கவனிக்க: இந்த மின்னூலைத் தனிப்பட்ட வாசிப்பு, உசாத்துணைத் தேவைகளுக்கு மட்டுமே பயன்படுத்தலாம். வேறு பயன்பாடுகளுக்கு ஆசிரியரின்/பதிப்புரிமையாளரின் அனுமதி பெறப்பட வேண்டும்.
இது கூகிள் எழுத்துணரியால் தானியக்கமாக உருவாக்கப்பட்ட கோப்பு. இந்த மின்னூல் மெய்ப்புப் பார்க்கப்படவில்லை.
இந்தப் படைப்பின் நூலகப் பக்கத்தினை பார்வையிட பின்வரும் இணைப்புக்குச் செல்லவும்: Nethra 2002.04-06

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Apr.-Jun. 2002
●《》《》《》鲇》《》《》《》●《》《》《》《》《》《》钞《》〈
0000 000 00 000 000 00000 A non - specialist jou
IN THIS
Regi Siriw
K. Sivati
Dayan Ja
Ten Years Af Where Stands SC
Radhika Coor Sexual Violence (
Regi Siriv Birthday Apolog The Cat
INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR
 
 
 
 
 

Vol. 5, No. 2 ISSN 1391 - 2380
》鲇《》《》《》钞》《》《》*《》钞《《》《》《》《》《》《》《》
》《》《》《》《》●《》钞《《》《》《》《》钞《》《》《》《》《》 rnal for lively minds
ISSUE
Vardena
hamby
ya tilleka ter the Fall: ocialism Today?
таfas Wату duri
Var
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Nēthrā
Journal of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo
Nethra will appear quarterly. Subscription rates are:
Sri Lanka: Rs.350 per year
SAARC countries: U.S. $15 per year
Other countries: U.S. S20 per year
All rates are inclusive of mailing costs (by air in the case of foreign readers).
Material appearing in this journal may not be reproduced in any other publication without the written permission of the Editor, Nethra.
Copyright 2002 by The International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo
ISSN 1391 - 2380
Al correspondence to: International Centre for Ethnic Studies 2, Kynsey Terrace, Colombo 8, Sri Lanka
Printed by Unie Arts (Pvt) Ltd. No.48 B, Bloemendhal Road, Colombo 3.

Apr. - Jun. 2002 Vol. 5, No. 2
Quarterly Journal
Editor Regi Siriwardena
International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo

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Nethra welcomes contributions from scholars and writers. Since the journal’s interests are omnivorous, there is no restriction on subjectmatter. Ideally, however, Nethra looks for material that is serious without being ponderous, readable and interesting without being superficial, and comprehensible even to readers who are not specialists in the intellectual field in which the subject is situated.
In addition to papers and essays, we shall be glad to receive shorter critical comments and letters in response to any material that has already appeared in the journal.
Nethra also invites creative writing - poems or stories - from both Sri Lankan and foreign writers.
Editorial correspondence, including subscriptions to the journal, should be sent to:
The Editor,
Vētrā International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2, Kynsey Terrace,
Colombo 8,
Sri Lanka.

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Contents
The Illusion and the Reality Regi Siriwardena
The Kirta Yuga That Never Arose
K. Sivatharmby
Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism?
Dayan Jaya tilleka
Sexual Violence during Wartime
Fadhika Coomaraswamy
Birthday Apology and Apologia: 80 iambic peniameters for my 80 years
Regi Siriwardena
The Cat in Me
Regi Siriwardena
18
26
44
72
75

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The Illusion and the Reality
Regi Siriwardena
This paper and the two others that follow were read at a seminar, organised by ICES to mark the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, on the theme 'Where Stands Socialism Today?'
Where a revolution leads may be very different from the direction its makers and leaders intend. The English Revolution of the 17th century didn't create the rule of the godly, nor the French Revolution of the 18th the reign of liberty, equality and fraternity. It might have been supposed that since the October Revolution was led by a body of men who considered themselves scientific socialists, there would be a lesser distance between expectation and outcome than with previous revolutions. But it was Lenin who, four years after the revolution, produced the most haunting metaphor for the historical phenomenon I have been talking about. Addressing the last party congress he attended, he saw himself and the party as like the driver of a vehicle that was going in a different direction from what he wanted.
The frustration so evident in this and other pronouncements of Lenin's last years was inherent in the very project he had undertaken.
The vehicle is pulling out of hand; it is if there were someone driving it and the car were going not in the direction in which he steers it, but in the direction someone else is steering it; as if the car were driven by some illegal, lawless hand..." (Lenin, at the Eleventh Congress of the RCP(b), 27 March 1922). Among them: the comparison in the same speech of the Bolshevik Party to a conquering nation that had been culturally absorbed by the conquered; the confession in his last notes' dictated on 30-31 December 1922, “I am, it seems, strongly guilty before the workers of Russia for not having intervened vigorously and drastically enough on this notorious issue of autonomisation (i.e. of the republics); and the famous last letter to the party that came to be known as the Suppressed Testament.

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Classical Marxist socialism had been created in the belief that it would come to fruition in the advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe, for that’s where Marx expected the contradictions of capitalism to mature earliest. Even in making a would-be socialist revolution in a country with an 80 per cent peasant mass, Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that the European, and especially the German, revolution would soon come to their rescue. But waiting for a victorious revolution in Western Europe turned out to be as illusive as waiting for Godot. Stalin's call to 'socialism in one country in 1924 represented the point at which the Russian revolution turned inwards from the former dreams of speedy revolution in advanced Europe that have not been fulfilled to this day.
These realities meant that the social order that emerged from the Russian revolution was very different from the ideals with which its makers began. It's futile to discuss whether Soviet society represented true socialism'. For true socialism, then, would be one that has never existed in the real world but only in the minds and texts of Marxist thinkers - a curiously idealist view, as G.V.S. de Silva once pointed out, for supposed materialists. It's equally unreal to argue that socialism in its pristine purity existed at some time after the revolution but was then 'corrupted or 'betrayed. Consider, for instance, the question of dictatorship - of the party over society and of a ruling group over the party. We know the end-result, but when did the process begin? Those who think it started only with Lenin's death should be reminded that the faction in the Bolshevik party led by Shlyapnikov and Aleksandra Kollontai were criticising the party's stranglehold over the Soviets by 1921. Rosa Luxemburg, while defending the Russian revolution against its western enemies, made similar criticisms as early as 1918. Moreover, Trotsky, in his prerevolutionary polemics against Lenin, had predicted that if Bolshevism came to power, the party apparatus would substitute itself for the party as a whole, then the Central Committee would substitute itself for the apparatus, and finally a single dictator would substitute himself for
G.V.S. de Silva, Social Change in The Alternative: Socialism or Barbarism, Collected Writings of G. V.S. de Silva, ed. Charles Abeysekera (Social Scientists' Association), p. 242.

The Illusion and the Reality 9
the Central Committee. That was an uncanny prophecy of what actually happened, but Trotsky forgot his own prediction when he joined the Bolsheviks in mid-1917; and when the sailors of Kronstadt revolted, demanding freedom of the Soviets from party control, he took the lead in shooting them down. This is not to suggest that what happened under Lenin was identical with what happened under Stalin, but to point to the clear continuity between them.
If you start with a theoretical conception of socialism derived from the texts of Marx and others, measure Soviet reality against it, find it wanting, and then cry betrayal, you are indulging in an antihistorical and even anti-materialist proceeding. It’s as sterile as trying to construct an ideal capitalism from the books of Adam Smith and Ricardo and John Stuart Mill and treating actual British capitalism as a betrayal of it. If there was in fact a betrayal of socialism by the aftermath of the Russian revolution, it was the betrayal of an illusion by historical reality. So in this paper I shall take socialism as a historical phenomenon, for better or worse, as what existed in the Soviet Union and in certain other places. Of course, anybody who wishes to construct a more just and more equitable society anywhere is free to take a different road and call it socialism’.
The most substantial achievement that the Russian revolution made possible was the gigantic industrial revolution that transformed one of the most economically backward countries of Europe into a major industrial power. It was accomplished by a combination of state planning and centralised mobilisation of people and resources, ideological fervour and coercive labour discipline; but historical fairness must make us recognise that coercion was no less present in the previous industrialisations ofbourgeois Europe and America. The spectacular triumphs of the Soviet regime in the traditional sectors of heavy industry and the techniques and methods of organisation by which they were achieved became an inspiration and a model after the Second World War for other post-revolutionary societies; they were imitated also by some in the Third World that hadn't undergone revolution. Capital accumulation in the hands of the state and central planning thus became a widely accepted path for those societies that had failed to produce a strong bourgeoisie.

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Today, however, we have to contrast the impressive tempo of Soviet development in the older heavy industries with the fact that it fell lamentably behind the leading capitalist countries in the new industrial revolution of information technology. It’s impossible, I maintain, to understand this failure without taking into account the political structure of Soviet society. For that purpose it’s first necessary to offer a brief account of that structure.
It's true that neither the level of material existence nor that of mass culture in the Soviet Union in the 1920s would have made possible a flourishing democratic development. This absence was, however, accentuated by the fact that the Soviet regime made a virtue of necessity. It identified the party dictatorship, and later the dictatorship of the ruling group within the party, with the dictatorship of the proletariat. If we may return to Lenin's nightmarish image of the vehicle going in a direction unintended by the driver, we may say that no doubt one hand of Lenin had been trying to steer the Soviet system in the direction of a workers' state, but his other hand was taking it in another by the curbs on freedom of discussion and organisation, not only of the opposition parties but ultimately even within the ruling party. (The organisation of factions within it was banned, not by Stalin but already under Lenin in 1921.) Concentration of political power in a few hands is sooner or later accompanied everywhere by the concentration of economic privilege. Let me quote an account by one of the most brilliant Soviet journalists of the Gorbachev years of the end-result of this process:
A gulfin incomes and standards of living speedily opened between the ruling elite and the great mass of the population. In the first half of the thirties there were created for 'responsible workers' secret distribution points, special canteens and special rations. Gradually, the spectrum of special services broadened, enveloping essentially all spheres of life and social existence. There appeared special shops, special car depots, special barber saloons, special petrol pumps, distinctive number-plates for cars, separate waiting-rooms in

The Illusion and the Reality 11
railway stations and airports, and finally, special cemeteries, where an ordinary mortal could not enter; either alive or dead. I think if there had existed an atheistic heaven, the nomenklatura would have fenced off for itself a special reserve even there.
If inequality of rewards was originally a necessity in an economy of scarcity in order to stimulate effort, and if concentration of power was inevitable in a society with a low level of mass culture, the bureaucracy became ultimately a parasitic group clinging to a monopoly of power and privilege even when these had become socially unnecessary. It is in these circumstances that we must find the explanation for the backwardness of the Soviet Union in information technology. It wasn't due just to the fact that it started from a position of technological inferiority. That had been equally so in other fields, but it hadn't prevented Soviet scientists from spectacular advances in nuclear weapons or spaceflight. But those were fields in which progress could be made by concentrating resources, skills and knowledge in the hands of a relatively small group of specialists. But there could be no broad development of information technology without democratising access to the relevant knowledge and equipment, and this was impossible under a political dictatorship that feared the consequences of popularising the use of advanced communication media. Access not only to computers butt even to photocopiers was tightly restricted under the Brezhnev regime - the period when the new technologies were taking off in the West.
Was the Soviet bureaucracy a new class? In the 1940s the minuscule Trotskyist movement in America was shaken by a theoretical controversy about whether the Soviet bureaucracy was a caste or a class. Was it a transient excrescence or the spearhead of a new exploiting class whose power would be based not on ownership of property but on political control of the state apparatus in which that
4 Vyacheslav Kostikov, “Splendour and Poverty of the Nomenklatura', orig. in Ogonyok, trs. by RegiSiriwardena in The Thatched Patio, Vol. 2, No. 1, March 1989.

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ownership was vested? Out of this controversy came James Burnham's book The Managerial Revolution (1941). I don't suppose most younger people today have even heard of Burnham; they haven't missed much because he was a shallow thinker who created a brief sensation by claiming that the Soviet, Nazi and American corporate systems were all variants of one social form - the rule of the managerial class, and that this, and not socialism, would replace capitalism." Some years later Milovan Djilas would espouse substantially the same thesis in The New Class. Trotsky didn't share that perspective. Between 1917 and 1923 he had himself joined in building the party dictatorship and suppressing dissent; but after he was edged out of power, he was haunted by the prospect of a capitalist restoration engineered by the bureaucracy. He believed, however, that this possibility would be forestalled either by a political revolution by the Soviet working class or by European revolution. The last two alternatives turned out to be chimeras, but it was the first that materialised, though many decades later than Trotsky had feared. Under Stalin there could be no capitalist restoration by the bureaucracy because the latter were too insecure; the political satraps who could be hurled any time from the heights of political power to the dungeons of the Lubianka couldn't possibly be the makers of a counterrevolution. Life was safer, at least for the bureaucracy, in the relative relaxation of the post-Stalin years; and the increased economic and cultural contacts with the West, the wider opportunities for travel for members of the nomenklatura, must have transformed their consciousness. Their life-style, so grandiose in comparison with that of the mass of the Soviet people, must have seemed pitiful when
Burnham's thesis wasn't even original: its essentials had apparently been put forward before the war by Bruno Rizzi in a book published in Paris, La Bureaucratisation du Monde, that I haven't come across. Il met Burnham in Colombo in 1950 when he came here on a visit sponsored by the American Embassy. He was reluctant to discuss the theory of the managerial revolution because he had by then put all that behind him, and was building a new career as a cold-war propagandist of American democracy against Soviet Communism.

