Cross-posted from Reclaiming Medusa:

Those of you of a certain age will remember those grade school Armageddon drills where we we were instructed to get under our desks and put our heads between our knees in case of a nuclear attack, a tactic that served no purpose and certainly wouldn’t have saved us if the Commies attacked.

Now the U.S. military has a new version of this callously useless advice that they are using in Marjah, Afghanistan:

Afghan villagers should stay inside and “keep their heads down” when thousands of U.S. Marines launch a massive assault on a densely-populated district in coming days, NATO’s civilian representative to Afghanistan said Tuesday.

The results are predictable, here is Robert Naiman’s well-worded summary of the results:

“Civilian casualties are inevitable,” said U.S. officials before launching their weekend military assault on Marja in southern Afghanistan, and in this case, they were telling the truth. Yesterday, the New York Times reports, a U.S. rocket strike “hit a compound crowded with Afghan civilians… killing at least 10 people, including 5 children.”

What justification has been provided by the government of the United States for its decision to kill these five children?

It will be argued that the government of the United States did not decide to kill these five children specifically, and that’s absolutely true. The U.S. government did not decide to kill these particular children; it only decided to kill some Afghan civilians, chosen randomly from Marja’s civilian population, when it decided to launch its military assault. These five children simply had the misfortune of holding losing tickets in a lottery in which they did not choose to participate…

…NATO forces have decided to advise civilians in Marjah not to leave their homes, although they say they do not know whether the assault will lead to heavy fighting.

These five kids were staying inside, as instructed. It didn’t save them from U.S. rockets. Perhaps they weren’t keeping their heads down.

You can read the rest of Naiman’s commentary here. Suffice it to say, “Duck” is not an acceptable strategy for protecting civilians and should be seen as a gross violation of international law.

Billions of dollars spent killing children. How dare we talk about winning or honor.

The following is a report by award-winning Voices of Our Future citizen journalist Malayapinas on the horrific recent massacre of 57 people in Maguindanao, a province in the southern Philippines in which two of her  friends were brutally murdered. It is reprinted here at the request of World Pulse Magazine, and includes their explanatory introduction:

Since childhood Malayapinas has seen the dark side of globalization and violence in the Philippines.  She walked to school barefoot after early morning hours selling eggs and cigarettes to ship passengers in her nation’s ports. She toiled in the banana plantations to earn her way to college and became a young mother. Since secret military forces abducted her trade-union husband, she has raised her voice for local health, fair trade, and food security. Her dream is to see the Filipino people live to the fullness of their potential and women free to chart their own destiny. She faces numerous death threats for speaking out.  Her name has been changed for her protection.

Malayapinas is an award-winning Voices of Our Future citizen journalist correspondent for World Pulse Media , which covers global issues through women’s eyes from over 140 countries.  The Voices of Our Future program provides rigorous web 2.0 and citizen journalism training for emerging women leaders who are reporting from the frontlines of social change in some of the most forgotten corners of the world.

MY CRY FROM THE ISLANDS OF BLOOD

I am crying with anger at the shocking news of Monday’s mass slaughter in Maguindanao, a province not far from my home in the southern Philippines. Ever since I learned that my two women lawyer friends were among the casualties, my body has turned numb.

Concepcion “Connie” Brizuela, 56, and Cynthia Oquendo, 35, were stalwart human rights defenders on cases of extra judicial killings in Mindanao under the Arroyo government until the very end. We were together in our advocacy to stop political killings here in the Philippines.

I will never forget the laughter of Connie. She was so gentle in her ways but so firm and brave in confronting human rights violators. Cynthia was a quiet one who stood proudly for what she believes in.

On that fateful Monday, they had been traveling with a delegation of mostly women and journalists that were stopped by armed troops. They were on their way to file a Certificate of Candidacy for the May 2010 election for Buluan Vice Mayor Ishmael Mangudadatu in the provincial capitol of Maguindanao. Mangudadatu is vying for a governatorial seat against the incumbent Governor Andal Ampatuan Sr. of Maguindanao Province come May 2010 national election.

