Unsung heroines

Most discussions on the contribution of women who have fought against social injustice tend to focus on luminaries such as Aung San Suu Kyi, Mother Teresa, Wangari Maathai, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Miriam Makeba, while ignoring the less known ones who strive to protect civil liberties at the grassroots at great risk to their lives. 

One such heroine is Justine Masika Bihamba, who founded the Synergie des Femmes pour les Victimes des Violences Sexuelles (Women’s Synergy for Victims of Sexual Violence), to care for and support female rape victims in North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). 

Since 1998, the eastern part of the DRC has witnessed unending conflicts, in which some 5.4 million people have lost their lives.

In Kivu, the epicentre of the fighting, women have suffered the most, with UN reports indicating that more than 200,000 cases of sexual violence have occurred.

Tens of thousands of women have been maimed through torture, while many are later abandoned by their husbands and rejected by society.  

Yet apart from medical establishments, only a few Congolese organisations in Kivu – mostly those comprising women – fight effectively for these victims, undeterred by their limited resources. Bihamba’s organisation is a good example.  

Synergie comprises 35 organisations operating throughout North Kivu, and has developed the capacity to provide victims with medical, psychological, social and legal support and care.

The organisation strives to empower women financially. It also engages in family mediation in cases where husbands have abandoned their wives and families. It has handled the cases of more than 10,000 women since 2003.

“Its effectiveness is due in large part to its founder’s desire to include women who have themselves been victims. Bihamba and the organisation’s other leaders seem to be everywhere, raising the awareness of populations and communities and lobbying local, national and international authorities,” notes French photojournalist Pierre-Yves Ginet, who participated in an exhibition extolling the role of women like Bihamba at the Uganda National Museum in Kampala from September 8-30.

Organised by Alliance Française de Kampala, UN Women and the French Embassy in Uganda, the exhibition sought to give a balanced view of all continents, religions, countries, war zones or areas of “military-induced peace,” in order to underline the universality of women’s resistance.

WOMEN IN RESISTANCE

Through the complexity of women’s role in society, it explored topics such as respect for ethnic minorities, struggles against unjust laws or totalitarian governments, battles to gain full and recognised citizenship, struggles for survival through major epidemics and conflicts or often difficult post-war reconstruction.

Bihamba is among the women who featured in Ginet’s photo exhibition titled “Women in Resistance”.

Ginet’s work is dedicated to women’s resistance in the modern world. His first reports on the struggle of Tibetan nuns, between 1998 to 2001, encouraged him, in collaboration with the Association Femmes ici et Ailleurs (Women here and elsewhere), to widen his focus.

Between 2001 and 2006, he travelled to 17 countries to photograph women who were helping to write modern history. Whichever form their actions take, their initiatives have one goal: create a better future for generations to come.

Take the Rwanda genocide, in which close to 1 million people were killed in less than 100 days, for instance. The mass killings caused irreversible demographical and psychological long-term consequences. In 1995, women, who had been less targeted than men during the killings, accounted for 70 per cent of the Rwandan population. Half of the adult survivors were widows, and 65,000 orphans. 

The Association des Veuves du Genocide Agahazo (Avega) was established by 50 survivors to help those widowed or orphaned by the genocide.

Today, it has almost 25,000 members. Their story is captured in the exhibition titled “The Avega Widows, Adoptive Mothers of the Orphans of the Genocide.” 

Avega is playing a major role in the ongoing exhumations as well as the legal proceedings against those guilty of genocide. 

Ginet notes that “Many widows have displayed incredible acts of humanity. Despite their suffering, the women from Avega have travelled the county in search of their children and other relatives. They have sheltered, adopted, and brought up their nieces and nephews, the children of cousins, friends, neighbours, sometimes Hutu. In the absence of men, they rebuilt families, taking in four, five, 10, sometimes up to 27 children. 

“As a result, hundreds of thousands of orphans of the genocide have been able to enjoy a family structure. Often living on almost nothing, these women generally cannot explain how they manage to feed these families. Their daily battles have not only made survival possible, but have enabled the country to make a fresh start, with youth brought up according to values far apart from those of 1994…,” notes Ginet

DJAZAIROUNA

In Algeria, some 200,000 people were killed while another 15,000 “disappeared” in the 1990s. In the city of Blida, 7,000 people were killed. Among those killed in 1996 were Cherifa Kheddar’s brother and sister. They were first tortured by fundamentalist militiamen as she watched. A few months later, she established the association, “Djazairouna” (Our Algeria), a story captured in “Djazairouna, For the Victims of Terrorism”. 

Her group now boasts close to 25,000 members, mostly women. The most deprived families receive material assistance, often focused on children’s education. Psychologists help widows and the young rebuild their lives.  

Djazairouna is known throughout the country for its legal support to victims. Indeed, its members are the only 1990s’ rape victims who receive a state pension. Many women whose husbands “disappeared” also receive part of their husband’s salary, thanks to the association’s intervention. 