The Illusion and the Reality 13
measured against those of the American or European bourgeoisie. And how enviable the latter must have appeared to the Soviet bureaucrat in being able to enjoy their luxuries without the compulsions of holeand-corner secrecy that were enjoined by outward conformity to official socialist morality. In the aftermath of the abortive coup of 1991 by a section of the party and armed forces against the Gorbachev reforms, the bureaucratic counter-revolution had its opportunity. Unlike the Communist Party regimes in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989, the Soviet regime wasn't toppled by popular action but by a revolt from above. And once this political opening had been created, considerable sections of the bureaucracy hastened to enrich themselves by the appropriation of state property, so that many managers ended as proprietors of the enterprises they had once administered as state officials. This triumph of the kleptocracy was the apotheosis of the Soviet bureaucracy. It brought to realisation a witticism that had been current in the late eighties. What is socialism? The transition from capitalism to capitalism. Speaking seriously, the ultimate outcome of the Russian revolution had been to accumulate capital in the hands of the state, to build up the industrial structure and train the skills that no pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie was strong enough to do; once these had been accomplished, a new bourgeoisie, emerging from within the womb of the Soviet state itself, enjoyed the fruits.
Little inclined as I am to idealise or romanticise the former Soviet regime, I recognise that on the international scale, it did perform for four decades after the Second World War the role of a countervailing force to American imperialism. That was in its own interests, but it's undoubtedly true that its collapse has made the world a more dangerous place for the small, the weak and the poor everywhere. The events of the last six months alone are sufficient to bring home the terrible perils of a world dominated by a single predatory super-power. The devastation visited on the Afghan people for nothing they had done, the present menaces to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and the complicity of the United States in the illegal and brutal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory-all these may even induce nostalgia for the days when the existence of another nuclear Super

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power provided a partial balance. To those who think the big battle today is between American modernity and Islamic fundamentalist barbarism, it must be said that there is a high-technology barbarism as well as a low-level one, and that the former is by far the greater evil because of the immensely greater destructive power at its command. As for fundamentalism, the report by the journal Scientific American that 45 per cent of Americans believe all life was made by Godless than ten thousand years ago should shake those who think reactionary religious ideology is the monopoly of some Muslims; no doubt the true believers in Genesis are prominent among the docile majority that cheers George W. Bush on as he tries to re-enact the Crusades. The existence of overwhelming destructive power in the hands of a regime that rests on political illiteracy is the greatest threat today to international peace and security. The danger is all the greater because the technology of death has advanced to the point where targeted populations and territory can be devastated from the air, as in Kossovo and Afghanistan, with little commitment of ground troops; So there will be few bodybags coming back home and no risk of a civilian backlash against the war as with Vietnam.
There are some Marxists today who look forward to a different outcome when globalisation has run its course and the contradictions of capitalism have intensified to breaking-point; then Godot may finally be on the horizon and the Marxist dream of international socialism may at last come true. I can't rule this out, but it’s all too Speculative and remote to serve as more than psychological compensation in the present. Other futures are also possible, perhaps even more likely: for instance, global warming and other consequences of the ravaging of the natural environment may make the planet uninhabitable before the end of this century.
At this point I wish to read a passage from Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1937:
Marxism sets out from the development oftechnique i.e. technology as the fundamental spring of progress, and constructs the communist program upon the dynamic of the productive forces. If you conceive that some cosmic

The Illusion and the Reality 15
catastrophe is going to destroy our planet in the fairly near future, then you must, of course, reject the communist perspective along with much else. Except for this as yet problematic danger, however, there is not the slightest scientific ground for setting any limit in advance to our technical productive and cultural possibilities. Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress, and that alone, by the way, makes it irreconcilably opposed to religion.
The optimism of progress', of course, wasn't peculiar to Trotsky among Marxists: even his arch-enemy, who had him murdered in Mexico three years after these words were written, would have subscribed to it one hundred percent. But reading this passage nearly seventy years later, I have to say that today it is not just the still incalculable possibility of a chance collision with an asteroid that we have to reckon with; it's the very real danger of human beings wiping themselves out as a result of that very technological progress in which Trotsky, like other Marxists, reposed his faith. If that were to happen, Gandhi, who exhorted people to limit their wants, would turn out to have been a wiser prophet than Marx.
We have to recognise now that Marxism wasn't revolutionary enough. As the child both of capitalism and of Judeo-Christian culture, it took over uncritically the hubris of dedication to man’s mastery over nature, the assumption of the inexhaustibility of material resources, and the striving towards a continually rising standard of living and an endless multiplication of man’s worldly goods. In consequence socialism, like capitalism, has polluted the planet and destroyed the natural environment (the drying up of the Aral Sea is only the most conspicuous example), though, of course, capitalism’s share of
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Pioneer Publishers), p.45. I conjecture that where the word technique occurs in the text, Trotsky's Russian original would have read tekhnika, which in this context would be better rendered as technology.

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responsibility, and that of American capitalism in particular, is much the greater. Poverty is certainly an unmixed evil which crushes both body and spirit, and it should be eradicated; but the viable alternative to it isn't unlimited plenty. Today we have to realise that we can no longer consider the endless plenty that Marxism once envisioned as its ultimate goal to be either desirable or realisable: long before we reach it we would have destroyed ourselves. This has nothing to do with religion, for which I have as little use as Trotsky; it's hard reality. I don't know, therefore, what constitutes the greater danger to humanity: the United States present aggressive and militarist foreign policy or its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and its promotion of a so-called Clear Skies’ program that has been said to be a recipe for increased global warming. In either case, what is involved is the greed, selfishness and power of a small group, supported, of course, by the ignorant and the deluded.
It’s true that the global over-extension of American power contains the seeds of its own undoing. That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished, and George W. Bush in his arrogant folly is doing everything he can to hasten it. But I fear that in spite of his best efforts, the enormous reserves of economic and military strength the United States has built up mean that there will be no sudden collapse like that of the Soviet Union but a slow decline and fall like that of the Roman empire. And what destruction it may accomplish before then I can’t honestly see a popular force of sufficient international range, numbers and strength emerging at present that can arrest it. In the ten years since the fall of the Soviet Union, in the global confrontation with the violence of American imperialism the initiative has passed from Socialist movements of any shade to the counterviolence of nationalist and fundamentalist groups; the prototype of their militancy is not the social revolutionary but the suicide bomber. Where stands socialism today? asks the title of this seminar. Where indeed?
On that bleak note I have to conclude, I'm afraid, leaving, I am sure, many people in the audience dissatisfied, irritated orangered. Some of you would probably have much preferred it if I had treated you to a full-throated variation on the theme of

The Illusion and the Reality 17
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, Arise, ye wretched of the earthl
I am sorry I can't oblige: the season for such heroics seems to me over.

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The Krta Yuga That Never Arose
K. Sivatham by
Subramaniya Bharathi (1981-1921), the poet who introduced modernity and modernism to Tamil literary tradition, in a poem welcoming the "New Russia', characterized the fall of the Tsar (and his Russian empire) as that of the Himalayas itself (unbelievable and with great consequences), and ended his poem with the lines
Like a thunderstruck wall fell Kali Oh! Let the Krud Krta Yuga arise!
Kali in Hindu mythology is the embodiment of evit, wrongdoing, and everything unpleasant. Kirta Yuga, is the era of moral rectitude, political uprightness, social well-being and economic prosperity.
Looking back, now in 2002, the prophecy had gone unrealized: not only in the Soviet Union, even in some other countries like China, the Kirta Yuga remained a dream (except perhaps in that tiny country Cuba).
The ideology that respected this prophecy and motivated the revolutionary movements was socialism - a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange. (OED)
The term has a long history, and in its pre-Marxian phase
it was more of a day-dream, an ideal. It was Marxism, the political ideology of socialism, as expounded by Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, and imbued with great political potential, that set great activists like Lenin to take it over as their life's goal. It has often been said that Marx made it scientific, in the sense that clearly understood and well implemented, it would be quite predictable in its results.

The Kirta Yuga That Never Arose 19
And now, since 1989, it has been found that this socialism has failed. When the Soviet experiment failed, along with the collapse of the East European dependencies, it was taken to be, or, to be more exact, efforts were made to point to, the collapse, as the fall of the theory and the ideology too. Scholars talked about the end of history and the downfall of Marxism.
While these elegies were being sung, within a decade, during which time capitalism took over, it was realized that the political economy of the USSR (and of China, the other socialist giant that went astray) during its time who able to hold inequalities at a minimum level, and was strong enough to resist rampant unemployment, and to face no major youth revolt arriving out of distributional inequality. A few years later it was realized, at least in some quarters, that it was worth a resurrection (seen in the rising popularity of the Communist Party in Russia).
While this was being realized, on the international economic front, with the collapse of the Asian Tiger economies, it was realized at the level of economic punditry, that the Marxian (if not the Marxist) analysis of the inner working of capitalism is yet very valid, for such self-defeating developments of capitalism were inherent within the capitalist system.
So, to be most balanced intellectually, it would seem that socialism, or Marxist socialism to be exact, is not an unnecessary historical intervention but is something which has promise yet.
The question has, therefore, to be phrased slightly differently; instead of being too dismissive, one has to put it more correctly: What is it that went wrong with socialism and why was it not implemented correctly?
The answer, that is now quite clear on hindsight is the virility and the powerfulness of the system that opposes socialism, viz. capitalism.
It now transpires that the potential of the capitalist system had been underestimated. The capacity for capitalism to regenerate itself and its potential to change the very character of imperialism from the confines of territoriality to a new phase that transcends territoriality, the motivation it provides for technological explorations, and the

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cause-effect relationship the new technologies have in making capitalism more sophisticated, were not given adequate thought by the Socialist camps. In fact, the two major countries, Russia and China, were trying to argue for a universalization of their own historical experiences. The theoretical responses in Europe, France, Italy and Germany to understand the complexities of the challenges Marxism and Marxist organizations faced were either purposely ignored or politically misinterpreted by Russia and China.
The politics of Big-Power socialism did not allow any concerned action towards international socialism.
Ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union, there is an interesting dilemma confronting those who struggle towards social equality. Marxism as a economic theory is very relevant to understand the current workings of capitalism (so much so it is felt that one cannot fully grasp the significance of the changes without a knowledge of Marxism), but the prospects of socialism as a political reality are becoming dimmer, much dimmer than we would like them to be.
The tragedy is that the promise socialism gave to countries like ours during the days of colonialism (motivating millions to suffer, sacrifice and die for the socialist-oriented anti-colonial struggles) and in the early years of the post-colonial era is now fading.
To me, at this discussion, it is that question, viz. the promise of socialism that was never realized in the post-colonial days, that demands a close look.
Let us try to recapituate what happened in Tamilnadu (the Tamil regions of the earlier Madras province). The ideas of socialism, 'scientific socialism’, to be sure were very much in the air since the first decade of the 20th century. Besides Bharathi's brilliant translation of the term 'Communism” as potu utaimai (common ownership), Singaravelu Chettiar, acclaimed as the first communist of India', popularized socialist views and was responsible for getting E.V.Ramasamy (Periyar) to think in terms of a socialist future for Tamil Nadu (1914-1920). Of course, Singaravelu Chettiar and E. V. R. parted ways in the early days of the Self-Respect Movement (1924), but, with the coming in of Jeevanandan. there was an effort made to go to the grassroots of Tamil culture (1930's). The record of the

