Woman of Uganda by Dave Blume

The following is a piece by Ghanaian journalist and activist Abi:

If you’ve been following my blog entries you should know by now that I’m a Beep fan — in other words, that’s where I get most of my news about the continent. So, just in case you haven’t yet heard the news, Uganda dropped “FGM” from its list of embraced acronyms. I’ll interpret — Female Genital Mutilation is now legally banned in Uganda!

The BBC reported: “Anyone convicted of the practice, which involves cutting off a girl’s clitoris, will face 10 years in jail, or a life sentence if a victim dies.”

The news comes just weeks after a world acknowledgment of “International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women,” The human rights status of Uganda is still in the dark, considering some of the charges that have been brought against the government in the past: Reports about violation of refugee rights, torture allegedly is a well-known practice in security circles and of course, who can forget the arrest of the country’s main opposition leader, Kizza Besigye?

But I think it’s important for the world to acknowledge this bit of news as an indication of what Uganda could become. That perhaps taking this step against genital mutilation demonstrates the government’s progress in tackling women’s issues? This statement may be a stretch, but I say let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and monitor any advancements on the issue.

The World Health Organization asserts that between 100 and 140 million girls and women are living with the brunt of FGM today. This violation of the human rights of girls and women, viewed in some countries as a right of passage, is one of the most torturous experiences any woman should be subjected to. (Read this article)

I think African governments taking the initiative to ban such practices are commendable. But what happens to unmonitored areas of a country? It’s one thing for a government to pass such a law, it’s another, however, to ensure that traditionalists are held accountable and adhere to these new rules. Anyone familiar with African “laws” will tell you that with the bribery of a local official, one can get away with almost anything.

I would suggest – and I’m yet to see detailed official documents regarding this new Ugandan law – that any country that passes such a law should invest in resources that’ll ensure that they’re carried out. This is not just a law. It’s the life of a young girl who may someday want to become an entrepreneur, a doctor or lawyer but lacks confidence as a result of the ordeal because she feels incomplete and insecure. It’s the life of a woman who desires to build a family but never imagined that the sexual pleasure missing in her marriage would directly be linked to what was taken away from her as a child by someone who held a skewed view of preserving virginity.

I call on the voices of all women, specifically African women, whether you’ve undergone this procedure or not, to join forces and fight against the brutality. No human deserves this.

Want to read more of Abi?
Check out her webzine Obaasema, “a premier lifestyle, fashion and beauty magazine for the modern African woman. It is dedicated to celebrating, empowering and inspiring the African woman through productive channels, while providing exclusive, objective, independent, unbiased, real-life reporting in generous measure on all of its pages.

The literal translation of Obaasema is “Ideal Woman” in the Ghanaian language, Twi. Like its meaning, Obaasema magazine encourages its avid readers to strive to be “The Ideal Woman.”

Female prisoner of Tuol Seng, 1975-1979. At Security Prison 21 over 15,000 men, women, and children were tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge. These photographs were taken just before their death.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge party, under the leadership of Pol Pot, launched a bloody campaign to transform Cambodia into a Communist agrarian based society.  Soldiers emptied out cities and marched inhabitants to the surrounding countryside. They were separated from their families and forced into slave labor, digging trenches, planting, and gathering resources for the state. Thousands died from starvation, malnutrition, and other diseases. Many more were tortured, used for medical experiments, or killed en masse in what were to be dubbed Cambodia’s ‘killing fields.’ Among these were men and women targeted as potential traitors and supporters of a free market economy, or those who might oppose the leveling effect of Communism – doctors, lawyers, teachers, and artists.