Baya Maaloumi is a case in point. The 46-year-old woman’s husband was abducted in September 1995 as he worked on his farm in Melaha village.

The town hall employee’s body was never found, and while the local police gave a verbal statement on the abduction, they failed to make any follow-up. Djazairouna took up the case and obtained a disappearing act declaration in 2005, and eventually, a death certificate, thereby enabling Maaloumi to receive two-thirds of her husband’s salary.

In the exhibition titled “Tibetan Nuns”, Ginet observes that women’s education has been widely neglected in Asia. The nuns’ activities are often restricted to daily rituals typical of monastic life. Often secluded, they have few material comforts. 

Even though there are fewer nuns than monks in occupied Tibet, the nuns are viewed as a problem by the Chinese military. Consequently, convents are targeted for spying, re-education campaigns, destruction of buildings and evictions. Undaunted, they all display a picture of the Dalai Lama’s forbidden picture and retain their original Buddhist tenets. 

All convents are potential sites for dissent. The Garu Convent, for example, sheltered Ngawang Sangdrol, who was arrested at the age of 13 for demonstrating against Chinese occupation of Tibet. As a result of international pressure, she was released in 2002 after 10 years in jail. 

Besides, nuns led 55 of the 126 protests in Tibet between 1991 and 1996. “This resistance of the Tibetan nuns is especially remarkable for a social group that has always been discredited and neglected, even inside the religious community…,” Ginet notes. 

And in Peru, 331,600 women, mostly Indians, were sterilised between 1995 and 2000 in the “voluntary anti-conception surgery” policy of President Alberto Fujimori’s regime. Medical teams used different methods to achieve their aims: gifts, food, money, threats and physical force.

Today, the victims, many of whom were forcibly operated, suffer both physical and psychological trauma. 

DEFIANT WOMEN

Since 1997, Hilaria Supa Huaman, a peasant leader in the country’s Cuzco region, has encouraged women to file complaints. When she got no official response, this iconic Quechua woman sought support from rights organisations, with little success.

And despite threats, in 2001 Hilaria convinced 12 women from Anta Province, some of them illiterate, to go with her to Lima to testify in front of judges, political representatives and the media. “Their actions received a lot of attention at the time,” Ginet recalls in the story, “The Defiant Women of Anta.” 

Towards the end of 2005, Hilaria, and the “twelve”, together with some relatives, established the “Committee of the Sterilised Women of Anta.” By the end of June 2006, the association had 215 members.  

New complaints were to be filed, but this time before international tribunals. The women of Anta are waiting for a judgment against the state for their rights to be acknowledged. They are pursuing compensation for the 300,000 women affected. 

At the end of October 2011, an investigation into the mass sterilisations was opened.

“Thanks to the women of Anta, these abuses are not forgotten,” Ginet says. Ginet’s stories depict different types of female struggles, revealing some unknown “fighters”. The exhibition has five parts where the public can discover women who “exist”, “resist”, “survive”, “struggle” and “rebuild”. 

Ginet distances himself from the stereotypical representation of women as victims, or as a minority to protect. 

“…These women have taught me to consider and seek out these daily acts of resistance, which are often unspectacular, and seldom covered. At a glance, these acts, which are interlinked and identically intertwined in time by hundreds of women, may seem ordinary, but they form the basis of unalterable desire for life; the bedrock that shatters all forms of oppression,” Ginet says. 

He notes that although women represent more than half of humanity, they are still excluded from their countries’ economic, political and social life, and are more vulnerable to poverty, lack of education, wars and epidemics. 

“The story that was written by the women is also multifaceted and complex. I wanted to depart from this stereotypical representation, which places the woman as victimised, to recognise the fighting, visible or invisible, led by some,” he says. 

The photojournalist told DN2 that most journalists focus on men while ignoring women. “Many of us only talk about women when they are victims most of the time. We are mainly attracted to men fighters, but life is not like that.” 

Ginet says men are the dominant sex as fighters and violators. “As we attempt to subjugate our enemies, we kill and rape to show our power and dominance, especially over women. When men rape, it is a way to destabilise the enemy because we believe that women belong to men. ...They don’t belong to anybody except themselves. We (men) are cowards. Male domination has killed millions of people while feminism has not.” 

He contends that there is no major difference in the roles between men and women. “We all have the same roles, except that women give birth. All the other roles have to be shared,” he says.

Alongside Ginet’s project was an exhibition by a local photographer, Oscar Kibuuka, portraying two strong Ugandan women: Gladys Canogura, the leader of Kitgum Women Peace Initiative (Kiwepi) and civil society activist involved in the elimination of sexual and gender-based violence in northern Uganda; and Betty Nakibuuka, a veteran freedom fighter, singer and pastor from Luwero District.