Hell Hath No Fury (13 page)

The women fighters were integral to the Eritrean war effort. Female volunteers came from all strata of Eritrean society, both Christian and Muslim. Most joined the EPLF against the will of their parents, and the majority described their background as “very traditional.” In the EPLF they were plunged into a very different environment in which Marxist guerrilla leaders preached equality between men and women and challenged their basic beliefs. After 1977, the women fighters were allowed to marry their comrades in the trenches. After a brief honeymoon, husband and wife returned to the front, often not seeing each other again for several months.

Demography was the principal reason for this revolution in military affairs. Ethiopia had a population fifteen times greater than Eritrea's. However, although some Eritrean women rode in tanks, the overwhelming majority were used principally to hold fixed positions. Another potential problem, that of pregnancy, was obviated by the harsh reality of the war against Ethiopia, with its perpetual food shortages. Most women, if their body fat falls below a certain level, cannot conceive (see
Long March
, Chapter 4).

Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia in May 1993. In the months following the Eritrean victory, many women soldiers returned to their families, often after an absence of ten years. At the time they were seen as heroic freedom fighters and were instantly recognizable, with their cropped hair, military clothes, and plastic sandals. Many of them later handled the transition from soldier to working mother with some success, although the previously admired military style of dress was soon abandoned.

Nevertheless, the transition from war to peace was accompanied by social stress. Of twelve thousand women fighters demobilized on independence, more than half, according to UN figures, were reported to have divorced. Their marriages did not survive the arrival of peace. Male attitudes also underwent a change. One female EPLF fighter, Ruth Simon, observed: “The men have become traditional again…this traditional male thinking has deep roots that go back many generations. When they went to the front, men were forced to accept EPLF policy of equality between the sexes. When they came back to the towns after liberation, the government had other priorities and did not concern itself with the emancipation of women. Men fell back into the old way of thinking” (see
FLN Bombers,
Chapter 4, for the same postrevolutionary process at work).

In July 1995, on the urging of Miriam Muhammad, an EPLF veteran, a number of Eritrean women founded Bana (Dawn), the Eritrean Women War Veterans Association. Its aim was to help former women fighters become economically independent with the creation of a cooperative. Demobilized women were able to buy shares with the money they received when they left the EPLF.

In 1998, tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea—principally ongoing economic and border disputes—boiled over into war between the two impoverished nations. Before a cease-fire was agreed upon in 2000, an estimated 100,000 people had lost their lives and 25 percent of the Eritrean population had been displaced.

In the late 1990s the Eritrean army contained the highest proportion of women fighters in the world, some 40,000 out of a total of 300,000, the latter figure representing approximately 10 percent of the population.

Reference: Olive Furley and Roy May,
Ending Africa's Wars: Progressing to Peace,
2006.

FIGNER, VERA

Russian Revolutionary, b. 1852, d. 1942

One of the Narodnik terrorists who plotted the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Vera Figner lived to a great age and died a heroine of the Soviet Union.

She was the eldest of six children in a prosperous Kazan family and had a happy childhood, in which she was educated at home. After attending the Rodionovsky Institute for Women in Kazan, she studied medicine in Switzerland, where she lived with her lawyer husband, Aleksey Filippov, and her sister Lidiya.

In 1873 Figner and her sister joined a student discussion club, members of which would later form the nucleus of the All-Russian Social Revolutionary Organization. In December 1875 she returned to Russia, and a year later she joined the revolutionary group Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty). She obtained a paramedic's license, divorced her husband, and went to work in the countryside, where she combined her medical duties with the distribution of revolutionary pamphlets. In 1879, after a split in Zemlya i Volya, Figner joined the terrorist branch of the movement Narodnaya Volya (the People's Will). She became the group's agent in Odessa, writing articles, establishing links with dissident members of the Russian military, and planning the assassination of Tsar Alexander II with, among others, Sofya Perovskaya and her lover, Andrei Zhelyabov.