The Kirta Yuga That Never Arose 21
Communist Party in Thanjavur in fighting against the oppressive antipeasant traditions of the landlord, too, has been very good. Even in terms of electoral acceptance, the Communist Party was doing well in the first decade of independence. w But with C.N.Annadurai locating out of the Dravida Kaghagam and with EVR launching out on a populist programme for his newly formed DMK (1949) the leftist forces began to dissipate and lose the hold they had at the grassroots levels (see K. Sivathamby, Understanding the Dravidian Movement: problems and perspectives, NCBH, Chennai 1995).
The question is much more serious than winning seats and forming electoral alliances. It is a fact of history that since 1967, the year Anna formed the first DMK government in Chennai, there is a continuity of that Dravidian politics, however diluted and watered down it has been over the years. The Dravidian movement seems to have a hold on the popular cultural front, and national level parties, whether Congress or the Communist Parties, have to ally themselves with one of the Dravidian movements. How did the Communist movement in Tamilnadu fail to achieve that correct approach it had developed in the contexts of Kerala and West Bengal?
It will be quite off the mark to identify this with the character of the so-called Tamil nationalism because, M.G. Ramachandran and his AIADMK, and its current leader Ms. Jeyalalitha, have always taken a very critical attitude towards Tamil nationalism and movements which advocate it.
What happened in Sri Lanka has been more devastating, in terms of the human cost.
The Socialist parties of Sri Lanka - the LSSP and the CPhad, even before independence, clear views on the development of a nationalist tradition for Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). They had agreed on the political premise that Sinhala and Tamil should be recognised as the national languages and developed as such. The leader of the LSSP (Dr.Colvin R.de Silva), great master as he was of the verbal art, had responded to the early murmurings of a Sinhala-only dominance by the now historic statement, “One language, two nations; two languages, one nation. The Communist Party, in its turn, had been

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the first political party to advocate regional autonomy in Sri Lanka. All these were forgotten since 1966, and in 1972, when the United Front with the leftist parties holding an important position (Dr.Colvin R.de Silva was the Minister for Constitutional Affairs), brought in the first Republican Constitution, there was no reference to the status of the Tamil language. The meagre constitutional provision available thereto - Section 29 of the Soulbury Constitution - was also withdrawn in the new Constitution.
It should be recorded that the declaration for a separate Tamil country was announced in the Parliament of Sri Lanka by the leader of the Tamil United Front-S.J.V. Chelvanayakam. The Tamil militant groups, when they started coming up in the mid- and the late seventies, adopted this as a basic position of theirs. It is at least historically incorrect to brand the Tamil militant groups as the only separatists. I do not want to be misunderstood as now saying, in the 21 century, that we should have had premonitions of the eruptions of ethnicity and of ethno-nationalism when we were discussing the Sinhala-Tamil question as communal politics. What I do want to stress is that there never was any adequate theoretical examination of the problems the country or the state (in the case of India) was facing in terms of real socialist principles and practices. We did not develop the tradition of discussing the methods and mode of applying socialism to a typically pre-modern society which had a civilizational past. No effort was made to study or understand the role of languages, religions and cultures in such socio-economic situations. We were either too eurocentric in our efforts to grasp the problems or too simplistically interpretative, using socialist categories developed in political text books (e.g. Emile Burns) and not going to the original writings of Marx and Engels. It is no secret now that we were very much weighed down by the concept of the European nation-state.
What is most important, and perhaps very crucial to this argument, is that the Marxist parties in colonial countries had to perforce take a stand in relation to the Soviet Union and the CPSU. The Communist parties of the world until the Sino-Soviet rift were with the CPSU, and after that there was a mutual mudslinging in terms of reformism and revisionism. These parties depended on

The Kirta Yuga That Never Arose 23
the governments of the day to decide on the fortunes of a Communist party in a country which had not yet gone through a revolution. For instance, in India, the CP had to support the same Congress government that banned it. When the Soviet Union started supporting non-aligned states (Egypt, Indonesia, India etc.), the position of the Communist parties in many of these countries, when at an internal level, the state was very critical of the local Communist party. (e.g. Indonesia), was very much in question.
In countries like India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, post-colonial politics led to the rise of language/culture groups as important political activist groups. The inability of the existing Marxist parties to understand and take a correct view of the situation, led to the formation of Marxist groups which dismissed the official socialist parties as traditional/revisionist parties. The rise of the J.V.P. in Sri Lanka and the Naxalites in India are cases in point. In Sri Lanka, the militant Tamil groups rejected the existing leftist parties and claimed that they were more Marxist than the Marxist parties (the EROS and the EPRLF).
And when confronted with such situations, the demands of local politics were Such, especially during time of coalition/collaborationist politics, that the varxist parties tended to be very anti-intellectual (1960s). There was hardly any internal discussion. This tendency led to many dissensions - political and even personal.
The development in Tamilnadu deserves notice. The DMK leadership insisted that they were more truly socialistic than the communist parties and started strengthening their ideology of rationalism, which in the social context of Tamilnadu was antiBrahmin. There was a rejection of religion even as a social institution (which even Marx did not deny). The ideology of rationalism as expounded by the Dravidian ideologues created confusion about political ideals like socialism, and there was an inevitable personalization of politics, leading to personality cults. That was what exactly happened with the rise of M.G. Ramachandran.
And when this combined with electoral politics, even the Communist parties, because of the exigencies of party politics, had to join Such alliances and compromise with them.

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Sri Lanka did not differ much, Post-1960 electoral politics led to the leftist parties, defending the language-religion tie-up. And that led to the worst type of communal slogan mongering and politics (Dudleyge bade, masala wade).
This type of collaborationist politics led to a real confusion about (a) the real essentials of socialism and (b) the achievability of it through these parties. All these led to a total erosion of the socialist ideology in our political context.
Party politics based on electoral alliances and enmities called the very concept of socialism into question. The whole debate sunk So low that sworn advocates of capitalism went to the extent of naming Sri Lanka the “Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. In a way such nomenclatures symbolize the extent of desemanticisation, if such a term could be permitted, of the concept of socialism.
But the vital question is this: is there no need for real socialism, in terms of cessation of social oppressions and of the demand for fair, equal distribution?
A case in point is the almost sudden eruption of the Dalit demands in Tamilnadu, which had seen thirty-three years of Dravidian politics (since the late 90's the Dalit organizations are not doing well, having followed the path of electoral politics).
In Sri Lanka, the recent cry against war, should be noted with great interest. The leftist parties, which have had a structural alliance with the Peoples’ Alliance government had to issue statements directly calling for the end of the war after the election results (2002).
So, having dealt, though in very cursory terms, with the position of socialism - or at least of socialist parties during the hegemony of the CPSU, let me come to the question proper: Where stands socialism now?
The foregoing description is adequate to say, it stands quite battered. But the more important question is: Is there a necessity for socialism as a political goal?
My answer is a very affirmative 'Yes', but the recent past in our political histories, has made it meaningless.
But we need socialism/Marxism in its real sense-properly spelt out and faithfully adhered to. The way we handled it, Marxism lost its own logic and was made to look a travesty of itself.

The Kirta Yuga That Never Arose 25
The need of the hour is to view Marxism itself in Marxist terms. Marxism is not a closed dogma. It is an intellectual and ideological tool for a political purpose; the pragmatics of the situation should not rob the ideology of its meaning(s).
While on the one hand post-colonial thirst for power has robbed much of socialism’s attraction, especially in our local contexts, we should not forget that the power of Marxist ideology was so threatening that post-1970 Western intellectuals spent much time to discredit any meta-narratives. .
The meta-narrative Lyotard had in view was Marxism, and Marxism alone. The prophecy is now bared of its inner secret: it is now evident that post-modernism is the philosophy that not only justifies but enthrones global capital, to which the peripheral pluralities are as important as its central core.
One need not labour the point today that the fall of the Soviet Union took place quite independently of the doctrine of Marxism, through the inevitable mishandling of the historical situation. The Soviet experiment has failed and so has the Chinese experiment too. These do not warrant yet throwing away the child along with the bathwater.
The raison d’etre for the Marxist doctrine is that there is no other theory as clear as Marxism with its aim to wipe out social inequalities and oppressions. It is the aim of the enlightened humanity to have a 'sama samaja' (equal society) as the Sinhalese first perceived socialism and a 'sama-dharmam' (equal righteous way) for all, as the Tamils perceived it.
Anyone who believes in humanity and the human-ness of Homo sapiens has to place his/her belief in socialism because that is the closest we have to ensure a 'sama samaja' and ensure 'sama dharma'. It is true that Kirta Yuga did not arise as easily as it was prophesied by Bharathi. Good things need greater efforts, and let us now rediscover Marxism and struggle for the reshaping of the socialist parties wherein political expediencies will not lead to abandonment of the socialist targets. That rediscovery should be based on a thorough analysis of our past in terms of the present. Seventy-five years 1917-1991) is not a long period in human history if the correct lessons are learnt. Human equality is worth struggling for amidst all the overhanging gloom.

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Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism?
Dayan Jayatilleka
What follows is a 5000 word condensation of a 50,000 word study.
The historian must ahuays maintain towards his subject an indeterminist point of view. He must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the énown factors still seem to permit different outcomes. If he peaés of Salamis, then it must be as if the Persians might still win. If he peaés of the coup d'etat of Brumaire, then it must remain to be seen if Bonaparte will be ignominously repulsed. Only by recognising that possibilities are unlimited can the historian do justice to the fullness of life.
- Joseph Huizinga
This essay deals with an aspect of twentieth century history and in particular with an aspect of contemporary history. The subject sought to be addressed here is the crisis and collapse, i.e. the defeat and downfall, of socialism.
The 20th century was the Ideological Century. Ideas and ideologies have been weapons of contestation in other periods of world history - the Napoleonic wars being an obvious instance. However, in the 20th century the ideologies at work were more massive and theoretically sophisticated, their capacity to mobilise the masses wider than before, the ideologies incarnated in or represented by competing systems, the fact of ideological contestation openly acknowledged and identified, and finally the stakes higher than ever in that the contending camps were armed with the capacities to destroy the planet in the name of the ideologies they stood for. Thus, the 20 century was the one in which ideologies were more important and the clash of ideologies sharper than at any time in history. It was, to

Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism? 27
slightly extend Eric Hobsbawm, the Age of Ideological Extremes or The Age of Extreme Ideologies.
While historical processes and events have often been inspired by ideas and ideologies, none have been more intimately and directly so than the rise of Socialism and, in particular, the Russian revolution of October 1917. In retrospect the October Revolution was the nodal point of the twentieth century. The events preceding it - such as the Russo-Japanese war, the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, and World War 1 - could be said to have had the 1917 Revolution as their most significant consequence. Subsequent processes such as the rise of fascism / Nazism were at least in part, responses to the challenge of revolution and working-class struggle inspired by socialism, taking place within European societies. Thus, hardly any process of the 20th century can be isolated from the contestation between socialism and capitalism. They are all spin-offs of, or influenced significantly by, the rise of socialism in its three senses-as ideology, movement and system - and the responses of capitalism to that set of phenomena. The struggle between capitalism and socialism was the main axis of motion of the twentieth century. The rise andfall of socialism has thus been the central phenomenon/process of the 20th century. Today there is hardly a facet of global reality that can be identified as not issuing from or unrelated to the defeat and fall of socialism (e.g., unipolar hegemony, neo-liberal globalization, the l l September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism). The crisis, decline andfall of socialism - in its threefold sense of ideology, movement and system - has been the nodal point of the close of the twentieth century and the transition to the new one. Thus it will be thesa traceable origin or determinant of future history.
The contestation of socialism and capitalism shifted in the postWorld War 2 period - the period defined as contemporary history - to the global South. Here the Cold War was hot.
The dominant historical reconstruction of the crisis, decline and downfall of socialism constitutes a hegemonic discourse. It is part of the ideological project to inculcate the superiority and invincibility
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, London Viking / Penguin 1994.

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of the capitalist system over all competitors, past, present and future, and of the North over the South. Much of the commentary emanates from the North: the North provides the post-mortem; the South, the dead. The discourse entrenches the South's subalternity.
Most histories (a representative selection of which is mentioned in the literature survey) of the collapse of socialism are characterised by three features:
(a) They locate the origins, main events and protagonists of the process in the global North : Reagan, Thatcher, Poland, Solidarinosc, GDR etc.
(b) They privilege economic-determinist explanations: socialism
collapsed due to capitalism's economic superiority.
(c) The explanations are teleological and essentialist: socialism could not but fail, it was doomed from the start, because of capitalism’s inherent superiority and socialism’s inherent inferiority as systems.
These determinist views, which have their echoes in Marxian and Left interpretations as well, in retrospect invalidate, as utopian, the struggles of socialists and communists of all previous generations.
My study hopes to provide a counter-hegemonic explanation in three respects:
(a) The decisive turning points in the defeat of socialism are seen as located in the global South. Thus the trajectory, causation and periodisation of socialism's downfall are different from the dominant explanations.
(b) Socialism is not seen to have been structurally foredoomed. Its fate was not structurally foreordained but conjuncturally determined. This is not to imply that the defeat is temporary, but that it was not inevitable. It thus breaks with the determinist explanations of the triumphalist Right and fatalist Left. The

Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism? 29
central conceptual category in the explanation is that of conjuncture - which Louis Althusser argues is the central concept of the Marxist science of politics (cf. Lenin's current moment); it denotes the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradictions.'
(c) The defeat was for the most part, self-inflicted: it took place due to violent internecine struggles within the antisystemic fold, i.e. socialist civil wars.
The study impinges upon the realm of theory and philosophy:
(a) It speaks to the philosophical category of dialectics; of contradictions (the unity and struggle of opposites) and their correct handling.
(b) It privileges the question of the 'good and bad use of force' which Kautilya (Arthashastra) argues is the crucial issue of philosophy. One should study philosophy because... above all it teaches one the distinction between good and bad use of force.
(c) The question of internecine violence and anti-systemic barbarism leads to the philosophical questions of ethics and morality.
(d) The alternative explanation of the collapse of socialism also sheds light on the motive forces of history and thus leads to the area of the philosophy of history. The explanation hopes to throw lighton issues at the interface of political philosophy (the question of the good and bad uses of violence) and the philosophy of history.
Louis Althusser, For Marx, New York, Random House, 1969, p. 250. Kautilya, The Arthashastra, New Delhi, Penguin, 1992, p. 106.

