Kitchens, women, and war

One of the Liberian women who has been speaking at screenings of Women of Liberia: Fighting for Peace. (This is not the same woman as the one I mention below.) Picture from here.

Last night I went to a screening of Women of Liberia: Fighting for Peace, a 20 minute long documentary. Amnesty International (AI) commissioned Jonathan Stack, the producer of Liberia: An Uncivil War, to make the film. The film is helping to promote a piece of legislation called the International Violence Against Women Act, which would fund more programs to assist women and girls abroad. Following the screening, there was a moderated conversation with three Liberian women who had been fighters at some point during the conflict, and AI’s researcher for Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Bottom line: Didn’t learn much from the film, but I probably wasn’t their target audience. The film will help raise awareness about the plight of women during and after conflict, but it slightly misconstrues the role that Liberian women played during the war. The film de-politicizes the conflict by not explaining why anyone was fighting or the role of other countries. Below I highlight some of the more interesting parts of the film and conversation.

• Women generally take up arms for revenge, protection, and/or survival.
• AI screened this film in most counties in Liberia.
• During the first part of the war, women were abused, and most women didn’t fight. During the second part of the war, many more women joined various fighting factions, partly to protect themselves and make sure the abuse they suffered during the first part of the war wasn’t repeated.
• This documentary made the unqualified claim that the women of Liberia ended the war. (Pray the Devil Back to Hell also made this claim.)
• Some estimate that up to 35% of the fighting forces during the second part of the war were women.
• A criticism of the first disarmament (either before or right after Taylor was elected in 1997) is that women were not encouraged to disarm, and the disarmament process was not adequately explained to them. As a result many commanders forced women to sell them their weapons so that the commanders could reap the benefits of disarmament. Women didn’t need a weapon to disarm, but that information never reached them.
• A Liberian woman who runs a woman’s rights NGO, says in the documentary that “We are not going back to the day when women are in the kitchen.” This is an odd phrase, as most Liberian homes don’t have kitchens.
• During the discussion after the film, one of the Liberian women, I’ll call her Mary, told a story from a screening of the film in a rural county. Mary contacted a woman in the area who she knew had been raped during the war, but did not talk about it openly. Mary encouraged the woman to come to the screening. (In the film, many Liberian women speak openly of being raped.) The woman came to the screening, and approached Mary after the film to say how inspired she was, but she still wasn’t sure she was ready to speak openly of what happened to her during the war. Mary said that maybe if she spoke openly someone would be able to get her medicine for a health problem the woman had. So the woman told the group of people watching the screening about what she endured during the war. Maybe this is a good thing, but I was a bit disturbed by the story because it sounded like the principal reason this woman opened up was because she thought she might get access to resources from the foreigners who were involved with the film. I think this is yet another example of the complicated impact that “interventions” (even in this broad sense, a documentary) can have.

A March 2008 AI report about how the DDRR process did not meet the needs of women is available here.