In February 1881, Perovskaya directed the successful assassination of Alexander II in St. Petersburg. She was arrested in March, tried, sentenced to death, and hanged in April. Figner became the acting head of the remnants of the Narodnaya Volya, based in Kharkov, but was betrayed and arrested in February 1883 and sentenced to death the following year. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, initially in the Peter and Paul prison in St. Petersburg and then, for twenty years, in the dreaded Schlüsselburg island fortress on the Neva River, where, as she later wrote, “the clock of life stopped.” These bleak words later became the title of her 1921 memoirs.

In 1904 she was released into exile in Archangel, on the White Sea. Two years later she made her way abroad, living in Switzerland until her return to Russia in 1915. After the Russian Revolution, she chaired the Society of the Former Political Prisoners and Exiles. Between 1929 and 1932, her collected works were published in the Soviet Union in seven volumes.

Reference: Vera Figner,
Memoirs of a Revolutionist,
1927.

FLN BOMBERS

Algerian War of Independence, 1954–62

In the early 1950s, Algerian demands for even limited political and civil rights had been repeatedly rebuffed by the French colonial regime and the nearly one million European settlers in the country. The National Liberation Front (FLN) was formed in October 1954 to fight for Algeria's independence, and women were integral to the campaign from the start.

Depending on where they lived, city or village, and their level of education, Algerian women participated in the struggle along with men in several capacities. Rural women either joined the National Liberation Front or provided food, provisions, and havens for the guerrillas; about 80 percent of the women who actively participated resided in the countryside. In cities, they joined the FLN. By the summer of 1956, the FLN could boast some twenty thousand active members organized on military lines and count on the passive support of most of the Muslim population of Algeria. FLN operations in the capital city of Algiers were controlled by Saadi Yacef, who had been ordered by his high command to prosecute a campaign of terror against “any Europeans between the ages of 18 and 54” but to avoid killing “women, children and old people.”

Self-confident and ruthless, the twenty-nine-year-old Yacef had established a power base in Algiers's teeming Casbah and had built up a cadre of some fifteen hundred terrorists, a number of whom were attractive, well-educated young women who could pass as Europeans. At the beginning of what was later dubbed the Battle of Algiers, among the most significant of these women were Djamila Bouhired, Yacef's chief recruiting officer of fighting women, and Samia Lakhdari and Zohra Drif, law students at Algiers University. The twenty-two-year-old Drif had decided to join the FLN after the 1956 execution by guillotine of two members, Ahmed Zabana and Abdelkader Ferradj, the latter disabled.

The women undertook their first mission on September 30, 1956, carrying three bombs into the heart of European Algiers. They had removed their veils, tinted their hair, and wore bright summer dresses. The bombs, carried at the bottom of beach bags filled with swimwear, weighed little more than a kilogram and were set to go off at one-minute intervals from 6:30
P.M
. Drif and Lakhdari deposited their bombs in two fashionable cafeterias and left. The explosives detonated on time, killing three and injuring fifty, among them several children. Bouhired's bomb, placed in the hall of the Air France terminus, failed to detonate because of a faulty timer.

On January 25, 1957, two days before the FLN called a general strike in Algiers, Yacef launched another wave of bombings. Once again the bombs were carried by three women, whose operational value had been greatly increased by French body searches of every male leaving the Casbah, while women were allowed the cover of the all-enveloping traditional Muslim veil (see also
Suicide Bombers
, Chapter 10).

One of the bombers was a European, Daniele Minn, the stepdaughter of a Communist. Minn was among a number of French-educated women who had never worn the veil but adopted it as a military strategy in order to carry bombs, money, or messages from one zone of Algiers to another without being stopped and searched.

Another was Djamila Boupacha, who along with Bouhired would achieve international recognition for her suffering in the aftermath of the raid. Their targets were a student bar, a nearby cafeteria, and a popular brasserie. The bombs claimed sixty wounded and five killed, including an innocent young Muslim mechanic who was lynched on the spot in the backlash launched by the
pieds-noirs
(“black feet,” the nickname of European settlers in Algeria). Two weeks later, two teenage girls placed bombs in two crowded sports stadiums, killing ten and injuring forty-five.