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In his XIth. Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx stated famously that
philosophers have so far interpreted the world. The point is to change it." Today the point is to interpret those attempts at change, and to contribute towards changing the (dominant) interpretations.
Dominant Ideology
The existing literature on the collapse of Socialism yields the following broad explanations:
(i) (ii) (iii) (iv)
(v) (vi) (vii)
(viii)
Stalinism; the intolerant and therefore intolerable character of socialism; the inherent unviability of a socialist economy; the exposure to western popular culture via the information revolution;
the rise of Poland's Solidarnosci;
the defeat in Afghanistan; economic exhaustion, due largely to military over-expenditure; the greying of socialism, with resultant ideological exhaustion and systemic sclerosis.
These explanations do not seem to take into account the following countervailing points:
(i)
(ii)
The Yugoslav scission/excommunication notwithstanding, there was no evident crisis of socialism under Stalin's rule, which was also the most undemocratic.
The socialist economies obtained unprecedented growth rates while capitalism was reeling from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The USSR built an industrial base which enabled it to resist the onslaught of Nazi Germany, and repeated the
“ Marx, Karl, Theses on Feuerbach in Marx and Engels, Selected Works
in 3 volumes, Vol. 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, p. 13.

(iii)
(iv)
(v)
(viii)
وحم
Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism? 31
“economic miracle by rapidly recovering from the devastation of World War 2, unaided by and in the face of the hostility of the West. As a system, Socialism succeeded in ensuring the basic needs of the population within a generation, a feat which took capitalism centuries. The economic stagnation and crisis of socialism came at a subsequent stage. Even today, after the fall of its Soviet patron and despite the continuing embargo by the US, Cuba's economy survives, without slashing Social welfare expenditure. Therefore the case for the intrinsic unviability of socialist economies can be contested.
East Berlin didn't collapse in the 1960s when western popular culture to which it was exposed was at its most vibrant and exciting. Furthermore, no socialist society has been more exposed to Western music and popular culture than has Cuba, 90 miles from Florida. Yet as the Elian Gonzales episode in which Elian's father, a tourist sector employee, chose not to defect while on a protracted stay in the USA, demonstrated, the moral fibre of the Cuban revolution does not seem to have collapsed by such exposure. Thus, Western culture cannot be said to carry a deadly contagion.
Poland's Solidarnosc phenomenon and the retreat from Afghanistan could not prevent the enthusiasm generated on the Left world-wide by the experiment in open socialism under Gorbachev in the years 1985-1988.
Economic exhaustion - is there an absolute limit beyond which a socialist economy cannot recover from a crisis, and if so, what is it? Cuba's survival and recovery after 1991 from the collapse of the USSR and in the face of a decades-old and tightened blockade (the Helms-Burton Act) gives the lie to the idea ofan economic crisis which, in and of itself, is systemically terminal.
Ideological exhaustion: how did the years of greying socialism and ideological stagnation under Brezhnev witness

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the greatest expansion of Soviet power (the mid-late 1970s)? Furthermore what of the recovery from that exhaustion in the first years of the Gorbachev reforms, which rekindled hopes world-wide of a reformed, democratic Socialism, transcending the old divide between the Social-Democratic and Communist traditions?
None of the existing explanations for the collapse of socialism therefore seem to suffice.
These apart, there is a stronger interpretative argument, the finest exemplar of which is Eric Hobsbawm's. Here the reasoning is that ( i) the Socialist challenge in the triple forms of armed revolution, the socialist system, and working-class struggles, pressured capitalism into reforming itself in response; and (ii) this reformed and renovated capitalism (social democracy, Keynesianism) proved superior in the final analysis, to Socialism as economic system (which proved slower in reforming and evolving) and thus overwhelmed it.
This theory too has a decisive flaw. Socialism was beaten not by capitalism in its welfarist (New Deal/Keynesian) reform stage, which as Hobsbawm demonstrates, made for capitalism’s “Golden age (1950-73), but precisely its counter-reform stage, when it had gone into a long downswing. The counter-reform (economic neoliberalism) is not something that is taking place after socialism collapsed and because socialism collapsed. It antedated that collapse - and certainly became more generalised, and triumphant after it. It was the Thatcher-Reagan counterrevolution that caused socialism to retreat: Socialism was defeated when Republican and Conservative administrations were in office. The earlier Keynesian compromise was an accompaniment of the wartime alliance and corollary of the subsequent period of peaceful coexistence'. Socialism was beaten during the 'New' or Second Cold War’- and manifestly not during the post-World War Two long boom which was fuelled by the
Eric Hobsbawm, "Goodbye to All That’ & ‘Out of the Ashes, in After the Fall, ed. Robin Blackburn, London, Verso, 1991, pp. 115-125 & 315-325.

Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism? 33
Keynesian social compact. The Second Cold War was not fought on the basis of a social compromise: Keynesianism was itself a target and was deliberately buried by the monetarists and supply siders. The problem was seen holistically by the US: rising tide of revolution at the periphery, stronger military competition from the Socialist system, capital fettered by the social compromise at home. The counteroffensive was also therefore total: a global class struggle to restore hegemony. The counterrevolution was many-sided: domestically against the welfare state, externally against the national liberation movements and socialist states. Y
It is true - as Hobsbawm argues - that Thatcher and Reagan were unable to totally bury the welfare state; but if Keynesian/social democratic soft capitalism was the model that proved superior to socialism, the latter would have been beaten when capitalism was at its softest, most meliorative, and also most successful (1950-73)- not when there was but a residual or rump welfare state under the free market fundamentalism of Reagan/Thatcher! If one were to adhere to Hobsbawm’s ‘Keynesian explanation, several consequences would follow : One would have to admit that since unbridled capitalism was the winning model, it was more competitive than, hence superior to, both welfare capitalism and socialism. Or in the alternative, one would have to concede that capitalism, not(only) in its reformed and refined form but (even) in its roughest, most ruthless form was capable of beating socialism, because whichever the policy regime, as an economic system it was intrinsically and infinitely superior.
Specificity and Methodology
This study is a Marxist analysis. It is born of a hypothesis that the postmortems conducted so far have given inaccurate diagnoses for the death of socialism and have erred in reconstructing the chain of causation. Furthermore, it is predicated on the assumption that the existing diagnoses entrench the hegemonic ideology, reinforce capitalist triumphalism and impede strivings for justice and

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emancipation. These diagnoses have one thing in common: whether of the Right or Left, they all hold the defeat of socialism to have been in some way inevitable. While this thesis of a foredoomed socialism serves to reinforce the sense of intrinsic superiority of capitalism, it also soothes the defeated socialists by positing an inevitability to the denouement. It is the inverted version of the mechanistic view, prevalent in the Second International, that the victory of socialism was (economically) inevitable.
Lenin broke from the latter outlook and emphasized the role of consciousness, of leadership, of the correct analysis of the concrete situation, the current moment - and the scientific application of organised will. In sum, he brought politics back in.
The real redefinition away from political economy concerning Marx's specific contribution came in a 1915 note by Lenin, first made accessible in 1930 when it was published and little noticed even then: "In general, the philosophy of history yields very very little - this is comprehensible, for it is precisely here, in this field, in this science, that Marx and Engels made the greatest step forward. Here most of all, Hegel is obsolete and antiquated.
That which marks Marxist political science theoretically is the centrality of the notion of conjuncture: the exact balance of forces and the complex, changing combination of contradictions in their unevenly structured hierarchies. This is what is irreplaceable in Lenin's texts; the analysis of the structure of a conjuncture’ (Louis. Althusser)".
The current study is conjunctural in twin senses: (a) it attempts to trace, reconstruct, identify and interpret a certain conjuncture i.e engage in the analysis of the structure of a conjuncture”; (b) it proffers a conjunctural explanation for the phenomenon under review, the downfall of socialism. In short it attempts to apply Marxist political science to the history of Marxist politics. The perspective is, however, not only that of a Marxist
6 Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, in Collected Works, Volume 38,
Moscow. p. 314. 7 Louis Althusser, For Marx, London, 1969, pp. 178-179.

Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism? 35
Political Science. In keeping with Lenin's concern with identifying the “weakest links and Gramsci’s privileging of the Southern question, its perspective is that of a specific location; a certain siting. The explanatory discussion brings us East and South not North and West. In its stress on the global south the study finds itself at one with the consistent perspective of Samir Amin. The Southern view is not a view solely of the South: it is a view of the global totality, the historical process and the attendent political phenomena from the South.
Against Teleology
Avoiding the teleological trap of a foreordained doom for socialism - with its logical corollary of vain colossal sacrifice, the discussion in this study attempts a triple shift:
(I) Within economics, away from changes in metropolitan capitalism, to the relations and dynamics between centre and periphery in the system taken as a whole i.e. from capitalism to imperialism. (This is to rehabilitate the Leninist problematique).
(II) Away from economics to the extra-economic: the spheres of war, politics, diplomacy, strategy. Socialism was beaten not by capitalism as economic system, but by political factors : the imperialist state, which instrumentalized the political issues of nationalism and democracy in post-revolutionary societies. The Marxists lost the political-ideological struggle within postrevolutionary society.
(III) The defeats of socialism in the periphery are understood as internal to the revolutions, and located not at the level of
* Samir Amin, Class and Nation ( London, Heinemann, 1980), Samir
Amin, Maldevelopment( London, Zed Books, 1990).

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economics but precisely at the level of politics i.e. of political contradictions; contradictions within/among the political vanguards of the revolutions.
In three senses then, the present study endeavours to constitute an alternative reading of the downfall of socialism; a reading that is: (a) Marxist (b) critical of economic-determinist explanations (c) breaks from Eurocentric, West-centric and North-centric modes.
The argument unfolds in three stages.
(1)
(2)
There was in the post-World War Two period, a broad consensus between the two antagonistic camps-capitalist and Socialist-that the struggles that would tilt the balance between them would be fought out in the Third World. Commencing roughly in 1968 there was a clear upswing in revolutionary struggles world-wide, especially in the Third World. This upswing reached a peak in 1974-80 with revolutionary victories in four of the five continents of the globe. In terms of the preexisting capitalist and socialist strategic perspectives as well as in terms of discernible politico-strategic behaviour, this meant a clear shift in favour of socialism, and a retreat on the part of world capitalism. Socialism was on the offensive, world capitalism on the defensive.
In less than a decade socialism had begun to crumble; in slightly over a decade it had fallen in the place of its first victory, Russia. The 1917 October Revolution had been reversed. How was this reversal of the global correlation of forces - a reversal that was so radical and rapid as to amount to an inversion - possible? When and where did it come about? It cannot be attributed to the Reagan/Thatcher-led counter-revolutionary offensive as such, since the revolutionary wave of 1974-80 entailed a defeat for all the strategies hitherto used by the USA.
The Right-wing global counteroffensive succeeded because it impacted upon and utilized an internally divided,

Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism? 37
fissiparating series of revolutions. These revolutions had been weakened from within; had weakened themselves through internecine strife generated mainly by fanaticism and left fundamentalism. Thus it is the internal fracture that was decisive and which enabled the Reaganite rollback to succeed. The chapter traces this line of fracture running through the series of victorious revolutions, demonstrating how the 197480 wave of revolutions, which shifted the balance in favour of socialism, engaged in violent self-sundering thereby reversing its own results vis- a- vis the global balance. It was a case of self-negation.
(3) This fracture proved even more damaging and decisive since it took place within the context of- and impacted upon - an older, larger fracture; the Sino-Soviet schism. This was the parental or parent fracture (in the senses of older, and originating source). The Chinese revolution decisively changed the balance of global forces in favour of socialism. Therefore, its trajectory could not but affect, decisively, that balance. Chinese foreign policy evolved through various phases right up to to the period in which it became a critically important counterweight to the wave of victorious revolutions and the most important single countervailing factor in the global correlation of forces that had evolved in the 1970s in favour of Socialism.
My argument is that while an analysis of the structure of the last revolutionary conjuncture reveals that the capitalism/socialism contradiction was evolving in favor of socialism, the unpacking or deconstruction of that conjuncture reveals a deeper structure: the capitalism/socialism contradiction was not a single or simple contradiction; rather, it was overdetermined in the Althusserian sense, by the socialism/socialism contradiction i.e. the contradictions
Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination and “On the Materialist Dialectic, in For Marx, London, 1969.