As in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which encouraged a radical stripping away of the ‘Four Olds:’ Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas, the Khmer Rouge enforced a discontinuity with the past and the severing of family ties in order to create greater allegiance to the state. The valuing of individual life over the collective was considered heretical. Children were forced to denounce or even kill their parents, and many were separated from their family and trained as child soldiers. By 1979, when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam invaded Cambodia and stopped the genocide, as many as two million people had perished under the Khmer Rouge’s violent program of reform. (For a first-person account of the KR’s brutal campaign, please read the next post on Cambodian-American writer Loung Ung)

Cambodia is a geographically beautiful and culturally rich country. However, after thirty years of internecine war, it is still in a process of recovery, hampered in part by slow economic growth, violent crime, sex trafficking, corruption within the judicial system, and the presence of thousands of unexploded land mines left over from war. Tribunals of former Khmer Rouge leaders are now underway. Kaing Guek Eav, also known as ‘Duch,’ who headed the Tuol Seng prison, or S-21, orderd the torture and death of over 15,000 Cambodians, is now on trial. In a precedent-setting move backed by the UN, Duch’s victims, known as ‘civil parties’ have been permitted to testify and question the defendant, but with mixed results. A verdict is supposed to be reached  early next year.
– by Jacqueline Blair Holt

The following by Juliana Rincon Parra was originally published by Global Voices Online, a website that translates and reports on blogs from around the world.

“Condition: Critical is a website showcasing the stories of victims of the violence in Eastern Congo coordinated and launched by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing asked Pete Masters of Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders for some more information on the project and then posted his reply:

“Condition: Critical was launched one year ago by Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to bring to the world’s attention the plight of the people living through the war in Eastern Congo (DRC). BUT, rather than MSF at the focal point, it is the people and their stories that take centre stage. In this, the last chapter of the Condition: Critical project, listen to the stories of four people telling how the conflict has affected their lives.

“Bukeni Waruzi, a DRC native who is the project coordinator for the African and Middle East region for Witness.org, writes an article in The Huffington Post about the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and also posts a video commentary explaining the political situation, the historical roots for the crisis, and a call to action for all citizens to bring attention to this crisis, and try and force the authorities to intercede in benefit of the civilians taking the brunt of the conflict.”

The following is a post from Peruvian-Colombian blogger and translator Juliana Rincon Parra and first appeared in Global Voices.

Today, November 25th is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and through videos, many people and organizations around the world are expressing their need to end the violence as well as the efforts they are undertaking to ensure that women have a safer world to live in.

UNIFEM, in the Say No to Violence channel on YouTube has already documented some of the actions being taken around the world to end gender violence. This first video shows the Ngara Girls High School in Nairobi, Kenya, where young girls are being taught to say No to Violence, to stand up for their rights and also how to deal with rape, assault, harassment and other forms of gender violence:

Also in Kenya, the Kenyatta National Hospital has a Gender Violence Recovery Center, where women and their children can go and receive care in cases of violence against them. In this next video, they tell of their experience running the center, the context they are in, and women who have been victims of gender violence speak out:

In Peru, the Flora Tristan organization is having a protest and mass gathering for another aspect they believe is related to gender violence: the denial of free access to birth control methods and the new law that determined that the day after pill (emergency contraception) wouldn’t be distributed free of cost. They will be doing an educational campaign in a park in Lima and giving out information about birth control, also handing out day after pills and birth control packets as a symbolic protest:

In the context of all Latin America and the Caribbean, UN-INSTRAW launches this video as part of an awareness campaign :

“Latinoamérica y el Caribe es un lugar peligroso para las mujeres. Más de 50 por ciento de las mujeres de la región han sido objetos de agresiones. En la República Dominicana, por ejemplo, 1,453 mujeres fueron asesinadas entre los años 2000 y 2008. En el marco del Día Internacional para la Eliminación de la Violencia Contra la Mujer, UN-INSTRAW lanza un nuevo video sobre la seguridad de las mujeres latinas y caribeñas.

Latin America and the Caribbean is a dangerous place for women. More than 50 per cent of the women in the region have been subject to agression. In the Dominican Republic, for examples, 1 453 women were murdered between the years 2000 and 2008. In the context of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, UN-INSTRAW launches a new video about the security of Latin and Caribbean women.”

In Spain, women participated in the 5th Self-Defense seminar against gender violence, where they are taught how to protect themselves in case they face a dangerous situation. Training is geared towards enabling them to disable their aggressor momentarily so they can run away from danger.

And from Chile, Hip Hop Artist COFLA has made a song titled Femicide. Whereas hip-hop lyrics are often thought to promote violence against women, this artist has put out a song condemning how men go from promises of love and protection to violence, aggression and even murder:

Have there been similar efforts and activities in your hometown or country? Please let us know in the comments how your community is moving towards ending violence against women!

