هديه ل(لجنة الرؤيه) ب(قطاع الشمال) مقال للدكتور الباقر العفيف!

Quote: However, I thought I will start first by sharing my thoughts about some of the currents stands made by some Sudanese women in this issue. To come directly to the issue I would to take a little time to explore the position of two of our women party leaders on war. The highest two ranking women in our Northern parties, are Ustaza Fatima Ahmed Ibraheim and Fighter Nada Mustafa. Each one of these women sits in the highest body of her political party. Ustaza Fatima is a member of the central committee of the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) and Fighter Nada is a member of the highest body of Sudanese Alliance Forces (SAF). Both of these women strongly advocate armed struggle and recently both have come out as strong pro-war voices. I must hasten to add that one important difference is that the SCP does not seem to have a unified or coherent stand on the issue of armed struggle in contrast to SAF which was born as a military movement first and later developed its civilian branch. ...... ...... ...... In the case of Fighter Nada we cannot of course speculate about her reasons for advocating war, since she became known as such from the start and since her initiation into politics came through a war machine. However, it is not easy to come to understand the intellectual foundations, if any, of her views. There is certainly a blend of disparate and contradictory themes apparent in her writings. After all most of us in North America know her from her writing in the list; unlike Fatima who has made speeches everywhere. Fighter Nada (this is her official title in her organization) is young and have actually attained a leadership position in a new organization. Moreover, her training seems to be in women studies as evidenced by the overly frequent presence of the word "gender" and other "academic" jargon in her writings. Unlike Fatima who has actually sent an emotional heart-felt message as her war cry, Fighter Nada’s style is certainly very different. She rarely approaches the issue of war unless provoked beyond tolerance. However, when she does write about war, she lends support to her message from the traditional literature of mostly leftist revolutionary movements. She invokes the spirit of the 60s in the sense that we are made to feel that a revolutionary war, made by a revolutionary army will bring everlasting peace and prosperity on Earth. In such instances her language is mostly very romantic and the rosy picture that comes across to us of it is of children being educated in schools with old pens while being cured from or immunized from tuberculosis, with the help of NGOs and wonderful foreign revolutionaries. When it comes to women, her language is entirely "academic" of the type fashionable in academic feminist classes, full of gender, textual, agency etc., no wonder they arrive dead with no hope of touching, provoking or inspiring the audience. While many of these words have made their way to the mainstream outside university classes, Fighter Nada relies heavily on them without showing exactly how this language can be incorporated to articulate topical Sudanese women issues. Such style makes sensible give-and-take discussion with her almost impossible. Thus it is never clear to us from her writings what the exact role of women in this war is at all. In response to any issue relating to women place or role in this war, she often responds with long passages from her party program which are evidently mainly written by her, or a like-minded, as they often contain the same lifeless academic style. These lengthy passages, however, on the whole provide us with little that enlightens us as to how her movement intends to go about challenging conservative mores in our culture. Thus Nada the feminist proves to be even more elusive in her public writings than Nada the fighter. Of course the most important question for us in relation to war is what she thinks about the ethical dilemma related to modern warfare in Africa in the last two decades and especially in the nineties. Fighter Nada sees any mentioning of the misery that befalls women and children in war as an insult to women because it stems from "a victimization approach" that deprives women of "agency". Again all this is wrapped in academic language blended with hazy, romantic, and I must say juvenile notions about revolutionary wars and struggle. The world is full of harsh realities, and one of these realities is that some people fall victims in wars. They are victims simply because they do not initiate these wars nor do they have the power to protect themselves when these wars bring devastation to their homeland. There is nothing shameful in being a victim, rather what is shameful is willfully harboring the illusion that the people who live in the places where wars are launched are free agents who control their own destiny when their fate is actually decided in "overheated apartments in the West" and other diasporic magnets. Fighter Nada also exhibits breathtaking naivity when she thinks the African child-soldier phenomenon can be prevented in the East by laws written by the Generals, or their doctors, in her movement decreeing that children should not fight. The fact that wars are times when all laws are broken, first and foremost by those who wrote them, does not seem to occur to Fighter Nada. As if child-soldier phenomena occurred in places where people love children less than we do, or where Fighters could not dish out lofty literature and articulate less genuine grievances against their status quo. Fighter Nada seems to have this picture laid out of a war that is nice and clean