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within the anti-systemic space. This “overdetermination decided the fate of the capitalism/socialism contradiction against the latter: the socialism/socialism contradiction, that sourced in the relations within the anti-systemic space, determined the fate of capitalism/socialism i.e. the system/anti-system contradiction.
Communist thinking held that the capitalism/socialism contradiction manifested itself in three domains: (i) the struggle between the two systems (ii) the class struggle in the metropolitan/ developed capitalist formations (iii) national liberation and revolutionary struggles in the dependent periphery-Asia, Africa, Latin America. However, the socialism/socialism contradiction was present within or impacted upon all three:
(a) The inter-systemic struggle was cross-cut by the intra-systemic
struggle: USSR/PRC. (b) The class struggle in the capitalist formations was distorted by the struggle within the socialist fold, especially but not solely, the Sino-Soviet struggle, e.g. the impact on the Portugese revolution. (c) The liberation struggle in the Third World was torn apart by
fratricidal strife, e.g. Kampuchea-Vietnam.
The original thesis contained in this study therefore is that the determinant factor in the fall of Socialism was the internal relations within the anti-systemic space; relations constituted and reconstituted by the political practice of the anti-systemic forces. It introduces a third term into the existing dichotomy revolution/counterrevolution (the latter encompassing counterrevolutionary intervention). That third term is the disintegration of the revolution
Conclusion
An age died that winter in Moscow in 1991. And with it “a way of
being in the world. It was an age that had begun in Russia in 1917, or in 1905, or was perhaps born earlier, in 1848, with the publication

Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism? 39
of the Communist Manifesto. It was a Promethean Age, the age of the struggle between capitalism and socialism on a world scale; the age of Socialism and Revolution. Philosophically, intellectually, it was the age of Marxism.
The last wave of revolutions, the trajectory of which decided the fate of socialism, began in the 150th anniversary year of the birth of Karl Marx and died in the centenary year of his death. It began in 1968 in Saigon at 3:00 a.m. on January 31st with the NLF (“Vietcong) commando assault on the US embassy. It died in Managua on April 12th 1983 with FPL leader Salvador Cayetano Carpio turning his automatic pistol on himself.
Socialism's most rapid mode of transmission was the gun-shot. Marxism moved by way of inspiration, example and emulation; the example of heroic revolutionary struggle. "If those comrades can do it so can we', 'we can be like those heroes' were the secret sentiments that inspired young revolutionaries. "The gun-shots of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism. The October Revolution helped progressives in China as throughout the world, to adopt the proletarian world outlook as the instrument for studying a nation’s destiny and considering anew their own problems. Follow the path of the Russians - that was their conclusion'
In 1969 the gunshots - and rocket barrages - were aimed by revolutionary armies, the armed forces of the two principal revolutionary states, the USSR and China, at each other. In 1975-79, the gunshots were heard between Kampuchea and Vietnam. In 1979 they were heard between China and Vietnam, two states born of titanic guerrilla wars of national liberation, waged by similar leaderships according to overlapping military doctrines. In April 1983, the single gunshot that killed "Central America's Ho Chi Minh', Salvador Cayetano Carpio, was fired by his own hand and reverberated thoughout Latin America.
' Mao, 'On the People's Democratic Dictatorship - 1949, in Mao Tsetung, An Anthology of his Writings, (ed.) Anne Fremantle, New York, Mentor, 1962, p. 187.

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History is what hurts, says Fredric Jameson." The present study holds up a conclusion that is most discomfitting to Marxists. The defeat was not inevitable; it was avoidable. This is an indictment, in that it implies failure to avoid defeat. The explanation advanced here is lacerating for a second reason. The defeat is held to be the result of the erroneous handling of internal contradictions, in sum, the result of fratricidal strife. External encirclement and enemy action are understood to have been successful chiefly because they impacted upon and acted through the existing internal conflicts. The end is seen as one of self-destruction: the post-mortem reveals a set of wounds that were self-inflicted. The verdict is suicide not homicide (as Fidel Castro said of the downfall of the USSR). There is a kind of tragic nobility in this rendition of the death of socialism. If communism was no longer the collective hero, it had become not villain or pathetic victim and vanquished, but a tragic fallen anti-hero. None of this would have surprised Walter Benjamin, not simply because he was a Marxist who, in 1940, committed suicide. In his study of Charles Baudelaire', part of his incomplete Arcades project, Benjamin drew outlinkages between three phenomena: the hero, modernism, suicide.
"The hero is the true subject of modernism. In other words, it takes a heroic constitution to live modernism. That was also Balzac's opinion... the resistance which modernism offers to the natural productive elan of a person is out of proportion to his strength. It is understandable if a person grows tired and takes refuge in death. Modernism must be under the sign of suicide, an act which seals a heroic will that makes no concessions to a mentality inimical to this will. This suicide is not a resignation but a heroic passion. It is the achievement of modernism in the realm of passions'.'
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, London, Methuen, 1981.
pp. 101-2. o Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Verso, London, 1989.
Ibid., pp. 74-75.

Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism? 4l
Decades later Zygmunt Bauman would make another decisive identification: “Communism was modernity in its most determined mood and most decisive posture...'
Thus, if suicide was the logical end of modernism, and Communism the most militant mode of modernity, then perhaps suicide was the last stage of Socialism?
To recapitulate, the core argument of my study is that the ultimately decisive and determining factor in the defeat of global socialism was neither external nor economic. It was not the US-led New Cold War nor the intrinsic weakness/ inevitable debilitation of the socialist economies. The determinant factor was both internal and political. It was the superimposition of two internal fractures: (a) The last wave of revolutions that which shifted the global balance decisively in favour of socialism, disintegrated from within, in bloody internecine strife. (b)That strife took place within the larger context of a pre-existing rupture, that between the USSR and China. Sibling rivalry (eg Kampuchea-Vietnam) occurred within the framework of deadly parental strife (USSR -PRC). World capitalism was able to prevail in the New Cold War because of Socialism's self-inflicted damage. Thus the defeat of global socialism was not inevitable; its death was not foreordained.
“The basic state is unevenness”; “Unevenness is in the nature of things'. The uneven development of socialism proved deadlier than the uneven development of capitalism. Why did the inevitable contradictions within and among revolutionary processes - inevitable because of uneven development-manifest itself in bloody strife? Was that mode of expression too, inevitable? Certainly this was a leitmotif of the rise of capitalism and of course, of various religions, especially Catholicism. Socialism was only in its historical and civilizational infancy, so perhaps these were murderous infantile disorders'?
' Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, Routledge, London,
1992, p. 167.
o Mao tse-tung, “On Contradiction”.
' Mao, “Reading Notes on Political Economy', in Mark Selden, (ed.), The
People's Republic of China: a Documentary History.

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Perhaps they were but an inevitable function of the economics of scarcity -revolutions having been made in relatively backward societies rather than the economically and culturally advanced Western metropoles? Such historicism and sociologism is as unsatisfactory as economism in comprehending the fate of Socialism. It does not answer the question as to how two revolutions, decades apart and situated in the Third world, were able to avoid or resist all such temptations. These are the Cuban and the Nicaraguan. All the factors that bedevilled other revolutionary processes were present in these two. A revolutionary movement with different emphases - in the case of the Cuban, the Sierra and the Llano (the guerrillas in the mountains and the urban fighters and support groups) and in the case of the Nicaraguan, three rival tendencies within the FSLN. Marxists, non-Marxists and not-so-Marxists; complex relations between the Communist party and the revolutionary vanguard; imperialist plots, encirclement and armed counterrevolution: in other situations any one of these factors and certainly a combination of them would have degenerated into internecine strife. Yet neither the Cuban revolution nor the Nicaraguan turned lethally on itself or on its brothers. Neither bore the mark of Cain.
Fidel Castro was the most consistently exemplary leader of the revolutionary left since Lenin; also the one who made the fewest damaging blunders and committed the fewest crimes. (1) He led and won his revolution, which places him in fairly limited and exclusive company (2) he built and (has) sustained a socialist state (3) he did so in an utterly and singularly adverse geo-strategic and geo-political location (4) he did not isolate himself and Cuba from the rest of the world but pursued an activist articulate policy of internationalism or globalism (5) no members of the original revolutionary leadership were bloodily purged (6) no members of rival leftwing organizations and tendencies were executed.
Above all, Fidel Castro bridged the gap between the practice and philosophical endorsement of revolutionary violence (or at least the refusal to renounce it) on the one hand, and humanistic and humanitarian ethics on the other. In this sphere (alone) he was superior to Lenin. His main contribution to Marxism has been the stress on

Suicide: The Last Stage of Socialism? 43
moral-ethical factors in revolutionary political praxis. A quintessentially Gramscian moral-ethical hegemony, based on superiority of values and conduct, is the secret of the survival of the Cuban revolution. It is why, 90 miles from history's mightiest and the world's sole superpower, forty years into the economic blockade, and ten years after the death of the Soviet Union, socialist Cuba survives, defiant. The Age of Socialism is dead. Communism was like a comet in the night” of History. Yet even within the global defeat and disintegration of the socialist project, Fidel Castro, the Last Promethean, has shown that an existential victory is possible.
"7 The famous description of the life of Lenin's older brother and hero
Alexander, executed for plotting the assassination of theTsar.

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Sexual Violence during Wartime
Radhika Coomaraswamy (United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women)
Paper prepared for UNIFEM, January 2002.
Introduction
Violence against women during wartime has been one of history's great silences. Though other aspects of war have received detailed consideration over the last few centuries, violence against women during armed conflict was an invisible issue, often seen as a necessary cost of war. In recent times, due to activism of women's groups around the world, the international community has begun to outline standards and prosecute violators. This has led to a great deal of research and activism at the international level on issues pertaining to the situation of women during armed conflict. This paper attempts to Summarize these developments while drawing on the personal experience of the author as Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.
The first part of the paper will discuss the debates relating to the causes of violence against women during wartime. The second section will look at how women are affected by war, how they are both victims and agents in a military context over which they rarely exercise control. The third section will deal with issues of law and accountability, discussing international standards for the accountability of perpetrators and some of the emerging legal doctrines from international courts. The third section will look at the humanitarian consequences of the war and the type of programs that exist to help women victims of violence. The fourth section will look at certain special issues that have risen in recent times with regard to armed conflict and the need to flag these concerns for the international

Sexual Violence during Wartime 45
community. Finally the last section will look at examples from around the world where women have resisted war and have taken an active part in the rehabilitation of their societies.
Causes of Violence against Women during Wartime
Many authors have speculated on the causes of violence against women during wartime. Scholars such as Catharine MacKinnon have located the cause of this violence' in patriarchy and male attempts to dominate and subjugate the female. Other writers such as Susan Brownmiller see sexual violence during wartime as an aspect of the communication between males. In this analysis, men rape women to dominate and humiliate other men who are seen as their enemy. In Latin America, feminists have argued that rape, sexual violence and murder are required acts to socialize the military recruit and to permanently separate the recruit from the civilian population. It is a means for brutalisation to harden soldiers for battle and sacrifice, and to bond men with one another. In ethnic wars, some commentators argue that sexual violence is a means of asserting and marking boundaries between ethnic groups, reinforcing the tension and animosity among communities."
Whatever the philosophical roots of violence against women during wartime, certain patterns of sexual violence are discernible if
See for example Catherine Mackinnon, “Sex Equality:_On Difference
and Dominance' in Catharine A. Mackinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of The State, New York, Harvard University Press, 1989.
2 Susan Brownmiller. Against Our Will, Men Women and Rape, Simon
and Schustet, 1975.
Cynthia Enloe, "All the Menare in The Militias, All the Women Are Victims: The Politics of Masculinity and Femininity in Nationalist Wars in Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpined. The Women War Reader, p. 50.
Darius M. Rejali, “After Feminist Analyses of Bosnian Violence', in The Women War Reader p. 31.

