Sex and International Tribunals. Chiseche Salome Mibenge
years since that early evening in the market, my sense of humiliation and rage has passed. What remains with me both intellectually and emotionally is a lasting desire to investigate narratives of gender and their narrators. I am ever watchful to see why and how men and women are influenced and/or bound by the narratives that dictate safe and unsafe expressions of masculinity and femininity. I have found powerful, often coercive expressions of gender wherever my research has taken me over the past decade. In Dutch law faculties, I have been struck by the traditional gender expectations surrounding motherhood versus career progression; to my surprise it is perfectly acceptable to publicly grill expectant Dutch coworkers on personal choices concerning child care and their obligation to “raise their own children.” In Bradford in northern England, the gender narratives of “acceptable” dress and behavior for British-born university female students from Pakistani families intrigued me. I was especially amused by a white British librarian who said of a rowdy group of female, British-Pakistani students, “Such a pity, they’re just as foul-mouthed as our girls now, sometimes worse. We don’t dare to hush them.” In Washington, D.C., in the buildup to the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, I overheard many gendered sentiments about the candidates as well as their spouses: “Sarah Palin should focus on her five children and not politics”; “Hillary Clinton lost because of the pantsuits, she should have worn more skirt suits”; “Michelle [Obama] is great because she stands behind her husband, she lets him be the man”; “McCain is an old man, he will make America look weak.” I presuppose the existence of narratives about gender in every sociopolitical regime, be it in democratic countries, secular states, war-torn countries, developing nations, or liberal or conservative states.
In this book, my geographical focus is sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. My decision to focus on these two African countries, best known in the international community for decades of political violence and armed conflict, was not intended to highlight the most extreme or egregious manifestations of unequal gender hegemonies in wartime. Rather, I chose this focus because postwar reconstruction processes in these two countries provide rich case studies of the many responses to societal gender inequality and discrimination. These responses have taken many shapes, including human rights advocacy, affirmative action, repeal of discriminatory legislation, security-sector reform, demobilization of fighters, civil society activism, education and community sensitization, constitutional amendments, and criminalization.
The Justice Process and Its Dominant Narrative
I concentrate specifically on the justice sector’s responses to gross human rights violations and war crimes. This sector interprets human rights norms in order to determine accountability, producing compelling legal narratives that detail and help make sense of the infliction of political violence on men and women. These legal narratives arise from legal as well as factual findings based on evidence that prosecutors, witnesses, and others submit before such mechanisms of accountability as truth commissions and military or international criminal tribunals. The narratives have the power to legitimate victims and condemn perpetrators of human rights abuses. They can produce categories of victims, perpetrators, collaborators, martyrs, traitors, and heroes—all as expressions of “good” and “bad” gender models. For example, a pattern of acquittals or sentences of light community service might affirm the integrity of men who killed their daughters rather than let them be kidnapped and raped by invading armies.
These decision-making processes are not free from bias as the words law and fact might suggest. Hegemonic power relations contribute to the collation of fact and law, which in turn affect the formulation of the legal narrative. Various stakeholders, including prosecutors, victor states, former colonial masters, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and international donors take part in the political negotiation of law, fact, and human rights standards. Political circumstances can constrain the investigative reach of prosecutors and defense counsel, expedite extradition processes, and moderate sentencing practices. Political narratives about the interests of the victor, the needs of victims, and the reckoning with the vanquished are expertly woven by transitional governments; and they color the justice process, which is ultimately the product of a political edict, for example, a peace accord, Security Council vote, or agreement between the state and the secretary general of the United Nations.
Thus, in justice processes, there are a variety of narratives: legal and political, as well as social. By social narratives I mean narratives arising from tales, myths, anecdotes, proverbs, and stories that emerge from within a society on any given subject. Scholars, researchers, writers, journalists, human rights defenders, and others codify these usually oral testimonies through a process of interviews, observations, and analysis. These codifiers ultimately produce a social narrative that can become a vehicle for political activism and advocacy. Thus, although I will refer to the narratives of Rwandan and Sierra Leonean men and women on gender and violence, I am really referring to my own appropriation (as scholar, researcher, and writer) of stories I heard during my encounters in Rwanda and Sierra Leone and my arbitrary interpretation and codification of these stories. In sharing these stories with an international and elite audience, the social narrative I tell will have the potential to serve different political purposes.
The narratives of Rwandans and Sierra Leoneans I have selected are by and large not the type that would fall into the category of baleful testimonies about atrocity. Rather, the testimonies I present throughout this book, whether they were collected by me or by other researchers, are contributions not to our collective outrage about war’s victims but to a gender analysis of the laws and justice processes that seek to promote human rights. I include them not merely to show that gender is part of the narrative of modern-day postwar reconstruction processes or to add nuance to our understanding of the experiences, both shared and divergent, of men and women in armed conflict. I use narratives to pose a challenge to assumptions and easy conclusions that legal scholars can only draw when relying solely on the case law and transcripts as sources of fact and law. These legal texts have created new crimes against humanity, such as sexual slavery, and in doing so have inscribed femininity and masculinity into our understanding of war’s victims and perpetrators. I argue that this inscription has created an essentializing and gendered binary of male abusers and female victims. Further, this binary does not include men and women who do not, cannot, or will not fit neatly into either of these categories. My selection of narratives in this book is motivated by a desire to disrupt the legal text by identifying masculinities and femininities that emphasize other experiences of war yet still warrant inclusion in the process of transitional justice.
I have placed narratives of gender and violence at the center of my research for a number of reasons. Narratives occur within all sectors of society and, because of their authoritative potential, can have an impact on gender roles and relations in periods of violent political transition. And violence ultimately generates and transforms social hierarchies and perceptions within and between groups.3 An example of a violent transformation of social hierarchies is the image of an armed child soldier arresting or facilitating the passage through a checkpoint of frightened adult civilians in their vehicles. And in the aftermath of violence, communities shape collective narratives that can represent a cultural remembrance of the violence and its significance for the group identity, including gendered identities. However, narratives can be contested and may be a source of conflict between members of a society. I can illustrate this by recounting conversations with two Sierra Leoneans I encountered on a field visit in February 2007.
I was the guest of Paramount Chief Sesay.4 He told me that he had survived the war because, as rebels advanced, he was able to escape to a rebel-free zone where he stayed during the years that the rebels occupied his chiefdom. On his return to his chiefdom, he held several meetings with his people. Apparently, the men of the village asked the chief to thank the rebels for their benevolent rule during the occupation. According to the village representatives, apart from a few killings at the start of the occupation, life under the rebels had been peaceful and secure.
The chief later introduced me to Bintu, a mother, wife, and grandmother who had recently been elected the first woman local representative in the area’s political history. She had been supported in her campaign with leadership training and funding by several local women’s NGOs. In a private conversation with her, I mentioned that “some men” had told me that apart from