Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women, and War

Abstract On August 28, 2003, the Commissioners of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) submitted their Final Report to President Alejandro Toledo and the nation, thus joining the growing list of countries that have implemented truth commissions as a means of transitioning from a period of armed conflict and authoritarian rule towards the founding of a procedural democracy. The PTRC shared several features with the Guatemalan and South African commissions that preceded it. All three commissions were considered "gender sensitive" because they actively sought out women's experiences of violence. This focus reflected the desire to write more "inclusive truths," as well as changes in international jurisprudence. In this paper, the author draws upon research she has conducted since 1995 in Peru to explore the commissioning of truth and some implications in terms of women and war. She examines what constitutes "gender sensitive" research strategies, as well as the ways in which truth commissions have incorporated these strategies into their work. Truth and memory are indeed gendered, but not in any common-sensical way. Thus the author hopes to offer a more nuanced understanding of the gendered dimensions of war. Notes Notes 1. Das, in her work on the partition in India, has suggested that women's silence about rape may be a form of agency—perhaps the only form available to women—and thus silence does not necessarily signify the absence of linguistic competency but rather the active refusal to allow it (1997). See also Ross (2002) Ross, F. 2002. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, London: Pluto Press. Google Scholar and Butalia (2000) Butalia, Urvashi. 2000. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Durham: Duke University Press. Google Scholar. 2. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998 included sexual violence as a crime against humanity in Article 7 and a war crime in Article 8. 3. Even after the TRC gathered almost seventeen thousand testimonies, it is still impossible to determine the magnitude of sexual violence during the internal armed conflict. My research experiences resonate with a study carried out in Ayacucho by COMISEDH (Falconí and Agüero 2003 FALCONÍ, C. and Agüero, J. C. 2003. "Violaciones sexuales en las comunidades campesinas de Ayacucho". In Violaciones sexuales a mujeres durante la violencia política en el Perú, 23–48. Lima: Comisión de Derechos Humanos COMISEDH. Google Scholar) in which they determined that rape was systematically used as a strategy of war and that the number of rapes was massive. Ultimately this is what the Peruvian TRC argued, based upon the testimonies they received (TRC 2003). 4. The other guerrilla movement was the MRTA, Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru. MRTA was always considered a lesser threat, although the group succeeded in invading the Japanese Embassy and holding dozens of hostages for several months. When government troops stormed the embassy, members of MRTA were killed after they had surrendered. One of the images repeatedly shown in the media was Fujimori strutting through the rubble in a flak jacket. 5. See Hayner (2001). 6. I benefited from conversations with Roberto Garretón regarding the Rettig Commission in Chile, and Elizabeth Jelin has taught me so much about Argentina, past and present. 7. In South Africa, of the 21,227 testimonies given to the TRC, women accounted for fifty-six and half percent of the witnesses (www.peacewomen.org) and in Peru women accounted for fifty-four percent of the 16,885 testimonies at the national level, and sixty-four percent of the testimonies given in Ayacucho (TRC 2003, vol. VIII). 8. Mantilla Falcón (2005a and b). 9. TRC (2003, vol. VIII: 89–90). 10. I would add another explanation centered on the war-peace continuum of violence against women. In rural communities, wartime rape was a continuation of long-standing patterns, albeit exacerbated and "massified." It was common practice in cases of rape for the family of the young woman to look for "un buen arreglo." That is, a "good arrangement" that would entail the rapist marrying his victim or, in the case of pregnancy, at least recognizing the child with the father's name on the birth certificate. Sexual violence was thus resignified within the idiom of kinship. 11. See Jelin (2002) for more on this topic. 12. Susto (fright illness) is the result of intense fear that separates the soul from the person's body. See Rubel et al. (1984) Rubel, A. J., O'neill, C. W. and Collado, R. 1984. Susto: A Folk Illness, Berkeley: University of California Press. Crossref , Google Scholar. 13. One thinks here of the impact of militarization and the new forms of security and insecurity that a sustained military presence implies. For interesting discussions on this issue, see Enloe (1988) Enloe, C. 1988. Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women's Lives, London: Pandora Press. Google Scholar and Jacobs, Jacobson, and Marchbank (2000). 14. 14 Theidon (2003). 15. See the TRC's Final Report (2003, vol. 8), on women in Sendero Luminoso. 16. Kelly (2000) Kelly, L. 2000. "Wars against Women: Sexual Violence, Sexual Politics and the Militarised State". In States of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance, Edited by: Jacobs, S., Jacobson, R. and Marchbank, J. 45–65. New York: St. Martin's Press. Google Scholar. 