Women of the Congo by Martine Perret for the UN

More than five million people have died in the last 10 years in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Though rebel groups negotiated a fragile power-sharing government, the Eastern Congo is still rife with violence. The roots of the civil war were ethnic and economic, but women have taken a central role in the conflict as guerilla groups escalate their use of rape as a tool of warfare.

“The war claimed an estimated three million lives, either as a direct result of fighting or because of disease and malnutrition. It has been called possibly the worst emergency to unfold in Africa in recent decades.
The war had an economic as well as a political side. Fighting was fuelled by the country’s vast mineral wealth, with all sides taking advantage of the anarchy to plunder natural resources.” BBC News, October, 2009.

Many Americans are unwitting consumers of these natural resources. Gold, diamonds, laptop and cell phone parts, and copper wire commonly used in homes are abundant in the Congo and are their primary exports. The battle over their control has been the source of the DCR’s violent conflict, one we support by continuing to buy them.

Congolese women at a refugee camp by Spyros Demetriou

Communities are attacked and looted and forced to leave their homes. As a result there is an enormous population of refugees, many of whom are women who have been brutally wounded by rape. The rapes often happen in villages far from cities and proper medical care. Village men are unarmed and cannot protect the women who are seized, savagely raped, or sometimes kidnapped for months at a time and kept as sexual slaves and tortured by militia men. In many instances, the woman’s husband and children, and other villagers are made to watch the rape, so that her ‘shame’ is compounded by this act of witnessing. Due to the lack of education in villages about HIV and AIDS, a woman who has been raped is often isolated for fear of contagion. There are also deep-seated social codes and taboos about a woman’s body being ‘used’ sexually by other men. This in combination with the men’s shame, their helplessness to stop the rape, means that the women are often left by their partners.

The total devastation and terror that results from such brutality is felt by the women who experience it, and by the community as a whole. These women sometimes have their sexual organs cut, burned or mutilated, or even shot at. Young girls are shot in the vagina so that they may never feel pleasure again. Some women are raped so violently that they are become unable to hold in their bodily fluids. It is often said that rape is not about sex, and is solely an act of violence. But rape uses the mechanics of sex to inflict pain. Witnessing a woman’s body, and especially her generative organs, which are life-giving and sacred, being so abused is a profoundly destructive act for an entire community. And these soldiers know it. It is reported that roughly 90% of women in the Congo have experienced rape. Toddlers as young as 3 and elderly women as old as 75. This means that a vast segment of the population – men and women – have been raped or have witnessed rape. Rape has become naturalized in the Congo, as another “weapon of war.”

– by Jacqueline Blair Holt

What we can do to stop it:
Check out the Women for Women International website. You can sponsor and correspond with another woman!
To raise awareness about products from the Congo: Raise Hope For Congo

This is a follow-up article for a previous post on women in the Congo.

Child at a IDP camp in the Congo. As a result of heavy fighting in the nearby Masisi mountains, hundres of thousands of internaly displaced people (IDP) gathers in refugee camps outside of Goma. By Endre Vestvik

The following article by Spanish journalist Elia Varela Serra was originally publish in Global Voices Online.

Today is International Human Rights Day and, under the motto “Every human has rights,” this year’s marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is also the last day of the yearly campaign 16 days of activism against gender violence. In many parts of the world, however, the human rights situation is far from ideal and gender violence is a daily threat. One of those places is the North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as shown by this roundup of blogs written by aid workers in the region.

As an introduction, a reminder by journalist Michael Kavanagh:

“I’ve been reporting on DRC for five years now, and there’s nothing that frustrates me more than the dismissive comments I often get about how conflict in Africa is endemic.
Violence is rarely irrational — it almost always has root causes that can be addressed. We’re often just too busy or lazy to learn enough about a situation to figure out how.”

