Authors: Sally Armstrong
It’s not just “firsts”—first governor general, first cabinet minister, first chair of the board, first firefighter—that clear the way for women, it’s a sea change in attitudes about the treatment of women. Stories about underage girls being forced to marry or become prostitutes are no longer dismissed as “the way those people live.” They make headlines, go viral, wind up on YouTube. When a fifteen-year-old child bride named Sahar Gul was rescued in 2011 by Afghan police from a home that was a torture chamber—the girl said her mother-in-law had pulled out her fingernails with pliers—the news made headlines in the foreign press. Gul had been married off to a man twice her age, and soon after the nuptials, she was told she had to become a prostitute to bring money home to her new husband’s family. When she refused they beat her, pulled out her hair, burned her with cigarettes, cut off pieces of her flesh and locked her in a windowless toilet. The neighbours called the authorities after hearing her crying and moaning day after day.
Even a short time ago, Gul’s story would likely have been ignored, first by the police, as it would have been seen as a domestic issue and nobody’s business, and then by the media, who would not have been alerted by the police or the neighbours. During the Taliban regime, the atrocities committed against women and girls in Afghanistan were shockingly brutal. One eighteen-year-old girl was in labour for forty days while the Taliban
forbade medical help because she was a woman. Her family tried to help her with hot compresses that burned her abdomen and endless concoctions that made her sick. When Dr. Sima Samar at last was able to travel to the girl’s home, she did a Caesarean section to save the girl’s life and remove the fetus, which had been dead for most of the forty days. Afterwards, Samar said to me, “Losing the baby wasn’t the worst thing that happened to that girl. I had to do a hysterectomy because all the reproductive organs were infected. Now she’ll be relegated to be someone’s slave because she cannot bear children.”
There was almost no media attention on the fate of Afghan women at the time, most assigning editors concluding that what was happening to them was “someone else’s culture, none of our business.” For most news agencies, the women became a story only after the Americans toppled the Taliban after 9/11.
Although Sahar Gul’s husband fled before the police arrived, her in-laws were arrested and charged. And in a sign of the times in Afghanistan, Noorjahan Akbar, of Young Women for Change, named the Internet café that the organization opened on International Women’s Day in 2012 after the girl, to honour her and keep her story alive. Reporting the story is one thing. Naming a café after her so that her story will never be forgotten is an example of how women’s issues have taken on a new status in places where it seemed as if such change would never happen.
The international community has historically been cowed by accusations that by protesting injustice and abuse they are interfering in someone else’s culture. By suggesting that rape was an inevitable consequence of war, they normalized it. In the guise of a message from God, oppression of women seemed acceptable. Diplomats and activists were silenced by thugs who’d hijacked
their culture and their own religion for political opportunism, and bowed to the finger-wagging of self-appointed guardians of cultural and religious codes. While endemic mistreatment still goes on in many places—which country would tell a Saudi Arabian prince that his oil was not wanted as long as his country lashed women for driving—at least women are winning the public relations war on oppression and subjugation.
Case in point: on March 31, 2009, the international community did a major about-face that altered the course for women in Afghanistan, as well as for the men who oppress them. At a NATO summit meeting on the war in Afghanistan in Strasbourg, France, Hamid Karzai announced that he had signed the Shiite Personal Status Law, which rolled back the gains women had made in Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted. Among other draconian measures, the law blesses marital rape, accepts child marriage and forbids wives to leave their homes unless the right to go to work has been written into their marriage contract. It stripped women of custody of their children after divorce and of the ability to inherit property. Article 132 (3) stated, “The couple should not commit acts that create hatred and bitterness in their relationship. The wife is bound to preen for her husband, as and when he desires.”
Shiite Muslims make up about 20 percent of the Afghan population; they are mostly Hazara, the most persecuted tribe in Afghanistan. But Shiite women have been vocal about the need for change. They are often first to register for literacy classes and take every opportunity to upgrade their skills. So the passing of such a law was a blow to their new emancipation. They, like most Afghans, had presumed that Karzai would let the issue float: he’d claim in public that the retrograde measures were
being discussed, even taken seriously, but would never table such a law. In fact, behind the scenes Karzai was being pressured by the fundamentalists to sign the Shiite law. But here he was meeting in Strasbourg with the very people who had committed troops and funds to get his country back on its feet and announcing a return to the dark ages. The reaction was swift and excoriating.
The Guardian
newspaper reported that it was Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, who spoke first. “If you support that,” he told Karzai, “we can’t support you.” Leaders from the international community lined up to condemn the Afghan president and to stand together on the line that Harper had drawn in the sand.
Why did Karzai choose such an inopportune moment to make his announcement? Given the history of the international community’s response to women’s issues, you’d be hard pressed to accuse him of misjudging his audience. In the past, the United Nations in particular had turned a blind eye to equally ridiculous pronouncements and edicts. There was little other than lip service about improving the lives of women and girls to suggest that the men and women Karzai consulted, accepted bailouts from and paraded around as his pals would stand in his way. But they did. And Karzai backed down, first saying that the version of the law released to the media was different from the one he had signed, then that he had signed the law without ever reading it.
Most people wondered how the president could have made such a blockhead decision in the first place. Afghans said it was all about the upcoming presidential election. Karzai’s numbers were dropping, and there were two or three credible candidates who could maybe have beaten him. He’d crunched the numbers and then had done what power-hungry people do (or are forced to do when extremists and warlords are holding the key to
power): he attempted to sell out women to win over the fundamentalist vote that would secure an electoral win. But for once the tactic backfired.
