Nationalism

Nationalism comes into being with the independence movement that generates a nation. Typically the rhetoric of such movements proposes a vision of the future as a narrative based on history and custom. This vision is the cornerstone of the emerging nation. As histories and customs are not universal, a nationalism is specific to its nation. It is a story of community that a people accepts as a definition of itself. Its function is to unify. Thus, nationalism generally ignores the diversity of its presumed community.

The new nations formed in the devolution of the great European empires have sought community in a variety of sites—in tribal compatibility, a common culture, a language, a religion, a constitution. Peoples held together by an imperial power have sometimes found differences of custom, religion, and ethnicity too great to tolerate when that power has withdrawn; for example, after World War II, the secession of India from the British Empire in 1947 was quickly followed by the Partition, entailing the movement of large populations to establish in Pakistan.

As long as emergent nations are in the process of separation, either from a waning empire or from each other, they have little enthusiasm for establishing programs to meet women's needs and rights, even if they recognize them. Survival maintenance—the provision of food, shelter, and protection from acts of war—is all that can be attempted.

After independence is achieved, the government is the official promoter of the national story. Governments, heirs as they are to emperors, monarchs, and tribal chieftains, tend to think in terms of hegemony, of the power to acquire and regulate resources. This focus reinforces traditional ways of regarding women as the property of men, useful for reproduction, labor, and establishing relations with other men. It encourages a camaraderie based on gender issues—that is, policies affecting men as a group.

There are myriad ways a legislature might oblige such a group of comrades, from failing to pass laws criminalizing violence against women to declining to intervene in privatization contracts that deprive women of their traditional rights to water and land. Governments move only when a particularly noxious scandal hits the headlines, or when grassroots activists vociferously demand change. Even when a law is passed, it may not be enforced, on the excuse of insufficient resources. Overall, the government does not represent the nation, which also comprises women, children, persons of uncertain gender, lesbians, and gays.

Discussion of two elections, both riven with gender issues, will provide examples of the place of women in relation to the importance of political power. In the summer of 2006, women in Kuwait, one of the smallest and richest of the new nations, and in the Congo, one of the largest and poorest, both voted in a parliamentary election for the first time.

Kuwait, a constitutional hereditary monarchy, became an independent nation in 1961 when the British dissolved their protectorate arrangement with the al-Sabah dynasty. The emir is the chief of state, the crown prince was the prime minister (this changed in 2003), the deputy prime ministers are men of the royal family. The elected Constituent Assembly has constitutional rights to demand electoral reform and to reject ministers the royal family appoints.

In this parliamentary democracy, Kuwaiti women suffragists worked for twenty years for legislation that would give them the vote. In most other Arabian Gulf nations, the ruling family initiated female suffrage. In Kuwait, traditionalist members of the Assembly voted down such measures. When the Emir Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah in 1999 issued a royal decree empowering women to vote, Islamist members of parliament argued that it was anti-Islam, and tribal members of parliament that it was against traditional Kuwaiti society. Critics of this position have suspected a class issue as well as a gender issue. Women of the merchant class for decades had good private educations and ample career choices. They became lawyers, physicians, university professors. Men of the middle class—in which the women were the most unlikely to seek employment outside the home—have availed themselves of public education, and resented the high employment rate of privately educated women. Voting against female suffrage, the argument goes, is a result of this resentment. Nonetheless, in May 2005 the national assembly responded to increasing public pressure and granted women full political rights.

In June 2006, women voted for Assembly members for the first time. That female candidates might not be elected did not distress them: as 57 percent of registered voters were women, a politician could no longer be seated by the votes of men alone, nor would the Assembly be able to ignore the needs and rights of these newly enfranchised citizens.

The Belgian colony of Congo gained independence in June 1960. The Republic was immediately plagued by political and social unrest. On July 4, the Congolese Army mutinied, ousting Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961). In January 1961, Lumumba was assassinated with the connivance of Western powers. Colonel Joseph Mobutu (later Mobuto Sese Seko, 1930–1997) declared himself president in 1965, a position he maintained for thirty-two years, holding elections with himself as sole candidate. In May 1997, the Mobutu regime fell to a rebellion led by Laurent Kabila (1939–2001), who renamed the nation the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The following year, insurgents from Rwanda and Uganda attacked Kabila's regime. Troops from other neighbors—Angola, Chad Namibia, Sudan, Zimbabwe—weighed in on the side of Kabila. In July 1999, the warring parties signed a ceasefire agreement, but Kabila was assassinated nonetheless. His son, Joseph Kabila (b. 1971), who became head of state, negotiated the withdrawal of Rwandan troops from eastern Congo. The first multiparty elections for the presidency since independence were held on July 30, 2006.

