Nine Parts of Desire (18 page)

Except for Ramadan, the day started with the prayer call at about five-thirty each morning. After prayers, recruits in black sweatsuits lined up for physical training. “We do the PT before any of the male administrators show up,” said Tracy. That way, the recruits could work out with their hair uncovered, although they usually kept their scarves tied around their waists, just in case.

Only fifteen women dropped out of the course. Some couldn’t cope with the presence of a few male administrators in the military school. Others missed their families, or their maids. Those who stayed thrived. At first the American trainers had revised their fitness targets downward, to accommodate women who’d never had to walk to the grocery store, much less complete a forced march. But within weeks the targets had been raised again, as the women easily mastered a hundred push-ups a day. One recruit shed forty-four pounds during the five-month training.

As the course wound toward its end in May 1991, “we saw this metamorphosis take place,” says Janis Karpinski. “In the last thirty days, I never saw these women but their shoulders were squared, their heads tall.” When Hadra Dawish took leave to visit her family, they were shocked at the changes in her. “They told me I’d changed too many things, from the way I walk to the way I act with them,” she said. “Some they liked. Some, no.” Hadra found her women friends hardest to convince. Sitting in their gilded salons, with foreign maids passing trays of sweet pastries, they shuddered at Hadra’s tales of digging foxholes and standing guard all night in desert camps. “They kept saying to me, ‘You have to come out, you’ve made a terrible choice.’ But I knew I’d made the right decision.”

Meanwhile, some senior officers in the Emirates’ army found it hard to credit the fine results the women recruits were achieving. Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Nasser, the commander of the academy, had admitted from the beginning that he felt lukewarm about the whole idea of women warriors. “If we had a bigger population, I’d rather see women stay at home,” he said. But slowly he had to revise his view of their capabilities. At first he refused to believe the
omen’s shooting scores. “When I see results of thirty-eight out of forty, I have to be surprised,” he said. The women, after all, had grown up in an atmosphere in which girls never even played at aiming a toy gun. The lieutenant colonel wondered if the high scores reflected a defect in the newly built shooting range at the women’s academy. To find out, he commandeered the men’s academy shooting range and ordered the women to redo the test. There he watched in growing astonishment as bullet after bullet slammed home, right smack in the center of the target.

Before I went to the Middle East, I’d always found myself on the dovish side of every argument. Despite glaring evidence to the contrary (Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher) I believed that a world with more women in positions of power would be a more peaceful place. So it seemed odd, and a little sad, that of all the rights a woman might aspire to, the one that Hadra and her friends had won was the right to kill and be killed. And yet it was impossible not to celebrate the strength the Emirates women had discovered in themselves, the skills they’d mastered and the confidence that seemed to shine from every face I encountered on the base.

I had grappled with this paradox once before, in Eritrea, huddling in a trench burrowed out of an African mountaintop. A few meters away, Ethiopian soldiers stared through binoculars, waiting for someone on our side to make a move. Of the hundred or so soldiers on the Eritrean side of that front line, about fifteen were women, including the commanding officer.

Those Eritrean women guerrillas had witnessed the worst that war could offer. One had seen a friend take a Kalashnikov round full in the face, blasting away half her jaw. Another held the hand of a comrade as her mine-shattered leg was amputated without anesthetic. The women talked of these things with a sad pragmatism. Most had been born since the fighting with Ethiopia started in 1962 and had known nothing but a country at war.

As in the Emirates, Eritrean women had joined the guerrillas because they felt they had to; there simply weren’t enough men to challenge the might of black Africa’s biggest army. If anything, their
society had been even more resistant to the notion of women warriors than that of the Emirates. In the 1960s in Eritrean villages, women’s position was so lowly that a wife presumed to speak to her husband only if it was absolutely necessary. From the Koran’s pronouncement that menstruation is “an illness,” during which women must refrain from sex and prayer, Eritrean villagers had developed a tradition of forcing menstruating women to leave their homes for a week each month and seclude themselves, day and night, in a pit reserved for the “unclean.”