A few days ago Rebecca Wynn, a press officer with Oxfam, wrote about the displaced people (IDPs) in the Kibati area, north of Goma:

” The children I am meeting here in Kibati in the Democratic Republic of Congo are at school, but they get no education. The school is where they sleep. It’s their home. Ever since they fled from the violence in their villages, it’s where they have slept, with leaves as their mattresses and their bodies snuggled close.
[…] There are 21 villages of Kanyaruchinya, which surround the Kibati camps. Four of these villages are completely empty and the rest are full of thousands of people who have been forced to run from their homes. The population here was just under 19,000 people before the recent troubles, but an estimated 50,000 people have arrived in the camps and villages here over the last month. Of the families here, 65 percent are hosting displaced people. But many people are living in public spaces such as schools, churches, and orphanages.”

Gina Bramucci of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) also writes about the Kibati IDP camp, where around 5,000 people live “in unsound shelters – a frame of tree branches, a plastic sheet as a roof, dry banana leaves to fill gaps and act as a windbreak”:

“Firewood distribution in Kibati is important on several levels right now […] In conflict areas trips outside of the population center or camp in search of firewood and water expose civilians to a higher potential of violent attacks. In Congo, men and boys can be beaten, intimidated or forced into labour by armed groups. But the chore of collecting firewood falls to women and girls, and for them, the stakes are even higher.”

The danger she’s talking about is, of course, rape. Elizabeth Roesch, a gender and advocacy expert working for CARE, quotes a girl in a displaced camp:

“The other day, I asked a young girl who fled the most recent fighting, when she would go back home, and she replied: “As long as there is war, we won’t go back – how can we go back and risk being raped? When we go for water, when we go to the fields, we are afraid.” Other women nodded in agreement, and suddenly I understood how effective rape is at terrorizing communities.”

Stop the war in North Kivu, a blog written by an anonymous aid worker in Goma, has a short video of such IDP camps:

Stop the war in North Kivu also writes about the unofficial “taxes” that the CNDP (the rebel group led by Nkunda) has imposed on civilians in the area they control:

” -Long truck: 2000 U$ to get through.
-Fuso truck (small size): 500 U$ to get through.
-Toll for every vehicle: 50 U$.
-If you carry just a bag with some items that could be sold in the market: 5 U$
It is said around here that CNDP is a disciplined force in the sense that they don´t loot the population. Now I understand that they simply don´t need to do it. With this kind of tax procedure, looting becomes completely unnecessary.
Meanwhile, the price in Goma of first need commodities like beans has tripled in the last two months.”

Emily Meehan, communications manager for the IRC in Goma, writes about her recent arrival to North Kivu:

“[earlier this year] I was reading about the Democratic Republic of Congo, particularly North Kivu, and wondering why we didn’t hear more about the ongoing humanitarian crisis there. I thought about the women and girls who have been raped and tortured by armed groups. I imagined Goma, North Kivu’s capital, to be a town under daily siege, with mortars blasting, windows shattering and machine gun fire crackling always in the distance. I imagined civilians running in hordes from clashes in the streets, screaming, moaning, and falling. My imagination was far from reality.
I arrived here in Goma last month […] and I quickly saw that this tragedy is not so obvious – people have been living with war for too long in Congo. It is not sensational. They carry on, their ‘everyday switch’ set on emergency.”

Women at an IDP camp in east DR Congo, by Endre Vestvick

Iker Zirion, working for Veterinarios sin Fronteras (VSF) in Butembo, writes [Es] a parable to illustrate the complexity of the armed conflict in North Kivu, in what he calls “three causes for one same effect“:

“Un soldado de las Fuerzas Armadas de la RDC que huye del frente entra en casa de Vital Kagheni buscando algo de comida. Le golpea. Aprovecha para robarle el dinero y el móvil. Más tarde, vuelve con otros dos soldados. Quieren algo más que dinero. Quieren a su mujer.
Al otro lado de ese frente del que huyen, el CNDP toma varias localidades. En la escuela de una de ellas, encuentran a Bertrand Kitambala. Tiene 13 años. En algunos países, hay personas que creen que esa edad es suficiente para empuñar un arma. Desgraciadamente, la RDC es uno de esos países.
Un miembro de las FDLR está escondido en el bosque. Lleva ahí mucho tiempo. Está cansado y tiene hambre. Hacia él se acerca, sin saberlo, Kakule Lukumbuka. Lleva una cabra atada con una cuerda. Cuando llega a su altura, el FDLR sale de su escondite y le dispara. Pero no antes de arrebatarle la cuerda de las manos. No tiene ganas de correr y no quiere que el disparo haga huir a la cabra.”

