Where are the women's voices in today's antiwar movements?

By Medea Benjamin 

When Will US Women Demand Peace?

WHENEVER I TRAVEL TO INTERNATIONAL gatherings to talk about the war in Iraq, economic development and women's rights, the question I get asked most frequently is: "Where are the women in the United States? Why aren't they rising up?"

I hear it from women in Africa, who have lost funding for their health clinics because of the Bush administration's ban on even talking about abortion; from Iraqi women, who are suffering the double oppression of occupation and rising fundamentalism; from European women, who wonder how we can tolerate the crumbling of our meager social services and from Latina women opposed to unresponsive governments that represent a tiny elite.

The question is variously posed with anger, contempt, curiosity or sympathy. But always there is a sense of disappointment. What happened to the proud suffragettes who chained themselves to the White House fence for the right to vote? What happened to the garment workers whose struggles for decent working conditions inspired the first International Women's Day in 1910? What about those who emulated Rosa Parks, risking their lives or livelihoods to confront the evils of racism? Given their tradition of activism, why aren't American women today rising up against a government that dragged them into war with lies, that spies on their peaceful activities and diverts money from their children's schools or their mothers' nursing homes to pay for an immoral war?

I mumble excuses. We have no strong opposition parties or militant trade unions. We have a corporate media that keeps women ignorant. We're either too affluent to care or too poor to do anything about it. I insist that we keep trying, with efforts like CodePink: Women for Peace, the National Organization for Women and other women's groups, like Gold Star Families for Peace. I say that millions have come out to protest against the war but get demoralized when our government refuses to listen. But deep inside, I ask myself the same question: Where are the women? Why aren't they rising up?

I remember when we first started CodePink before the invasion of Iraq, and we felt compelled to leave our families, our jobs, our warm homes to camp out in front of the White House to try to stop the war. "We'll put a call out to women across the country," we said, "and the streets of Washington will be flooded with angry women saying no to an unjustified war." During the four cold, winter months we spent in front of the White House, hundreds of women came to join us, and more than 10,000 marched with us when we ended the vigil. But we kept wondering, "where were the millions of women who, according to the polls, were strongly opposed to the war?" When a grieving Cindy Sheehan called on people all over the country to join in her vigil at Crawford, Texas, last summer, a few thousand people--most of them women--responded. But why didn't tens of thousands come? Or 100,000?

Over the years, hundreds of thousands of women--perhaps millions--have marched in antiwar rallies. Why don't they become part of an ongoing movement? Why do they get demoralized so quickly when their efforts don't bear fruit?

A few months back, I asked a group of international women for advice. Two issues kept cropping up: persistence and solidarity. "It took us decades to overthrow the oppressive apartheid regime," said one woman from South Africa, "and one of the things that kept us going was solidarity from the outside world--people getting arrested at South African embassies abroad, refusing to buy South African products, sending us moral support." The others agreed. "The struggle has to come from within," said a woman who had spent years organizing landless peasants in Brazil, "and you in the US have more freedom to organize than we ever had. But US women need to feel the support of their sisters overseas, just like we have had tremendous international support."

So on January 1, 2006, CodePink launched a new international campaign called Women Say No to War (see www.womensaynotowar.org). It included a Global Women's Call for Peace in Iraq that we asked women around the world to sign, with the goal of getting 100,000 signatures. The campaign culminated on March 8, International Women's Day, with women worldwide taking the signatures to US embassies, and women all over the US doing antiwar actions on that day. We also brought to the US a delegation of Iraqi mothers to meet with US mothers like Cindy Sheehan who had last their sons in this war, and jointly they put pressure on Congress and the State Department to bring the US troops home.

The response to this campaign has been astounding. We now have contacts with women all over the world--literally from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Women in more than 70 countries signed the call, there were over 100 antiwar actions globally on March 8, and we now have a global network that we will use for future campaigns. But perhaps even more important, the global nature of this campaign was an incentive for US women to get more active. In fact, the US women who participated were so excited that we have decided to keep the campaign going and call on women to join us in Washington on Mothers' Day to fulfill the original mandate of that holiday as a day for women to come together against war.

