurity, and especially the actual and the perceived dangers of sexual violence, created a climate of fear that prevented women and girls from participating in public life - going to school, going to work, seeking medical treatment, or even leaving their homes. Iraqi women were thus prevented from fully participating in the crucial early phases of the country's postwar and post-dictatorship recovery and reconstruction."
It also goes some way to explaining why they stayed off the streets. Prisoners in their own homes to a degree.
The same site carries another report from Human Rights Watch, telling us that "...the all-male Iraqi police force had not received training on the legal and procedural rights of women. Police officers often reacted with indifference or outright hostility to female victims of rape or sexual assault when they attempted to report the crimes, and often refused or were unable to investigate their cases."
Thus the victims were silenced.
As to the 'casualties of war'...
"In south and central Iraq, urban and rural populations were placed at increased risk, after the 2003 war, from hundreds of munitions storage containers, EO, and fresh mines and cluster munitions used during the war. With men and boys at the highest risk for mine-related injury, women take on both an extra burden of care for the injured and extra responsibility that had been the purview of men prior to their injuries."
I am reminded of a speech I heard at the Feile Bride in February past. A lady from Darfur was telling us that women who leave the camp to collect wood for the fires are raped by the militia. When asked why the men didn't collect wood for the fires, she replied, they only rape the women, they would kill the men.
Who, in that scenario, has the 'market in suffering' cornered? Does gender matter when your life is at stake? Surely not, all life being sacred and / or equal, depending on your point of view. However, I do believe that the suffering of women and children is often forgotten by western media, unless they have a sensationalist story to sell.
In this country, women have an equal right to participate in society (point for debate but please not on this thread). This is not the same the world over. Without getting in to the rights and wrongs of it, from a western perspective, it is important to acknowledge the suffering war brings to women and children.
From the same site as the above quotes...
"Although by October 2003, there was yet no generally accepted estimate of the number of civilians killed during March and April, hospital records and other reports obtained by journalists indicated that many women and girls were killed and wounded as a result of Coalition fire. However estimates may not have included deaths that doctors indirectly attributed to conflict, including women who died due to complications during home births when they could not reach a hospital, or chronically ill people unable to obtain necessary care. The Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that 11,000-15,000 Iraqis were killed during the 2003 war, about 30 percent of them noncombatants."
One could infer from the above segment that the real figures are a) considerably higher, b) hidden or c) were never collated in the first place.
As General Franks said "we don't do body counts".
As to the exact percentage of Women and Children Killed versus Men Killed, which is where I feel this thread is going. The Lancet report of 2004, reported in the Guardian states...
"About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html
In the following article from truthout.org, the Lancet study and the Iraq Body Count numbers are queried. This is their conclusion...
"But if the number of innocent Iraqi men, women and children killed in the war is to become a topic of public discussion, the people responsible for the war want to minimize the count. The story of Iraq Body Count provides perhaps the most fascinating saga of this battle of statistics and propaganda."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041306J.shtml
So as to the exact percentage of Casualties, be they women and children or men, the real figures seem difficult to gauge. Whose purpose does that serve?
As to the twelve hour fast, well done Margaretta!
So the only data that I could find (and we have no reason to assume that the 4 or so months that were sampled were different in some way from the rest of the war) shows that those gendered male are more likely to die in war.
Moving on to the assertions that (while undoubtedly true are also unsupported by hard data) that women suffer more from being
not just killed, they are raped, sexually attacked, mutilated and humiliated.
The uncontested evidence that we have so far is of thousands of men detained in Guantanamo being sexually humiliated, the majority of detainees in Abu Ghraib (men) being sexually humiliated, sexually attacked (electroshocked testicles and dogs) and reportedly raped. It seems clear that the same things are going on for women. I really don't believe that this sexual assault on men is unusual, it's just not something that's highly reported in normal circumstances (apart from widely popular jokes about prison and not bending down to pick up the soap). And of course it would appear that the majority of this violence is committed by men .... apart from the fact that the commanding officer of Abu Ghraib was a woman and the central figure (this may be a distortion though) was also a woman and some of the leading figureheads of the administration behind this violence were women (Clinton era Madeleine "500,000 Dead Babies is Worth It" Albright) and are women (Condoleeza Rice).
I think the (very short to be so-called) hungerstrike isn't very effective (what's Koffi Annan going to do with yet another petition?). I wouldn't really care about any of that though, except that I feel that the underlying assumption is at best weakly supported by what we do know and the implication is that those protesting are diminishing and trivializing the deaths and sexual violence of vast numbers of men.
Custom, culture and religion have built an image of women as bearing the 'honour' of their communities. Disparaging a woman's sexuality and destroying her physical integrity have become a means by which to terrorize, demean and 'defeat' entire communities, as well as to punish, intimidate and humiliate women,"
Substitute man for woman in the above sentences and it's also true. What's shocking is that the rape, torture and murder of men have been completely left out of the equation. Men get fucked (quite literally as well as figuratively) under patriarchy just as much as women as far as I can see.
I congratulate Margaretta D'Arcy for trying to do something and acknowledge the good motives behind this. Also thanks for taking the time to respond clearly and calmly even if we disagree Elaine.
"Substitute man for woman in the above sentences and it's also true. What's shocking is that the rape, torture and murder of men have been completely left out of the equation. Men get fucked (quite literally as well as figuratively) under patriarchy just as much as women as far as I can see."
I do agree with you on this. The full horrors of war are not known to us in the west. If all we have to quibble over is percentages then we don't know trouble at all.
Abu Gharib and Guantanamo are important, and the gender of the victims does not add to or take away from their suffering.
It does occur to me that when we mention the forgotten victims of war, we all, individually, forget someone. However collectively, as a nation, we seem to have forgotten them all.
We might not disagree as much as you think.