Syria’s rebellious women
These women, fighting against both the Assad regime
and ISIL, don’t fit into any easy political narratives:
by Rachel Shabi
The real surprise is that there should be any surprise. Watching the
film series titled Syria’s Rebellious Women, it should be obvious that
this is the case: that there are women actively involved in the war, on
the ground.
Filmed over the past 18 months in rebel-held, war-ravaged Aleppo,
northern Syria, these documentary films show women who have been on the
front lines alongside men in this war-torn city, or are responsible for
securing food and vital supplies, or stitching up the wounded in field
hospitals and making sure that schools open and kids get to them.
One of the women profiled in the film, Ahed, was at the forefront of
demonstrations in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, both against the Bashar
al-Assad regime and against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),
and faced beatings by both. Now engaged in relief work, she notes that
some of the men in this conservative city may look at her askance. But
she doesn’t know why; she says: “I find it normal.”
These documentary films - the work of Syrian journalist Zaina Erhaim
with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) - are currently
screening across Europe and the United States - with one aim being to
bring our straying focus back onto women in this nightmarish war.
More specifically, the idea is clearly to stop us viewing Syrian
women only as victims - enslaved, raped or forced to flee the country -
without pausing to think if this is actually representative of the
entire female population.
So, alongside Ahed, we’re introduced to Zein, one of many women who
has been imprisoned and tortured at Adra prison, in Damascus - grimly
notorious as the place where political prisoners are detained by the
Syrian regime - a “cemetery for the living”, says Zein. Released after
14 months, she works as a paramedic at Aleppo’s now makeshift Dar al-Shifa
hospital, which was bombed and destroyed by the Syrian army. Then
there’s Ghalia who, despite repeated attacks and an arson attempt,
founded several vocational training centres for women in the rebel-held
Idlib province in northern Syria.
Waed, meanwhile, left her family behind in a government-controlled
part of Syria and is the only female citizen journalist (doubling up as
a paramedic), in northern Syria - having to cover her head and control
her words while working in Aleppo.
These women, fighting against both the Assad regime and ISIL, don’t
fit into any easy political narratives. They aren’t part of a divided
opposition, nor comprising various jihadi elements. They aren’t backed
by any of the international powers that have been funnelling funding or
weapons to their “sides” in what they’ve turned into a gruesome proxy
war.
No frame
And, of course, they don’t fit into a frame of Arab women as passive,
helpless victims, either. As such, they aren’t picked up by a Western
viewfinder that seeks Middle Eastern women in need of liberation - the
complex defined by Gayatri Spivak, a professor at Columbia University
who wrote the influential essay, Can the Subaltern Speak?, as the belief
that: “White men are saving brown women from brown men.”
But if women are not taken seriously as components in the fight on
the ground, they aren’t recognised as being part of any peace, either.
When a group of Syrian women turned up at the Geneva peace talks in
December 2013, demanding to be a part of this international peace
effort, then UN Special Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi pretty much
admitted this to be the case, saying: “[…] women have an important role
and women must play that role, but unfortunately it’s not very easy to
see women playing that role.”
The Syria peace talks held in Vienna a few weeks ago - and resumed
over the past weekend - notably did not include any actual Syrians in
the negotiations. But those negotiations also exposed the glaring
omission of any female delegates, too - as the all-male picture released
from the talks table revealed.
But the problem extends beyond the talks too. While it is painfully
true that women are dealing with the most grotesque violence in Syria,
with rape and sexual violence routinely used as weapons of war, it is
harder to grow international solidarity among women if Western women are
seeing only female victims in the Syria war.
Film-maker Erhaim, who is also a trainer and Syria project
coordinator with IWPR, notes that aid organisations “are victimising the
women [in Syria]. It’s a concept I still see” - adding that she hopes
these films will help counter such assumptions.
Made at great risk for all the women involved, Erhaim also hopes that
her films will reset the documentation of Syria’s nightmare war. She
tells her female protagonists: “You may well be forgotten when history
is written. I just want to prove that you were there.”
- Aljazeera |