Women – Pike & Hurricane

Portrait of a female warlord

Oliver Ösmark — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:00:11 +0000

The Taliban are well-versed in crime. En masse, they’ve effectively run the gamut of all crimes founded on a total contempt for humanity, in all its forms, except for those that abide by the constrictive and unaccommodating codification of ethics only they have authorship of. As is common among terror organizations and their death-worship, they set those enthralled under their tyranny up to fail, and relish in imparting the brutal—many times fatal—penalties for noncompliance. Amorality and psychopathy are rewarded with the spoils of their “holy” war, and in a society which offers no commensurate glory for the person with little aspiration for the homicidal narcissism of the Taliban Jihadist, fear prevails.

With good reason. More than 10,000 civilians in Afghanistan were killed or injured last year, of which 47% is attributed to Taliban actions. These numbers have been stable since 2014, from which they escalated at a worrying rate in 2009. The UN estimates that civilian casualties have exceeded 100,000 since the organization began documenting the impact of the Afghan war more than a decade ago. Much like ISIL’s genocidal murder and abductions of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children shortly after declaring themselves a state in June 2014, the Taliban have their own sins yet to be answered for.

In the mid-1990’s, the Taliban committed to a strategy of fear and bloodshed targeting civilians. UN officials stated that between 1996–2006 there had been as many as 15 massacres. One such was the attack on Mazar-e Sharif in August 1998, representing one of the single worst examples of killings of civilians in the wars that have raged in the Afghan region since the Soviet invasion of 1979. In what is considered an act of ethnic cleansing, the Taliban launched an attack on the city and began killing an estimated 5,000-6,000 ethnic Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks indiscriminately. This society of dread and servility under threat of death will have shaped generations that have known little else but war.

Kaftar, the dove of war

In the mountains outside of the Baghlan Province in northern Afghanistan, an ex-commander with the mujahideen that fought the Soviet forces operates out of a compound with an alleged 150 fighters. Her name is Bibi Aisha Habibi and she is Afghanistan’s only known female warlord. She is referred to as Kaftar, or “dove” in Dari; a diminutive sobriquet—by one account—given to her by her father because she would quickly move from place to place as if she were a bird. She was born in 1953, in the village of Gawi in Baghlan province’s Nahrin District, the daughter of an important community leader, or arbob. She was one of the middle children of 10, and, being as she remembers it, her father’s favorite. She’d follow him around as he worked to settle disputes and give advice to villagers on matters of farming and family affairs.

She was engaged at the age of 12 to a man 10 year her senior. This was normal practice for most girls living in rural Afghanistan; where around 80% of the Afghan population live. Unlike other girls she wasn’t removed from public life and it was agreed—and consented to by her husband—that she’d continue to be allowed to act on her father’s behalf as an arbob. She took pleasure in working as an intermediary in marriage disputes; sometimes forcing families to allow women to choose whom they wanted to marry. Also, she implemented rules to reduce dowries, which was an obstacle for many couples not able to marry under previous conditions. In the wars to come, her husband would stay at home with their 7 children while she rode into battle.

In 1979, the Soviets invaded. A group of Soviet commandos swarmed her mountain and killed many villagers, including her son. She took to Jihad and against the Soviet forces for the next ten years. She lost family both to the Soviets as well as the Taliban which was in conflict with the mujahideen. After the Soviets, the Taliban would eventually take Kabul and control up to three-fourths of the country. In the years to follow, Kaftar would lose brothers, sons, nieces, and nephews to the Taliban.

She considers herself a collector of lost and exiled men. Her fighters consist of ex-Taliban, ex-mujahedeen, fighters of dejected ethnic minorities compelled to take up arms against the threat of bandits, brigands, and Taliban. Yet, she has herself lost family that swore allegiance to the Taliban and has, on numerous occasions, been a target of assassination attempts orchestrated by relatives. Regarding this she says, “It’s really painful when your own family members come to kill you, and then later it’s painful when you kill them.”

War all the time

With the U.S. invasion in 2001, she thought that peace would be imminent. The Taliban were routed to the south and east part of the country by coalition forces and trained Afghan security forces. Armed unaffiliated militia groups like Kaftar’s were seen as a destabilizing factor, and in 2006—convinced by the prospect of peace—she agreed to surrender most of her and her fighters’ weapons as a part of the UN’s Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups programme.