When war broke out with Ethiopia, a few women insisted on fighting. “At the beginning, they were needed, so there wasn’t the luxury of refusing them,” said Chuchu Tesfamariam, who became a fighter herself at the age of seventeen. The valor of the fighters won new respect for women in general and broke down many taboos. The Eritreans, desperately poor, had few factories. But, as a gesture to the comfort of the women fighters, they had invested some of their scarce resources in a plant to produce sanitary napkins.

Living conditions at the front line were desperately harsh. The troops, slight and undernourished from years of drought-reduced rations, lived on a porridge of lentils scooped up in spongy bread. Their World War I-style trench system burrowed for miles across high mountain ridges. Supplies had to be hauled by hand up the near-vertical rock face, work that the women shared equally with the men. Everyone slept on the ground.

The guerrillas came from a wide range of backgrounds. Some, like the university-educated idealists who returned from exile to enlist, found it natural that women and men should fight together. Others, simple villagers, had difficulty adjusting to the idea.

Ismail Idriss, a twenty-three-year-old goatherd and a devout Muslim, had never spoken to a woman from outside his family when he suddenly found himself taking orders from one. “Women fighters I knew about from the beginning; even when I was wandering with my goats I’d seen them,” Ismail explained, sunning himself on a rocky ledge during a rare break in the fighting. “But I never believed a woman could give orders to a man.” Ismail’s company commander was a stocky, taciturn woman of his own age named Hewit Moges, a thirteen-year veteran of front-line fighting who came from a Christian
background. “Now I have seen it in practice I have had to start to accept it,” he said, in a voice that still sounded hesitant about the idea. “When it’s a hard climb she runs up the mountain, when it’s a battle she’s in front of the troops, and when someone is wounded she’s the one who carries him from the field.” He spread his palms and raised his shoulders in a wide shrug. “What can I say against it when I have seen such things?”

A few nights later the war took a rare break for a wedding. Fighters always married in large groups; a single couple couldn’t afford the traditional feast of goat meat. A young dancer dressed in a costume made of grain sacks marked “Gift of the Federal Republic of Germany” leaped and twirled across the sand, followed by 120 brides and grooms, all clad alike in the same shabby khakis they’d worn into battle shortly before. The couples paired up and held hands, waiting for their division commander to read out their names and declare them husband and wife. Each couple received a wedding certificate, produced in the fighters’ underground printshop, carrying a quote from the 1977 Marriage Law stating that the union was “the free will of the two partners based on love.”

I sat on the sand listening to the long list of names. Nura Hus-seini was marrying Haile Gabremichael. Abdullah Doud was wedding Ababa Mariam. Muslims and Christians were marrying each other by the dozen. “It’s possible that these people come from parents who were taught that you starve before you share food from the plate of someone of a different faith,” said Chuchu, sitting on sand beside me. But in the trenches of this long war these young men and women had shared much more: fear, and victories, and belief in a cause. In the dark I could just make out Chuchu’s profile. A sad half smile played across her face. “Not everything that comes from war is bad,” she whispered.

And unfortunately, not everything that comes with peace is good. In 1994 I returned to Eritrea, which by then had been an independent country for almost a year. The capital, Asmara, had fallen to the guerrillas without a struggle. Unscathed by the fighting that had reduced so much of the country to rubble, its Italianate buildings glowed in a gentle wintry light, their terra-cotta walls splashed with sudden tumbles of scarlet bougainvillea. The streets were clean and
safe to walk, even late at night. During the war, even schoolteachers had carried AK-47s. Now, no one was armed, even at the airport or entrances to government buildings. One of the world’s most militarized populations had put away its guns.

For once, a guerrilla movement had come to power and not been instantly corrupted by it. The movement’s leaders still wore the cheap plastic sandals they’d fought in, and none of them, including the president, drew a salary. Like the other fighters, they donated their labor to the rebuilding effort.

