Fighting war is a women's issue
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
Pentagon war is a women's issue, say women all over the
world who oppose the U.S. military aggression against Iraq.
Women are demonstrating and leading protests against the
imperial war in record numbers.
The Bush administration claims that war is a "women's issue"
too. Bush and the generals have tried to justify their brutal
bombing and continued occupation of Afghanistan in part by
pointing to the brutal treatment of women there by the
Taliban.
What hypocrisy: It's no secret now that Washington financed
and fostered the rise of the Taliban in the first place.
The United States bombed the population and infrastructure
of Afghanistan mercilessly. It continues to occupy the country
in the interests of Big Oil and geopolitical control in the
Central Asia region.
Oil corporations have been trying to get a pipeline through
Afghanistan for about 10 years. (New York Times, May 26,
2002)
Washington installed the new regime headed by Hamid
Karzai--a former consultant for the U.S. oil company Unocal.
Karzai helped Unocal plan a proposed 1,500-kilometer gas
pipeline starting in Turkmenistan, stretching across Afghan
istan and ending in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, at ground zero Afghan istan, the population's
misery deepens.
Afghani writer Zama Coursen-Neff, co-author of "We Want to
Live as Humans," says, "Women and girls are still being abused,
harassed and threatened all over Afghanistan, often by
government troops and officials." (Reuters, Dec. 12)
In one province in rural northern Afghanistan, there is an
epidemic of mothers dying in childbirth--6,500 maternal deaths
for every 100,000 live births. This is the highest rate ever
documented--and 87 percent of these deaths were preventable.
(U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Remember all those promises from Wash ington about
"rebuilding" Afghanistan?
The cosmetics industry sent free lipstick to Afghani women.
Backed by Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue magazine, the industry
also sent some money to establish a "beauty school" in Kabul.
(The London Telegraph, Nov. 17)
Strangling economic sanctions
This terrible crisis for women also accompanies "undeclared"
wars the United States wages on countries that try to establish
some economic and national independence.
Before the U.S. imposed sanctions against Iraq after the
first Gulf War in 1991, women there had the right to education,
employment, freedom of movement, equal pay for equal work,
universal day care and five years of maternity leave.
(www.madre.org)
Today sanctions have devastated the Iraqi economy and its
public services that made these rights a reality.
Far worse, sanctions have resulted in the deaths of more
than 1 million people in Iraq. More than 60 percent of them
were children under the age of 7. The women of Iraq have
watched their children die from starvation and preventable
disease. (UNICEF Child and Maternal Mortality Survey, 1999)
Nawal el Saadawi--Egyptian feminist, activist, author,
physician and freedom fighter for Arab women--laid bare U.S.
policy's impact on the women of Iraq: "Who is being punished in
Iraq? It's not the rich people--it is the poor. It is women,
children and the poor who suffer the most, who die most in war
and in 'peace' under sanctions. The United States has no
interest in the Arab region except for oil." (Workers World,
April 30, 1998)
And remember all the media propaganda about how the United
States and its NATO allies were bombing the former Yugoslavia
to "liberate" women and refugees of all genders?
Today almost one-third of the 700,000 women and girls forced
into sexual slavery in the world annually have been transported
into areas of what was socialist Yugoslavia, now broken apart
by the United States and other NATO powers. U.S. officials
working for the United Nations have been implicated in this
capitalist sex trade for profit. And the organized-crime
network of prostitution is tied to the U.S.-backed Kosovo
Liberation [sic] Army. (New York Times, Oct. 20)
It's a class war
How is war a women's issue?
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates
that of the 50 million people uprooted by war around the world,
75 to 80 percent are women and children. Eighty percent of
casualties caused by small arms in a war are women and children
in the civilian population--outnumbering military casualties.
(Refugees magazine, UNHCR)
In war zones, women work daily to obtain food, water and
fuel, and to care for children and elders devastated by wartime
disease and trauma. The loss of a father or husband brings
extra economic burdens because of many women's economic
dependence on men. ("War and Public Health," 1997)
In fact, as the United States prepares to launch an all-out
war on Iraq, it is becoming more and more apparent that the
Pentagon drive for global domination is really a class war--a
war against the poor and oppressed of the world.
It is an international war against the women and girls who
do two-thirds of the world's work, most of it unpaid and much
of the rest at sweatshop wages that can only feed capitalist
profits. (Global Women's Strike-UK)
The United States pours more that $450 billion a year into
military spending. A mere 20 percent of that could provide the
essentials of life for everyone on the planet--water,
sanitation, basic health, nutrition, literacy and a minimum
income. (Global Women's Strike-UK)
It is also a domestic war waged against women in the United
States.
A recent study of industrialized countries found that the
United States had the highest poverty rate for female-headed
households of all countries studied: 30.9 percent compared to a
10.5 percent average. (Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper,
Sept. 2000)
In fact, 60 percent of all poor adults in the United States
are women. Recent census figures show that the sinking
capitalist economy here is hurting women in disproportionate
numbers. Working women are 40 percent more likely to be poor
than working men, and families headed by a single woman are
twice as likely to be poor as families headed by a single man.
(NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund)
An estimated 20 percent of African American women and
Latinas live below the poverty level. (U.S. Department of
Health and Human Resources, 2002)
As the U.S. government marches toward war, states are making
budget cuts to deal with an estimated $50 billion shortfall.
This means that in 2003 the situation of many women in this
country will worsen, in a heartbreaking parallel to the lives
of women in other parts of the world.
More women here will be evicted from their homes, have
utilities disconnected, go hungry together with their children.
They will spend more time trying to get medical care, and will
still be turned away. And women of color will bear a
disproportionate share of this overall burden.
Some women will be forced by the "economic draft" of racism,
sexism, homophobia and low-paying or non-existent jobs into
joining the U.S. military.
Still others will suffer at the hands of men returning from
war--men programmed to kill by the military who end up killing
their wives and lovers, as did veterans of the Fort Bragg
Special Operations unit returning from Afghanistan last
summer.
Pentagon war & women's liberation
Fighting to stop Pentagon war is a women's issue. But not
because women are instinctively and "naturally" more peaceful.
Not because women give birth or because women have been the
"guardians of life" while men have been making war.
Fighting Pentagon war is a women's issue because it flows
out of the inherent need of capital to expand its markets and
its rate of exploitation in order to survive--and women's
labor, paid and unpaid, is a foundation upon which this profit
system rests.
Capitalism wages brutal imperialist wars and imposes brutal
imperialist peace in order to secure those profits, extorted
from working class, oppressed and impoverished people of all
sexes.
Now, on the eve of this war with Iraq, young U.S. men may
face the reinstitution of registration for the draft, and young
women, presumably, would not. But from the perspective of
progressive activism, the point is not to get young,
working-class women onto the frontlines of battle in Iraq--the
point is to get the men out.
Fighting against Pentagon war is a women's issue. It is
linked to the struggle for the liberation of all poor and
working-class people, all oppressed people.
Stop the war on Iraq! U.S. out of Korea, the Philippines,
Colombia and Vieques! Stop the war on women!
Minnie Bruce Pratt, a lesbian, anti-racist activist,
organized for women's liberation in the military-dominated town
of Fayetteville, N.C., in the 1970s and 1980s. She is currently
a member of International ANSWER.
Reprinted from the Jan. 23, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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