17. In part I am troubled by the pedagogical use of another's suffering or grief as a means of sensitizing those who do not recognize an Other as capable of pain. I think here of the African women in the film "Long Night's Journey into Day," whose legs gave way beneath them as they wailed in anguish at police photos of the mutilated bodies of their loved ones during the Amnesty Hearings. I imagine the goal was to teach white people that darker others also grieve (although in this film it is the death of one young white woman that is foregrounded). 18. Patricia Connell's research on domestic violence was helpful to me as I analyzed what women talked with us about. In her work, she criticizes the use of agency and victimhood because they are too frequently conceived as mutually exclusive in relation to one another. She found that often women refused to characterize themselves as victims, leading her to argue that focusing on a woman's status as victim "creates a framework for others to know her not as a person, but as a victim, someone to whom violence is done" (1997: 122). 19. See Theidon (1999). 20. See Rehn and Sirleaf (2002). 21. See Gutmann (1997) on the need for an anthropology of men and masculinity. 22. See Enloe (1988) for her discussion of war rape and male bonding. 23. Diken and Lausten (2005: 114). I thank Jean Franco for bringing this text to my attention. 24. In the TRC's Final Report (2003), they also note the use of ethnic insults when raping and torturing both men and women. Fueling the violence was a sense that Quechua-speaking Others were semisavage, also captured by the term "chuto." 25. In her analysis of the gendered dynamics of armed conflict, Cockburn argues that "… male-dominant systems involve a hierarchy among men, producing different and unequal masculinities, always defined in relation not only to one another but to women" (2001: 16). 26. The fact I am a woman may certainly contribute to men's silence about rape; however, I have worked with several male research assistants and they did not find men forthcoming on this topic. This may be a more pervasive silence. For instance, in Jean Hatzfeld's interviews with genocidaires in Rwanda, the men speak in a matter of fact way about killing and their participation in the genocide. However, as I read Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, I noticed none of the men included himself when describing the massive raping of Tutsi women and girls (Hatzfeld 2005 Hatzfeld, Jean. 2005. Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Google Scholar). Kelly offers one way of understanding this: "Any 'peace' involves a reworking of power relations, not just between nations or parts of nations but between men and women. Attempts are made to conscript women into a 'rebuilding the nation' agenda in which their needs are subordinated to those of repairing the damage to men and 'the society.' One central, but universally neglected, element of this is that the violations women experienced during the conflict are silenced, since the male combatants need to be constructed as heroes rather than rapists" (2000:62). This comment is suggestive, but it also requires attentiveness to the nature of the armed conflict and the construction of winners and losers, heroes and victims. 27. The silence of the perpetrators is a theme worthy of further research. I was struck by Antje Krog's comment that, to her knowledge, no rapist applied for amnesty from the South African TRC. See Krog (2001). As I completed revisions on this article, I also came across a fascinating piece by Roland Littlewood. In laying out a research agenda on military rape, he insists on the importance of understanding the motivations and experiences of the men, while acknowledging how difficult it will be to answer these questions given the "… near impossibility of research on humans… .and because of the post-conflict disgust, on the part of the principal and his surviving victim which prevents any sort of detailed contextual study (1997:13). 28. For a thought-provoking analysis of theories of language, referentiality, translation, and radical incommensurability, see Povinelli (2001) Povinelli, E. A. 2001. Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30: 319–334. Crossref, Web of Science ® , Google Scholar. 29. Das and Kleinman (2001: 5). 30. For a similar process in South Africa, see Ross (2002) Ross, F. 2002. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, London: Pluto Press. Google Scholar. 31. Jacobs, Jacobson, and Marchbank (2000: 82). I focus on women in this conclusion but hope I have demonstrated the importance of "gender-sensitive" strategies that take all genders into consideration. 32. Krog (2001) Krog, Antje. 2001. "Locked into Loss and Silence: Testimonies of Gender and Violence at the South African Truth Commission". In Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, Edited by: Moser, C. O. N. and Clark, F. C. 203–216. London: Zed Books. Google Scholar. 33. The Peruvian TRC designed the Program of Integral Reparations (PIR), one of the most comprehensive truth-commission reparations programs to date. One component of the PIR includes symbolic reparations, which would include public gestures, memorials, and media campaigns. See Guillerot (2006) and Laplante and Theidon (2007) Laplante, L. J. and Theidon, K. 2007. Truth with Consequences: The Politics of Reparations in Post-Truth Commission Peru. Human Rights Quarterly, 29(1): 228–250. Crossref, Web of Science ® , Google Scholar for more information on the Peruvian PIR.