Translation:
“A Congolese Army soldier fleeing the frontline enters Vital Kagheni’s house looking for some food. He hits him. He then steals his money and mobile phone. Later, he comes back with two more soldiers. They want something more. They want his wife.
On the other side of the frontline they are fleeing from, the CNDP takes several towns. In the school of one of them they find Bertrand Kitambala. He’s 13. In some countries there are people that believe that’s old enough to take up arms. Unfortunately, the DRC is one of those countries. A member of the FDLR is hiding in the forest. He’s been there for a long time. He’s tired and he’s hungry. Unknowingly, Kakule Lukumbuka is walking towards him. He’s carrying a goat tied to a rope. When he arrives where the FDLR is, he comes out of his hiding place and shoots him. But not before snatching away the rope. He doesn’t feel like running and doesn’t want the shot to scare the goat away.”

In another post, Iker Zirion writes about starting over:

“¡Buenas tardes! El día ha pasado sin incidencias, pero en un ambiente de tristeza para casi todo el mundo. Nada se ha salvado. Hay que empezar nuevamente de cero”, nos dice vía sms APRONUT, oenegé de desarrollo congoleña y una de nuestras contrapartes en Kirumba. No es la primera vez. La población de la zona ha tenido que comenzar de cero varias veces desde la década de los noventa hasta hoy. ¿Qué se puede responder a un sms como ese? Yo, desde luego, no lo sé. Afortunadamente, otra persona del equipo tuvo más capacidad de reacción: “¡Animo! Empezaremos de nuevo todos juntos.”

Translation:
“Good afternoon! The day passed without incidents, but in an atmosphere of sadness almost for everybody. Almost nothing was salvaged. We have to start again from scratch”, tells us via sms the Congolese development NGO APRONUT that is one of our partners in Kirumba. It’s not the first time. The population in the area has had to start from scratch several times since the 1990s until now. What can we answer to an sms like this one? I really don’t know. Fortunately, another person from the team was able to react faster: “Come on! We will start again all together.”

Dr. Pumla Gobodo Madikizela, the psychologist who served on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, recently gave a talk at UMass Amherst’s Center for the Psychology of Peace and Violence that elaborated the stages – and art – of forgiveness. Gobodo-Madikizela, now associate professor of psychology at the University of Cape Town, facilitated for the Commission a groundbreaking dialogue between the leader of a notorious apartheid death squad, Eugene de Kock, and the widows of the men he killed. In her book, “A Human Being Died That Night,” Madikizela gives an account of the hours and days she spent with de Kock in his cell as he spoke of his crimes, his childhood, and what she calls his “strikingly incomplete code of conscience.”

De Kock, who carried out innumerable bloody ‘killing missions’ for the state and ran the notorious Vlakplaas, the headquarters for the South African Police counterinsurgency, where political opponents were tortured and executed, said he had experienced profound feelings of remorse. After a series of confessions at the tribunal, and a mediated confrontation with his victims, the Commission did not give de Kock amnesty and he is currently serving a life sentence for gross human rights violations. However Gobodo-Madikizela, a black South African who grew up in a township and saw and felt the effects of apartheid’s savage regimes, believes after watching de Kock’s metamorphosis, and the astonishing compassion shown to him by the widows, that he should be freed.

Madikizela’s experience with the Commission inspired her to make the following questions the center of her work: “What are the conditions that make forgiveness possible?” and “What are the phases of transformation?” She found little in her psychological studies that treated forgiveness as an authentic response to profound trauma, but rather as an act of denial, evasion, or transference on the part of the victim. It was at this point she reached out of the academy and into her southern African cultural inheritance for answers, incorporating and finding new applications for the concept of ‘ubuntu,’ a philosophy that emphasizes the interconnectedness of human beings. Ubuntu is both an ethical principle and a perceivable quality in a human being. In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity.”

