April: Machete Season

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (2006) by Jean Hatzfeld, Susan Sontag and Linda Cloverdale.

For updates on human rights in Rwanda, see HRW's country page. The BBC has a good brief article on 'How the Genocide Happened'. I always find it interesting to look at the government's website as a useful introduction to the current issues in the country, and if you would like to go into more detail, I highly recommend that you check out Frontline coverage-- they have interviews, a chronology, political background, analysis, and more.

Susan Sontag's preface says that this book is one that  "everyone should read . . . [because making] the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda . . . is part of being a moral adult."

We will meet on Tuesday, April 12th to discuss the book.

And the World Changed, edited by Muneeza Shamsie

UPDATED!

Just broadcast! PBS Wideangle podcast on the Taliban and Women in Pakistan -- and how they are targeting women's rights and education. This is by the producer of Children of the Taliban.

100th International Women's Day
March 8th is International Women's Day, and we are celebrating in our own way: by reading an anthology of Pakistani women writers- stories set all around the world.

Interesting facts about Women's Day: in 1909, the Socialist Party of America declared the first National Women's Day, celebrated on February 28th. In 1910, leader of the Women's Office of the German Social Democratic Party Clara Zetkin called for an International Women's Day at the second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen. 100 women from 17 countries were in attendance. Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland celebrated International Women's Day for the first time on March 25th, 1911. In 1913, Russia celebrated their first International Women's Day. In 1917, Russian women organized a strike, based on the 2 million Russian solders who died in the war, calling for 'bread and peace', and the movement ended up forcing the Czar to abdicate, and women got the right to vote!

HRW's Women's Rights Division
In honor of International Women's Day and as part of their 20th anniversary of the Women's Rights Division, HRW released a beautiful new webpage hub, which includes audio clips and a timeline:
Women's Rights Division

The following is the message that the WRD sent out on International Women's Day, 2011:
Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and there is still much that we must do to ensure that women and girls can enjoy their human rights:
· Women still constitute the majority of those who are illiterate – two thirds of adults who cannot read and write are women, and this figure has not changed much over the last 20 years;
· Women workers continue to be clustered in the most insecure forms of work, including part time, casual and informal employment.  They earn less than men, and bear the burden of (largely) unpaid domestic work and childcare;
· Customary and statutory laws still limit women’s access to, and ownership of, land and other economic resources in Africa and Asia and consequently, women are over-represented amongst the poor;
· Violence against women, in its many manifestations, remains one of the most widespread and pervasive violations of human rights.

Despite this, there are many reasons to celebrate today and these include the establishment of UN Women (an achievement that represents several years of advocacy by women’s rights activists), women in the Middle East and North Africa taking their rightful places in demonstrations and protests to demand their human rights, the slow reduction of female genital mutilation, the increased numbers of women who are receiving ante natal care, and the diminishing gender gap in the enrollment of girls in primary education.  As Michele Bachelet said last Thursday night at the official launch of UN Women, “we have hope”.

Cries From the Heart, May 9th, 2011
Mark your calendars!
This is an evening of prose, poetry and performance at the Broad in Santa Monica.
For one night only, star performers will come together with Human Rights Watch, bringing to life the stories of Ordinary Heros. A cocktail reception precedes the performance, and a dessert and coffee reception concludes the evening.

We are seeking sponsors at levels from $1,000 - $10,000
Individual tickets are $100- $150

More information coming soon. Please start preparing a list of possible sponsors you could ask to support this important event!

And the World Changed
What a fantastic, passionate, committed group! We started out the evening talking about the new article posted by a fellow female journalist about CBS/60 minutes journalist Lara Logan, who experienced violent assault and rape while reporting on the protests in Tahrir Square, Egypt. Along with the well-written article in the New York Times (see the comments to this post), Amanda Marcotte's article for The Guardian provides a very clear summary and analysis, as well as a broadly representative set of links. Frustrating that women are still forced to make such difficult decisions about whether they should report gender-based violence on the job or just keep quiet, because if they speak up, they will face character assassination, claims that they 'asked for it', that they are lying for personal gain, and that men should do those jobs just to avoid such messy situations. This is an age-old dilemma, however, and one of many challenging, messy, murky life decisions that women often face. And this leads us to the discussion of the book! 