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one were to study the conduct of war in different parts of the world. In some wars, such as in the former Yugoslavia, evidence before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia appears to show that sexual violence was used as a tactical weapon to intimidate and terrorize the population of the other side. Commanders encouraged and used it as part of their military operations. Rape as a conscious instrument of war has been a factor in many wars throughout the years. Rape and sexual violence are also used to punish certain women who may be close to leading male figures of the other side. In Haiti, in what is termed political rapes, women who were wives and daughters of dissident political leaders were systematically raped. The same was true in East Timor. Wives and relatives of suspected guerrilla leaders were subject to rape. With regard to women prisoners, rape is often used as a means of interrogation. In Peru, women suspected of supporting the Shining Path were often raped while in custody as part of the interrogation procedure. Other Latin American wars have also recorded similar experiences. Women are also raped or sexually harassed by fellow activists and men from the same political group. In Colombia, many ex-combatants have spoken about being raped or sexually harassed by their male superiors as a first step in initiation." Finally, armed conflict creates an atmosphere of impunity and lawlessness and many men take advantage of this situation to rape and commit acts of sexual violence against women. The impunity attached to their actions encourages them to commit these acts without any fear of being arrested or prosecuted. M
In ethnic wars, rape and sexual violence take on an added dimension. The work on the India-Pakistan partition by scholars, as
Report of The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its causes and consequences, Mission to Haiti, 1998.
Report of The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its causes and consequences, Mission to Indonesia and East Timor, E/CN.4/ 1999/68/Add.3
7 Report of The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its causes and consequences, Mission to Colombia forthcoming 2002.

Sexual Violence during Wartime 47
well as research on the war in the former Yugoslavia, point to ethnic factors that increase the vulnerability of women. In such a context, rape and sexual violence are seen as an attack on a woman's honor and raping her shames and humiliates the whole community. Vindicating women's honor then becomes the battle cry of the other side. In addition, rape and talk of sexual violence is used to mark boundaries between communities, especially in the context of highly mixed populations. By raping the other, one searches for purity, certainty and distance from the other, who then becomes merely the object of violence. Research has shown that rape was highest in situations of mixed population where these public rapings along with public murder were an aspect of forcing differentiation and distance.” Duringwartime, sexual violence is not usually a private crime. It is often committed in public in front offellow soldiers and the family of the victim. This public spectacle is aimed at instilling terror among the population, but it also strengthens bonds and comradeship among fellow soldiers or militias. The public acts are meant to harden the warrior and to create shared experiences among the men. Studies into the lives of perpetrators of crimes have clearly shown that this element of male bonding is an essential aspect of rapes during wartime.
How Women are Affected by War
Women are affected by armed conflict in a myriad different ways. They are often direct victims of violence, being either killed, maimed to subject to sexual violence. This direct violence is often severe and of the 'shock-the-conscience' variety. Women are often gang-raped
Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries:- Women in India s Partition, New Delhi, Kali, 1998.
Silva Meznaric, "Gender as an Ethno-Marker: Rape, War and Identity Politics in the Former Yugoslavia in Valentine M. Moghadam ed. Identity, Politics, and Women:- Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective, Boulder, Westview, 1994.

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and killed, usually in front of their families." They are often sexually mutilated, sometimes their bodies are tattooed or they are paraded naked through the streets, or forced to dance nude on tables.' They are made to become sexual slaves as well as domestic slaves and they are sometimes forcibly impregnated.' Human rights groups have documented the nature and scale of this sexual violence in many countries throughout the world. They conveyapattern of brutality and humiliation that is often unimaginable for those living in peacetime. In addition to being direct victims, women suffer violence as refugees or internally displaced. While the men go to war, women are usually displaced with their children, trying to eke out a life at a refugee camp. They are often victims of sexual violence in flight, and they are also harassed once they are in the camps. If they are with their husbands, they are often subject to increased rates of domestic violence. Some scholars have argued that women often make use of the refugee status to acquire agency over their lives, having escaped the structures of patriarchy. But for many women, being a refugee and an internally displaced person is a state of victimhood where they are subject to sexual violence and discrimination as a matter of course. In addition, they are denied basic economic and social amenities and have to often survive in subhuman situations.
During wartime, the presence of large armies and unattached
males often leads to a demand for prostitution. This demand is often met by the trafficking of women from borders or from the countryside. Lured by job offers and other enticements, many of these women end
' see the reports of The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women missions to Rwanda, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Colombia. For the former Yugoslavia see Alexandra Stiglmayer, Mass Rapes:-The War Against Women in Bosnia Herzogovina, Lincoln, University of Nebraska, 1994.
see the Foca case, International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia, February 2000.
' see Rhonda Copelon, 'Surfacing Gender Re-Engraving Crimes Against Women in Humanitarian Law 5 Hastings Women's Law Journal 243 (2) (Summer 1994).

Sexual Violence during Wartime 49
up in brothels in terrible conditions. The comfort women of Japan are the best-known victims of these practices. They were often lured by job offers and then kept in brothels run by the Japanese army. There they serviced up to 40 clients a day in little bed-cubicles. They were subject to extraordinary violence and humiliation, and after the war many returned home with terrible scars and an inability to make a new life. Today, trafficking continues though private owners run the brothels. In recent times, the presence of large numbers of UN peacekeepers has led to trafficking and prostitution in areas adjoining their camps. This has caused a great deal of unhappiness among the local population, and new efforts are being made to curb these activities and to raise awareness among the peacekeepers.
Women are also affected by war in the sense that many of them become war widows. Their husbands may have been killed in combat or been lost in displacement. These women have to take on the burden of being heads of single-parent families trying to eke-out a living in new places and new contexts. They are often at the bureaucratic mercy of state institutions and international humanitarian institutions. Many complain of sexual harassment and difficulty while living in the community. Many others turn to prostitution to make ends meet. They have to find food, clothing and shelter for their children as well as education, and this is often an uphill struggle. In some countries as widows they are denied inheritance rights so that all their husbands property reverts back to their families leaving the widows at the mercy of their male in-laws. The lack of inheritance rights makes war widows into paupers, and if they have no male children they are denied any right to the husband's property.
Women are also affected by war in that in some wars pornography plays an important part in the war. In the Bosnian war
Report of The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its causes and consequences, Mission to Korea and Japan, 1995.
' for an extensive discussion of these issues, at least in the South Asian context, see Bina Agarwal, A Field of One s Own, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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some of the rapes were publicly performed and videotaped and then the tapes were sold as pornographic material Women victims were ordered to pose in certain positions and pictures were taken for pornographic magazines. This exploitation of women's bodies during war, with its strikingly modern technology of video cameras and hitech props was one of the great horrors of the war in the former Yugoslavia. The Serbs directing the films used sophisticated modern methods and props and even dubbed the dialogue. This cynical dehumanizing use of women is a new contribution to the depravity of war.'
Women are also victims in another sense. Many of them become armed combatants, especially in the newer wars. As women combatants they are entitled to the protection of the Geneva Conventions, but in practice they need special treatment and care. Women in guerrilla movements are particularly vulnerable to rape from the other side. If they are captured they are invariably raped as part of the interrogation. (For this reason the women fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam take cyanide capsules rather than give in to capture.) In addition, many of these women are subject to sexual assault from their own colleagues. In Colombia ex-combatants spoke of sexual abuse by commanders and colleagues as well as a ban on pregnancy that often made them leave the movement. The control of reproductive rights often goes hand in hand with the presence of women fighters. Though some women would argue that the right to take up arms is the right of women as resistance fighters, the specter of armed women cadres raises disturbing issues about women, nonviolence and women's role in peace movements. Many argue that belonging to an armed movement is an actofempowerment. However, whether participation at the lower echelons of a military chain of command can be truly liberating for women is one of those interminable debates within the women's movement.
Women are also often compelled to work in munitions and production factories preparing uniforms, shells and other military
Catharine M. Mackinnon, Turning Rape into Pornography: PostModern Genocide', MS July, August 1993.

Sexual Violence during Wartime 51
equipment needed for the war. In Britain, the munition factory worker was seen as doing a patriotic duty in making ammunition for the troops. Women in guerrilla villages sew and make clothing for the troops and also make other material needed for the war. The woman worker who comes out into public life to assist men during wartime, only to return to the home after the war is over, is a well known pattern in the conduct of war. It is also true that women play a major part in peace efforts far in excess of their numbers. But their presence in the war machine cannot also be overlooked, and many women play an important part in the conduct of war.
Perhaps the greatest but least quantifiable impact of war on women is in the process of militarisation. Militarisation reinscribes certain masculine values and lifestyles. These lifestyles that condone violence and a measure of aggression often result in greater violence in the home and greater violence in the community. Army deserters, young men with guns, the climate of impunity, the celebration of martial valor, all lead to a context where violence becomes an acceptable way of life. This has enormous consequences for women since they are often the first victims of this tolerance for the violent lifestyle and the last to benefit from the largesse of the state toward its military apparatus. .
International Standards of Accountability
There are two conflicting approaches on how history treats violence against women in wartime. Many scholars have argued that such crimes have been invisible and that history has no recollection of these horrible events. Seen as a necessary consequence of war, violence against women in armed conflict has been ignored by recorded history and those involved in making and implementing international standards. These scholars feel that patriarchal notions of sexual violence and the invisibility of women in the international law-making process led to the complete neglect of sexual violence during wartime. Such violence is rarely named as a terrible crime, and there are few provisions in international law that deal with these acts.

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It is often pointed out that The Hague Convention, the first document of the twentieth century to deal with crimes of war, has no provision with regard to sexual violence during wartime and only mentions a general notion of family law. It is also pointed out that though rhe Fourth Geneva Convention in Article 27 clearly states that crimes against women's honor are prohibited, sexual violence is not mentioned as one of the crimes that constitute a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions triggering individual criminal responsibility and universal jurisdiction. Cast in the language of honor, these crimes have a very patriarchal ring to their language and tenor. The Statutes of Nuremberg are also silent with regard to sexual violence, and such acts do not explicitly constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity as stated in its provisions. It is only in the 1990s with the International Tribunals in The Hague and Arusha that sexual violence is treated as a serious war crime and a crime against humanity.
Another school of thought, usually emanating from the office of prosecutors around the world, is the belief that sexual violence against women has always been seen as a prohibited act of war. Pointing to the chivalry codes of the medieval ages, the provisions on honor in the Hague Conventions, the provisions of Control Council Rule No 10 of the Occupying Powers of Germany, the trial of Japanese Commanders for sexual violence in Nanking, these prosecutors argue that sexual violence against women has always been seen as a crime of war. They also point out that the general clauses on torture and willful killing that mark the language of the Geneva Convention provisions on Grave Breaches were meant to include acts of sexual violence and assault. They argue that the prohibition against sexual violence during wartime is so universal that it is an aspect of customary international law. These arguments then set the framework for the legal argument about the accountability of perpetrators for sexual violence during wartime.
The accountability of the perpetrators today begins with the Geneva Conventions to which all states are party. Article 27 of the
' This is the argument of the prosecutors at the Two International Criminal
Tribunals of the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

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Convention speaks about protected persons and their right to be protected from crimes against their honor, rape, enforced prostitution and indecent assault as well as discrimination. However it is Article 147 that deals with individual criminal responsibility and therefore the accountability of perpetrators. Those combatants in an international armed conflict that commit these crimes against civilians are seen as having committed a war crime, and these acts trigger individual criminal responsibility and universal jurisdiction, the possibility of being sued in any of the courts of member states. The acts that constitute a grave breach of the Geneva Convention and are a war crime are stated as:
(a) willful killing; (b) torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments; (c) willfully causing suffering or serious injury to body or health; (d) extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; (e) compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve
in the forces of a hostile power; (f) willfully depriving a prisoner or other protected person of the
rights of fair and regular trial; (g) unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement; (h) taking of hostages.
These provisions then constitute the internationally accepted framework of international war crimes against civilians under the Geneva Conventions. Though sexual violence is not explicitly stated, prosecutors have successfully argued that these crimes are subsumed under torture and willfully causing suffering and serious injury. However, feminists argue that the lack of explicit language on sexual violence displays the patriarchal attitudes of the negotiators.
For crimes that are committed during a local internal war, as opposed to international armed conflict, the Geneva Conventions contain a common Article 3 in all the Conventions that spell out prohibited acts during internal wars. These are stated as:

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(a) violence to life and persons, in particular murder of all kinds,
mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) committing outrages upon personal dignity; in particular,
humiliating and degrading treatment;
(c) taking of hostages;
(d) the passing of sentences and carrying out executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all judicial guarantees which are generally recognized as indispensable.
However, these acts described are not included as part of Article 147 which defines Grave Breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and therefore it was ambiguous as to whether individuals were criminally responsible before courts of law for committing these acts. The Security Council in setting up the Rwanda Tribunal, however, passed a statute that clearly states that individuals are to be held personally accountable for committing the acts contained in article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and that they could be brought to trial for violating these provisions.
Most countries of the world are signatories to the Geneva Conventions and are therefore bound by these provisions. Jurists and courts have held that the principles contained in the Geneva Conventions are so universally recognized that they constitute customary international law and states are bound, regardless of whether they have signed relevant treaties. The universality of the Conventions makes it still the most important document when it comes to dealing with individuals who have committed crimes during wartime.
Some states have gone beyond the Geneva Conventions and signed the Statute on the International Criminal Court which went into operation just two years ago. The ICC Statute is the state of the art document on international war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is far-reaching in its treatment of sexual violence and there is explicit language with regard to sexual violence and gender discrimination. Individuals are held criminally responsible for the prohibited acts and can be brought before the International Court.