We feel like we are finally beginning to unleash the power of women across generations, races, ethnicities, religions and borders. By showing our anger over the war, our compassion for our sisters in Iraq, our disgust with our leaders and our determination to change course, we in the US are finally taking our place in the broader peace movement in a way that will make our global sisters--and our grandmothers--proud.

MEDEA BENJAMIN is co founder of Global Exchange and CodePink: Women for Peace. You can support Women Say No to War by going to its website: www.womensaynotowor.org.

War Criminals in Our Midst

By Sister Dianna Ortiz 

AS PRESIDENT BUSH PUSHED THIS country into war, the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TAS SC) joined other organizations in opposition. However, TASSC'S primary cry was different from those of our fellow antiwar groups: "War Breeds Torture."

To understand why, one should know that TASSC is an organization of torture survivors. Our members know firsthand that torture is an implement of war, just as they know that rape is an often-used technique of torture. (We TASSC members who have been raped by one side or the other know this not only well, but quite personally.) While we may have opposed the war for many reasons, torture was foremost in our minds. That Saddam Hussein tortured placed him in the company of many others, including the leaders of governments the US considered friendly and certainly had no intention of overthrowing. Clearly, it was not his brutality, his willingness to torture, that made him our target.

Our government has been torturing for a very long time--supporting governments that torture, teaching torture, establishing torture/death squads and doing the torture itself.

The difference today is that in the past the government has been successful in limiting public knowledge of what was going on. Now, the genie is out of the bottle. This government tortures and we know it. While a few low-level personnel have been sent to prison, those who ordered and approved torture remain above the law--shrouded in their impunity.

Long after this war is over, the United States will pay for that impunity. Our claims to moral leadership will be mocked and rightly so. Years from now, we will be trying to explain this war as a "mistake." But it was not a mistake. Some years ago, then President Bill Clinton "apologized" to the Guatemalan people for the decade-long involvement of the US government in torture and murder in Guatemala. He referred to it as a "mistake." But it was no mistake. It was a natural extension of our imperial foreign policy, corporate greed and conviction that others were simply inferior to us. President Clinton did not suggest that the authors of this mistake should pay a price. To hear him, one would not even know that anyone was responsible. Years from now, we will be apologizing to the Iraqi people, to Arabs, to Muslims, for our "mistake," a mistake for which no one will be responsible. And so it is that "mistakes" will continue within the framework of our militaristic society and TASSC will continue to demand that those who torture, no matter what the reason, face prosecution.

The day will come when we will say that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales et al. were misguided, but others will know the truth. Make no mistake, they were not misguided. Like Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet and those like them, they knew what they were doing. In the name of human decency, the only option is to end impunity once and for all and bring those responsible to justice.

SISTER DIANNA ORTIZ, OSU, was born in Colorado and raised in New Mexico. She was abducted and tortured in Guatemala by members of the Guatemalan security forces, headed by an American. In 1998 she founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) and has been its Executive Director since that time. She is the author of The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth.

Threats to Iraqi Women's Rights Demand UN Response

By Vivian Stromberg

AS THE CRISIS IN IRAQ CONTINUES TO intensify, Iraqi women face an urgent need for security, functional government and the provision of basic services within a human rights framework. For this reason, MADRE chose the third anniversary of Bush's illegal invasion to reiterate our demand for an end to the US occupation and to call for the deployment of a United Nations-led peacekeeping force in Iraq. I'd like to share with you some of the reasons that MADRE made this call. Many Iraqis want UN troops in Iraq. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, leader of the Shiite majority, and arguably the single most powerful person in Iraq, has long sought greater UN involvement. While Sistani is not a democratically elected leader, he represents the view of millions of Iraqis. Assessing the legitimacy of any military intervention requires listening to the opinions of the civilian population. In Iraq, there is a clear call for UN involvement.

