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The essays in this volume examine
many related issues: the soldier/terrorist conundrum— one side’s
freedom fighter is another’s criminal; and the carpet bombing
of Afghanistan where the deaths of innocent civilians is
explained away as ‘collateral damage.’ It looks at what
constitutes ‘patriotism,’ at the terms ‘brave’ versus
‘coward’—the former is used for the American pilots who
bombard from a safe height but the latter for the Arab ‘terrorists’
who rammed their planes into the twin towers. Surely, the same
sense of duty, honour and sacrifice lie behind the actions of
‘cowardly’ terrorists and ‘brave’ soldiers. This is
brought out mainly in an interview with Susan Sontag who was
vilified and abused by the American pundits for her outburst
against the American policy after September 11.
A startling
contribution by Dubravka Ugresic on the Yugoslavian men and
women during war interrogates the gendered nature of war and how
the imagery of war and sex is often connected. Rape by soldiers
is often legitimised as part of male psychology during war as a
‘proof of manhood.’ A Yugo-mythology is created in which
weapons are given the names of women, quite reminiscent of the
Kargil war when the Indian Air Force fighter pilots joked how
they dropped bombs with ‘Raveena Tandon’ inscribed on them
to spite Musharraf’s men.
In this climate of
"escalating militarism," writes Sunera Thobani,
"there will be precious little emancipation for
women." In Afghanistan, for example, the Northern Alliance
has no better record of supporting women than that under the
Taliban regime, thus rendering US intervention disastrous in
terms of gender empowerment. Women in the West, on the other
hand, are equally abused because they are forced to parade their
nationalism by supporting military aggression. They have to live
with their brutalised husbands and sons when they return from
war. Here is a case of national interest cutting across gender
bonding.
At another level,
Western modernity is rejected by Osama bin Laden and his
supporters in the form of severe conservatism practiced upon
their own women who are unwaged and confined. Mohammad Atta went
to the extent of making a will barring any woman from touching
his corpse or approaching his grave. Yet, the use of western
technology such as arms and ammunition, aviation techniques and
the Internet by the 19 men of his team, who participated in the
September 11 carnage, should ideologically not be indifferent to
a womanpower that has increasingly contributed to the economic
successes of the West.
The last part of
the book is a collection of vignettes: short stories, letters
and diary entries. Among them, the recipient of the Nobel Peace
Prize, Rigoberta Menchu’s letter to President Bush in the wake
of 9/11 is noteworthy. The editors, Kalpana Sharma and Ammu
Joseph, inspire the view that all political processes like
citizenship, nationality, democracy, wealth-distribution,
globalization, the state and even freedom are not
gender-neutral. They have also produced evidence, marshalled
from much scholarship, that the western model is not always
synonymous with civilization or the Manichean other with
barbarism, especially when we see this in the context of women
related experiences.
What is, by far,
the most impressive lesson one learns from this book is a
comment on academic elitism: the role of the intellectual is not
simply to produce a disembodied, ‘objective’ commentary on
political events but to engage in political activity fearlessly
and passionately, to give radical opinions and commit oneself to
social justice movements. In my view, academics should listen
foremost to the voice of their conscience, if they have one
left.
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IN
Women and Politics in the Third World, a book reviewed in
these columns some months ago, I wrote that some of the contributors
of the volume argued how feminist organisational structures must
reflect the feminine values of gentleness and care. And yet, these
wholly domesticated images must not discount political activism.
What are usually taken to be two separate realms, the domestic and
the public, were not so widely disparate. Terror Counter-Terror
also addresses similar issues by emphasising how both war and peace
are about power distribution, which is the chief reason why women
have never been part of either. Side by side, the book puts forward
a virtual manifesto of women’s voices against male-bred violence,
particularly in the case of Afghanistan after 9/11. The violent
aftermath of the American tragedy perpetrated even more violence:
the recent events in Afghanistan tell their sad tale.
