BOOK REVIEW: WAR IS NOT OVER WHEN IT'S OVER

WAR IS NOT OVER WHEN IT’S OVER: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War

Ann Jones

Metropolitan Books

Working as a volunteer for International Rescue Committee, Ann Jones traveled in Africa, East Asia and the Middle East. In War Is Not Over she tells individual women’s stories, but also fills us in with the back story of U.N. Security Council resolution, beginning with 1325 in 2000. It mandated that women be full participants in decision making in every step of conflict resolution and peace building. In 2008, Jones reminds us, “SCR 1820 demands “the immediate and complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence against civilians with immediate effect.” How grand it would be if women’s safety could be guaranteed by resolutions. Nevertheless, sometimes it’s good for the camel to stick it’s nose in the tent, and these resolutions are important steps to assuring women’s safety.

As part of her planning for her trips, Jones met with Heidi Lehmann, the head of the UN Gender-Based Violence (GBV) technical unit, and asked her what she thought would be useful to do. “Unlike other aid workers,” Jones says, Heidi had questions. ‘We see all these statistics about the numbers of women raped and captured or displaced,’ she said, ‘but we don’t know much about who they are.’” Lehmann wanted to know about their hopes and problems and “what international assistance might actually be of help….And she wanted to find a way to break the silence, to help them speak up for themselves.” “Women,” Jones says, “need more than the world’s sympathy. They need the world’s ear.”

Jones was not quite alone when she set out on her year-long journey. She carried with her a goodly supply of guts, empathy, creativity, and a willing ear. But she also took with her a few digital cameras. The book begins with her experience in Cote D’Ivoire, one of several African countries she visited. In villages in each country she visited she asked a small group of women volunteers to document their lives in photographs. Then they met to discuss their photos. Few of the women had ever seen a camera before, and most had never spoken publicly. But soon they were organizing the “First-Ever All-women’s Photography Exhibition and Celebration” and they invited local “bigwigs” to view it. Each women showed two of her photographs that documented a problem. Next she described the action needed to bring about change.

Jones makes the point that the purpose of the project was to help women develop skills in “observation, analysis, articulation” and the “confidence needed to advocate for themselves.” Those goals were achieved, yet Jones had some misgivings. “…some opened up,” she says, “and told us their stories, several on videotape, wanting the world to know. But the stories were so awful, I wondered if the world could bear to hear them.”

I forced myself to “hear” those stories in the pages that follow. Photos in the book record some of the hard-to-see events in the women’s lives. One shows a woman sprawled on the ground, and the man who apparently knocked her there is headed toward her again. It is almost a duplicate of a poster against domestic violence I saw in Kabul in 2005, and for me it illustrated the universality of women’s plight.

Among the horrors that Jones does tell readers about are “more than ten thousand rape victims, (needing) the surgical repair of thousands of fistulae, most caused by brutal multiple rapes, some with the insertion of other foreign objects. The oldest patient was eighty-three, the youngest nine months.” Some never reached a hospital until about a year after the rape. A hospital admitted six or seven women a day, “when the consequences, STDs, HIV and fistula became harder to bear than the shame.” Sometimes it was too late.

But the book is not all bad news. After the “First-Ever” photo exhibit, Jones collected the cameras to take to the next village. “They didn’t need them any more,” she says. “They could look around, spot problems and speak up….The impact varied…but the changes in the way communities looked at women, and women looked at themselves, were real and often dramatic.” In one village, after a month of photographing and discussing the images, “the women had somehow learned to generalized. They had begun to talk about “women,” and not just that one individual in the photo. They had begun to talk in terms of fairness and justice.” The women learned to photograph what was important, and to speak up for what they wanted. In at least one case they challenged tradition by looking their chief straight in the eye.

It was surely painful for Jones to listen to the women’s stories, and it is hard to read about them. It will be even more challenging for the U.N., village elders, and people throughout the world to create serious, permanent, fundamental reforms. But the process begins with people in all cultures understanding the pervasiveness and depth of the damage done. It will take all of us who care about women and children to support what the women have started. I can’t think of a better way to begin than by reading this book.