Gobodo-Madikizela outlined the steps and conditions that make forgiveness possible:
1) Public acknowledgment: admitting one’s moral digressions in public or to the victim.
2) Affirmation: The victim and their community witnesses and affirms the acknowledgement.
3) Remorse: A show of genuine remorse and regret from the perpetrator, one that must feel authentic to the
victim.
4) Acts of reparation.
5) Reclaiming of the voice: Trauma causes a sense of brokenness and rupture, a loss of meaning, and so memory and storytelling are used to create continuity with the past and with lost parts of the self.
6) Integration: Forgiveness is not about a ‘letting go’ and ‘moving forward’ in a linear fashion. One must integrate the trauma in a new way that creates a new relationship with the perpetrator.

In these steps, Gobodo-Madikizela reveals that the process of forgiveness is one of the most creative healing acts we do as human beings. It asks us to transform feelings of rage, grief, humiliation, and fear all at once. It asks us to enter a space that is both deeply private and universal, what Gobodo-Madikizela calls the ‘moral imagination.’ It is a space of dialogue and empathy, where the distance between victim and perpetrator is collapsed and their primary connection – through pain – might be transcended.

In her words, “Just at the moment the perpetrator begins to show remorse, the victim becomes the gatekeeper to what the outcast desires: readmission into the human community.” It is this new ability to re-admit through forgiveness that releases feelings of powerlessness and creates real autonomy and freedom.

In August 2007, the South African Department of Science and Technology announced that the Vlakplaas farm would become a center for healing. The center will research traditional medicine and promote dialogue between practitioners of allopathic medicine and traditional healers.

– by Jacqueline Blair Holt

For an in-depth conversation with Pumla, check out her interview with Krista Tippett on NPR’s ‘Speaking of Faith.’

Loung Ung, author of "First They Killed My Father," a memoir of the Cambodian genocide.

Loung Ung is a Cambodian-American human rights activist, an international lecturer, and the national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. I met Loung this past September at the Omega Institute’s Women and Power conference and spoke with her briefly about the process of writing her first memoir, “First They Killed My Father,” where she traces her journey of survival through the Cambodian genocide, one that led to the death of her parents and siblings and her eventual training as a child soldier.

Loung Ung was only 5 years old when her family was forced out of Phnom Penh with the invasion of the Khmer Rouge in 1975. She was the sixth of seven children and her father was a high-ranking military officer, a position that put him in danger of being targeted by the Khmer Rouge. The Ungs fled their home with just a few possessions and were marched, along with thousands of other Cambodians to the village of Anglungthmor. Rations were very poor and illness ran rampant through the camps. Half of the evacuees died from starvation and disease. Ung began to suffer from malnourishment, her belly ballooned painfully, and she daily witnessed the careless burial of the newly dead.

The family was forced to move to the village Ro Leap, where they stayed for the next year and a half. Evacuees became the slave labor force of the state, digging trenches, planting and building for long hours and receiving only a thin rice gruel for nourishment. Soon after their arrival three of Loung’s siblings, brothers Meng and Khouy and sister Keav, were separated from the family and sent to neighboring camps. In August 1976, the Ungs learned that Keav, then fourteen, had died of food poisoning at the Kong Cha Lat work camp, a devastating loss for the already weakened family. Several months later, soldiers came to their hut and took Loung’s father away and he was never seen again. In the book Loung flies to the site of his death in her imagination and recreates her father’s last moments. It is an astonishing and courageous piece of writing, and one she repeats for her mother and sister Geak, who also perished at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

As conditions worsened at Ro Leap, Loung’s mother ordered her children to pretend they were orphans and flee to different villages. Loung was separated from her sister Chou and forced into a special training camp for child soldiers where she stayed for another year and a half. After a terrifying flash of intuition, she took a dangerous night journey to her mother’s village and learned that her mother and sister had died. Loung realizes that the lie she told for survival, that she was an orphan, was now true.