Their bodies were among the fifty-seven found buried in shallow graves, allegedly murdered by one hundred policeman and para-military troops of the Ampatuans, the ruling warlord clan in Maguindanao. Some were reportedly raped, decapitated, and chain-sawed. Two of the bodies were pregnant women. Faces of the some of the victims were so mutilated they couldn’t be identified by families.

The torture was horrific. “My wife’s private parts were slashed four times, after which they fired a bullet into it,” said Vice Mayor Mangadadatu in an interview published by the Philippines Daily Inquirer. “They speared both of her eyes, shot both her breasts, cut off her feet, fired into her mouth. I could not begin to describe the manner by which they treated her.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Gender Across Borders,

Women forced into sex slavery in Japan during WWII, nicknamed “comfort women”, are still seeking an official apology from the Japanese government. These now elderly women, mostly from North and South Korea, are hoping for the official apology they have deserved for decades. It is estimated that up to 200,000 were forced into sexual slavery in Japanese military brothels during the war. Then opposition party leader, now Prime Minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama, stated in 2002 that the Japanese government should officially apologize to these women. Prime Minister Hatoyama has yet to deliver on his promise, but the women have reason to be hopeful.

The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery By Japan has put together a beautiful website that documents and memorializes the lives of the Comfort Women.  The site includes photos, artwork and written testimonies as well as a petition demanding Japan take responsibility for the crimes that were committed against these women.

Tu-ri Yun, 76 years of age, says in her testimony,

After a ride on the military vehicle, we arrived at the first comfort station in Yongdo, Pusan, at night. I begged them to take me back home since I already had a job, but in vain. There were 45 comfort women in that comfort station, all Korean girls.

I resisted and struggled against a soldier who seemed an officer, but ended up being raped there. My lower parts hurt for several days so much that I refused the soldiers coming to me, which got me badly beaten. I had to receive soldiers all day except at mealtimes. I must have had an average of 30-40 soldiers a day. In particular, on the days when a ship came in, there were more soldiers than usual. We had more soldiers during Saturdays and Sundays as well. When there were too many soldiers, I thought I was losing my mind. During busy days I could not even count how many soldiers I received, since one left then the other just came in. Even though I received so many soldiers, neither money nor army tickets were given or shown to me.

I didn’t get pregnant at the comfort station, but two of the comfort women got pregnant there. One of them died due to a botched abortion. The other became quite big with child, so she tried to kill herself, but was found by a soldier. She was sent somewhere else. I don’t know where she was sent. There was nobody who had a child at the comfort station.

In our period we were provided with gauze for sanitary napkins. We could use them while we did not receive soldiers. However, we had to receive them even during our periods, so there was no time to use the sanitary napkins. As long as we were alive, we had to receive soldiers, anyway. The disgusting and horrible conditions were certainly beyond description. During our periods, we put cotton rolled with gauze into the vagina and then received soldiers. The ones who got gonorrhea had an injection of the so-called number 606. The injection was as painful as if the arm were removed. I was also infected with gonorrhea at the comfort station. I went to hospital to get injections and had a lot of medicine. Even after leaving the comfort station, however, it recurred whenever I got weak.

Fifteen days after I arrived at the comfort station, I tried to run away from there. Even before getting several feet away, however, I was caught and beaten three times on my behind with a rifle and fell bleeding from my mouth. The beaten wound on my bottom festered and I had such a high fever that I could not even lie on my back. Even with my wound, I was forced to keep receiving soldiers. The flesh on my bottom kept festering and got rotten. Only after that, soldiers took me to hospital and cut the flesh off. I had three days off after the surgery. Three days later when the wound was not even healed and it was so painful that I could not lie down on my back, soldiers came to me. It was the hardest time. My behind was too painful to lie down, but I was forced to receive soldiers. It was so much pain. Every comfort woman in there wanted to run away, but after seeing that I was caught and beaten and suffered from the wounded, everybody just gave it up. Afterwards there was no one who tried to escape.