But disarmament hasn’t proved an effective strategy for peace in a culture already plagued by unresolved endemic conflicts. The Taliban were revived with a fresh dynamism. Troubled by family feuds of tit-for-tat violence and regular death threats made by the Taliban, Kaftar has experienced none of the peace promised to her by the UN and the “democratic transition of power” heralded by the war against the Taliban.

As the U.S. prepares to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan, many fear the return of Taliban rule. This time, however, her fighters aren’t prepared for active revolt. The legitimacy granted to the Taliban by the current peace talks give them a political advantage over the poorly armed rural resistance fighters. In a 2014 interview, she says that she would like to seek asylum outside of Afghanistan, but has to ensure the passage of 30-40 of her family members first. Without help or enough weapons, she fears that the extremist militants will target her and her family. “I was proud of my career,” she says. “But since I have been getting threats and I’m struggling and suffering, now I think I should not have become a commander. I wish I would have been just a normal housewife. That no one would know me, no one would come to talk to me, and I would have been just a normal housewife. Now I am sitting awake at night, always on guard, with a gun, ready to protect myself.”

Blood can’t wash blood

While she has, in her own way, worked to moderate the divides between men and women, and has taken an unlikely role in her society as the leader of a community and armed fighters, she is not a respected woman among warring factions and squabbling relatives. The old Afghan proverb “Zar, zan, zamin”—gold, women, land—still motivates violence in a culture of guns and rivalries. Until the paradigm of fundamentalism and lawlessness is dismantled by means of education and stable government institutions, the rule of the sword will persist and those able to fight will give their lives to protect those they hold dearest.

Kaftar knows this life all too well, but doesn’t wish it on the generations to come. The life of a warrior is a precarious one, but if it comes to the choice between fighting and submission, the prospect of subservience under Taliban rule will always inspire bloody insurgency. Despite her hardships, she knows this: “It makes no difference if you are a man or a woman when you have the heart of a fighter.”

Photo credits:

Afghanistan Observes 2007 International Peace Day, United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

High Moon over Nili, Afghanistan, United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Afghanistan-1, Ekaterina Didkovskaya, CC BY-NC 2.0

100331-F-2616H-011, Kenny Holston, CC BY-ND 2.0

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Re-Metamorphoses: The Misogynistic Legacy of Western Mythology

Oliver Ösmark — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 17:18:07 +0000

All cultures throughout history have had their ways of coming to terms with existence and how humankind came to be. People used stories to provide a narrative for the creation of the world; from the oldest recorded stories of the Fertile Crescent, the primordial egg of the ancient kingdoms of the Nile river, the cycle of creation and destruction of the civilizations of the Indus valley, the “Dreamtime” of the aborigines. All stories are rich with complexities. All marked by idiosyncrasies and peculiarities which constitute a collective neural network from which culture flourishes.

Stories are tools used to proliferate ideas. They provide us with a sense of authorship, a way to gather and amass a kernel of meaning from the overwhelming silence of creation. They can shape societies for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to come. Small remnants of values reside in traditions passed on by customs and rites and are so hidden in plain sight that a terrific effort is necessary on our part to sensitize ourselves and acknowledge their influence in our daily lives.

The civilization of Greek antiquity is considered to be the precursor of modern Western civilization. However, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees in giving the Ancient Greek culture too much credit where it isn’t due. Greeks regularly interacted with cultures of the Mediterranean and beyond, bringing back the arts of mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and inspiration for the makings of ideal government and laws. Though, by virtue of their susceptibility for innovation, Athens became the intellectual crucible from which ideas of government, literature, sciences, architecture, sports would proliferate and last for millennia to come.

Democracy is one of the most influential ideas handed down from the Greeks and is today the sine qua non of the modern liberal nation state. But this “rule by the people” begs the question: who are these people entrusted with the power to rule? Clearly, not everyone. It is known that slavery was an accepted practice in ancient Greece endorsed by writers of the day – notably Aristotle – as natural and necessary. J. G. A. Pocock, in the book “The Citizenship Debates”, notes that the Athenians claimed citizenship required being far-removed from the grind and toils of everyday life. And the Athenian males solved this problem by delegating those duties to slaves, immigrants, and women, effectively excluding them from the agora.