As an anthology, this book presented us with a very wide-reaching and complex view of Pakistani women's worlds. One theme that we came to notice was the complexity of women's responsibilities, allegiances, cultural and religious backgrounds, priorities and goals. Sometimes, when thinking about human rights work, it is easy to fall into a pretty black-and-white view of things: right and wrong, abuser and victim, justice and truth... but life is often not so obvious. Victims become aggressors; family members retain oppressive expectations along with providing abiding love and support; past violence continues to shape everyday meaning even for those who were not yet born when the conflict "ended"...

And the stories reminded us that the violence of colonial rule, and of Partition seem to be key elements of individual and familial identity, and daily life, even generations later. There were clear echoes in the claims of War is Not Over When It's Over . Also of the variety of women's lived experiences, the rich cultural, educational, political and artistic heritage of Pakistani women, of their global and cosmopolitan as well as parochial and conservative selves, of the importance of class and race in women's experience, and of how hard it was to generalize -- once we read these individuals' voices.

Recurring questions also arose: of the nature of the humanity of human rights abusers (how can they do such violence); of the utility and moral appropriateness of trying to understand why human rights abusers do what they do (how to explain and not excuse); of relativism and culture wars (HRW link); of impressing our ideas of what should be done or standing back; of how to define 'help' and 'solidarity' when we cannot understand the people we reach out to; and of idealism and anger at injustice, frustration with the intransigence of oppression, impatience with the slowness of change, and the danger of accepting people's suffering because we want to be understanding and patient. In other words, we got to the philosophical and ethical roots of human right work!

This anthology is available from the Feminist Press, as well as your more standard online booksellers, and comes highly recommended. Each author is introduced, and the 25 different stories cover a lot of topical ground. If you are interested in themes of social and cultural change, immigration, East-meets-West issues, and the challenging of stereotypes (gender, race, and class), you will be bound to find something here that is interesting.

In terms of background, we all know that Pakistan is important to the foreign policy of the U.S., particularly in the context of the ongoing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pakistan is a nuclear power, and that makes it a really important player in the region. To take a look at the recent human rights issues in Pakistan, see HRW's website.

The BBC has a very useful and concise introduction to Pakistan.

Update for: It's Not Over

For those of you still interested in the very lively discussion we had on Ann Jones' book on women and war, the latest Tomgram includes an article by Ann Jones about Afghanistan, women's participation in politics, and the challenges of applying United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. It is worth a read.

If you don't want to read, but you would like to listen.... you are in luck! An interview with Ann Jones is available.

First book of 2011: Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick

image of the Koreas from space

UPDATE:

An what a great conversation we had! The author's style of writing, based on the detailed research and clear prose of a newspaper reporter, combined with really engaging personal stories about everyday people in North Korea. To learn so many details about everyday lives in a country that is one of the most closed societies in the world was really fascinating. Most of us had no idea how bad the famine was, how advanced the North Koreans had been at the end of the Korean War, or how expansive government control really was.

One interesting question that came up in discussion was the question of how to understand this strange country, and the people who live in it. Were they all brainwashed? Based on the stories in the book, North Koreans are born and raised into a political system that is based on a cult of leader worship, and extensive monitoring. Every home is supposed to have framed photos of the leader and his father displayed. They have a special cloth to dust the photos with. Television, radio and film is all tightly controlled and censored, and listening to forbidden media would probably mean torture and the death penalty. The accepted position is that the leader of the nation is the provider of all that is good, that the North Koreans want for nothing and are better off than the rest of the world, and that they are a special people, the last communist society in a hostile world. However bad it is in North Korea, the rest of the world is to be pitied, since they are worse off and do not have such a great leader to protect and guide them. Even asking questions or expressing a small amount of skepticism about the government position can lead to a lengthy sentence in a labor camp.  Neighborhood monitors or unannounced police checks serve to enforce the rules.