where children go to bed at eight o'clock after drinking a glass of milk. Despite all this haziness and confusion, Fighter Nada is perhaps the only one in the pro-war side who is at least willing to brush off the concerns about wars and what they can do to innocent people who are not part of the struggle. Male pro-war writers do not trouble themselves at all with these trivial issues. Their eyes are firmly focused on Khartoum and their goal is the demise of the National Islamic Front while the cost does not matter in the least, so long as someone else will pay. If you observe their writings, they are full of rhetoric on how bad the National Islamic Front is and how rotten the sectarian parties are. Despite this "gender" difference between male and female pro-war writers, peace and its importance for women in Africa now is not admissible in the rhetoric of one of our most aspiring women leaders. And despite her constant reminders to us about the importance of gender issues and secularism, Fighter Nada shows extreme zeal in defending the generals and their Abu-centric ways. Putting in mind that among Sudanese institutions, which are uniformly known for their discrimination against women, the Sudanese army is certainly a mighty fort of conservatism and misogyny. Sudanese army officers are indoctrinated in such a way as to believe that civilian men are half men, half women, while the Police Academy is nicknamed by them "The Female Teachers Academy", thus women cannot hope for a any real appreciation from army officers unless they content themselves with the crumbs of power of the type that Nimeri offered to Dr. Fatima Abdelmahmoud!!This brings me to the observation that even though women took different sides in this issue of war and peace, the only two women in the political leadership of Northern parties are both pro-war. Many independent and politically active women and feminists remained either skeptical if not outright opposed to war. I think we have the right to wonder whether this is a coincidence. Whether or not women are admitted into leadership positions only if they are expected to comply with the predominant tendencies and fashionable thinking en vogue among the male-dominated political establishment. Does the inclusion of women in the leadership of political parties truly signify changing attitudes and notions or is it conditioned by the chosen women being in tune with the agenda of their male comrades? This question is interesting especially in light of the fact that during times of tough political and military struggle men usually seek the support of women, which they hope to get by offering token recognition of women aspirations. In the case of Fighter Nada one can also wonder what the possibilities could have been, had she remained a "free agent" and an independent feminist i.e. not part of a war machine? Would it have made her feminism sparkle and come alive instead of being shackled and suffocated by being in a party where army officers absolutely rein? Some may argue that women have to be part of parties and struggle from the inside to force and push their agenda to the forefront. I see the legitimacy of this very much but I also see that the presence of women in parties is nothing new in Sudan, if anything the story of politically active women and feminists in Sudan is the story of their being part of parties all the time with all the resulting stunting of their feminist spirit and growth. How much have we been affected by the absence or paucity of strong independent feminist voices? Can women really affect parties from within if they do not have sufficient and independent strength outside parties to enable them to exert enough pressure from without to force men inside to listen? My personal opinion is that, at this stage, feminist issues need to be articulated more on the outside, in the sense that among the politically active class, mainly the middle class, a strong feminist presence needs to be forged. The dynamics of the subjugation of women in daily life and inside the family and in popular culture need to be diligently exposed and elucidated. It is hard to do that when one is forced to protect a "party line" all the time. In the case of Ustaza Fatima, any productive discussion is impossible because she always hastens to cry "Western influence"!!. In the case of Fighter Nada, the discussion is also impossible because she hastens to copy lengthy passages of the party program illustrating the party unfailing commitment to women’s issues on paper. Or she may doubt the sincerity of those criticizing or go on to bring even more damning evidence such as in the instance when she listed the fighters with Abu-Rajil names thinking that the mere fact that these were imaginary sons (PLO-style macho Abu-Ammar, Yasir Arafat, who has no sons, only one daughter) is not damning enough. The protectiveness of party women of their male colleagues does influence serious tackling of important issues such as armed struggle and how it can affect women (if not the whole population). It also has ramifications on all other issues as well as the rift it creates among politically active women and feminists. What kind of dialogue can we hope to build with these women, is it at all possible? Can we exert pressure—and pressure must be exerted--- on them and their parties while still maintaining an open dialogue to promote feminist issues? There are more and more questions and I don’t have all the answers. I feel that this message has become too long. However, I think this discussion has lots of other aspects that I cannot do justice to right now. But let’s hope that it will continue and hopefully others will join. Nazik Hammad