april 2005
Speech on International Women`s Day at the Eu Parliament, in a debate about violence against women
By Nurit Peled-Elhanan
International Women`s day, The European Parliament, Strasbourg, 8.3.2005
Thank you for inviting me to this day. It is always an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you.
However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R`aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gazza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family`s strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.
When I asked the people who invited me here why wouldn’t they invite a Palestinian woman the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized.
I don’t know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.
It is true unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army, has expanded around the globe, In fact state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA.
This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.
Great France of la liberté l`égalité et la fraternité is scared of little girls with head scarfs, Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb which ans its ministers call it a demographic threat. Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective citizens with blind fear of the muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic, chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non devout Jew.
I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour, I don’t know the kind of violence that turn a woman`s life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken in at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished , who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal. But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi, Aphgan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightment rob us of our children. Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Aphgani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And The viruses , though they may have various illustrious names such as Democracy. Patriotism. God. Homeland, are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful.
We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land.`
All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies.
And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear and frustration, to take prozak for anxiety, but never hail Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.
I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals.
Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I don’t dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change their lives. I don’t want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes.
Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racist and cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields.
I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers` cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or in on filthy roads by the checkpoints , when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova, another mother who lived in a regime of violence against women and children, had asked:
Why does that streak of blood, rip the petal of your cheek?
http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=996
From Mona Baker
Universal jurisdiction: Reflections on the
'Case of Ariel Sharon'
By John Borneman
Special to The Daily Star
From Laurie King-Irani
Massacres imprint themselves on the minds of victims and
perpetrators alike, but only the community of survivors
tends to retain a memory of the event, and this for
generations or even centuries after its occurrence. Most
groups remember their own victimizations only, while
choosing to ignore harm done to others. As time passes,
therefore, the fate of victimizations - whether their
significance extends beyond those involved in the initial
events - depends on the effective deployment of
collective memory beyond the memories of the survivors.
There is, in fact, a growing international competition
for the collective memory of massacres, each group
demanding that its suffering be recognized by strangers.
The 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps
in Beirut, most of whose victims were stateless
Palestinians, was slowly entering the deep sleep that
characterizes losers in this competition when, on June
18, 2001, a criminal complaint on behalf of 28 witnesses
and survivors was brought before a court in Belgium.
According to the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, any
group's claim of suffering that falls under the rubric of
particular heinous crimes - war crimes, crimes against
humanity, or genocide - entitles it to a hearing,
irrespective of where the plaintiff or defendant reside
or where the crime was committed. On this basis, the
Belgian court decided to hear the complaint, which
included a charge against the current Israeli prime
minister, Ariel Sharon, assuring that this massacre
re-enter world public consciousness and simultaneously
sealing its fate. For, while it is no longer novel to try
a sitting head of seat, it is an impertinence to try the
head of the state of Israel, the nation of Holocaust
survivors, a state whose legitimacy is intimately linked
to Jewish victimization.
It has long been something of a public secret -
implicitly acknowledged but not in fact recognized - that
there is a perverse link between "Palestinian"
and "Jewish," such that any claims for
recognition of present Palestinian suffering have been
balanced against claims of past Jewish suffering. Hence
the "Case of Ariel Sharon," as it became known
colloquially, was by its very nature framed as a
political event about prioritizing the competing
victimizations of the Palestinian present and the Jewish
past. After a long trial, the Belgian Supreme Court
agreed with the plaintiffs and the prosecution that they
had legal recourse in Belgium, and it confirmed the
principle of universal jurisdiction, encoded in the
Fourth Geneva Conventions, customary international law,
and the 1984 Convention on Torture, which assumes that
all signatories to the convention have not only the
right, but also the duty, either to prosecute or to
extradite individuals guilty of such crimes.
But on Aug. 5, 2003, a political solution was reached
that nullified the Supreme Court's decision and
substantially changed Belgium's victim-friendly national
law, severely restricting the ability of foreigners to
lodge complaints in Belgian courts regarding heinous
crimes. In the short term, the pre-emptive strike by U.S.
and Israeli authorities that coerced Belgium into
changing its law demonstrates unambiguously the limits of
justice and any form of supranational accountability at
the beginning of the 21st century. For the longer term,
however, the Sharon Case alerts us to some possibilities
in the use of law to intervene in the competition over
collective memory, and in the use of the doctrine of
universal jurisdiction to redress group victimization.