The United Nations provided 1,700 peacekeepers and the European Union an additional 1,000 troops to keep the peace during the election. The European Union and other donors contributed $400 million to provide electoral materials and training to poll workers. Interested organizations like the Southern Africa Development Community sent observer teams to watch the electoral process, which turned out to have been "peaceful, credible, well-managed, and transparent."

In Kivu Province, women went to the polls hoping the government would be able to reduce the violence perpetrated by the militants and the military on displaced women. In South Kivu, 4,000 women had been raped in the four months preceding the election. Many of them were consequently infected with HIV/AIDS.

Antoinette Kayiba of Kinshasa, the capital, said that she was "too close to death to see the fruits of these elections." Voting of her own free will was a pleasure after her forty years of compulsory suffrage. She was "more confident for the future" and hoped that the new head of state would be able to inspire the Congolese to end the war and to rebuild the country. She hoped women would no longer be raped and children would get a good education. None of the women who spoke eloquently of their intention to vote revealed who they would vote for. Their reticence came from the violence fostered by the election itself. President Kabila was re-elected in the run-off election of October 29, 2006. As of February 25, 2007, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is slowly coming to order (UNNews 2006).

TRAFFICKING

No country with transportation reaching beyond its borders is immune from trafficking in persons. Women, children, and men are tricked into or abducted for forced labor or prostitution. Trafficking is almost universally illegal. However, new nations are often unable to prosecute because of insufficient funds. Some turn a blind eye because slavery, forced marriage, and bonded labor are embedded in tradition. The varieties of labor are contingent on local conditions: In the Congo, militias have forced boys as young as nine to fight as soldiers. In the Côte d'Ivoire, trafficked men toil on coconut plantations. In Kuwait, Filipinos are imported for domestic work and enslaved. Worldwide, child prostitution has increased, in large part because it is thought that young girls are less likely to carry the HIV virus. The sexual exploitation of children is greatly under-acknowledged, even in countries like Vietnam and Myanmar—reported destinations for sex tourism.

FORCED MARRIAGE

Forced marriage is common in many of the new nations; it may entail abduction, rape, and murder. India and Iran have a high rate of forced marriage. In Bangladesh and Pakistan (where men comprise 15% of forced spouses), marriage is subject to personal law, which is specific to each religious community. Islamic law holds that a marriage is void if the two parties, both of the age of majority and of sound mind, have not both given their consent. Child marriage is allowed if consent is given by parents or guardians, but may be annulled if at puberty a child objects and the marriage has not been consummated. If the consummation was forced, the marriage may likewise be annulled. In rural areas of Pakistan, forced marriage has been used to settle disputes: the family of a murderer or debtor has been able to discharge the incurred obligation by offering young daughters to the wronged. These children, ostensibly brides, become indentured servants and, in many cases, sex slaves. In Ethiopia, 92 percent of all brides are abducted, often with parental consent. Poverty is thought to be a major cause, and education the best way to solve the problem. There has been little effort to provide such education.

FEMALE CIRCUMCISION/GENITAL CUTTING/MUTILATION

Female genital cutting, common in parts of Africa and Arabia, entails cutting off the prepuce of the clitoris; excising the clitoris altogether; or excising the clitoris, scraping out the labia minora, sewing up the raw flesh, and binding together the girl's legs until scar tissue covers the genital area. The most extreme type of excision is called infibulation. In childbirth, its medical consequences can be disastrous for both mother and child. Many new nations have passed legislation against it, but prosecutions are rare because it is a ritual hallowed by long custom and considered vital to community life.

It is generally agreed that persuasion is more effective than legislation to eradicate excision. In Iraqi Kurdistan, one activist group of women has made documentaries and shown them in villages beyond the reach of television. In Sierra Leone, imams have preached against genital female cutting, informing their congregations that the Qur'an does not require it. These activities are modifying custom without legislation. In Senegal, excision was outlawed in 1999. Tostan, a nonprofit organization which supports basic education and empowerment for women, maintains that this legislation has made their work more difficult by promoting defensiveness where excision is practiced (U.S. Department of State, Office of the Senior Coordinator for International Women's Issues 2001). Nonetheless, as of July 2006, Tostan had encouraged more than 1,600 Senegalese villages to abandon the custom.

FORCED LABOR

In South Asia, entire families have provided bonded labor, a condition resembling the slavery of trafficked women and children. In Pakistan, and in every state in India, there remain indigenous tribes who, driven from their native forests and arable lands by deforestation and large-scale agriculture, endure a meager existence as day-laborers and gleaners, made worse by debts accumulated through disaster and desperation. If a man becomes unable to repay his debts (swollen by huge finance charges), those who own the bond seize his children to become carpet weavers, beggars, and prostitutes, or take his wife for domestic or brothel service. Debts may be passed on through several generations. Should daughters and wives live to bear children in slavery, they are seldom ransomed.

