Here is Why Human Rights Violators don’t get caught
In her widely read novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood took the futuristic nightmares of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World one step further by imagining a misogynist state that was ruled by fundamentalist men. The new state of Gilead, located in Boston, Massachusetts, denied women jobs and education, persecuted homosexuals, banned other religious sects, and moved undesirable populations to colonies. Women were turned against women through domination and indoctrination, the state controlled women’s sexuality, and reproduction became an instrument of terror.
Atwood wrote her novel in 1986, perhaps as a literary response to both the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which brought an Islamic Republic to power, and the growth of Christian fundamentalist organizations in the US. Yet despite this foreboding novel, in the last decade threads of her vision have become a reality in Europe, the Middle East, and most egregiously, Afghanistan. Historians might call the turn of the twenty-first century The Era of the Gender Wars. The word war is not only used as a euphemism for intellectual and political debates, but also as a reference to the bloody carnage that persists over who gets to control the women’s minds and bodies in the new millennium.
By definition, a war has both victories and losses, and these ongoing Gender Wars in the Middle East/Muslim world are no exception. The growth of Islamist movements worldwide, and the rise of new nationalisms after the fall of the Soviet Union, unleashed new atrocities aimed at women. At the same time, Middle Eastern/Muslim women reached new milestones in the 1990s by placing women’s human rights, women’s centers, and feminist scholarship on the political agenda.
A History of Official Human Rights Violation
The 1990s opened with the war in the former Yugoslavia, leaving behind the carnage of Bosnian and Croatian women. After Serbian nationalists besieged Sarajevo close to 10 percent of the Bosnian Muslim female population, or nearly 100,00 women, were raped. Over 60 percent became pregnant as a consequence of this systematic rape, and by 1993 over 35,000 babies were born as a result of rapes in concentration and death camps. After the war, and as the decade dragged on, trafficking in women reached epidemic proportions.
Throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina women are to this day held in debt bondage in brothels. They are forced to provide free sexual services to local police who sometimes participate in the trafficking as owners and employees of clubs, or as middlemen who provide false documents. Even some members of the International Police Task Force (UN Police) have been charged with visiting brothels as clients.
The world once again watched in horror when a similar scenario was repeated in 1999, this time aimed at the Muslim Albanian women of Kosovo, as well as other women of the former Yugoslavia. Rape and various forms of sexual violence were used as weapons of war and instruments of systematic “ethnic cleansing.” Rapes were not isolated acts of individuals; they were weapons to terrorize the civilian population, extort money from families, and force the population to flee their homes.
The purpose of rape by the Serbian and Yugoslav forces was to force the ethnic Albanian Muslims out of Kosovo. According to Human Rights Watch, the perpetrators were the Serbian special police in blue uniforms, the Yugoslav army soldiers in green, and especially the Serbian paramilitaries, bearded men who carried long knives.
Rape often took place in the presence of military officers and with their acquiescence. Sandwiched in between these two European atrocities was the genocidal episode of the Taliban in Afghanistan (1997–2001). The Taliban (and before them the Mujhidin of the United Front) sexually assaulted and abducted women on a large scale during the years of conflict. Under the Taliban, women of all social classes and ethnicities were targeted, though the most systematic violations were aimed at the minority Hazara and Tajik women.
What we don’t know about Taliban
Under the Taliban regime, severe restrictions were placed on the liberty and basic freedoms of all women, thereby practically erasing them from public life. The Taliban banned women’s employment (in most sectors), closed girls’ schools, and forbid women from appearing in public without supervision by a close male relative. All had to wear the burka, a restrictive, head-to-toe covering, instead of the lighter veil that had become more common in the urban centers in the last few decades. The religious police, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (modeled after similar institutions in Saudi Arabia and Iran), ruthlessly enforced these laws. Women were severely beaten for showing their wrists, hands, or ankles. They were even tormented for begging on the streets. These actions took place at a time when Kabul alone had forty thousand war widows.
Prostitution, while legally banned, became rampant, and the Taliban leaders, the same men who had forced female doctors out of the medical profession, routinely frequented the houses of prostitution. Many of these restrictions are still imposed on women in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, as well as several other nations with which the international community maintains routine political and economic Ties.
While not reaching the level of denial of women’s rights found in Bosnia, Kosovo, or Afghanistan, the spread of Islamist movements, and in some cases the increase in poverty and war in parts of Africa, Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East, has led to a loss of rights and benefits for women in a number of other countries.
In Bangladesh, where orthodox Muslim clerics issued a fatwa (religious edict) that called for the death of feminist author and medical doctor Taslima Nasrin a few years ago, new laws were passed that increase punishment for crimes against women, including rape, kidnapping, and the throwing of acid on women’s faces. The high court has declared that fatwas are illegal and has asked the parliament to enact appropriate laws in this regard.
Where there is hope, there is a Future
It remains to be seen if the social, political, and cultural emancipation of Middle East/Muslim women will be accomplished in our time. The turn of the twenty-first century has been a highly contradictory one for advocates of women’s rights.
Alongside the brutal and misogynistic nationalist and Islamist movements that have tried to push women’s rights back, there has developed a remarkable and courageous feminist movement, one that attempts to undo the outdated notion that feminism is a Western or “imported” phenomena or that it is irrelevant to Middle Eastern and Muslim women. Instead through journals, women’s centers, and academic publications new indigenous expressions of feminism are gradually and painstakingly constructed, articulated, and disseminated.
Perhaps those who essentialize the women (and men) of the Middle East and the Muslim world should expand the definition of feminism and human rights to encompass the voices of Muslim feminists such as Shirin Ebadi and Mehrangiz Kar. Not every misogynistic interpretation of religion is “authentic” and “indigenous,” just as not every liberal and progressive reading is “Western” and “foreign” influenced and therefore “inauthentic.” This type of labeling has been the tactic of the Islamist movements in their effort to gain power. It is now being challenged by some intellectuals and women’s rights activists of the region, individuals whose voices need to be heard more often.