Five conclusions might be drawn. First, there exists a
clear but not rigid international economy of
victimization and identification that prioritizes the
suffering of some groups over others. To use law to enter
into this economy assumes that one can subvert its
hierarchies. Suffering itself presents merely an emotive
possibility. But to achieve recognition of suffering, one
must challenge the hierarchies that organize and justify
it. These hierarchies work primarily in political rather
than religious terms, meaning that the entire state
system and its organization of people into nationals is
central to this economy.
Second, only universal jurisdiction can do justice to the
principle of human rights, for the very purpose of human
rights claims is to grant standing to victims who have no
access to jurisdiction in their own backyards. Stateless
people are prototypes of this sort of victimhood, but
there are many people who live in states that regularly
abuse them - Middle Eastern states are exemplary in this
respect today, despite a remarkable tradition of Arab
jurisprudence. By delinking the issue of justice from
territory, the doctrine of universal jurisdiction
bypasses the international economy of victimization and
promises redress to those whose suffering would
ordinarily be forgotten. But the success of universal
jurisdiction - literally, who is authorized to speak the
law - and at obtaining standing are largely dependent on
propitious circumstances: money to finance a case,
victim-friendly laws and judges, the political
significance of the victims, the accepted vulnerability
and innocence of the perpetrators, the persistence of
individual activists.
Third, humans everywhere are extremely ambivalent about
inflicting and experiencing abuse and suffering - though
not all humans equally, and not about the same abuse in
every place. On this basis of this ambivalence, some
groups or individuals reject the human rights for others
that they claim for themselves. The major obstacle in
preventing and remedying human rights violations, then,
is not whether, but to what extent, people believe that
they or others should be allowed to engage in or to be
protected from these violations. It is therefore not a
particular legal system or "legal culture" that
prevents redress but an international political system
that provides immunity from accountability for some and
no protection from abuse for others.
Fourth, universal jurisdiction claims an authority that
is entirely temporal, based on the minimalist idea of
justice in shared world time, but many states prefer to
trust their own citizens and their own territorial legal
systems over the uncertain benefits of human rights. By
considering a case that had nothing to do with its
territory, the Belgian courts in the Sharon case
permitted injustices elsewhere to enter into their
jurisdiction, offering a legal remedy to problems - a
massacre of refugees - that had been dealt with only
militarily. The refusal to extend universal jurisdiction
in this case marks the end, for the moment, of a brief
period of legal and democratic possibilities focused
around "1989,"
including those of Eastern Europe and Chile, which
replaced the power of guns with other means of
establishing accountability.
Fifth, and finally, the claims of universal jurisdiction
challenge and disturb the normal routines of national
justice systems with unpredictable results. Judicial
activism on behalf of noncitizens often results in the
unexpected marshaling of legal branches of one government
against the abuses of national executives of another.
This exacerbates conflicts between competing sovereigns
in noncontiguous territories, but also opens up new kinds
of cross- national alliances. The unpredictability of
outcomes extends to who will initiate a case, which
jurisdictions take them up, how decisions are enforced
and received, and when crimes are investigated. The lack
of a statute of limitations for human rights violations
means that many complaints will be lodged decades after
some (or even all) of the actual injured parties are
dead. In other words, one might say neither the doctrine
of universal jurisdiction nor the memory of the victims
of Sabra and Shatila is dead; both are in remission.
John Borneman, professor of Anthropology at Princeton
University, U.S.A., and visiting senior Fulbright
professor at Aleppo University, Syria, has recently
published "The Case of Ariel Sharon and the Fate of
Universal Jurisdiction" (Princeton Institute for
International Relations, 2004, to purchase contact: pzimmer@princeton.edu). He has written on issues of domestic and
national accountability in East Central Europe and is
currently engaged in fieldwork in Lebanon and Syria. He
wrote this commentary for The Daily Star and can be
reached at johnborneman@yahoo.com
Copyright (c) 2004 The Daily Star