The subjugation of women in Classical Athens was overt. Women had no legal personhood and were assigned their place within the oikos; a word used to refer to the domestic trifecta of family, the family’s property, and the household. The legal term for a wife was “damar”, a word derived from the root verb “to tame” or “to subdue”. The average age for marriage was around 14, which was partly to ensure that the girls were still virgins when they were wed. The lasting boundary to achieve citizenship was gender, and to the extent of history no woman ever achieved full citizenship. It would take more than two thousand years for Greek women to get the vote; which they did in 1952.

The Roman statesman Cicero wrote in the fourth book “On emotional disturbances” of his Tusculan Disputations that the Greek philosophers considered misogyny a disease, one caused by a fear of women. Perhaps this fear can be traced back to their earliest stories, their mythos.

In the beginning…

In the beginning there was only Chaos. A vast void of infinite darkness. Out of nothingness – to the relief of metaphysicians – sprang something. More notably, Gaia, or the earth; along with her siblings Nyx (night), Erebus (darkness), Tartarus (the abyss), and – by some accounts – Eros (the god of love and sex). Gaia eventually bore the Titans, setting about a chain of events that would eventually lead to the creation of modern human beings by the Titan Prometheus and his betrayal of Zeus, king of the ancient Greek pantheon.

Out of the union of Gaia and the sea, a host of monstrous children would come about to be: Echidna, a half-woman, half-snake, and mate of the giant serpentine monster Typhon; the Gorgons, two immortal sisters Stheno, Euryale, and the mortal Medusa, with hair of made of living snakes, and eyes that turned anyone who beheld them to stone; the Graeae, three witches who shared one eye and one tooth between them; and the not-so-monstrous Hesperides, beautiful nymphs of evening light whose interchangeable names in the Greek sources is testament to their impersonality. The recurring motif of the characterization of the feminine in Greek myth could only be lost on the most zealous male chauvinist.

The Rape of Europa is a painting by the Italian artist Titian, painted ca. 1560–1562.

Stories of sexual and physical violence directed at women in the myths of the Greek Heroic age are abundant. One such being the fate of Medusa. In Ovid’s late account, she is described as originally having been a priestess of Athena. Being very beautiful, many suitors desired her. One of these was the sea god Poseidon who subsequently raped her in the Temple of Athena. The enraged Athena – goddess of wisdom, and a symbol of freedom and democracy since the Renaissance – transformed Medusa into a gorgon as a punishment for… well, what mortal could possibly hope to interpret divine judgement? Medusa was later beheaded by the more-than-willing Perseus on a wager made by a King on a cursory whim, and got all the aid he could hope for by the gods – including Athena.

Hand-me-downs

The rediscovery of Greek mythology in the Renaissance, through the poetry of Ovid, had an immense effect on the creative resources of artists and poets for hundreds of years to come: from Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” to Titian’s “Rape of Europa”, Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” to Goethe’s “Prometheus”, Joyce’s “Ulysses” to O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms”. Greek mythology and its themes have endured in the Western cultural consciousness for centuries. As Mary Beard writes in her article “Women in Power”, mythology has nurtured a “real, cultural and imaginary” separation between women and power.

“Perseus with the Head of Medusa” by Benvenuto Cellini in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

Hillary Clinton experienced the brunt of this kind of antagonism full-force during her 2016 candidacy. A photo modelled after Cellini’s bronze “Perseus with the Head of Medusa”, with Clinton’s face superimposed onto the severed head failed to incite the same wave of hostility that a similar representation of Trump’s severed head did. Similarly aggressive rhetoric and crude allusions have been used against politicians such as Chancellor Angela Merkel, ex-Prime Minister Theresa May, Brazilian ex-President Dilma Rousseff. While such discourse is rare in mainstream media in its unmitigated form, it has its own, more pernicious, effects. A study shows that anticipated gender discrimination decreases women’s leadership ambitions and that these expectations are often that women leaders will be punished more harshly for failure than men.

There are of course varying degrees of severity around issues of misogyny and sexism between countries. There is a disproportionate number of death threats made to women MPs in the UK, while in Finland the party leaders of all five parties in parliament are women. In Greece, as previously mentioned, women were first allowed to vote in 1952. Excerpts of parliamentary discourse within the Greek parliament reveals aggressive and derogatory forms of speech that directly attack the gender of the addressees.

