Women against war AMID the debris of this war, feminist movements and women will celebrate, almost all over the world, their international day on March 8. They have been steadfast in refusing to be "enlisted for causes that do nothing for the emancipation either of peoples or of women". SOPHIE MASSOURI
HE reality of the war perpetrated in the Middle East over the past few weeks is very distant from the principles in whose defence it was supposedly waged. The defence of the weak against the arbitrariness and violence of the strong, which the leaders of the "allied" coalition claim as their goal, has never been so travestied.
This barbarism has not ended with the surrender of the Iraqi dictator. The embodiment in law of the use of force and of violence, the political use of humiliation, hurt those they claim to protect. After this carnage, the "most weak" will be sensed as weak and the strong as strong as never before.
Women had every reason to oppose this war. This legitimized and institutionalized violence echoes that perpetrated, for many centuries and in all societies, against women. War concentrates all the macho behaviour of our society and the sexist stereotypes — in support of "our gallant soldiers", mothers and wives are called on to participate in the patriotic mobilization.
The aim of the Gulf war is supposedly the defence of "international law"; but such rhetoric appears hollow when the women of Saudi Arabia are subject to the most rigorous enforcement of sharia (Islamic law) in the Middle East.
As the Algerian womens' movement has put it "the dignity of women is inseparable from that of the peoples" (see interview p. 5), and indeed it is the dignity of the Iraqi people, and that of the Arab masses, which imperialism has sought to break in this war. The Algerian Islamic fundamentalists have moreover well understood the logic which makes of every man, or woman, of every humiliated person, a potential enragé, and have used this logic for their own ends. The rise of fundamentalism is nourished by the war.
For women, in particular, the "new order" resembles the old, but worse. Rarely have the means employed contradicted so flagrantly the declared good intentions. This imperialist war has corrupted the very sense of law in whose interests it is supposedly waged; the women of the Middle East and of the Maghreb will be without doubt the silent victims of it, at least unless, as in Algeria, they rise up in defence of their interests.