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Books Exposing wars attacks on women
WARS DIRTY
SECRET: RAPE, PROSTITUTION, AND OTHER CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN Anne
Llewellyn Barstow, editor The Pilgrim Press, 224 pages,
$20 |
By TAYARI JONES
Wars Dirty Secret is a book with a mission, to
change the way you think about war. Editor Anne Llewellyn Barstow along
with the contributors to this volume, who represent more than a dozen nations,
certainly achieve their goal. Their writings expose a painful irony: In
the last 60 years we have invented the most sophisticated weapons ever known.
Yet in recent years, armies have increasingly turned back to the oldest
forms of attack -- rape and sexual torture.
You may wonder how the oldest forms of attack can be
wars dirty secret. Its because the reality of wartime
rapes are often omitted from official histories. Even groundbreaking documents,
such as the excellent account of the Salvadoran civil war compiled by Americas
Watch, includes mention of only a dozen or so incidents where rapes were
involved, although other accounts indicate that rape was a frequent
tactic of the Salvadoran government. Another notable example of this tendency
to erase the violence against women is found in Seymour Hershs writing on
the occasion of the 13th anniversary of the My Lai massacre, which failed to
recount the 20 Vietnamese women who were raped that day.
Wars Dirty Secret seeks to fill this silence on the
subject of womens experience of war with a rebellious noise. Along with
more academic and sociological studies of the sexual violence of war are
first-person accounts of the body as battlefield from the points of view of
Bosnian, Haitian, Rwandan, Japanese, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Chinese, Filipina
and Korean women. I list the nationalities of the women who share their stories
to draw attention to the range of this study, but also to highlight the scope
of the atrocities to which the worlds women are subjected when nations
seek to destroy one another.
Alphonsine, a 19-year-old Rwandan woman, tells her story. He
[the solider] told me that he knew that even though I was a Hutu that my
grandparents were Tutsi and that he would kill them if I didnt submit to
him. He took me to the sorghum and raped me on the ground there.
A few
months later, I realized I was pregnant. I was angry about the pregnancy and
even thought about getting an abortion but I had no money and no way to do it.
I gave birth to twins.
They survived 11 months, but died. I still think
a lot about the rape. I wonder if I have AIDS.
In addition to mass rapes -- cases like the one quoted above in
which soldiers systematically rape the women of a town or community -- this
study includes sexual slavery and prostitution, particularly as
practiced in Asia. We hear the voices of Korean comfort women who
were forced into sexual slavery by Japan in World War II as well as the voices
of Japanese women who not only stand in solidarity with the comfort
women, but also are demanding that their own government compensate the
women for the indignities endured.
No doubt there will be readers who will regard the work with
suspicion: This is a book with an American author, published on an American
press, yet attempts to bring attention to the plight of mostly Third World
women, women of color. Barstow anticipates this criticism by beginning the book
with the following anecdote: Barstow traveled to Beijing in 1994 to attend the
U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, where she attended a press conference
held by the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations. The room was packed with
mostly younger Japanese women who wanted to talk about the Japanese
governments refusal to do justice to the comfort women of
World War II. The Japanese women were not allowed to ask questions. Finally at
the urging of a Japanese friend, Barstow demanded that the ambassador address
the issue. The room exploded into angry chanting from the women who had not
been allowed to speak.
This book, in many ways, is a further extension of the dynamic in
that room in Beijing. Barstow uses her position as a historian, author,
feminist and American to secure this safe space from which the women who know
firsthand the violence of war and its consequences may speak. Wars
Dirty Secret is dedicated to the women who are breaking the silence
and speaking out. Their voices will change you and the way you think
about war.
Tayari Jones is the author of Leaving Atlanta, which
will be published next year by Warner Books. Her e-mail address is
TayariAJones@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, March 9,
2001
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