The correlation between laggard societies and how women are received in positions of power is not fully established, however, there are countries with strong and lasting traditions of portraying women as inferior by direct subjugation or implicit cultural characterizations. And these stories are powerful and incidentally unifying. Unifying in the sense that having assigned roles is a comfort in a modern age of existential crises and erratic individualism. Nevertheless, these roles have been assigned in an age that predates the notion of universal human dignity by an immense time span and there’s nothing as dull as a constant rehashing of the same characters in different productions. If we are, each of us, the product of the stories we tell ourselves, then we could use some new ones.

Related articles:

German hip-hop: misogyny in rap music

Photo credits

Bustos filsofia aristotle, morhamedufmg, Free for commercial use

Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545-1554), Rodney, CC by 2.0

The Rape of Europa, Titian, Public Domain

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Empowering Society

Emilie Yung — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 15:09:48 +0000

Women are not the problem, it’s men

As a feminist and a young woman, I was both horrified and excited when the #MeToo movement began last October. Horrified, not because I was surprised that these things were happening every day, but because of the sheer number of women who bravely shared their experience with sexual assault. And excited, because I felt a spark of hope inside me – we were heading for change.

Last year, I’ve spent many hours thinking about how we reach that ‘change’ which we are so desperately in need of worldwide. I felt frustrated that once again, we (and by “we” I mean women) were given the task to make people care about and understand just how comprehensive the problem really is. In particular, I was looking for more men to participate in the conversation, but -from my viewpoint- they seemed to be missing (out).

Sexual violence in statistics

Global estimates published by the World Health Organisation indicate that 1 in 3 women worldwide have been exposed to either physical and/or sexual violence throughout their life.

An extensive survey from 2012 conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights highlighted the sexual violence women face and experience within the 28 European member states. With 52% of women having experienced physical or sexual violence, Denmark takes the number one spot followed by Finland and Sweden.

In other places around the world, such as in Vietnam, the percentages are significantly higher. Research by International Charity ActionAid in 2016 found 87% of women have experienced sexual harassment at least once in their lifetimes. Conclusion: Sexual violence is everywhere.

But exactly who commits these assaults? In America, according to a 2010 survey by National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence, more than 90 percent of perpetrators of sexual violence against women are men. Interestingly, 93 percent of the perpetrators of sexual violence against men are in fact also men. Taking these facts into account, we must address the elephant in the room – one gender is more prominent than the other in these statistics. If men are at the center of the problem, then, they are integral to the solution.

So why do men struggle to engage themselves in the conversation?

Taking the lead

Wade Davis, a former National Football League player is now an activist and educator. At a conference on gender and workplace, he said , “Here’s what men don’t get about the #MeToo movement: It is not about women, it’s about us.” Suffice it to say, by “us” he meant men.

Educator, filmmaker and author, Jackson Katz, hosted a TEDxFiDiWomen talk where he stated that sexual violence is not a “women’s issue”, but instead a “men’s issue” due to a number of reasons. The primary reason is indeed, calling it a “women’s issue”. “This gives men an excuse to not pay attention.” He then illustrates that using the passive voice in relation to men excludes them from the conversation. With an exercise made by the linguist and author, Julia Penelope, he shows exactly how:

“John beat Mary.”

“Mary was beaten by John.”

“Mary was beaten.”

“Mary was battered.”

“Mary is a battered woman.”

Already in the third sentence ‘John’, the perpetrator, has left the picture and ‘Mary’ is now the focus. Katz says it illustrates structurally how we think and literally how language conspires to keep our attention off men. The goal, he explains, is to get men who are not a part of the abusive culture to challenge those who are, and use the bystander approach to interrupt and to create a peer culture climate where the abusive behavior will be seen as unacceptable.

“There’s been an awful lot of silence in male culture about this ongoing tragedy of men’s violence against women and children, hasn’t there? […] We need to break that silence, and we need more men to do that.”

This article is not a battle of genders. The problem is more so the structure of society that is off. How we speak about these issues is essential to cultivating a conversation where men are actively participating. It is also essential to furthering men’s willingness to take on their part of the responsibility. If we are to see a change in the future, we need to start challenging men to be leaders in these conversations and encourage them to be allies against a system of patriarchy.

I therefore invite all men to take a step towards change.

by Emilie Yung Meiling

Photo credits

Statstic, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2012

UN Women’s HeforShe Campaign, UN Women, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Azul Exclusive Auction Dress for 2lei, Bea Serendipity, CC BY 2.0

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Women’s Leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Zarifa Dag — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 19:45:25 +0000

What comes to your mind when you think of a “leader”?