How much personal choice and autonomy can you attribute to people who have been born and educated into such an all encompassing ideology? It is a very tricky question. We struggled to find comparisons in the rest of the world that would help us understand what was going on in North Korea. The fear of being spied on by a family member or neighbor, the danger of dissent, and the methods of social control were familiar to the strategies of other communist countries, for example in East Germany. The strategy of authoritarian leader worship is familiar not only in communist figures like Stalin (curiously enough, it is rising again), but also for example in countries like Syria, where people were subject to state propaganda that insisted that the President was infallible and all knowing. But scholars like Lisa Wedeen argue that people in Syria understand the strategies of the government, and have ways of expressing dissent. In North Korea, society is so closed that we simply have no idea whether there are spaces for such strategies to survive. Perhaps most of the people who have tried are in the massive labor camps, where the guilt of one (very small) transgression condemns an entire family to punishment. In a society where dissent can mean that your entire family, including children, are imprisoned and tortured, it is hard to imagine the coexistence of personal autonomy or dissent. But still, there are glimmers of it in Nothing Left to Envy.

There was much more to the conversation, but should be a good taste!
************

There really is very little information on North Korea, but this reporter conducted many interviews with people who left. The result is an amazing look inside this very secretive and closed society, with some historical reach and good factual information while also bringing us some detailed personal stories of people who left North Korea. They are stories of people who defected from their country, where they grew up believing that they had 'Nothing to Envy' in this world, but discovered the world had left their country behind.

North Korea has certainly been on the news recently, because of the recent South Korean military drill off Yonphyong Island and the North Korean military response of threats and return fire. Read the North Korean statements at this Wall Street Journal blog.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer recently went to North Korea with the Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson. They spent six days there. Their experiences are the official version of North Korea, and they saw the people in North Korea who are the counterweight to the people we will read about in Demick's book: the people Wolf Blitzer saw are the chosen, the well fed and clothed, the educated, the employed. Watch the video or read the short description of the trip here.

North Korea has also made the news recently because of signs that Kim Jong-il’s youngest son Kim Jong-un is his most likely successor. There are significant doubts, however, that the hand-over of power will go as planned. Of course, North Korea has proven experts wrong many times in the past. Regardless of the outcome, there are some serious human rights issues in this country, and the ramifications of the policies of the DPRK will haunt the region for a long time.

November/December: Even Silence Has An End

Weds, December 8th at 7pm, we will discuss Ingrid Betancourt's book, "Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle"

If you did not get to read this book, and are till considering adding it to your shelf, take a look at some of this....

Ingrid Betancourt's book was really very interesting for our group for a lot of reasons:

It is a story of a female politician, and in her story there are hints as to what it is like to exist as a woman in this highly masculine world. Some of the judgments about her character, her attitude, and her decisions really clarify some of the complexities inherent in such a position. Many people believed the idea that she was naive about the dangers of the area where she was kidnapped- perhaps it was easier to believe because she is a woman (and also because of her wealth and protected background) but her book really challenges such a simplistic explanation- she is a really smart woman, after all, who was running a serious campaign to be president of the country. Some of the publicly expressed anger at her 'arrogance' and 'difficult' nature can also perhaps be seen in terms of the double binds that women often face as they begin to compete in traditionally masculine arenas, such as political or business leadership.

