Awareness of the widespread use of sexual violence against women in ethno-nationalist wars in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s prompted greater recognition of the need to better understand the gendered dimensions of conflict. A substantial body of feminist writing now exists that examines the ways in which war, conflict, and the processes that surround them are (and always have been) deeply gendered and experienced differently by women and men (e.g., Cynthia Enloe, Nira Yuval Davis, Lois Ann Lorentzen, and Jennifer Turpin). While exposing the gendered brutality of wartime sexual violence against women is a pivotal part of this literature, it also deepens the understanding of women's gendered experiences in conflict situations more generally: as “casualties of war” (through death, injury, dispossession, displacement, impoverishment, etc.); as providers of “support services” (from catering and message running to prostitution); as bearers of national or ethnic identity; as sacrificing mothers and wives of soldiers; as peace activists; as guerillas and combatants; and as perpetrators of atrocities.
Complementing this literature, a growing body of sociolegal writing analyzes women's experiences of “transitional justice” (e.g., Christine Chinkin, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, Rhonda Copelon), while a parallel literature examines the role of gender in political transitions from repressive authoritarianism to “democracy,” especially in South America (e.g., Sonia Alvarez and Georgina Waylen). What Happened to The Women? edited by Ruth Rubio-Marin greatly expands the horizons of gender analyses of postconflict transition. The second book under review—To Save Her Life by Dan Saxon—is best read in light of the insights of the abundant scholarship on gender, conflict, and transitions more generally.
Christine Bell and Johanna Keenan (“Human Rights Nongovernmental Organizations and the Problems of Transition,” Human Rights Quarterly [no. 26, 2004: 330–374]) suggest that the core problematic of transitional justice has become the balancing of normative imperatives of justice against the pragmatic requirements of peace and reconciliation. This balancing act usually entails a shift away from retributive/punitive to restorative/reparative models of justice. The bulk of feminist interventions to date, however, has centered on “engendering” retributive models—most notably, securing the historic recognition of rape as a “war crime” and “crime against humanity” in the Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998). Ten years on, however, there are well-founded concerns about the limitations of retributive justice in meeting the needs of the majority of survivors of wartime sexual violence and in closing off consideration of other gender-specific impacts of conflict.
What Happened to the Women? responds to this gap. It is the culmination of an important scholarly undertaking, which provides comprehensive overviews and gender analyses of six examples of restorative/reparative approaches to transitional justice in South Africa, Guatemala, Peru, Sierra Leone, and Timor Leste. Rubio-Marin explains that reparative approaches to transitional justice generally involve the allocation of symbolic and material resources toward 1) recognition of victims and survivors; 2) provision of compensation or restitution; 3) rehabilitation measures; and 4) reforms to ensure that the violations that occurred during the conflict will not happen again. She cautions that inadequate participation of women and women's rights organisations is likely to “introduce gender bias into the shaping of reparations policies” (p. 29). At the same time, she is optimistic that the “harms-based extension of the notion of victim” at the heart of the reparations model of justice “has great potential for engendering reparations” (p. 31). For example, the possibility of naming as reparation triggers the use of sexual violence as a political tool or of being widowed (and becoming a single parent/sole breadwinner) through the killing or disappearance of a spouse or partner.
The book contains many accounts of violations of women's human rights that have occurred across the six case studies and the “non-responses and weak responses” that have accompanied them (p. 27). In Timor Leste, for example, Galuh Wandita and colleagues note that despite 853 documented counts of sexual violence in the 1999 conflict, inadequate supports for women to testify resulted in “only one conviction for rape as a crime against humanity” (315–316) in 2005. Regarding Rwanda, Heidy Rombouts flags several concerns of women vis-à-vis the evolving reparations program there, which are indicative of women's apprehensiveness around transitional justice processes more generally. These include fears of personal violence, stigmatization, damage to fragile social support networks on which women depend, or even renewed conflict as a result testifying; chronic lack of support and rehabilitation services for victims; inaccessibility of reparation processes (especially for rurally based women); and potentially discriminatory modes of compensation (e.g., services for “needy” victims, and monetary lump sums for “non-needy”).
