Barbarian Beasts Or Mothers of Invention Relation of Gendered Fighter and Citizen Images Dissertation by Annette Weber
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Barbarian Beasts or Mothers of Invention Relation of Gendered Fighter and Citizen Images with a specific case study on Southern Sudan Dissertation by Annette Weber Fachbereich Politik- und Sozialwissenschaften Freie Universität Berlin July 2006 Annette Weber betreut von Prof. Dr. Marianne Braig/ Erstgutachterin Prof. Dr. Ute Luig/ Zweitgutachterin Verteidigt am 23. April 2006 Magna cum laude 2 To you Meret! you rule my world 3 Acknowledgement: To those staying with me in times of tension. And those who kept me happy. To all my friends who brought life and fun to me and my house. To my family who hardly ever asked why this is still going on but never gave up believing it will be done. To the women in Sudan who took me in – regardless, who talked to me – in spite of, who inspired me with their clarity and power, who kept their friendship over all these years, who questioned and critizised and challenged. To the women in Eritrea who were disillusioned but new their strength and will never go back. To all the people, women, men and children in the conflict areas of Chiapas, Los Angeles, Sudan, Darfur, Nuba Mountains, Upper Nile, Bahr el Ghazal, Equatoria, Khartoum, Cairo, Uganda, Eritrea, DR Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, who allowed me to take their thoughts, their experiences, their suffering and sorrow, their knowledge and hopes with me in my notebook. To Marianne Braig and Ute Luig who are my supervisors. To Ulrich Albrecht, who was my supervisor for many years. To Kris, who was reading it and re-reading it and kept on giving me the right words and grammar and encouragement. To the imagined community of feminist scholars. To many at amnesty international London for pushing me to the reality of human rights. To the scholars who brought endless flows of thought to my brain. To those who kept me invited to teach what I thought. 4 CONTENT I. INTRODUCTION 9 New wars 11 Dilemma 1: the absence of 14 Dilemma 2: Theory 16 Dilemma 3: Text 20 II. FEMINIST POSITIONING ON GENDER CONSTRUCTS 23 Mix of Methodology 27 II. 1. GENDERED CITIZENSHIP 35 Civic Myth 42 Gendered Citizenship 44 Southern Sudan: Citizen Perspective 46 Militarized Gendered Citizenship 48 II. 2. FEMINIST CONFLICT THEORY 52 Origin of Feminist Conflict Theory 52 Basic Assumptions of International Relations and Feminist Conflict Theory54 Power and Control: How to create a myth 58 Myth of Protection and Security 60 Myth of Caretakers 62 II. 3. CONSTRUCTION OF THE GENDERED BODY 67 Soldier Bodies 69 Caretaker Bodies 72 Female Soldier Bodies 73 III. WAR 81 Power 82 Power State – State of Power 84 III. 1. TECHNIQUES OF STATE FORMATION 87 III. 2 STATE FORMATION AS THE END OF INNOCENCE 95 Changes in the Dimensions of War 96 The Commodification of Killing 98 The War Machine 99 Logic of War 100 Changes in Speed and Space 103 Changes in Economic and State Dimension 108 Eros of War 111 III. 3 MODELS OF INSURGENCIES 114 Civil war 114 Just War 116 Political and military dimensions 118 5 Insurgencies 122 Warlord Insurgency – Personal Rule 129 Refugee Camps as State Models 132 III. 4. ACCEPTANCE OF MILITARY RULE IN THE AFRICAN CONTEXT 134 Post Colonial Regimes 140 State 142 Soldier-Ruler and Military States 145 Civil Society 147 Army Constitutes State 148 Nation State 150 Ethnicity 155 Economy 157 Foreign Powers and Militarizm 162 III. 5. HISTORY AND DYNAMICS OF INSURGENCY IN SUDAN 165 Representation Vanguard 166 Regular Army – Revolutionary Force 169 Historical Background and the Evolution of the Guerilla 170 Identity in Internal Liberation Struggle 171 Southern Parties 175 AnyaNya 186 III. 6. SUDAN PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY/MOVEMENT 191 Discipline and Control 194 Leadership 196 AnyaNya II 205 Nasir Faction, South Sudan Independence Movement/Army and SPLA United 207 Political Assessment 210 Economic Factors of Armed Groups 212 III. 7. THE POLITICAL PROFILE AND ORIENTATION OF THE SUDAN PEOPLE’s LIBERATION ARMY AND MOVEMENT 214 Guerilla as Political Force 214 Simulating the State 216 Enemy Image 218 State Vision 219 Identity 220 Political Agenda and Profile 222 Just War Legitimation 227 Vanguard SPLA 230 The Movement and Civil Population 231 New Sudan, Old Elite 236 6 IV. GENDER CONSTRUCTS IN WAR 248 IV. 1. THEORY: BARBARIAN BEASTS OR MOTHERS OF INVENTION? 248 Rewriting Herstory 248 The West and the Rest: Normative Subject Placement 253 Construction of Gender Identity 256 Gender Struggle 258 Miltitary Masculinity and the Threat of Female Soldiers. 263 IV. 2. PRAXIS: WOMEN’S ROLES IN WAR 265 Women as Recruitment Cadres 266 IV. 3. ASSESSMENT OF FEMALE FIGHTERS 268 Assignments 269 Motivation 272 Self-Assessment 276 IV. 4. FROM WARRIOR QUEENS AND LEOPARD WIVES 280 Absence of women in history 280 Examples of exception 281 Amazons 282 IV. 5. DISCOURSE: BODY 288 Rape 290 Female Rapists 295 Rape as a Bond with the new Militarized Family 296 Femininity as Camouflage 297 Prostitutes: the Ideal Guerilla? 