As a woman, her experience of being a long-term hostage leads us to insights that we may not have gained from a male hostage (and there are those accounts, by two American hostages who were held captive with Betancourt and they clearly did not get along with her all the time, or see things the same way). Because of her perspective, we do get a more complete understanding not only of what it is like to be held captive in these circumstances, but also what the social dynamics are among the rebels. For example, Betancourt noticed how the sexual politics of the FARC guerrillas conflict with their ideology of solidarity in struggle: young women were expected to prove their commitment to the cause in part by accepting the sexual advances of their commanders, they weren't treated as equals. She also pulls us into her own personal experience as a daughter whose father dies when she is hostage, and as a mother whose children grow from teenagers into adults while she is suspended in a kind of limbo, only able to hear the deepening of her son's voice on radio broadcasts. You can hear more from Betancourt about this part of the experience in an interview she did with Amy Goodman, in two parts:
Part One


Part Two


A really insightful element of the book is found in the many sections where Betancourt describes what it is like to be threatened with the loss of ones humanity, how her captors use language and deprivation of basic resources to do that, and what she did to combat these dehumanizing forces. The really thoughtful and detailed descriptions of her experiences in the jungle bring to life how overwhelming captivity can be. Particularly interesting to consider are the similarities in experiences of kids incarcerated for life without the chance of parole, people in refugee camps, kids abducted to serve in the military, or foreign domestic servants who are held captive by their employers. In these situations, there are also these issues of isolation from society, inability to choose your work/do productive work, uncertainty about the future, the loss of privacy, loss of control over basic personal decisions, and high threat of violence. Consider HRW's work on some of these issues:
Juvenile live without parole

Forced removal of refugees in Sudan


Child solders in Uganda
Migrant domestic workers

The main challenge for several members of the book club was a lack of contextual knowledge about Colombia and FARC. Here are some links to learn more.

This Washington Post article outlines the current challenges regarding the rural poor in Colombia. Consider also the link between poverty and recruitment practices of rebel groups and government military, especially for children and young people.

HRW has three reports, outlining the guerrilla's use of landmines (2007), the mafia-like structure of the paramilitaries (2008), and the violent successor groups to the paramilitaries (2010), as well as news of the recent abduction and killing of a Governor.

Another really interesting perspective comes from the facebook movement, One Million Voices against FARC, started by a young professional and his friends, outraged the news about a boy who was born to a woman in captivity and abandoned by the FARC in terrible conditions. There is a great synopsis and a video of Oscar, the founder, here. People went into the streets in cities across the globe to protest, although there were still arguments over the tactic of street protests.

Finally, the NYTimes has a great section on FARC, with a lot of information in articles, book reviews, videos and photos. Particularly useful is the timeline, which starts with the founding of FARC in 1975, the start of peace talks in 1999, their failure, Betancourt's kidnapping, and more.

Happy reading!

October 2010: It's Not Over

For October, we are reading War is Not Over When It's Over, based on the work of the author with the IRC (International Rescue Committee) in which the volunteered a year with them and set up a project to give digital cameras to women affected by war. For those of you who have been following the book club, this may remind you of Mia Kirshner's book, I Live Here. Kirshner also gave a camera to kids who had survived conflict.

This topic is of course incredibly important and current. Just in mid-July, HRW reported on the ongoing "Taliban War on Women" in Afghanistan. Even more recently, HRW Researcher Tanya Lokshina published a story, "Choked by Headscarves" on the growing violence against women in Chechnya, another place that has seen ongoing war and conflict.

The author, Ann Jones, was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.

Ben Travers also interviewed Ann Jones for a PBS Wideangle episode on "Women, War & Peace"

Ann Jones Q&A | Wide Angle

If you would like more of a preview, you can read the entire Introduction online.

UPDATE:

What a great conversation we had on this book!

The group raised some major questions, really big important questions. What do you do when you have to do something, but nothing will be enough? What happens to local people once the cameras go away and the funded projects run out? How do you start to change conceptions of justice when there is a constant threat of violence?