The Indian Constitution guarantees the right to liberty. The Supreme Court of India has interpreted this right to include choice of employment and the protection of employment legislation. The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976 made all debt bondage illegal. However, as of March 2005, enforcement was sparse (The South Asian 2005). In Pakistan, an estimated one million bonded laborers have been denied their rights by a coalition of feudal landlords, President Pervez Musharraf's military regime, and other political interests.

RAPE

The governments of some of the new nations have been in denial about rape, a state of affairs to which the president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, referred in her inauguration speech of January 16, 2006, pledging to use the new rape legislation coming into force the following day.

Pakistan promises a spectacular change in rape law provoked largely by one woman's refusal to be shamed into silence and her persistence in bringing her case not only to local and national authorities but to the world at large. In June 2000, Mukhtar Mai, a Tatla woman, was raped by three men of the Mastoi (a clan of higher caste) in revenge for a suspected rape of one of their women by Mai's adolescent brother. In his next sermon, the village imam condemned the rape. He introduced a local journalist to Mai's father and persuaded the family to bring criminal charges against the rapists. The media picked up her story, which was broadcast on the BBC and appeared as an article in Time magazine. As her case advanced through the courts, Mai became an international icon for courage and women's rights.

Under Islamic law, raped women who cannot provide four Muslim male eyewitnesses to the rape have traditionally been convicted of adultery, a capital crime punishable by stoning to death. In June 2006, President Musharraf signed an amendment to current law allowing 1,300 women convicted of adultery to be freed on bail. This amendment covered only women in jail awaiting trial. In December 2006, he signed the Protection of Women Bill, passed by both houses of Parliament, which allows charges of rape to be tried in criminal court. Protesters have complained that the new legislation is anti-Islamic. This is a case where the nation has responded to the needs of women.

SEXUAL ORIENTATIONS

Half of the new African nations and three-quarters of the new Asian nations have criminalized gay and lesbian activity; another one-sixth of African nations have laws against male same-sex acts only, as do one-twentieth of Asian. Penalties range from death to a small fine. In sharia areas of Niger and Somalia, any sex act outside marriage incurs the death penalty, as it does in Islamic nations in Africa and Asia.

However, Namibia has passed a Labor Code including laws against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The South African Constitution explicitly protects against it; the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage to take effect in 2006. Israel has enacted gay rights legislation; the armed forces allow service for both gays and lesbians. The policy established by the Anti-Corruption Committee of Sierra Leone forbids all kinds of discrimination against homosexuals.

In July 2005, Iran hanged two teenage boys for having sex together. In November 2005, United Arab Emirates police raided a remote hotel on the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway to find a dozen men in bridal dresses and another dozen in male attire preparing for a wedding. Even though none were found in a sexual act, they were arrested and underwent psychological evaluation. They were to undergo all appropriate therapies, including testosterone injections if they were found deficient in the hormone. In Iran, male-to-female sex-change operations have been given official support as a means of curing alleged gender-identity disease. These nations are struggling to deal what they see as the problem of deviant sexual behavior. Their efforts are directed toward community apprehensions rather than to the needs of these men already marginalized by society.

Outside of the national territory, allegiance to national customs continued to shape the destiny of women and girls. At the end of empire, no one could have foreseen the numbers of the ex-colonized who found their way to the imperial homeland. Some went as displaced persons; others fled from the tyranny of military-backed regimes. Many of them expected eventually to return to their birth nation. Physicians, nurses, social workers, and teachers from Asia and Africa abound in Britain. Unlike these professionals, unskilled laborers often had little knowledge of the host country's language, law, or culture. As their work does not require it and they generally live in enclaves of like immigrants, they had little incentive to learn. Many such immigrants from rural areas of Pakistan brought their feudalism and their loyalty to their clan, tribe, or extended family with them. Some of them have imported boys and girls from their clan to marry their own sons and daughters; some have arranged to send daughters back to marry males of the clan. These journeys, involving large expenditures of time and money, suggest a strong attachment to the homeland; Algerians in the banlieue of French cities have a like relationship with their natal country. Surrounded in their daily lives by nationals like themselves, they have maintained their nationalism as a nostalgic recuperation of an imaginary past, and live in the shadow of their birth nation.

see also Communism and Marxism; Gender Roles: III. Contemporary Understanding; War.

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                                                Jean Pickering