298 Menstrual Blood as Initiation 303 IV. 6. GENDERED CONFLICT ROLES 305 Inauguration of the Male Warrior/Citizen 306 Legitimized use of violence 306 Mittäterschaft / Collaboration 309 V. COLLABORATION OF THE BEAUTIFUL SOULS 314 Mothering the Frontline 315 Forced Reproduction as Female National Heroism 320 Initiation/Training/Warfare 321 Enemy Image 326 Active Recognition 327 Movement Recognition 330 Demobilization 331 Women in SPLA/M 334 VI. CONCLUSION 340 VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY 345 7 I. INTRODUCTION 8 I. INTRODUCTION The relationship between fighter and citizen status Monrovia – trucks with armed young men and women enter Monrovia. More than 3 million people died in the last four years of conflict related causes in north-eastern Congo, more than 60 percent of the fighters are assumed to be under the age of 18, hundreds of girls and women are amongst the fighters. New attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda target mainly children. Girls and boys are abducted and forced – in turn – to abduct their siblings, kill their neighbours and commit acts of spectacular violence against those they care for. In the new generation of African Wars, children play an active part in fighting. Whereas we see and hear about cruel acts of violence committed by young boys, we increasingly see and hear about marauding girl gangs, however, most often – their acts of violence are overshadowed by the forced sexual slavery and rape by male gang members and insurgency leaders. The line between civilians and fighters is becoming more and more blurred. Civilians – as in the war in Darfur in western Sudan – became the main, and sometimes the only target. However, the switching from civilian life into militarized life, from the life of the farmer, the unemployed civilian into a member of an armed group and back is not only known since the Genocide in Rwanda. Mainly young men – and more and more women – use and are forced to use – ‘fighter’ as a lifestyle, as means of survival and income. Many war leaders do not consider civilians as the population that is fought for or the population that should be protected from the enemy. The population is not understood as the rightful citizens of a state or territory. Civilians are easy targets for looting, rape and recruitment. Beyond that they are considered a nuisance who should be dealt with by the international humanitarian community. For the international humanitarian community, civilians in conflict regions are mainly perceived as victims of the wars, in need for humanitarian interventions. For the globalized political and economic world, civilians in conflict areas are not considered citizens, are denied human rights or are described as a group of lost people that are 1 kept on a mere survival level . Serious interest in their citizen status, their abilities, their interest, their needs, perspectives, desires and aims is hard to detect. The question remaining is not only, if there is a difference between new war leaders and rebel leaders of ‘just wars’, independence or guerrilla struggle. An important factor is the definition, perception and reality of citizenship. How is this definition linked to the concept of state and what – if any – is the relation between fighter and citizen status? In many conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, the status of fighters in society, and further in the 1 Seibert, T. (2003). “Die neue Kriegsordnung: Der globale Kapitalismus und seine barbarische Rückseite“, in Das Unternehmen Krieg: Paramilitärs, Warlords und Privatarmeen als Akteure der Neuen Kriegsordnung , Dario Azzellini and B. Kanzleiter. Berlin; Hamburg, Assoziation A. p. 23. 9 power and elite structure of formal or informal leadership conglomerates, appear to be the entry ticket. The ‘cake’ is not shared with somebody who did not take up arms, who did not fight, neither in the Democratic Republic of Congo, nor in Sudan today. Citizenship, however, seems to have an aura of idealist vision but hardly any evidential reality. The question of citizenship, representation, and participation however is of essential importance in the transformation from a conflict to a post-conflict state. In the formation of society the definition of citizen and the respective role, rights and duties will determine the future developments of newly emerging states, post-conflict societies, political traditions, and the very stability of the state and government. It is troublesomely striking that the definition and model of the fighter has much more reality to it than that of a citizen. It is equally alarming, that the majority of states in eastern and central Africa and the Horn of Africa are lead by former insurgent-leaders turned into head of states. Museveni in Uganda, Kagama in Rwanda, Aferworki in Eritrea, Zelawi in Ethiopia, Kabila in DR Congo, Bashir and the late Garang and now Salva Kiir in Sudan, reflect a tradition of militarized leadership with control as a leading topos of their leadership and an almost paranoid fear of the uncontrollable citizen and the potential of their democratic representation.