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https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/margaret-owen/conflict-widows-agents-of-change-and-peacebuilding
CONFLICT WIDOWS: AGENTS OF CHANGE & PEACEBUILDING
By Margaret Owen -
10 June 2015
The rise of
religious fundamentalism and conflict is diminishing widows to the status of a
chattel. Their key role as sole supporters of families must be prioritised in
negotiations for conflict prevention and resolution.
I am always at a
loss to understand why the status of widows continues to be so neglected,
especially in conflict and post-conflict environments, given their basic and
long-term needs, and their crucial roles as sole supporters of families, as key
players in peace building and the restoration of the social fabric of society
in their communities and countries generally.
Widowhood is not
just the root cause of poverty and inequality across the generations but also
the reason that millions of children of widows, daughters as well as sons, vital
to a society’s prosperity and future, are denied education and well-being.
Without any qualifications, they will become a cost and not a benefit to their
society. Apart from the human rights and ethical issues, this neglect will have
irrevocable social economic and political consequences. For poverty,
inequality – especially gender inequality – and injustice, if not addressed in
peace processes, will fuel future conflicts.
Never has the
world witnessed such an increase in the numbers of widows as we have seen in
the MENA region in the last decades. They and their children are the poorest of
the poor, exploited, wretched, and abused, with little or no acknowledgement or
support for their important social and economic contributions to the
development of peace negotiations, and the stability of communities.
Conflict,
revolutions, sectarian strife, violent extremism, lawlessness has created
uncounted millions of widows, of all ages, as well as wives of the forcibly
disappeared or “missing”. Abandoned, without adult males to protect them
and negotiate for essential services, mostly devoid of pensions or other social
security, these female heads of households, their children and other
dependents, are vulnerable to many diverse forms of discrimination, exploitation
and abuse, including sexual violence, during conflicts – and long after
conflicts are formally concluded.
Widows, in
particular rural widows living in traditional communities, even in times of
relative peace, may lose rank and status on the death of their husbands, as
cultural practices and discriminatory attitudes take precedence over modern
laws, constitutional guarantees and international standards about gender
equality and the empowerment of women. They may be forced to remain secluded
within their husband’s family home, as domestic or agricultural slaves,
“inherited” by a husband’s brother in a forced remarriage, or excluded and
abandoned if they do not adhere to such customs, losing all rights to
inheritance or share in land and property. In which case they have few
alternatives for survival, except exploitative informal sector labour and
begging, and are at high risk of violence and sexual exploitation.
But conflict
situations exacerbate widows’ vulnerability, particularly when they are internally
displaced or become refugees.
The rise of
religious fundamentalism in the present unstable environments perpetuates and
extends discriminatory patriarchal attitudes and harmful traditional practices
relating to widowhood. These intensify the stigma, diminishing widows to the
status of a chattel, someone without any rights, or access to justice. Yet
widows should never be seen exclusively as victims of patriarchal oppression,
but recognised, in conflict environments, as agents of change, and potential peace
builders, often more able than married women to empathise and make contacts
with other bereaved women across ethnic and religious divides. For
widows, whatever their background or the political, religious, ethnic identity
of their dead husbands, have so much in common, in their fervent wish for
peace, and for a future for their children.
The violence,
revolutions, invasions, occupations, civil wars and insurrections in the MENA
region have caused millions of civilian deaths in addition to the loss of life
among the armed forces and other militias. Moreover, unknown numbers of men are
missing, and their wives may never discover whether they are held in prison, or
are lying nameless in some mass grave.
The dearth of
reliable statistics on the numbers, ages, and situation of widows is one of the
main obstacles to galvanising the UN, governments, and aid agencies into
actions to address this topic. It is vital that data, quantitative and
qualitative, is gathered, using methodologies that are appropriate to safeguard
the dignity of the women interviewed so that all aspects of their lives that
need addressing, including such details as support systems, coping survival
strategies, and experiences of violence, including sexual violence, are
properly documented to inform policy makers. And, in the case of violations of
the law, especially sexual violence, forced remarriage, sexual slavery, the
evidence must be gathered as a strong basis for criminal prosecutions of the
perpetrators under national or international laws.
The richest
source of information is the widows themselves, and a wealth of anecdotal and
narrative material exists, gathered through the initiatives of grass-roots
women’s associations undertaking their own surveys and research, securing the
trust of traumatised bereaved women, many of whom, having witnessed the murder
of their husbands, are also victims of rape. A shocking common feature of
war is the separation of men and boys from the women and girls, the killing of
the former and the rape of the latter. Conflict widows suffer multiple stigmas,
as women, as widows, as rape victims, refugees, IDPs and also members of ethnic
minorities in situations where sectarian strife prevails.
Widows are of all
ages, including elderly grandmothers, young mothers, and even young girl
children coming from communities where child marriage is still a prevalent
practice. Widows’ voices are rarely heard, and so fail to inform the national or
international policies concerned with conflict resolution and peace processes.