And yet Japan has still not apologized.

Not surprisingly, it is quickly becoming clear that the election in Afghanistan is a sham that flies in the face of the U.S. narrative of bringing democracy to the Afghan people. Kavita Ramdas, the President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women puts it succinctly, “After five years, $30 billion in aid, and the presence of 150,000 foreign troops,

While the Obama administration’s recent shift in military strategy towards increasing the protection of Afghan civilians is encouraging, it begs the broader question of whether top-down military interventions from the global North are the best means towards securing lasting peace in Afghanistan. Unless we are willing to question whether violence can truly be used to end violence, it is unlikely that this election will change anything in Afghanistan. It will not bestow legitimacy on Karzai nor is it likely to bring greater security and safety to ordinary Afghans.

Even the tired Western trope of charging in to “rescue” Afghan women from the clutches of their “oppressive” culture and their “tribal” menfolk has lost its sheen. That narrative collapses under the weight of the fact that pro-government NATO bombs that kill one in three civilians. Afghans also remember their history. They know that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were networks recruited, armed and trained by US Special Forces and the CIA. Ordinary people are the victims, caught in the crossfire between the Taliban and the West’s precision drones that leave villages in towns with countless orphaned and maimed children and widows.

Today Afghan women are tired of broken promises and of living in a land overrun by foreigners. Women parliamentarians like Malalai Joya write, “the longer foreign troops stay in Afghanistan doing what they are doing, the worse the eventual civil war.” Afghan women laugh outright at the argument that further militarization of their society will bring them peace and security. They have seen the rise in “insurgent” violence alongside increased foreign military troops.

Despite the fact that, according to Ramdas, women make up 35% of registered Afghan voters, very few appear to have actually voted.  As I pointed out on the Feminist Peace Network blog last week, even if women were able to get to the polls, a shortage of female poll workers for the segregated polling places virtually assured that few women would be able to vote.

In a report published on the RAWA website, Alex Strick van Linschoten, an independent journalist based in Kandahar, provides this glimpse of what actually took place.

Women’s voting centers were interesting to visit. The first that I saw, Kaka Said Ahmad High School in the center of the city, had some women voting (perhaps several dozen) early in the morning. In one room that we entered, however, the two boxes were open and women were in the process of handling the vote papers. When we asked the head of the voting center what was going on (boxes were supposed to be locked and closed) she said that some women had come very early in the morning (before the official opening time) and asked, hands trembling out of fear, to vote quickly.

In another women’s voting station (Mirwais Meena Girls School), we were kept waiting outside the locked main gate for around ten minutes before finally being allowed in (a policeman outside gave us a hand opening the gate). When inside, there were hardly any voters (under a dozen in the whole building) but lots of election workers and other girls. Again, I’m not sure if this was an irregularity, but my guess is that women’s polling stations, especially ones in the districts, were easy places for fraud to occur.*

Along with the U.S. silence regarding the passage of a law legalizing marital rape in Afghanistan, the liberation of Afghani women at the point of a gun can only be seen as a deadly farce that as I noted on FPN and Ann Wright also points out, should make us seriously question recent statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding helping women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  As Wright reports,

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) will implement a $7 million program with medical care, counseling, economic assistance and legal support to 10,000 women and girls in North and South Kivu provinces, the regions most affected by rape and sexual assault.

Another $10 million U.S. contribution will fund new programs in eastern DRC to include equipping women and front-line workers with mobile devices to report abuse and share information of treatment and legal options.

A separate $2.9 million U.S. program will recruit and train female police officers to investigate rape and interview survivors of violence against women.

All of which sounds like the U.S. is making a huge commitment to help women in the DRC.  But as Wright notes, that the U.S. military, rather than humanitarian agencies, will decide how to best provide the aid should make us question the motivation and usefulness of these promises.

(T)he U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) is sending an assessment team to “determine how to best assist survivors,” and provide “sensitivity training on sexual violence and legal seminars that contribute to the professionalization of the Congolese military.”