One major concern was about the design of the project headed by Ann Jones. Basically, Ann came into a community (some urban, some rural) and got permission to do a photography project with some local women. Then, she came in and taught a group of local women how to use a digital camera. They were assigned the task of documenting their everyday lives, including "their problems, their consolations, and their joys". The women then met regularly to review their photographs and talk about what the photographs were about. In a kind of 'consciousness raising' format, Ann Jones and other IRC staff facilitated discussions about the problems and needs of local women. At the end of the project, the women presented their work in the form of a photography exhibit for the entire community. Each woman stood in front of those assembled and described her photograph and its meaning. In some communities, this resulted in greater empathy and understanding of how women's problems mattered to everyone. In others, the messages of women's importance and rights were less obviously grasped by community leaders and husbands. After the community participated in the photography exhibition, Ann Jones left, to conduct the same project somewhere else.

Some of us wondered what happened to the tenuous claims to authority, voice, and rights that were gained by the women who participated in the photography exhibit after Ann Jones left. To her credit, Ann clearly had thought about this question, and she reminded the women that even if the cameras broke, and they could not continue to take pictures documenting abuse and other problems, the real camera was their own eyes. She even suggested that the women continue to pretend to take photos with a broken camera, just to keep the men in line. The men didn't have to know that the cameras were broken, and just the possibility that their behavior was being documented could be enough to keep some men in line!

In a refugee camp, she left a more lasting system in place, as the women photographers gained essential training to use their cameras as forensic tools to document evidence in spousal abuse cases. In most communities, however, the project seemed to just pick up and leave- and while the women had made good progress in building confidence, rights awareness, and self-advocacy skills, it was not clear how much of a lasting change this project would or could make. It seemed to us that what most of the women were asking for was economic independence and education, not photography projects. The women felt that they would be able to deal with violence and insecurity far better if they had the ability to sustain themselves and their children, without being so dependent on men for financial and physical security. On the other hand, the women really did seem to find some benefit in the photography project, in terms of personal growth as well as female solidarity.

In light of this brief discussion, two tensions we confronted were: the necessity of community involvement and men's support in resolving women's issues, but the tenuousness of those things without the rule of law and basic economic and political security at the macro level. Some communities were still so much in the throes of war and its aftermath, that men as well as women were living in a society that was ruled by violence and impunity. The ability of women to improve their own lots in life based on solidarity and advocacy skills seems to be pretty dependent on the existence of some level of security. Men and women needed a basic level of security guaranteed by the state, and the state was failing. So how could women pursue justice in the absence of basic security? This is the old justice v order debate, very clearly illustrated.

Second, and related to the first tension, is the question of defining security with women in mind. There is a tension between what women said they wanted and needed (security in the form of economic independence) and the fact that security and independence are currently defined based on a model of men's lives, and not with women's lives in mind. Security does not just mean that the roads are patrolled by armed military men, who will discourage looters and kidnappers from attacking people going to markets and business centers. Security also means that police and others in authority cannot harass or accost women who travel alone on the road, and that police will protect women against an abusive family member. These are just two examples. Women's experiences in the economic, social and political realms will be less than equal, less than satisfactory unless their specific security concerns are taken into account. So, just pushing for any old security is clearly not the answer. Even though women really need security, it is not security that sacrifices women's rights and women's humanity that will, in the end, be helpful. Ann's photography project seemed to touch on one way for women to start defining and re-defining security and justice in a way that included the interests of the entire community- including men and women. But the magnitude of the issues are so great that readers in our group still felt dissatisfied and overwhelmed.

One thing that can be done at a micro-level is to go to Lisa Shannon's website, A Thousand Sisters, and sponsor a woman through Women for Women International, or take part in any of the other events listed there. Keeping track of what is going on in Africa, continuing to educate ourselves and passing that information on to people we know is also really important. Human Rights Watch is a great resource for that. Also, send emails on important women's issues such as the rape kit backlog and the international violence against women act to your representatives- check out HRW's action resources.

Powder: Update

On topic:

Just this morning (Sept. 8th), I heard an NPR story about a woman who started flying a combat helicopter as soon as the U.S. started allowing women to do so (way back in 1995!) it's an interesting story.