But, for the women fighters, peace had brought some unexpected disappointments. The new government offered women political participation and new legal rights, such as the right to own and inherit land. It also banned genital mutilation in hospitals, and sponsored a radio series in which both the Muslim mufti and the Christian bishop stated clearly that such practices weren’t religious obligations.

Still, the traditions of the wider society outweighed the culture that had developed at the front. Suddenly, fighters had come back home to families who had spent the war under occupation by Ethiopian forces. Often, the guerrillas’ progressive mores were at odds with the deeply conservative values of their parents. “Most of them respect us—they understand we lived a different way,” said Rosa Kiflemariam, a thirty-three-year-old who spent eight years at the front. “But others say to us, That was then—this is now, and now you have to live our way.’”

In 1989, Rosa had married a fellow guerrilla in one of the frontline wedding ceremonies. The couple, serving at different fronts, had spent only one month together before peace came. Now she and her husband were trying to get to know each other in the midst of enormous family pressure. Rosa’s mother-in-law didn’t approve of her son’s wife going out to work and wanted her to give up her job as a financial officer in the Eritrean Women’s Union. “Every time she sees me she starts saying, ‘Why don’t you have children? Why don’t you stay at home?’”

In the villages, particularly, families found it difficult to accept the tough young women who were used to absolute equality, or even positions of command in military units. In those cases, families urged divorce, offering their sons young, tractable village girls as alternative
wives prepared to wait on them hand and foot. Such tensions were exacerbated if the husband and wife were from different religious backgrounds.

For a young, unmarried woman fighter, the future was problematic. On the one hand, she was a heroine, but that didn’t necessarily make her marriageable in villages that still valued modesty and certain virginity.

To Rosa and many other women, a new struggle had just begun. “We have to fight now to make them understand that everyone has the right to live freely. It’s another war, I think.”

Chapter 7

A Q
UEEN

“I found a woman to reign over them, who is provided with everything requisite for a prince, and hath a magnificent throne.”

THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF THE ANT

T
he ancient trade routes of Arabia are potholed highways now. The groaning strings of camels that Muhammad led for Khadija from coastal port to inland fortress are gone as well. Instead, trucks thud and grind from Aqaba to Mecca through a miasma of diesel and dust. What passes for an oasis these days is a gray concrete truck stop, innocent of a palm tree or even a blade of grass.

In the spring of 1989,1 went to cover a riot in one of these places—a dismal shanty town named Maan in the middle of the Jordanian desert. The Jordanian prime minister had raised the price of gas, and Maan’s truck drivers had poured into the streets to protest. The riots spread from there all over the country, troubling the stability of King Hussein, the Middle East’s longest-reigning monarch. It was a story I’d written a half dozen times: a poor country needs aid, the International Monetary Fund comes in and demands economic reform, its terms are too tough, the people revolt.

But this time, as I perched on what was left of a chair in the burned-out ruins of a Maan bank, the story took a sudden lurch away from what I expected to hear. Sitting opposite me on the upturned drawer of a filing cabinet, an edgy Bedouin in a grimy robe played with the fringes of his kaffiyeh. He had been with the mob as it
rampaged through the town a week earlier. “The demonstrators want lower prices, yes. They are poor already, and the increase will take the food from their children’s mouths. But that wasn’t all they were shouting for.” He looked around, to make sure no one was listening. “They were shouting for the king to divorce the queen.”

Like most Middle East correspondents, I knew vaguely that King Hussein had married an American, but I’d thought of her as photogenic fodder for the social pages, not as someone likely to emerge as a slogan in a price riot.

“People here have many questions about the queen,” the Bedouin said, letting go of his kaffiyeh and reaching into the pockets of his robe for worry beads. As the beads traveled through his grease-stained fingers he listed the questions one by one: “Was she a virgin when she married the king? Is she really Muslim? If so, why doesn’t she cover her hair? Is it true she supports Christian causes? Her family is from Halab [the Arabic name for the town of Aleppo, in Syria, where her grandfather was born before moving to Lebanon]. Halab has many Jews. How do we know she doesn’t have Jewish blood? We have heard that she is from the CIA, sent to poison the king.”