They tell a story in upper New York State to illustrate what faith is. A man was crossing the deep, roiling chasm of Niagara Falls on a tightrope, pushing a wheelbarrow as he went. This unreasonable action drew a huge crowd at the other end. As the man came closer to his destination, and safety, the crowd began to cheer louder and louder. When the tightrope walker finally stepped onto land, one man in the crowd called out for him to do it again. “You were great just now! Do it again! I know you can!” he yelled. “Do you really believe that?” said the tightrope walker. “Oh yes, absolutely, I just know you can do it!” replied the man. The tightrope walker paused a moment. Then, looking right into the man’s eyes, he said, “Okay, since you really believe I can do it, I will. Just get into the wheelbarrow.”

This story illustrates the dilemma of outsiders who observe the difficult work of all those engaged in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and other endeavors for peaceful coexistence in post-war regions. We know you can do it; we’ve seen you do remarkable things before. But when you tell us to get in, we can’t. It’s not our wheelbarrow. We know we’re outside your picture.

But, in fact, we’re not. We’re already in the wheelbarrow because what you are doing, wherever it is, affects the future of all humanity.

Another wheelbarrow we’re all already in is the wheelbarrow of gender. This is not a women’s issue; it’s a human issue. Gender is a universal characteristic that transcends all regional, political and religious identities. No matter how often our thoughtful concerns turn to political and ethnic animosities, we can never avoid the fact of gender.

 

Unfortunately, what all too often happens is that our attention to politics and other levels of understanding conflict can actually prevent us from seeing the effects of gender as we find understandings that leave gender out. The most profound results of any society’s evolution toward democracy, however, involve an evolution in its patriarchal assumptions and an evolution away from those assumptions. For those of us who are concerned with peace, reconciliation and human rights, attention to gender is clearly among our highest priorities.

Mr. Odd Einar Dorum, Norway’s Minister of Justice, made an eloquent statement at the first plenary session when he noted that no institution has yet adequately acknowledged the crimes committed against women. These crimes are glaringly obvious in the most travailed regions of the world. Perhaps the reason we and our institutions have such great difficulty in acknowledging them, however, is that we are somehow implicated. The reason for this is that gender envelops us all. It is a continuum of possibilities of injustice, from daily prejudicial assumptions we make about each other as women and men to the horrors of genocidal rape. But the gender continuum need not be one of violence. Together we can find ways to overcome our fears of difference, however unconscious they may be, and restore the opportunities for communication and understanding and love that our gender situations offer us.

It is in this context that I offer some brief comments here about the situation of women in Bosnia as I have observed it since 1992 and written about it in Rape Warfare (1996) and, now, Women After War (with Susan Schwartz Senstad, M.A., M.F.A., forthcoming 2003). I have spent years meeting with women from all walks of life and all entities of the Republic of Bosnia & Herzegovina; they teach us important universal lessons about what can happen in grievously exaggerated situations of fear, and they show us how they survive and recover. Most importantly, they show us what women who have experienced the severe trauma of war, genocide, rape and enforced pregnancy need. Women are the slim majority of the world population; they are the great majority in a post-war society. Women’s issues, always, are human issues. This is the great truth. Attending to them always benefits society as a whole. Failing to do so always has the opposite effect.
To put part of what happened during the war in Bosnia schematically, thousands of Bosnian women and girls suffered two kinds of rape. They suffered the rape always associated with war, when male soldiers who, consciously or unconsciously, fear and therefore at some level despise women, take advantage of their combat-zone freedom from accountability to rape, perhaps justifying their actions as reasonable behavior against an enemy.

 

But non-Serb Bosnian women also suffered genocidal rape, where Serb nationalist forces adopted a policy of attacking civilians in which rape was a major weapon of war and genocide. While all sides committed rape, like other atrocities, the Serb nationalist forces were the only ones who adopted and carried out the policy of genocidal rape. Their pathological “logic” in the rape/death camps they set up was that children born from the enforced pregnancies that followed rape would somehow grow up to be little Serb soldiers and claim vast territories for the legendary homeland, Greater Serbia. This warped intention of altering the “ethnic” identity of the enemy population contains the logic, in any case, of the genetic warfare that may haunt the world as our new century develops and against which we must find preventive measures immediately.
Women and girls who have been raped face shame imposed by patriarchal values and great risk if they testify against the perpetrators. People sometimes think of women and girls who survive rape either as somehow responsible for their own tragedies–somehow having “asked” for it, like a prostitute might ask for sex–or as saints, women whose endurance of terrible trials has mystically purged them of human frailty. To subscribe to either stereotype is to dismiss the very real women, people like you and me, who have suffered and survived terrible trauma and to risk marginalizing the very real needs they have today.