Unlike the US occupying forces, the UN is considered a legitimate authority by many governments and people in the Middle East. While the region's governments refuse to contribute troops to a US-led occupation, there have been indications (for example, during Dick Cheney's January 2006 talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak) that the Arab League might contribute troops to a truly multilateral force in Iraq. Such a force would help dispel perceptions of a US/European/Israeli conspiracy against Muslims that is currently being mobilized to garner support for militarism and a reactionary social agenda in many majority-Muslim countries.

The deployment of an international force signaling an end to US occupation would greatly weaken Iraqi insurgent groups. These armed groups have committed grave human rights violations, mainly against Iraqi civilians. The insurgents' primary target is the US occupation and its "collaborators." An end to the occupation would deprive the insurgency of its primary target and nullify its most powerful recruiting message.

George Bush invaded Iraq in flagrant violation of the UN Charter as part of a strategy to make the UN "irrelevant" to US conduct in the world. A reassertion of UN leadership in Iraq would be a victory for the rule of law and international cooperation at a time when the Bush administration's contempt for these principles continues to threaten international peace and security.

MADRE recognizes that UN peacekeeping missions are themselves politicized and have, in some cases, produced human rights violations, particularly sexual violence against women and girls. But the real-world alternatives are between ongoing occupation by a US administration that seeks to defend and normalize grave violations of the Geneva Conventions and international human fights (torture, summary execution and the use of banned weapons against civilians, the denial of emergency medical aid and support for death squads, to name a few) and a multinational force that has legitimacy in the region and considers itself accountable to the principles of the UN Charter and international human rights standards.

The US peace movement's call to "bring the troops home now" is a slogan, but not a policy. To have credibility, that slogan must be linked to concrete policies that address Iraqis' dire need for security and governance.

MADRE therefore calls for an immediate end to US occupation and the withdrawal of US troops to be replaced by a joint peacekeeping force of UN blue-helmet peacekeepers and troops from the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

VIVIAN STROMBERG is the executive director and a founding board member of MADRE, an international women's human rights organization that has worked in partnership with community-based women's groups since it was founded in 1983.

A Promise to Ourselves

By Biljana Kasic

THE SLOGAN "GLOBALIZE feminism and antimilitarism" embraces the women's movement that fights against war, violence and militarization. In the last 30 years, more than 250 Women in Black groups throughout the world have made visible women's resistance to war, militarism and fundamentalism. These forms of discrimination in turn create opposing forces: nonviolence, feminism and antimilitarism. Together with other women's antiwar and peace organizations at local and regional levels, Women in Black helps create a politics of public disobedience that rejects all forms of war and militarism and demands global demilitarization to the benefit of all humanity.

By positioning themselves both to a concrete and very specific local public as well as to a multiple (dis)located audience throughout the world, women activists ironically express an oppositional voice of human consciousness. Our main dilemma is how to develop a consensual and livable antimilitarism from the voice of this human consciousness, and how to break down the general unquestionability that surrounds militarism as its own all-encompassing explanation of the world.

Regardless of how much we might have yet to learn about militarism and its specific details, I think that we know enough or more than enough already. However they appear, we need to take a stand against the many related events that have shaped our lives, including war, neocolonialism, modern slavery and trafficking, unjust capitalism, the feminization of poverty, rape as a tool in war, military adventures, cultural theft, terror, discrimination, militarized zones and so on.

I encountered feminism in the late 1970s. Very soon I was looking to engage in campaigns against male violence and later against war. I quickly became aware of how all forms of violence were intertwined. During the war against Croatia in the 1990s, I dealt with women war survivors and conscientious objectors and saw how a sense of being always means taking responsibility for one's own stance at any particular moment, just as Virginia Woolf dared to roar against the insanity of war at the threshold of the Second World War.

In 1992, I stated that antimilitarism was a position that does not require any additional explanation. The effects of militarization across the globe have created "a geography of pain" which none of the immense resources that militarism boasts can heal: Antimilitarism is not merely an ethical behavior, nor can it be understood in the narrow terms of good intentions. It is always a position towards humanity itself and for this reason, it is a truly human choice, and an ethically urgent one.