If the women of the Congo should Google, “U.S. military – sexual assault and rape,” I suspect they will decline the offer of assistance from the African Command. 1 in 3 women in the U.S. military are sexually assaulted or raped. Women and girls in countries with U.S. military bases are raped by U.S. military. 8,000 U.S. Marines are being “re-located” from Okinawa in great measure because of citizen activist pressure following the numerous rapes of women and girls there. Prosecution rates in rape cases in the military are abysmal- 8% versus 40% in civilian cases.

The August 10, 2009 Washington Post article “Congo’s Rape Epidemic Worsens During U.S.-Backed Military Operation” begins with an alarming statement: “For the women of eastern Congo, a U.S.-backed Congolese military operation meant to save them from abusive rebels has turned an already staggering epidemic of rape has become markedly worse since the January deployment of tens of thousands of poorly trained, poorly paid Congolese soldiers, with people in front-line villages such as this one saying the soldiers are not so much hunting rebels as hunting women.”

Writing about the Afghan election, Malalai Joya sums it up well,

Democracy will never come to Afghanistan through the barrel of a gun, or from the cluster bombs dropped by foreign forces. The struggle will be long and difficult, but the values of real democracy, human rights and women’s rights will only be won by the Afghan people themselves.

Clearly the same could be said about Iraq as well, where women’s lives are in far more peril now than they were before the U.S. invasion.  The bottom line is that the use of militarism is not only oxymoronic when it comes to establishing democracy and freedom but also when it comes to protecting the lives of civilians, especially women and children.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we used women’s lives as a cynical justification for military action. This should serve as a cautionary note regarding the connection of aid to the women in the DRC and an increased U.S. military presence and is extremely worrisome.  If  history is an indication, the chances are that, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, the lives of Congolese women will be further imperiled in the name of U.S. imperialism.

———-

*The full report makes riveting reading and also points to another site where firsthand reports on the voting have been posted. Please take the time to read both.

As usual, I find myself at the end of the week with a cornucopia of stories and not enough time to post them all, so I’m going to try something different this week and post a wrap–up with links, and if this works well, it may become a regular event.  It isn’t that each of these doesn’t deserve its own post, it’s just that no one has invented an 8th day of the week or hired a staff for FPN!  Without further ado:

The Global Fund for Women has a fabulous new blog, check it out here.

Stop Family Violence has the latest on the Stamford Marriott rape story.  Let’s keep the pressure on Marriott to go beyond apologizing and become an industry leader in ensuring the safety of their guests.

As this blog has reported too many times, the C-section rate in this country is much too high which both raises the costs of maternity care and endangers the lives of mothers and infants.  Our Bodies Our Blog points to evidence that if you take away the financial incentive for performing C-sections, the rate mysteriously goes down. Hmmm. And as they also point out, part of the health care reform process is figuring out how to pay for health care.  Reigning in unnecessary costs would be a brilliant start although I do have to say there is this nagging thought in the back of my mind that worries about starting with women’s health as the place to cut costs because it can go too far as it did with what became known as drive-by mastectomies where women are released from the hospital much too soon after such major surgery.

This piece by Masum Momaya takes an in-depth look at Google’s controversial advertising policy for abortion services in 15 countries asking if the policy violates women’s rights.

RAWA has this brilliant piece by Malalai Joya about the Afghan elections.

And check out this new DoJ resource for information on Domestic Violence, a lot of really useful stats.

And last, we have this horrific account of acid attacks in Zambia via WNN:

“I didn’t realize that the tongue skin was also peeling off. The young girl was pushing something in her mouth. I opened her mouth to see and found that almost the whole tongue had come off. I had to pull it out like you do with a cow and only a little red thing (tongue) remained.”

These excruciating words by a girl’s older sister describe the aftermath of the worse physical attack a 13 yr old could ever experience.

For all the times I get accused of being an angry feminst, I ask how stories like that could possibly evoke any other response.

Let me know what you think of having regular wrap-up posts.