Drawing upon one or more case studies, examine the role played by women during a violent conflict, and compare this with their role during the post-settlement peace building process.

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Drawing upon one or more case studies, examine the role played by women during a violent conflict, and compare this with their role during the post-settlement peace building process.

This essay will examine the role that women have played in a violent liberation/revolutionary struggle and the role they played in peace building and in the building of a new society after the conflict.  I will be using the example of Eritrean liberation as my case study.

War, armed conflict, revolution and struggles for independence have often been seen as men’s business.  In fact women have always been centrally involved in all of these activities, playing both active and passive roles – as aggressor and victim – just as men have.

Most of the history of war and peace has women and men playing out the traditional roles that most societies have ascribed to them, although there have always been exceptional men and women who have stepped outside the norms.  In the vast majority of cases, however, we can analyse women’s and men’s involvement in war as separate and different from each other.  In most cases, wherever in the world, or whatever the time, the role that women have played has been generally similar.

Over the last century there have been a large number of conflicts that have been fought as liberation struggles – either to liberate a nation from colonial rule, like Zimbabwe and Algeria; or to liberate a minority group from majority oppression, or  liberate a people from the oppressive actions of their own government, for example South Africa and Nicaragua.   In some of these struggles women have played a more active and combative role than has been the norm and also in some cases the liberation of women has been either a central plank of at least one of the stated aims of the struggle.

I want to look at the role that women have played in this kind of struggle, particularly in Eritrea both during the struggle and in the peace building.  I also will be looking at whether women’s liberation was advanced in any way as a direct result of the struggle and the part that women played in it.

The war in Eritrea lasted for thirty years and was a liberation struggle against Ethiopia, who were seen as an occupying force – set up by Ethiopia’s own ex-colonialists, through Haile Selassie, with the Soviet Union supporting the Ethiopia Derg in its fight after the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1974.  The war was a long one between two very poor countries with occupied land ebbing and flowing, with many complicating factors including civil war and major infighting within both Eritrea and Ethiopia. It was also placed in a very dynamic period of history – conditions and situations changed a lot during the thirty years and so it is not possible to be simplistic in looking at the roles that women played.  None the less we can make generalisations without making arguments invalid.

Whilst I will be looking at the roles that women played and their liberation over the period of the war and the first few post-independence years, most of the information that I am basing the essay on come from the last few years of the war.  There is a whole new story playing out with the more recent war with Ethiopia, which I will not be examining.  For a more detailed political chronology, see Appendix 1.


Women's role in the conflict

Women’s role in the conflict changed significantly over the thirty years of the war.  Most obviously women weren’t allowed to enlist as fighters at the beginning of the war, neither were they part of the decision making bodies of the Eritrean Liberation Front – which predated the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.  

Over the course of thirty years there were a lot of changes.  Areas were liberated and lost; women became more and more active, while the world outside of the region changed along with women’s position in it.

Whilst a lot of attention is and has been put on the role of women fighters in Eritrea, it is important to remember that still the majority of women (as men) were civilians and played vital roles in the liberation struggle as such.  

As Christine Mason says:  

... the current discourse on Eritrean women largely categorizes their participation in the liberation struggle only in active or passive terms… In the context of the war for liberation, the ultimate demonstration of active female service was participation in the front as a military fighter or in roles previously reserved for men…“Traditional” gender roles situating women in fields such as health care, food preparation, child rearing and other non-combatant occupations during the war were frequently viewed as less significant, passive participation.

Cynthia Enloe examines the traditional roles that women have played throughout history in war and violent conflict.  Whilst she has a very western perspective – analysing women’s roles largely in the US and the UK over the last two centuries – the roles she describes are still valid and relevant.  As she also points out, ‘a war and a revolution are not synonymous’ and the ELF and EPLF (in common with other revolutions/liberation struggles) had a much wider socio-political agenda than merely ridding itself of an occupying force.  Nonetheless, her analysis of the range of roles women play in conflict provides a starting point in examining women’s roles in Eritrea.

Wife, mother, daughter and sweetheart

The first and perhaps most obvious role that women play during conflict is a prime role that they play at any time: that of wife, mother, daughter or sweetheart.  This role is defined in relationship to someone else – usually a man.  This offers several vital roles to men fighting: someone to protect; someone to (re)produce;  and someone to care-take, motivate, and inspire.

In Eritrea, as in many other conflicts, women sacrificed their sons and daughters for the liberation movement, and many Eritrean women actively supported their husbands’ involvement in the war:

Women civilians whose husbands were fighting often went with them to a civilian base and cooked, nursed etc or if they were in a liberated area the same.

After 1977 or so marriages were allowed between fighters and that meant that women fighters also bore and raised children. Women fighters who had babies went to a place for women and babies and whilst they were pregnant they helped look after the new mothers and the babies whose mothers had gone back to the front.  At the beginning women had to leave their babies after three months to go back to work, later after research showed that this was detrimental to the children they stayed with them for a year and then 18 months.  Men had nothing to do with bringing up the children at all.

Nurse – support services

This role merges more into the previous one in this liberation struggle than it might in a conventional interstate war, as ‘fighters’ and civilians are much closer physically – often feeding, nursing and supporting the soldiers as a community rather than having specific support roles.  In Eritrea the relationship was reciprocal, with the ‘fighters’ helping to work in the fields, educate and organise communities in liberated areas.  In this sense the ‘fighters’ roles were a little less defined also and many of the ‘fighters’ spent time doing many different things and not just fighting.  

The roles that civilian women played in relation to the soldiers was very much an extension of their normal roles within the community and as already mentioned many civilian women went with the husbands to base camps precisely to carry out the role of wife to him as a soldier.

The role that women within the EPLF played also tended to follow the traditional pattern with more women than men nursing.  Many women in the EPLF were trained as ‘barefoot doctors’, and educators.  As the war went on more women became involved in the front line fighting and men and women shared the tasks in the camps and in the liberated areas – this was a gradual process and often born out of necessity rather than ideology.

 

Prostitutes

Whilst Eritrean women were prostitutes in Asmara for the Ethiopian troops during the war there appears to be no evidence to suggest that the EPLF used women in this way.  

Women nonetheless played a role in providing a sexual outlet for men.  The issue of sexual relations was one that both the ELF and the EPLF gave consideration to in organising themselves. Both men and women fighters were expected to stay celibate, at the beginning of the war, unless they had their spouses with them. Although this wasn’t respected across the board, it does seem that it was respected to an extent. Evidence in other liberation struggles seems to suggest that most women who become fighters are single women.  After 1977 soldiers were allowed to have sexual relations with other soldiers and this became quite widespread.

Join now!

There were incidents of sexual harassment, and even rape, within the EPLF but few talked about it.  However, if a man was proved to have raped a woman they were harshly punished.  Nonetheless, more subtle sexual pressure was used by men in higher positions to intimidate and control women.  At the same time there was some competition amongst women for the attention of men in high positions – for the gain of extra privileges, status, comfort etc.

Workers - keeping the economy going

 

Again this role is perhaps less clearly separated in a liberation struggle, as in ...

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