It was a first on a number of fronts: the international community had, for the first time since the insurgency in Afghanistan began, refused to be bullied by the argument that says “this is our culture and is none of your business.” Referring to the various international treaties, mostly under the auspices of the United Nations, that Afghanistan has signed—covenants and conventions that protect the rights of women and girls—progressives demanded that the Afghan government honour them. Pressure from inside the country to heed the Afghan constitution, which also protects the rights of women and girls, also increased.
Karzai was caught off guard; when he’d given a sweeping amnesty to the war criminals in his country, for example, the international community and his own citizens had mostly succumbed to the old dodge “there’s nothing I can do.” Not this time. Women in Kabul marched in the street. Media reports showed men throwing rocks at them, but a ring of policewomen moved in to surround the marchers and keep the men back. The protesters demanded a meeting with Karzai when he got back from Europe. They got it. At the meeting they demanded changes to the Shiite Personal Status Law. They didn’t get all they asked for—the law is still a thorn in the side of anyone who seeks fairness and justice—but Karzai did amend it. For example, under the law, a girl was deemed mature and marriageable at her first menstrual period, which could be as young as nine or ten years old. The age of maturity for boys was set at fifteen. Amendments changed the girls’ legal “marrying” age to sixteen. Karzai also agreed to change the law forbidding women to leave the home. They can now leave for
work or school or medical treatment without having previously signed a marriage contract allowing such trips.
It wasn’t the end of the rights debate, of course, but it did herald the fact that by banding together (as the women in Senegal did to end female genital mutilation and the women in sub-Saharan Africa did to turn the tide of HIV/AIDS), Afghan women could alter their own destiny.
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Indicators of grassroots change in attitudes toward women’s rights had been cropping up in unusual places throughout the first decade of the new century. Since 1999, the second brutal civil war had raged in the West African nation of Liberia. One corrupt dictator, the infamous Dr. Doe, had been replaced by another—the psychopath Charles Taylor. The usual complement of horrors had overtaken the country: mass raping of women, abducting children and turning them into child soldiers, a campaign of torture, dismemberment and killing that paralyzed the people with fear.
In 2002, when it seemed as if the civil war would never end—and Liberian women figured they’d sacrificed their entire lives to the carnage and bloodletting of conflict, to the fear of being raped in the ongoing violence—a young woman named Leymah Gbowee, who had become involved with two nascent regional peace movements, had a dream in which she saw women of both the country’s major religions, Christianity and Islam, coming together as an unstoppable force with a plan for peace. Soon after, she gathered Christian women together to start a conversation about how they might contribute to moving the peace talks
forward. Then a Muslim woman arrived at the meeting, asking how she could become involved. The two religious groups had known plenty of discord, so the first step was to settle their own differences. They talked through each issue and discovered that misinformation and suspicion were largely responsible for keeping them apart. Solidarity followed.
Calling themselves the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, and armed with nothing more than the courage of their convictions, the women, under Gbowee’s leadership, made signs, donned white T-shirts and went to the fish market every day for months in 2003 because they knew that Charles Taylor, the president, drove by every morning in his motorcade. Their signs told him that he had to negotiate a peace and stop the violence. The protests were ignored.
What happened next astounded everyone, including the women. They decided to take their placards to the Presidential Mansion, where they chanted their demands for peace; their bold stand became the talk of the country. And it worked. Taylor was persuaded to attend the peace talks with the rebel leaders being held in Ghana, and the women followed him there just in case he changed his mind.
When the peace talks in Ghana broke down, the women staged an unforgettable scene. Linking arms, they circled the building where the negotiators were deadlocked and announced that they were taking them hostage on behalf of the women of Liberia. They vowed that they would not budge until a peace accord was signed. When commissionaires were sent to physically remove them, the women stood their ground and threatened to shed their clothes if the guards tried to send them away. It was a curse of nakedness on all those men, and the consequences of
such a curse are formidable in Africa: men who are exposed to that curse are considered to be dead. No one will cook for such a man, or marry him, or do any kind of business with him. The security men left the women alone.
The next day, with the peace accord still elusive, the protesters announced a sex strike. No woman would allow her husband to have sex with her until the peace agreement was signed. They encouraged all the women of Liberia to join the protest, and a massive number did—sending messages via cellphones and runners to let their sisters in Ghana know that the sex strike was taking immediate effect.
A mediator came out at that point to negotiate with the demonstrators, who agreed to give the men two weeks to get the talks to the finish line. At the top of their list of demands was that the men at the table stop talking about the political appointments and rewards and access to the country’s resources that they anticipated in the aftermath of the agreement and start talking about how to implement a lasting peace. To the astonishment of many, exactly two weeks later the peace treaty was signed, and Charles Taylor went into exile. UN troops were deployed to maintain the peace, and the women went home.
An army of women had confronted Liberia’s ruthless president and rebel warlords and won. But the women didn’t stop there. They went to work on the election campaign that brought Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to power as the first woman to head the Liberian state. Leymah Gbowee helped lead an army of women that ended the war in her nation and in the process emerged as an international leader who changed history. In a classic case of non-violent action, she and the women of Liberia reversed the power equation.
Gbowee would eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her efforts, but the event that led to that international honour might have been missed except that the American filmmaker Abigail Disney heard about the commotion and turned it into a widely released and praised documentary called
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
. When I asked Disney where she got the title for the film, she explained: “Leymah said at one point in our discussions that Charles Taylor was such a fake religious guy he could pray the Devil out of hell. My director said these women were praying him back.”
The film has been seen in thirty-two countries on all seven continents (including Antarctica, on a docked cruise ship). The story it tells has inspired the women’s movements in Bosnia, Georgia and Cambodia. It’s influenced how the UN understands women who are trying to be heard at peace negotiating tables. And it’s having an impact on the vital importance of women’s voices being taken seriously in ending conflict.