The Vietnamese Army wrested control of Phnom Penh in 1979, pushed westward, and created a refugee camp in Pursat City. Ung stayed with a family there briefly and was reunited with her brothers Meng and Khouy, who had escaped from their work camps. After a series of perilous journeys, including one across the Gulf of Thailand, Meng, his new wife, and Loung arrived at a refugee camp in Thailand. Here they found American sponsors and made their final voyage to the northesastern United States.

Loung’s second memoir, “Lucky Child,” recounts her process of assimilation in to American culture and her later return to Cambodia to piece together the missing narratives of her family’s story. There, she reunites with her sister Chou and the rest of her Cambodian family. In person, Loung Ung has a vibrant, funny, grounded, compassionate presence – an ebullience that does not speak to the horrors she witnessed as a child. She has given us two volumes that render the full arc of war: displacement, loss, grief, survival and recovery. In addition, her story gives voice to a deeper force in human beings – one that might transform rage through a search for truth and the words to speak it.

– by Jacqueline Blair Holt

Ung writes:

“It’s just too easy to just get disillusioned, to feel that we need to take care of our own lives first and not worry about anything else. It’s so easy to look at the bigger world out there, and think, “If I worried about it, if I spoke out about it, it would just become too overwhelming, too painful. I’m powerless to make a difference.”

Perhaps the people who believe their voices will make no difference have never been to the killing fields of Cambodia– and looked down knowing 20,000 human beings had been dropped there, their words and thoughts and voices silenced. Perhaps they don’t know what it is like to live in a place where to speak out means death-not only for you but for your family and loved ones as well.

Or perhaps they are discouraged by the fact that they don’t see direct evidence of how their actions make an impact. But I know small actions make a difference because it was small actions of others that got me to where I am today. It was the nurses in Cambodia who saved me, the teachers trying to teach me English, it was the refugee workers trying to teach me about America. It was the Red Cross and United Children’s efforts and people who brought over blankets and life medicines and food. Those people who helped me probably wouldn’t recognize me if I saw them today, but they changed my life.

And the truth is, your inactions make a difference too-just as tangible, and in a negative direction. Your silence gives other people permission to be silent. Your inaction gives other people permission to be complacent.

So my advice to those looking to make a change: just do the best you can. Work toward the changes you think are needed but do not get broken when those changes have not been made. Take care of yourself. And continue to do it. Somewhere along the line, changes are being made all the time, and sometimes those changes are made in places and are affecting lives of faces you will probably never see. And that’s the wonderful thing about change.”

Last weekend Gloria Steinem spoke at the Omega Institute’s 8th annual Women and Power Conference. This year’s conference was dedicated to facilitating cross-generational dialogue between women. The three-day event was an all-star line-up of women, ages 20 to 80, transforming women’s roles in the media, academia, civil rights, community leadership, and the arts.

Lateefah Simon, who at 32 retired her 11-year tenure as executive director of the Center for Young Womens Development in San Francisco to take up the reins as executive director of the Lawyer’s Committee of Civil Rights, provided an introduction with enough inspirational punch to give Omega’s Main Hall a revival-meeting vibe. Steinem noted, “I come from the Midwest where you have to be on LSD to know if you’re feeling anything, and I’m thinking, I have to follow that?”

Humility aside, Steinem is, at 75, an incredible speaker: inclusive, grounded, funny, with the ability to make everyone in the room feel as if she is speaking directly to their experience. Her talk jumped from discussions of race, “We have to realize that race is a fiction. We make it up,” to women coming to terms with unconscious psychic lineages, “We are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. We are also living out their dreams,” to the wild shifts in consciousness experienced by people with multiple personality disorder, who she called the “prophets of human possibility” because they might possess the knowledge that ”humanity is shared, they know that the labels are really quite artificial.”

Steinem’s speech seemed to meander, but a greater theme finally emerged: the effects of violence on the human psyche and the gifts that healing from trauma might bring, “We are each trying to complete the full circle of humanity.”

Steinem’s gift to inspire lies in her loyalty to both honesty and hope. She incites change without inciting violence, speaks candidly about the horrific, but for every statement of hard truth, there is one of possibility. She punctuates facts with alternatives and solutions. “Hope is a form of planning, “ she said during the Q and A following the talk, “Go there in your heart and mind and you will go there in your body.”