These needs include, but are not limited to, access to appropriate trauma therapy, immediate and ongoing economic aid, training so that women may become economically independent, an ever-expanding voice and role in local, regional, national and international political and social institutions. One of the organizations working most effectively toward meeting these and other needs is Sweden’s own Kvinna till Kvinna. Survivors also need to see perpetrators held accountable and justice done. The ICTY and national courts are working toward this, as are all Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and similar structures. All organizations, however, national and international, must recognize the urgency of attending to the specific needs of rape survivors, wherever they live.

Another group of women face different human issues in Bosnia–though this group overlaps with the group of rape survivors, so many women have needs in both areas. These are the widows, especially widows of victims of genocide. All widows, even in peacetime, face a transformation in their social roles. This is dramatically true for rural widows, wherever they are. Additionally, women who have lost their husbands and other dear ones to massacre--the female survivors of the massacre at Srebrenica, for example-- urgently need to know what happened to those relatives. Until remains are found and identified, no burial and appropriate grieving can take place, and widows’ lives remain in a limbo that causes vast, ongoing suffering and can do no good to a society trying to reconcile and rebuild. Fortunately, the International Commission for Missing Persons and other groups are making progress in this regard. All good efforts need international institutional and governmental support now.

As we take the grim tally of women’s post-war needs, we must not forget those of women whose husbands and partners were perpetrators of rape. Such men have themselves been horribly brutalized. Nothing in their post-war return home guarantees healing from that brutalization, and, in fact, their wives and partners suffer greatly from ongoing domestic and relationship violence. The instance of domestic violence in the post-war Serb Republic has doubled, as it has increased elsewhere, as well. This is perhaps the most hidden effect of rape in war as in peace. It comes back to infect the personal and social lives of the perpetrators. The clear need here is for therapeutic intervention for its victims and also for the perpetrators themselves.

Susan Schwartz Senstad and I have learned from women in all Bosnia’s entities that the most successful formula for true security is safety plus the acknowledgement of vulnerability. Safety includes but is not limited to freedom from violence, daily needs being met, economic recovery, and justice. The acknowledgement of vulnerability includes but is not limited to telling what happened in a context where it will help others, engaging in appropriate therapies, recognizing that fear is universal to humans and that enemy populations are also victimized by fear. In the acknowledgement of one’s own vulnerability lies the beginning of empathy.

The Witness Protection Program at the United Nations International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague is a remarkable institutionalization of this formula, providing, as it does, for the safety and support of witness survivors as they courageously tell what happened to them in the Court. But this Program does not extend far enough beyond the Court to protect survivor witnesses on an ongoing basis. This task must be taken up by national and local institutions; international institutions must make the assuming of such responsibility a condition for further aid.

As Professor Elizabeth Jelin so eloquently remarked during the Forum, war exaggerates gender disparities when we see it as a picture of men fighting and women crying. To a large extent, this picture is false. Both men and women do both. But to whatever extent it is true, we need to, and can, change it. Professor Irwin Cotler made a passionate plea for institutions and states to foreground the needs of women in post-conflict situations. There is a continuum between such situations and daily life in peacetime. We ourselves can practice restorative gender justice in our own lives. We, not they, can do this today, now, here, and every today, every now, every here, as individuals and as international organizations and as states by:

Prime Minister Göran Persson has seen many of these truths and has promised that, if he is re-elected, he will host another Stockholm Forum next year and, if not, will encourage his successor to do so. I applaud this promise and enthusiastically suggest that Prime Minister Persson take the bold, positive step of, first, choosing for next year’s theme Women In Today’s World and, second, inviting as participants not only distinguished women from all over the world but also distinguished men. In the meanwhile, may we all be inspired to create courageous new possibilities of peace, understanding and love as we work toward our common goals of truth, justice and reconciliation.