Moving to South America, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey offers a cogent overview of the gender dimensions of human rights and reparations in Guatemala. During more than 30 years of internal conflict ending in 1996, there were approximately 132,000 executions or disappearances. Paz y Paz Bailey reports that approximately 20% of those executed, tortured, or detained, 12% of those who disappeared, and 50% of those who died due to displacement were female (women and girls). Predictably, 99% of the victims of 1,464 reported rapes (accepted to be a massive underestimation) were women or girls. Against this backdrop, Paz y Paz Bailey singles out “widowhood” and “sexual abuse” as the “forms of victimization” that most affect women (p. 99). In addition to a lack of political will to address the needs of victims in general, she underlines two key obstacles to gender justice in reparations processes. First, political leaders persistently “downplay the magnitude of violations committed against women during the conflict” (p. 105). Second, and perhaps more challenging as an obstacle, is the ongoing “fear and social shame suffered by women for having been victims of violence, especially sexual violence [which] prevents them from denouncing these crimes” (p. 105).
While the pessimistic side of the balance sheet weighs heavily, the book contains several examples of positive commitments and principles that have been secured, which have the potential to “broaden the imagination and suggest ways of conceptualizing forms of redress tailored to women” (p. 27). Most notably, the reparations program in Timor Leste includes “gender” as one of five “guiding principles” and, importantly, recommends that “at least 50% of resources … be earmarked for female beneficiaries” (p. 308). In Peru, Julie Guillerot hails as “a major step forward” the inclusion in the reparations plan of rape “among the crimes to be repaired, and particularly among crimes covered by economic reparations” (p. 170). In Guatemala, as Paz y Paz Bailey notes regarding the reparations debate, “the opportunity [for women] to participate and speak and the state's acknowledgement of … its responsibility for violence against women during the conflict have in themselves been reparative” (p. 119).
Staying with Guatemala, To Save Her Life is aptly described by Dan Saxon as a “riveting narrative” that is “part human rights drama, part political thriller, part love story.” The narrative takes as its point of departure two weeks in the life of Maritza Urrutia in July 1992. Urrutia (we discover as the book progresses) had been an active member of the Guerilla Army of the Poor (the Organización) for 10 years and in 1992 was playing a significant communications support role in the armed resistance against the repressive right-wing government. Urrutia, who was also the ex-wife of a highly placed guerrilla in the Organización, was kidnapped from the street by army agents after having dropped off her 4-year-old son at The Walt Disney School in Guatemala City. She was to spend a grueling week subjected to various forms of torture at a nearby detention facility before appearing in a television broadcast repudiating her antigovernment activism and denying she was kidnapped, followed by her subsequent choreographed “reappearance.” Another week of anxiety followed as Urrutia became the center of a mini diplomatic crisis and an intense international advocacy campaign; she waited in hiding at the Archbishopric for approval to leave Guatemala and enter the United States with her son, aided significantly by Dan Saxon and his organization—the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala (ODHA).
Saxon effectively uses these events to tell multiple stories, not least his own personal story as a young and often naive human rights advocate in a Catholic human rights agency. The reader learns about the turbulent political history of Guatemala and the role of the Urrutia family therein, its legacy of social justice activism under the revolutionary government of Jacoba Árbenz, and opposition to the right-wing governments that followed. Saxon introduces a vast cast of players in a compelling account of the interplay of realpolitik and human rights advocacy in a country in transition: Maritza Urrutia and her family members, journalists, politicians, army colonels, U.S. CIA agents and diplomatic staff, human rights activists and their organizations, and members of the Catholic clergy. From a gender perspective, however, the book has considerable shortcomings suggested in the title; this is not in fact a story about Uruttia but about an array of (mainly male) protagonists around her and the actions they took, ostensibly “to save her life.”
Throughout the book, we learn very little about Urrutia the guerilla and political actor. Saxon never properly addresses the wider context of human rights abuse set out by Paz y Paz Bailey (even though she relies largely on a report produced by his organization, ODHA). The book misses an important opportunity to reflect on Urrutia's engagement with the Organización and the gender-specific aspects of how she was treated as a result by the different arms of the state, the Organización, the wider society, and her family and supporters. Instead, Saxon's account relies on well-worn gender stereotypes. Overall, we get a picture of a woman who is out of her depth and has inadvertently caused a great deal of grief to all around her. The reader is repeatedly reminded of her primary identity as a mother and that her paramount concern throughout was to be reunited with her son. Saxon frequently describes scenes where she is confused, appears to be “crazy,” or literally cries on Saxon's shoulder—that is, a woman in need of the protection of her brother, the Archbishopric, Dan Saxon, and through him, the benevolence of the “good guys” in the U.S. machine (politicians, human rights activists and organization, diplomats, etc.).
While there are undoubtedly kernels of truth to this picture, it leaves too much unexplored about the significance of Urrutia's association with the armed resistance and what this might tell us about women's complex experiences of conflict, the role of women and gendered power relations in transitions from conflict, and the gendered construction of our stories and histories in each case.
