The mettle of mothers

One of my absolute favorite people, Nick Hockings, once said to me, "Wars will end when parents stop accepting flags for their dead children." He was referring to the war in Iraq at the time, but his was a timeless observation. Martyrs, flags, and dog tags make for poor substitutes for children. Any parent can attest to that.

As a slight change of pace, I'd like to talk a bit about two instances of courage and hope in the face of despair, times when parents -- actually mothers and women more generally -- have decided they'd rather have their sons and daughters and neighbors to corpses. In some cases, these women affected the course of history and their cultures, and in others they are still affecting a change and may (godwilling) alter the course of insanity.

Act 1: Madres de Plaza de Mayo
For seven years, starting in 1976, the junta of Argentina waged war against its citizens. The "Dirty War," as it is called, began after President Peron's death. His wife and vice president, Isabel Peron, took hold of the government but was soon removed from power by the military, who then attempted to consolidate its position by committing genocide against its people. Ultimately, between 10,000 and 30,000 people were "disappeared" or murdered, most of them trade unionist, students, and activist - your normal undesirables.

Although some say the Falklands War with Britain was the reason for the Dirty War's ending, there was a growing movement of opposition during the war led by the mothers of the disappeared. And their protest helped to undermine the junta both nationally and internationally.

During their campaign of terror, the government abducted "subversives" and innocents alike, tortured them, drugged them and dropped them alive out of airplanes into the ocean, stole the babies from pregnant prisoners, and denied any knowledge of even the existence of the abductees.

Starting on a Saturday in 1977, mothers of children who had disappeared gathered in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, wearing white head scarves with the names of their missing children written on them. Some even wore pictures of their children around their necks. Soon the women began to meet every Thursday to demand answers, marching to see their children again or to know what had happened to them.

The government, of course, denied any knowledge of their children's whereabouts and tried to ignore the uppity mothers, calling them crazies and subversives, in the hopes that they'd go away. They didn't.

Although everyone knew the government was behind the mass disappearances, no one spoke up, no one except the mothers. In Latin America, and especially the Catholic Argentina, women had one of two roles: the public role, which usually translated into 'prostitute', and the private role, which was the respectable 'mother.' Good women did not engage in the public sphere, making the very public, very focused, very political actions of the mothers all the more powerful. As Gilda Rodriguez writes:

By showcasing their grief in public, the Madres turned their motherhood and their bodies into political tools to hold the government accountable for its actions.

Over time, their actions drew the attention of the international community. Human rights organizations helped the mothers to organize, to learn to give speeches, and to focus their movement. It has been said that

As mothers, they presented a powerful moral symbol which, over time, transformed them from women seeking to protect their children to women wishing to transform the state so that it reflected maternal values.

Although some of the mothers were themselves disappeared, the movement continued to grow, placing pressure on the government and on the country as a whole.

For years, the mothers were the only public sign of dissent, but slowly the movement grew to include the middle class and workers more generally. On December 10, 1982, they held a 24-hour protest, this time with thousands behind them. By 1983, the government's disdain for the mothers' movement went public, as police used tear gas and sticks to break up and break down the mothers. But theirs was a "a tenacity born out of a mother's love," and it would not be broken so easily.

Eventually, with the help of international pressure and the fall of the military junta during the Falklands War, the Dirty War came to an end, but the mothers kept going. They demanded that those responsible be held accountable, and while many children never came home and many parents never found out what happen to their babies, the movement changed the way women and mothers were perceived. No longer relegated to the private sphere alone, these women marked their ground in the public sphere and called tyranny by name.

Act 2: Women in Black
During the first Intifada in 1987, Israeli women began to gather in vigils. By 1988, these small vigils became a movement with weekly demonstrations in Jerusalem on Fridays (I assume because of Sabbath). Arab-Israeli and Palestinian women joined in, leading to a coalition of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian women. They had no agenda or platform other than the end of aggression and occupation.

The women extended support to one another, crossing the Green Line, visiting Palestinians in Israeli prisons. They gathered at regular intervals, always wearing all black to represent mourning, always keeping their message focused on ending the occupation, aways non-violent, though not always silent. They were often harassed, mostly - but not completely - verbally. Men and boys would spit on them and drop their pants to show off their asses and genitals. Fruit, sandwiches, eggs, waters - basically anything throwable was thrown at them. But such actions seemed only to strengthen their resolve.

Gila Svirsky, one of the women in the early years of the movement, recalls the attacks in detail, pointing out that such abuses were always sexually motivated.

For the record, I repeat here some of the most common invective: “whores” (in general), “whores of the Arabs” or “whores of Arafat” (in particular), “You girls need a rape to make you feel better”, “What’s wrong with Jewish men?”, “Is fucking Arabs (or Arafat) better?”, “Shove it, babies, good and hard,” and the endless staple of “Fuck you”. These were often accompanied by appropriate hand gestures. “Whores”, the most common appellation, was often delivered in Arabic (sharmuta), although there’s a perfectly good word for it in Hebrew (zona), and those speaking were always Jewish....There is no question that much of the reaction to us was based upon our gender, not our politics. In mixed male and female demonstrations, the abuse is predominantly political, with words and phrases like “traitors”, “fifth column”, “anti-Semites”, “no memory of the Holocaust”, and the like. We had our share of this, but by and large the curses reserved for Women in Black were sexual.

The women endured and continued to stand vigil, week after week. After the Oslo Accord, the vigils slowed down. The women thought that the occupation was coming to an end. Sadly, they were wrong. As tensions flared up, so to did their vigils.

It didn't take long for the international community to become aware of what the Women in Black were doing. The movement continued to grow and crossed borders. By the end of the 1980s, women across the world were dressing in black, taking to the streets, and demanding an end to aggression and occupation in their own countries and abroad.

In the 1990s, women in former Yugoslavia donned all black and protested the regime of Slobodan Milošević. Slobodian dismissed them as witches, but needless to say, he didn't win that fight. In December of 2001, over 5,000 Palestinian and Israeli Women in Black and men marched in Jerusalem. In the same year, the movement received the Millennium Peace Prize for Women from United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and the Serbian and Israeli branches were (combined) nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Perhaps they have to wait until the occupation actually ends before they can win that prize, but if peace actually comes, I don't think the Nobel Prize will really much matter.

Better than a coffin
These are by no means the only stories of women opposing oppression and genocide. There was the Black Shash Movement in South Africa, for instance, but Africa deserves its own posting to cover all the grassroots movements to bring peace and end genocide. And while I focused on women here, we should not forget that men too have stood to bear witness along with their sisters.

But there is something inspiring about the presence of political women, of mothers unwilling to give up on their children or on the future. There is something tangibly powerful, though impossible to define, in seeing such actions. Perhaps it takes the unwillingness of the most marginalized elements of society to abandon hope and accept the status quo and all its violence to remind us of our conscious. Perhaps because women are often viewed to be unaware, powerless, or ready-made victims, their chutzpah is more powerful.

I don't know.

But one thing I'm sure of is that if I had to choose one person who I know would fight heaven and hell for me and whom I'd want to be at my side during a time of trial, it'd be my mom.