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In the section on Crimes Against Humanity i.e. certain kinds of acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack, there is explicit mention of sexual violence. Article 7(1)(g) includes as part of the prohibited acts, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparative gravity'. Another prohibited act is persecution against any identifiable group or collectively on political, racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender or other grounds...' In addition, enslavement is a prohibited act, and enslavement as defined by the Statute means the exercise of any or all the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person and includes the exercise of such power in the course of trafficking in persons, in particular women and children.' The Statute also recognizes forced pregnancy and defines it as “unlawful confinement, of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out other grave violations of international law. The requirement of proving intent to affect ethnic composition or carry out other grave violations of international law, however, is seen as a negative aspect of this provision from the perspective of women’s rights. The provision was part of the lobbying by the Vatican to ensure that the provision does not lead to unnecessary abortions.
The section on War Crimes is equally explicit. In this Statute War Crimes include the Grave Breaches of the Geneva Convention cited earlier as well as a whole series of other acts, including committing rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence also constituting a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions'. In
7 see The International Criminal Court (The Rome Statute) adopted by
The United Nations Conference on 17 July 1998. Article 7(11) (g) of the Rome Statute. Article 7(1) (h) of the Rome Statute. Article 7(2)(c) of the Rome Statute. * Article 8 (2) (b) (xxii) of the Rome Statute.

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addition, to avoid the problem of internal and external wars, the Statute in a different section on war crimes in internal wars refers explicitly to sexual violence during internal wars. It mentions that prohibited acts include rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, and any other form of sexual violence also constituting a serious violation of Article 3 common to the Four Geneva Conventions.'
The ICC Statute goes even further with regard to gender equity by requiring a fair representation of judges according to gender and requiring that one judge be appointed who specializes on violence against women as a subject area. The ICC exhorts the investigators of crimes to be sensitive with regard to their investigative procedures to the nature of crimes that involve gender violence and violence against children. Despite these laudable aspects, there are also certain disappointments with regard to the ICC statute. The provisions on genocide do not include any reference to sexual violence even though many women lobbied for systematic rape and forced pregnancy to be seen as an aspect of genocide. Gender is defined in a manner that seems to avoid any reference to sexual orientation, a major concern for certain countries and religions. Finally, with regard to the ICC as a whole, the country of the defendant or the country where the incident took place has to be a party to the Statute or give its consent to the proceedings. This vitiates any fully independent international process. Most states have not ratified the ICC statute to date, and with active lobbying by the United States against it, it is unlikely that there will be many signatories in the first few years. The Geneva Conventions, therefore, still remain the most important document with regard to binding provisions of international humanitarian law.
The nature of international norms and standards has evolved rapidly in the last decade because of the terrible wars that took place in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. These wars, both internal and
* Article 8 (2) (e) (6) of the Rome Statute. * Article 36(8)(a) and Article 36(8)(b) respectively of the Rome Statute. * Article 54 (1)(b) of The Rome Statute.

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external, so shocked the conscience of the world with effective media coverage and international mobilization that there was rapid development of international capacity with regard to the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Over the last decades, the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and The International Criminal tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) have made some far-reaching judgments that have resulted in people being prosecuted and convicted at the international level for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Sexual violence has been an important part of their considerations. Their pronouncements are important because they interpret the law to cover actual situations, and, therefore, give depth and meaning to the law. The law is in the process of evolving, but significant milestones have already been reached.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has defined rape as a form of torture and a grave breach of the Geneva Convention. Therefore in the future, if sexual violence occurs in armed conflict and the case is covered by the Geneva Conventions, the interpretation of the court will carry great weight as a precedent. This equation of rape with torture was done in cases of women who were raped by being detained in a prison camp' and when they were raped as part of an interrogation. In the Foca judgment, the court also held sexual violence to be included in the crime of enslavement and the crime of an outrage against personal dignity. In the Akeyesu judgment of the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda the court argued that rape in certain circumstances might also be an aspect of the crime of genocide. ...ہ The Foca judgment of the International Criminal Court of th Former Yugoslavia is the first judgment of any international tribunal in history to be primarily about sexual violence. In that sense it is an interesting case, and is therefore seen as an international standardssetter with regard to the application of international norms However,
o ICTY Celebici judgment (16, November 1998). * Furundzija judgment (2 December 1998).
Foca judgment (February 2000). * The ICTR Akeyesu Judgment (2 September 1998).

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the judgment is still only at the level of the Trial Court, and so some of the decisions may be reversed in appeal.
The Foca case involved the testimonies of many women who were detained in detention centers and private houses and raped repeatedly. The testimony of anonymous witness 75 gives one a sense of the sexual violence that took place in the former Yugoslavia. FWS 75 was in her village when it was attacked. At the commencement of the attack, she ran into the woods with her father her mother and her brother. The soldiers ran behind them and shot her mother dead and encircled the others. The men were separated and led away. They heard gun shots soon after, and then silence. She never saw her father or brother again. She was then taken to the Buk Bijela detention camp. As soon as she entered she was raped by ten men. After the tenth she fainted. From Buk Bijela she was taken to The Foca High School. There she was kept for some time. She was fed only once in three days. Policemen and soldiers would come into the High School, point to girls and then either take them to another room and rape them or take them overnight. She was taken out every night except for two to a private apartment and then raped by many men. After a few days she was taken to the Partizan Sports Hall. Again she was taken out every night and raped orally, vaginally and anally by so many men that she lost count. Finally she was taken to two apartments where the defendants lived and had to provide domestic service as well as sexual services along with some other women. She cooked, cleaned and washed clothes, often in the nude, and often had to dance nude on tables. When one of the men got angry with her, he marched her nude though the streets to a river and was about to shoot her when the other men prevailed upon him. This continued until the end of the war when she was sold in prostitution to a brothel owner.
The facts of the case were so terrible that prosecutors were of the opinion that the number of counts and charges should be augmented to ensure a long prison sentence for the individuals concerned. For this reason they were charged on the grounds of torture, rape, outrages upon personal dignity and enslavement. The men were accused of having committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. The main defendant received a cumulative sentence of over one life imprisonment.

Sexual Violence during Wartime 59
Despite these positive developments, some major questions remain from a legal doctrinal point of view with major implications for the future. What elements constitute rape during war-time, are the factors the same as during peacetime? In the Akeyesu judgment, the Rwandan Tribunal defined rape as follows. The Tribunal considers that rape is a form of aggression and that the central elements of the crime of rape cannot be captured in a mechanical description of objects and body parts...The Tribunal defines rape as a "physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances that are coercive". The extremely progressive judgment defines rape without any emphasis on the consent of the victim, probably under the belief that the issue of consent in the context of a war crime and a crime against humanity is an affront to the victim. Given the fact that such acts are committed in circumstances that are coercive’, the perpetrator himself need not use active force and act against the will of the women. In addition sexual acts are not defined in terms only of sexual intercourse but as any physical invasion of a Sexual nature.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is not so far-reaching in its judgment. The Furundzija judgment where rape at a detention center was seen as torture defined rape as "sexual penetration
(a) of vagina, anus of the victim by the penis of the perpetrator or
any other object used by the perpetrator
(b) of the mouth of the victim by the penis of the perpetrator by coercion, or force or threat of force against the victim or third person.
This definition requires sexual penetration of the vagina, anus or mouth of the victim and is therefore quite specific about sexual violence. In addition it requires the perpetrator to use some kind of coercion or force. This requirement of the use of force also requires that the prosecutor prove force. In a war context, soldiers may not actually use physical force, their uniforms are coercive enough. Therefore this definition of rape is very negative from the viewpoint of the victim.

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Finally, the Foca judgment lies in between these judgments. It states that rape occurs when
(i) “sexual activity is accompanied by force or threat of force to
the victim or third party, (ii) the sexual activity is accompanied by force ora variety of other specified circumstances which made the victim particularly vulnerable or negated her ability to make an informed refusal, (iii) the sexual activity occurs without the consent of the victim.
This definition rests the whole case on the use of force or the lack of consent of the victim. Though defined more flexibly to give room for vulnerability, this definition of rape also forces attention in certain contexts on the consent of the victim and may, therefore, result in terrible cross-examinations. In addition, by making it a constituent element of the crime, the prosecutor will have to prove lack of consent in certain contexts, again making prosecution difficult and onerous for the victim.
Ironically, in the evidentiary rules of the Tribunal itself, Rule 96 states that 'consent shall not be allowed as a defense of the victim if the victim
(a) has been subjected to or threatened with or has reason to fear
violence, duress, detention or psychological oppression or
(b) reasonably believed that if the victim did not submit another
might be so subjected, threatened or put in fear.
The dispute on the definition of rape therefore becomes a very important debate for people interested in women’s rights at the international level. The Akeyesu approach will ensure maximum accountability and successful prosecutions. However, it may have tilted the balance too far with regard to the rights of the defendant. On the other hand, the other two definitions have many of the dangers of national prosecutions, and given the context of war and the types of sexual violence that occur during wartime, may prove to be major obstacles in certain kinds of prosecutions.

Sexual Violence during Wartime 61
Despite its conservative position with regard to the definition of rape, the Foca judgment is a path breaker in its definition of enslavement. For the first time sexual slavery is clearly defined and analyzed at the international level. Defining enslavement as the exercise of any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership, it held that the activities in the private apartments where women provided all kinds of services and lived in a constant state of fear amounted to enslavement and a complete violation of international humanitarian law.
The Humanitarian Implications of Sexual Violence
Sexual violence during wartime has enormous consequences for women living in war zones. Because of the possibility of sexual violence many women flee their homes with their children. It is often said that women and children are 80% of the refugees or the internally displaced in any given context. Men may have become combatants or may prefer to risk staying behind. Women and children on the other hand go in large numbers to refugee shelters. In most areas of the world, agriculture of fishing are the main livelihoods of communities. Becoming a refugee often implies a complete break with livelihood cycles and a complete dependence on humanitarian agencies for basic survival.
Women who leave their homes, therefore, often have to trek long distances for water, food or medical help. In these long journeys, women are often attacked and raped. These cases have been documented among many refugees, and received international attention with regard to Somalia refugees in Kenya. Women fleeing the Vietnam conflict by boats were often raped by pirates at sea. Sexual violence during flight occurs regularly and is often a major consequence of the war. Women in flight are extremely vulnerable and are often asked for sexual services in return for bureaucratic or military favors.
In addition, when women reach their refugee camps, they are often subject to sexual harassment by camp officials and soldiers guarding the camp. The structure of the camp is extremely important,

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and that is why women activists have insisted that women be consulted when camps are designed. Where toilets are far away and secluded, women often experience sexual violence in this isolation. Women often have to offer sexual services to receive placement in the camp or for any provisions or privileges in the camp. Sexual services sometimes become a negotiating point for receiving even the minimum of basic services.
Research in refugee camps and IDP camps also point to a dramatic increase in domestic violence in the camps where families flee together. Research done in West Timor shows a startling increase in domestic violence in the camps as men vent their frustrations on their women.’ This has been confirmed by experiences in many refugee camps and interviews with women internally displaced. The social frustrations and disempowerment that populations face when they are displaced has terrible implications for women in the family. Husbands, brothers and sons often use domestic violence as a means of expressing displeasure at circumstances beyond their control. At the same time, some research points to the fact that women who come as single-parent units to the camps are seemingly empowered. They are Suddenly given the right to make decisions about their lives and the lives of the children. They become important actors in the camps, negotiating their rights and entitlements.
In the armed conflict areas, even without flight, women face great difficulties. In many societies women are responsible for the procurement of food and water. In war traditional systems of food distribution break down and it becomes imperative that alternative systems are put in place to ensure access to food. Economic sanctions against enemy-held territories often results in dramatic increases in malnutrition and food-related diseases. In this context international humanitarian agencies often assist in the granting of food to these areas
Report submitted to The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women by The AsiaPacific Forum on Women Law and Development.
*o Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, “Ambivalent Empowerment: The Tragedy of Tamil Women in Conflict, in Rita Manchanda ed. Women, War and Peace in South Asia, Sage New Delhi, 2001, p. 102.