It is also not recognised that widows are frequently the sole breadwinners, supporting
children, and other dependents, often the elderly, the sick, and the wounded.
We all had hopes
that the UN SCR 1325 and
the subsequent eight UN SCR
Resolutions on Women Peace and Security would ensure that gender issues,
which should accommodate those relating to widowhood, would be made central in
conflict resolution, prevention and peace building negotiations, but 15 years
after this Resolution was agreed by Member States, implementation is
poor. If the requirement to analyse the impact of the conflict on women
and girls were fully complied with, then the complex cross-cutting issues of
widowhood would be prioritised, and where peace tables are established, widows
would be represented on them.
Lebanon is now home
to over 1.3 million registered refugees from Syria, 80% of them women and
children, of whom many are widows or wives of the “disappeared”. There are many
widows among the Palestinian refugees who have lived here since the Naqba of
1948, and stateless widows and asylum-seeking wives of the disappeared from
Iraq, adding to the numbers of Lebanese widows. Lebanese hospitality is being
stretched to the limit.
The UNHCR reports
that women, mainly widows, head more than 145,000 Syrian refugee households.
Possible estimates for the numbers of widows in Iraq range between one million
to four million, or 10% of all adult women. We have no figures for child
widows. The Iraq-Iran war, the killings under Saddam Hussein, the invasion
and the occupation and now the barbaric murders by ISIS, suicide bombings, and
general violence have hugely increased the numbers. In the KRG also, apart from
the refugee influx from Syria and Iraq, there are some 50,000 Kurdish widow
survivors of the Halabja and Anfal chemical weapons atrocity of 1988, who have
still many unmet needs as they age and their health further deteriorates.
Recently, at a Parallel Event hosted by Palestinian women at the 2015 UN Commission on the Status of
Women in New York, I was told that in Gaza two thirds of all women there
were widows.
The international
community needs to recognise the semi-autonomous cantons of Rojava, Syrian
Kurdistan, which now host over 1.5 million internally displaced persons among
who are many female headed households dependent mainly on the services and
support of the Rojava women’s NGOs. These women and children are refugees in
all but name, but are unregistered by the UNHCR and, to date, no UN or Red
Cross humanitarian aid has been forthcoming to support them.
They include not
just Kurds, but Arabs, Turkmen, and Assyrians, including Christians. Rojava’s
Charter gives all of them equal protection and rights, for it is based on
freedom of belief, gender equality, and pluralism. A model for all of Syria and
other countries in this region when, in due time, peace accords must be drawn
up in which guarantees of gender equality must be central if lasting peace is
to be secured.
Many Kurdish
fighters from the People’s Defence Units (YPG and YPJ) have lost their lives
defending Rojava against ISIS, and Rojava is also home to many Kurdish women
whose husbands died in the regime’s prisons. Half the People’s Defence Units
are women. The ways in which the gender equality provisions in the Charter are
actually implemented from the centre down to the village is a model for best
practice everywhere.
There is another
fact that we must face, however difficult. If it is true that at least 5,000
ISIS fighters have been killed in the last two years in Syria and Iraq, then we
must address the situation of thousands more widows including the women who
were abducted and forcibly married to the fighters as “trophy wives”, or taken
in “temporary marriages”. Their fate is unknown but all these women
deserve our concern and help, whatever faction their dead husband was allied to
or the circumstances of their marriage. Nor can we, actually, turn our backs on
the “Jihadi widows”, the girls who were lured from other countries to join
these terrorists.
Refugee widows
whether living in camps, or struggling to survive and care for their children
in other basic accommodation, in Lebanon, KRG, Jordan and Turkey, are all
experiencing very challenging times. The majority have never had to work
outside the home, have been totally dependent on their husbands, many are
illiterate, and have had no income-generating training, to help them survive.
They are vulnerable to economic and sexual exploitation, forced prostitution,
and to sexual slavery.
There have been
several reports that impoverished refugee widows, unable to find the rents
demanded for accommodation in their host countries, are forced into
prostitution, and are targeted by traffickers for sexual exploitation. Some of
these women have been arrested as prostitutes; in Iraq there have been reports
of young widows recruited as suicide bombers.
A common survival
strategy of destitute widows is to withdraw children from school, to provide
some income from exploitative child labour, or sell or give away their
daughters in a child marriage. This is happening in the KRG, and in
Lebanon. Widows unable to feed all their children choose to marry off their
young daughters, hoping and praying that such marriages will at least keep them
safe from sexual violence.
In the KRG camps
and in Iraq there are reports of marriage agencies arranging marriages of young
girl brides, often the daughters of refugee widows, to older Arab men from the
Gulf States who will pay a dowry. An Iraqi project was offering 10 million
Iraqi dinars (about $8,500) to men in their late 30s or 40s if they would marry
a widow. Hanaa Adwar, who heads Al-Amal, a
Baghdad-based NGO, rejected this proposal for tackling the vast numbers of
widows as “cruelty” – forcing the widow to marry another man just to get
government help.
What needs to
be done: filling the data gap