Freedom fighters to Algerians but loathed terrorists to the French, Bouhired and Boupacha were among a number of women soon captured by the French police or army, imprisoned, and subjected to severe torture. After considerable suffering, Bouhired was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in July 1957. The execution was postponed after a national outcry, culminating in the publication of
Pour Djamila Bouhired
(For Djamila Bouhired), and Bouhired was sent to prison in France until the war was won in 1962.

Others also suffered grievously. Arrested in February 1960 for throwing a bomb into a café, Boupacha, a virgin, was subjected to a variety of tortures and sexual humiliation, culminating in rape with a broken bottle. Her case received widest publicity in France, a portrait of her by Picasso appearing in many magazines. A highly vocal “D B Committee” was founded by eminent philosophers and liberals such as François Mauriac, Simone de Beauvoir, and Germaine Tillion, which helped to foster antiwar sentiment and to ensure Boupacha's release.

The FLN's bombing campaign was just one part of an independence struggle that lasted until the spring of 1962 and was conducted with great savagery by the French military, the FLN, and the OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète, the backlash terrorist group that fought for a French Algeria in North Africa and metropolitan France). The war spread to the French mainland, brought down the French Fourth Republic, and led to the return to power of the war hero General Charles de Gaulle, who staved off a military coup d'etat, restored stability, and with great skill orchestrated the handing over of power to the Algerians.

This came at a heavy cost to both sides: in Algeria the French military suffered some 17,500 dead and 65,000 wounded. European civilian casualties ran to more than 10,000, including nearly 3,000 dead. It is estimated that the total number of Algerian casualties was somewhere between 300,000 and 1 million. At least 30,000 of them were FLN members who were the victims of internal FLN purges, or Muslims who died in the brutal reprisals that formed a key part of that organization's strategy of terror.

Zohra Drif, regarded as a heroine of the Battle of Algiers, spent five years of a twenty-year sentence in French prisons before completing her law studies and becoming secretary-general of the Algerian École Nationale d'Administration. Her fellow bomber Djamila Bouhired became a businesswoman and stood for election to the First National Assembly.

In the years following the struggle for independence, they remained among the very few examples of women liberated by the war. In the heat of the conflict, the French critic Frantz Fanon, the author of
A Dying Colonialism
and
The Wretched of the Earth
(both originally published in 1961), had predicted that a new social order would emerge from the dreadful carnage in Algeria, but he was wrong.

After the treaty of peace was signed with France in 1962, the independent Algerian government registered nearly eleven thousand women as war veterans, but this figure greatly undervalued the true number of women who actively contributed to the war effort. In an effort to assert political authority and cultural authenticity as well as to restore their masculinity so badly bruised by colonial rule, male nationalist leaders proved notoriously resistant to demands for female emancipation once they assumed power.

As in other liberation struggles (see
Partisans,
Chapter 4), the role of many FLN women had initially drawn them from a position of medieval subjection as passive complements to men to that of active participants in the fight for independence. After independence was achieved, the process was thrown into reverse gear.

Djamila Bouhired, now a grandmother, continued her militant activities after the war but shifted her battleground to feminist protest advocating immediate improvements in the legal, political, and social status of Algeria's women. Predictably, the horrors endured by these women and others did little or nothing to improve the status of Algerian women once the war was won. Despite heated opposition from women's groups, pressure from Islamists in the early 1980s resulted in the Family Code of 1984, which legally removed most of the rights given to women under the Charter of Algiers established after independence.

For the oppressed women of Algeria, there remains a bitter comparison with Tunisia, where women's rights are more firmly established and their roles less restricted. This demonstrates how closely women's lives in a postrevolutionary world are tied to levels of colonial violence and male definitions of nationalism. In Tunisia, independence was achieved in 1956 with relatively little upheaval, while unspeakable horror, bloodshed, and social chaos reigned for years in Algeria.