For three women leading various organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ‘leadership’ is synonymous with patriarchy, rape and war crimes. Rape was a common practice for soldiers in the Bosnian War and more than a decade after the conflict, some feminists claim that the acts of rape were perpetrated as genocidal acts. Others argue that rape is a tool in every war zone and that every military action is sexist.

Despite the trauma from the past, the women leaders in Bosnia are in charge of organizations aiming to help women in the post-war areas in Bosnia.

Leadership as Patriarchal Dictatorship

For Amra Pandžo, Danka Zelić and Sehija Dedović the word ‘leadership’ is a word they despise as it reminds them of a powerful dictator, hierarchy and dominance, especially on females. Amra, Danka, and Sehija struggle to call themselves leaders, as archaic leadership in Bosnia lead to the humiliation of many innocent citizens by means of a genocide, or rather ethnic cleansing.

Amra is a muslim woman leading the ‘Small Steps’ peacebuilding organisation in Sarajevo, Danka is a Catholic and a former female police officer leading UG Grahovo, and Sehija is a muslim woman with formal theological education, leading Nahla(bee). These organisations promote women’s human rights, peacebuilding and settlement during and after war.

All three women have been prominent leaders within their organisations and claim that they had no intentions of becoming leaders and this progressed throughout the years and their initiative to defend human rights, and eventually they self-trained themselves for leadership roles within their communities.

Yet, Zilka Spahić Šiljak’s article ‘Women, Religion and Peace Leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina ‘ states that for the three women the definition of a leader is, someone who knows how to persuade others on peace and having the vision, courage, and faith to act within their communities.

On the 11th of each month the Women of Srebrenica gather in the main square of Tuzla to stand in silent protest of their missing and dead men. Photo: The Advocacy Project

Humiliation – rape for being a woman or for ethnicity?

Rape is severe torture and aggression to the intimate self and the dignity of a human being.

The book “Mass Rape: The war against women in Bosnia-Herzegovina” describes how the ultimate torture that can be caused to a woman is by violently invading her inner space. This results in loss of dignity, shame, loss of identity, and self-determination or self-confidence.

Humiliation in this case is not only targeted at women but also at men. Women were a crucial target because women in many cultures are extremely important due to the perception of a woman as the pillar in family structure. Therefore rape became a different way of waging war between different ethnicities in general. Perpetrators ritualize rape as a means to show the men of the other ethnicity that they are incompatible and are not able to ‘protect their women’. On the other hand, many victims of wartime rape were not supported by their husbands neither as they were to blame and were ostracized by ending relationships. The women were silenced and never had the chance to fight for their rights.

Unfortunately, the UN did not acknowledge rape as a war crime until 2008. In wartime and among soldiers, rape has always been embedded. A typical excuse used to justify rape is that soldiers have been in the battlefield for an extensive period, leading to a situation where the men have urges to be fulfilled. And this is what we have come to accept – a common excuse.

Giving Women a Voice Again

Amra, Danka and Sehija use the ethics of religion to teach peacebuilding in their organisations. All three peacebuilders recognised the needs in their community, of which; deconstructing the media’s idea of Islam as a terrorism, submission and oppression, helping returnees to settle back in Bosnia, and including women in recognised organisations which are dominated by men. This has helped many women to regain their voices, as the peacebuilders did not want professional and experienced people to lead in their organisations, but wanted volunteers from all over Bosnia, to exchange knowledge and build support together.

Erasing women by traumatising them by war crimes such as rape is the same as erasing a community.

On the other hand, observing how Amra, Danja and Zehija work and strive for a better definition of leadership instills hope in their communities. This provides them a sense that Bosnia can become a better place than it was before the war. The world needs more of these prominent leaders, who use their traumas to teach others wisdom, and thus not letting their horrific experiences revolve into aggression and revenge.

This article is based on the article “Women, Religion and Peace Leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina” by Zilka Spahić Šiljak and the books “Mass Rape: The war against women in Bosnia-Herzegovina” edited by Alexandra Stiglmayer and “Bosnia: A Short History” by Noel Malcolm.

By Zarifa Dag

Photo Credit:

Sarajevo, Béatrice BDM, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Women of Srebenica, The Advocacy Project, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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