Download issue (PDF) - Nieman Foundation - Harvard University

Women: International
also gave the impression that she didn’t
want to talk and that she needed to stay
silent and be strong to face her
husband’s burial. This was a critical
time for her, a time when she had to
start making decisions regarding this
new and poorer life she had entered.
She was grieved by the loss of her
husband, but she was also terrified of
entering even deeper poverty, something
I learned when I came back later
with an interpreter. She spoke little
but kept saying how different life was
now. She explained to me that she
would only send her son to school and
only to primary school. Her daughter
was going to stay at home, and by not
attending school would, like her, enter
the cycle of poverty.
Burundi is one of the poorest countries
in the world. In any underdeveloped
country with a large peasant
farmer population, the death of a young
able-bodied man means a great loss of
income to his family. Expenditures must
be reduced; the widow either reduces
the amount of food she buys or the
quality she has been trying to maintain.
Sometimes, she decides she will eat
only once a day.
I find the silence of women like this
one expressive of a point of view. Talking
about the tragedy unfolding uses
up much-needed reserves of energy.
The combination of observing, taking
in, and emotionally processing the new
realities of one’s life requires extra
strength and resiliency. These women
will need to dig deep into their internal
reservoir of strength to survive.
For journalists to penetrate this protective
wall of silence requires time
and effort. Yet when these women tell
their stories, they are so very different
than men’s and necessary to hear if we
are to understand the consequences of
war. To speak with men in areas of
conflict is to hear them offer precise
descriptions of what happened—how
many people died, where the war was
fought, a bravado about their men colleagues,
and a strong perception of the
enemy, which is not necessarily accurate.
Although the social and historical
backgrounds are different, I found this
to be a common thread as I reported
on conflict in Bosnia, Burundi, Rwanda
and Nagorno-Karabakh.
Among women living amid conflict,
there is a ruthless practicality. They are
very conscious of the fact that they
don’t have mobility and that at any
time they could become refugees.
Young mothers are burdened both by
the care they give to their children but
also to their elders. Yet their constant
state of readiness is different from the
men’s, who think primarily about fighting
back even if it means losing their
lives. For the women, its about crisis
management and different calculations,
such as thinking about things to be
packed and what is possible to carry if
they have to suddenly leave their homes
for good. It is also their responsibility
to think about how to allocate tasks to
members of the family if the time does
come to leave their home.
I have watched refugees at the border
of Burundi and Rwanda and in
Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia. Perhaps
because of the ways in which they’ve
had to think about all of this and prepare
for it, women cope better with
being a refugee than do men. A Serbian
woman left the Krajina, which is sandwiched
between Bosnia and Croatia.
Along with 250,000 refugees, she
walked into Serbia carrying her family’s
clothes in a hand-embroidered tablecloth.
I admired the light yellow tablecloth
with the exquisite blue and white
flowers strewn around the cloth and
told her so. She smiled sadly and while
stroking it explained that she did it
herself when she first got married. Her
children who were with her were now
teenagers. This tablecloth will become
an important part of her family history.
Her smile said so much; no words were
necessary to know that she and her
family were never going back to the
Krajina. The tablecloth symbolized the
loss of her home and land but connected
her to her past identity in the
Krajina.
What I find most fascinating is how
women have a “psychological map” of
the war that is critical for the survival of
their families in the longer term. This
map offers them a way of seeing the
world in its entirety—in its past and
present and future simultaneously. In
interviews, this idea doesn’t always
emerge as clearly as this, and often to
hear women speak of this can be confusing
to listen to. But there is a strange
human filing system there among their
jumbled emotions. A journalist needs
to go back several times and speak with
other women in this community. Out
of these conversations will emerge similar
themes and reoccurring threads, all
of which will create a story that should
be told.
This psychological map consists of
emotional and psychological happenings
of the family and community,
things that become the cornerstones
of family history and, when brought
together, create a community’s collective
memory. In many countries that
experience war, records are rarely kept
of what actually happened: women’s
collective memories become crucial to
the perception of that country’s history.
Women are also, in many instances,
the instigators of peace. On the island
of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea,
conflict broke out between local landowners
and the mining company and
the government on the other side. After
some years of conflict the women
started to initiate dialogue with the aim
of establishing peace. Finally a peace
agreement, initiated by these women,
was reached. So, too, in Sarajevo when
by the end of 1995 the women had had
enough of the miseries of war. In my
interviews with them, there was already
talk of pushing the men towards
accepting peace. Although what happened
politically was more complicated,
the women’s role as movers of
the peace process cannot be underestimated.
Peace is not a political or ideological
stand for these women, rather it
is seen as a necessity. As one woman
put it to me in Sarajevo, “Peace is a
strategy, so my children can live a normal
live.”
One problem with telling these important
stories is that they are difficult
to tell. They take time and sensitivity to
report and cannot be told in quick
soundbites or written as typical news
stories with a tidy beginning, middle
and end. For example, when a war
ends, and the United Nations and foreign
journalists go home, it is left to
Nieman Reports / Winter 2001 83