Steinem’s talk ended with a plea for women and the women’s movement to focus on the end of war and for a more aggressive stance on gun control,
“We’ve learned from the domestic violence movement that the maximum time of danger is when a woman is escaping. That’s where our country is. . .We can see that the country is escaping and also that the danger is present. . . What we need is a big national movement, like MADD, (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) that simply says no house is safe if it has a gun in it. That connects our home and our lives to the armaments everywhere. I think we should do it big.”
She concluded in the classic fashion of a woman, a leader, and an advocate who knows the power of a good catchphrase, “Women need to say: If the guns stay, the men have to go.”

For more information about the event, excellent up-to-the-minute blogs from the conference, and guest blogs from the invited speakers, check out Feministing.com

– by Jacqueline Blair Holt

Huwara - check and commuting point south of Nablus, Palestine

This article is a follow-up to an earlier post about women giving birth at Isreali checkpoints.

The following article by Jillian C York was originally published on Global Voices Online:

As the Palestinian West Bank is occupied by Israel, visitors intending to travel there are required to obtain proper visas and documentation from an Israeli consulate. Such documentation, of course, also allows the traveler to visit the rest of Israel if they so wish. Or, at least, it did.

This summer, however, numerous reports have surfaced from travelers to the West Bank who found that their visas prohibited them from visiting the rest of Israel. According to Time magazine, the policy was quietly enacted by Israel in June as a “security measure.” According to a number of bloggers and activists, the policy violates international law and a promise made by the 1995 Oslo II Accords of unhindered movement for foreign travelers to Israel.

Palestinian-American Toufic Haddad, writing for online newspaper The Faster Times, details the offense, drawing potential comparisons:

“Moreover, the very restriction on travel is equivalent to a country issuing a visa to a specific area of its country, but not to the whole country. A parallel might be the U.S. issuing a visa only to majority-black Harlem in Manhattan, or the Mashantucket Pequot reservation in Connecticut.”

Marcy Newman, who blogs for Body on the Line and until recently lived in the Palestinian town of Nablus, writes of her own ordeals of living under occupation:

“Ultimately i knew that i could not stay in palestine forever given that foreigners (i.e., not palestinians; read: zionist colonist terrorists) control the borders and they get to play a game with the lives of all people who cross over into palestine whether they are originally palestinian or not. i’ve long heard stories and received emails–some from friends and comrades, others from complete strangers–about being denied entry. about being allowed limited entry, in terms of time. about three weeks before i left a friend of mine left for amman to renew her visa. she’s finishing up research for her dissertation and living in ramallah. she came back and said she had only a few days and she had to leave again. not only could she only stay one week (in lieu of the normal three month visa granted to foreigners at the malak [King] hussein bridge), but she was granted a west bank only visa. this was the first time i had heard of such a thing. but it turns out that it was quickly becoming a phenomenon.”

Canadian paper The Globe and Mail has suggested that the policy unfairly targets Arab-Americans and Canadians and simply those with “Arab-sounding names.” Canadian Dawg’s Blog agrees, writing:

“Canada isn’t the only place where having a “funny name“–like Abdelrazik, Mohamud, Khadr or Arar–can get you into trouble. Try visiting Israel if you have a name like that.
Canadian and American citizens with “Palestinian-sounding names” are now routinely denied entry into Israel at Ben Gurion National Airport, and told to use the Allenby land bridge from Jordan into the West Bank. But once they get there, their passports are stamped “Palestinian Authority only,” and entry into Israel is still denied.”

U.S. nationals to whom this has happened have banded together and complained to the U.S. Consulate. Palestinian Joharah Baker, writing for MIFTAH, encourages more to do so:

” So, US nationals, the next time you are turned back at one of Israel’s borders or are given a PA-only stamp, file a complaint with the US Consulate just for good measure. Just don’t expect a reply.”

Although U.S. President Barack Obama has issued a statement condemning Israel’s actions, the visa restrictions still remain. A U.S.-based campaign, run by the Arab American Institute, encourages American citizens who are denied entry at the Allenby bridge to fill out a denial form to submit to the U.S.