Again and again, I have found myself dealing with that very existential question of how to shape an alternative in order to foster critical awareness against the ongoing production of human havoc. In my view, there are three key questions for us:

How do we deal with human destruction, and the public spectacle of human destruction, as well as the self-destructiveness and self-negation caused by terror and terrorism?

Could any substantial transformation of the military such as engendering the military budget, decreasing the number of professional soldiers or putting military power under rigid civil control in the long term enable peace?

How do we articulate an alternative concept of human security across the globe that has visible implications for various social communities, keeping in mind the contemporary delusion of a military security that includes the matrix of exploitation, domination, aggression and terror?

In searching for answers we should be aware of both the complexity of the issue as well as the clarity of antimilitarism as the only possible option for human bonding. As one of the highest and most radical investments in our future, it includes a direct human and ethical engagement about a just and secure togetherness.

Only the serious articulation of antimilitarism within different kinds of global communities will be the foundation for inscribing a new type of human biography. Can we give a promise to ourselves?

Celebrating Women's Leadership for Peace

By Rev. Amy Chambers

If you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise from another quarter, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

Esther 4:14

WITH THESE SEARCHING WORDS Queen Esther was challenged to ask herself the reason why God chose her, an alien and a woman in a male-dominated society, in a foreign land, to be the vessel of deliverance for her people. The appeal had its desired effect, for with the words, "If I perish, I perish," Esther went courageously to brave the king's anger as she interceded for her oppressed and beloved people. Why was Esther called to liberate her people? The current system had failed; the regal control that the male leaders of her community exercised was incapable of providing the needs of the people. They needed a life-giving leader. What did God give them? A woman. A similar call comes to you and me, "And who knows whether you have not come to this nation and country for such a time as this?"

In the coming months we will be bombarded with many messages, not all of them peaceful. Maybe this is the time for more women to step forward to take up the mantle of leadership in our land, so that we can hear another side of our story--the part that has remained silent for many generations.

What we need most today is reconciliation. But this would be futile if the truth is not uncovered and confessions made. The work has begun toward reconciliation but seems to be faltering. Is there a revelation here--that women, including you and me, must step over our fences and extend our boundaries and allow ourselves to be vessels of reconciliation and peace in our country?

For far too long we have allowed ourselves to walk in the shadows of our men, be it fathers, brothers or husbands--because that's the expectation of our culture and society. Now, we must take our rightful place and become equal partners in all aspects of life in this land.

Most of us here today exercise some form of leadership. The world needs us. As we try to promote and celebrate women's leadership for peace, what dimension of leadership can we contribute to this land in order to make a difference?

For too long, the only type of leadership that many communities have known is the patriarchal dominating form. What our world needs is moral leadership. Can we as women leaders offer this?

It's time that women stand up for what we believe is best for our children and our world, to fight injustice and empower all--irrespective of race, culture, social background or sexual orientation. It's time to be brave, to question and challenge those in authority regarding our lives. Our responsibility as peacemakers is to be the prophetic voice, to be the voice of wisdom. We must no longer be silent for this is our time and we are called for a particular purpose. If we remain silent our integrity will be compromised and we will become nothing more than puppets of the system and of those in leadership. If we ignore the fight for justice then what are we saying to the solo mother, the prostitute with six children to feed and the battered wife? What are we saying to those who look up to us for guidance and empowerment? What legacy do we want to leave our children and grandchildren?

In the Christian bible, wisdom is portrayed as a woman. Is there a message in that for you and me today? The call came to Queen Esther, long ago; today the call is coming to you. Will you take up the challenge?

REV. CAROLINE AMY CHAMBERS is the principal of St. John the Baptist Theological College in Suva, Fiji, and vicar-general of the Anglican Diocese of Polynesia. This essay is taken from a speech she gave at a peace vigil in Fiji on February 23, 2006.