Sexual Violence during Wartime 63
with the consent of governments. But many foodstuffs are left out and the payment of commissions and levies to local actors results in less food at a higher price reaching the target population. As women are heads of single-parent households in war zones, this attempt to meet basic food needs occupies a great deal of their time. They spend hours trying to get the necessary permits from bureaucrats. In addition they have to often pay a price to the local soldier or operative on the ground who delivers the foodstuffs. Once they get the food and return home, in some contexts, a portion of the food is taxed by the local guerrilla commanders and the women end up with only a small portion of their entitlement. The lack of accountability creates a great deal of hardship, and survival becomes a very difficult reality.
In many Societies women engage in subsistence agriculture and agriculture is their main means of livelihood. In a war zone this livelihood is often disrupted. During war women are in grave danger when they try to carry on with day-to-day living. They are often the individuals asked to bring water and firewood as well as work on the land. They may be caught in the crossfire or they may step on uncleared mines that are often placed at random in all parts of the war zone. They are unable to graze cattle or get the basic minimum from livelihood because of these realities. In some cases women and children are forcibly evicted from the land by local commanders or invading troops. This forcedeviction is another aspect of warfare that takes a terrible toll on women.
Women's access to land is a major problem even after the conflict. In many societies widows are denied inheritance, and if they do not have male heirs, they can be sent off the land by their husband's relatives. This leaves many war-widows in a precarious position, and women often become paupers and begin begging in the streets during and after war. This pauperisation of women because of the legal system and the exigencies of war is a serious problem. In Afghanistan, begging became the only means of survival during the Taliban regime when women were refused the right to work. Women had no option but to begin the streets, always accompanied by their young sons who were their required male escort.
Another serious concern is health and health care for women

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during wartime. During times of war, women and children living in the war zones suffer an increase in communicable diseases, the risk of epidemics and very low nutrition status. They also have very little access to health care. This is particularly the case with regard to reproductive health care. Women rarely have access to familyplanning policies in war-affected areas or in refugee camps. Women in those areas who are pregnant rarely are given pre-natal and postnatal care. Most important, they have very little access to emergency obstetric care or expertise.
Women who have suffered from sexual violence have even more serious problems of health and health care. They are rarely given effective medical treatment immediately after the violent event. In addition they suffer terrible wounds. In both Sierra Leone and Rwanda, their vaginal areas are ripped apart, and this is often a life-threatening situation, especially for girlchildren. They require special surgery to help them regain a semblance of a normal sexual life. In most societies there are very few gynecologists trained to deal with these complicated cases. In Rwanda just after the war, with a large number of women who had suffered sexual violence, there were only five gynecologists who could give treatment for the women concerned. Women had to tend their own wounds or rely on herbal medicine. In addition, many of these women had contacted HIV/AIDS because of the sexual violence. In Rwanda, some women said that men infected with HIV/ AIDS deliberately had sex with women from the other ethnic group to infect them with the disease as part of the war. In addition, as many women in war zones and refugee camps have to give sexual services so that they can get basic survival essentials, the risk of HIV/ AIDS is extremely high. Besides HIV/AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases can have grave consequences for women, including infertility, inflammation, abortion and infection.
With little access to health care, women often suffer these
Report of The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its causes and its consequences, mission to Rwanda (1997). 32 ibid.

Sexual Violence during Wartime 65
conditions in silence. In some countries such as Afghanistan, women could not be treated by male doctors, and this often led to high rates of female mortality. In other countries, due to cultural reasons women do not travel long distances, so unless it is a terrible emergency women do not seek out medical services or medical health. The hospitals in the war zones are undersupplied and understaffed, especially since health professionals are likely to leave the war zone for safer areas. There is a dearth of drugs, and embargoes imposed by the other side can lead to the complete denial of important medicines for the civilian population. This in turn can lead to epidemics or the prevalence of certain kinds of illnesses, such as cholera and malaria, that in other circumstances can usually be brought under control by health professionals.
One of the worst problems which receive very little attention in war zones are the Socio-psychological issues that often paralyze women and make them incapable of dealing with their own lives. In Rwanda, psychologists estimate that 80% of the women who survived the war were suffering from major psychological problems and needed treatment. And yet, very few Societies have the resources or the strategies to deal with these psychosocial issues. According to psychiatrists working in these areas, fear is a central element in people's lives. This fear often leads to severe depression on the part of women. It also includes psychosomatic manifestations such as chronic stomach problems, palpitations, nausea, insomnia, and a loss of appetite and sexual energy. Thoughts of suicide and acts of selfmutilation are also very common. In this context only a concerted and planned intervention will help alleviate many of the issues faced by these women. In most societies mental health does not receive even minimum attention. It is therefore often left to the international community to raise these concerns and assist in setting up programs for their development.
Another area that deserves attention but is rarely discussed are the problems faced by so-called children of hate. East Timor and
ibid.

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Rwanda are both Catholic countries. As a result women who were raped and made pregnant during the war refused to have abortions. Sometimes the children born of rape were given to orphanages, but very often the children are brought up by the affected mother herself. The psychological manifestations of this relationship are often evident from the beginning, and is often healthy neither for the women nor for the children. The women and their children are in need of a great deal of support and counseling to help them deal with these problems, but rarely get any assistance from the state
Other problems relating to Violence against Women during Wartime
The problem of the girl child caught up in a zone of armed conflict is a special topic that requires separate attention. Girl children, like women, are killed and maimed during war. It is argued that women suffer landmine casualties, for example, in greater numbers since fetching water and firewood are often their traditional labor. In addition there are now many girl-child combatants fighting for different causes around the world. In Sierra Leone, girl children as young as ten were often kidnapped, then injected with a substance and sent into battle. After battle they were required to provide sexual services to the male cadres and commanders. Finally there are international and national networks of trafficking that pick up girl children from war zones, offer them a life away from the war Zone and traffic for prostitution or domestic services where they sometimes live out unconscionable lives.
Another increasing problem relates to the United Nations Peacekeeping forces. These forces, sent in to protect civilian populations, sometimes engage in acts of sexual violence. Such cases have been recorded in Mozambique, Somalia, Cambodia, and Sierra
Carol Nordstrom, “Girls Behind the (Front) Lines', in The Women War Reader, p. 85.

Sexual Violence during Wartime 67
Leone. In addition, there has been increased trafficking of women to areas where peacekeepers are stationed, whether in Kosovo, Sierra Leone or East Timor. Attitudes of some UN officials have not ameliorated the situation in some cases. The Head of the UN Mission to Cambodia, when questioned about sexual abuse and trafficking in Cambodia, replied, “I am nota puritan: eighteen year-old, hot-blooded soldiers had a right to drinka few beers and chase after beautiful things of the opposite sex.
The attitude toward women by peacekeepers is accentuated by the fact that sometimes there is a lack of women in the peacekeeping operations. From 1957-1991 women were between 5-25% of the international civilian staff supporting peacekeeping operations. Today in most peacekeeping operations women are about one third of the peacekeeping civilian staff. It was only after 1994 that the UN asked member states for women soldiers, but women in combat roles in peacekeeping operations is less than ten percent. The presence of women in peacekeeping operations does lead to a strengthening of the bonds with local communities and allows women from the communities more access to Peacekeepers.
In many of the societies at war there are also many women's groups that are in the forefront for the struggle for peace. It would be an overstatement to say that women are by nature Supporters of peace. There are many women who see themselves as mothers of warriors, many who have worked in munitions factories, and many who have screamed for war in the violent rhetoric that often underpins the political side of military mobilization. Women leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi led their nations to war without the slightest hesitation. And yet, it is empirically true that women are present in large numbers in peace movements and often take the lead in organizing foe peace.
Jennifer Turpin, “Many Faces: Women Confronting War, in The Women War Reader, p. 6.
Jennifer Turpin p. 6.
7 Janet Beilstein, The Expanding Role of Women in United Nations', p. 140.
ibid., p. 143.

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In recent times one has seen the phenomenon of women's groups being actively involved in the peace process. In Northern Ireland the Women's Coalition for Peace got elected and took part in the peace negotiations, often creating a channel of communication with the male members. In Burundi and Somalia women are present at the peace talks. In other countries women's movements for peace create the conditions for peace agitation and peace activism. The Women in Black in Israel, the Naga Mother's Front, the Women for Peace movement in Sri Lanka and countless others have asked for the cessation of violence. Women are also in the forefront of the demand for accountability with regard to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Mothers of the Plaza in Peru, South African women and the Mothers Front in Sri Lanka were movements aimed at demanding accountability for the loss of their sons. Peace and accountability for human rights violations have been twin themes in women-for-peace movements around the world. In some countries these women remain the only hope in a context of protracted war and ethnic conflict.
Recommendations
1. The system of accountability for sexual violence as war crimes and crimes against humanity should be strengthened. Countries should be encouraged to sign the Rome Statute (the International Criminal Court) and to amend their national laws to recognize the different types of sexual violence as war crimes and crimes against humanity. Prosecutors and investigators around the world should be supported to bring such cases before international or national tribunals and before Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. It is important to ensure that everyone recognizes that these crimes are unacceptable and that those who commit these crimes will be prosecuted and punished. 2. UN Peacekeeping operations should be sensitive to the problems of the local female population. It should have

(a)
(b)
(c)
Sexual Violence during Wartime 69
effective measures to protect the female population from sexual abuse and exploitation and special internal mechanisms to ensure that those who violate such codes will be punished or transferred. There should be more women at all levels of peacekeeping operations.
International and national humanitarian agencies should make violence against women during wartime a high priority. In this sense there should be systematic attempts to
make combatants and civilians aware that sexual violence during wartime is an international crime against humanity. This should be done by ensuring that troops are properly trained and guerrilla groups properly informed by agencies such as the ICRC; protect women living in the war zones from sexual violence and disruption of their livelihood through strict adherence to the Geneva Conventions; provide women in the war zones and the refugee camps with minimum services:
The right to food. Food should not become a hostage of war, and food to the civilian population, either through humanitarian efforts or through protection of livelihood, should be guaranteed. There should be no economic embargoes that affect the right to food and water.
Health care should be provided to the women living in war zones with a special expertise in wounds resulting from sexual violence. International and national surgeons specializing in v section operations for women as well as gynecologists skilled in diseases relating to the reproductive system should be an integral part of any medical team sent by the national or international health authorities. In this context, treatment for AIDS and programs to educate the population about AIDS and treatment for AIDS should also be a part of any health strategy in the war zones. . . . . "

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10.
11.
12.
Nēthrā
Psychosocial support should also be an important part of humanitarian strategies in the war zones. Trained counselors and community workers should be included in any such team at refugee camps or hospitals in and around the war zones.
Mobile units of health professionals may also be necessary in contexts where access to health services is limited. Mobile humanitarian services assisting both sides will be of great assistance in the context of War.
Women should be involved in all the decision-making plans with regard to refugee camps and in the management of such refugee camps. The same should be true with regard to local level leadership involved in individual projects.
It must be recognized that when services are given to the general population, at the lower level of these bureaucratic establishments women are often asked to provide sexual Services in return for the provisions. It is important to ensure an implementing strategy that prevents this type of exploitation.
Sexual harassment and domestic violence in the refugee camps and community centers are often a major problem. The management of these camps and centers should make it clear that these practices would not be tolerated, and there should be a committee from the camp or center to look into these matters where women also participate.
Programs of demining and awareness-raising about mines should be conducted in war zones, and women and girls should be specially targeted for this education since they are often the individuals who fetch the water and the firewood.
Inheritance laws and other impediments that prevent women's access to land and livelihood during and after conflict should be amended so that women war widows are given economic security and some assistance.

13.
14.
Sexual Violence during Wartime 71
Special programs for female-headed households in war zones should be implemented to ensure that these widows are not left at the mercy of local-level bureaucrats and commanders. Programs in awareness raising, skills training, trauma counseling and child management will be of great assistance to these women in the context of their real life situation.
The girlchild should not be neglected in the context of armed conflict. Special programmers should exist to reintegrate women and girl child combatants who have been combatants in the war, as their needs are different from male combatants. There should also be programs to prevent girl children from being trafficked from war zones to worse slavery-like situations where they must engage in prostitution or similar activities. Trafficking of women and girl children should be a serious concern of military authorities and humanitarian agencies working in the war.

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BIRTHDAY APOLOGY AND APOLOGIA: 80 iambic pentameters for my 80 years
Regi Siriwardena
1.
To have existed while the planet made Eighty revolutions round the sun is no Achievement, but I must confess I am Rather surprised to find myself still here. It’s scandalous at eighty years to walk The earth where younger, better people now Are dust and ashes. Thinking only of those Who died of violence and had much more To give - Rajini, Richard, Neelan - makes it Embarrassing to be alive. However, I never hungered for longevity: My mother's family’s sturdy peasant genes Must have prevailed, although my father left me A diabetic legacy - a nuisance. But I shouldn't complain: to compensate, I have acquired immunity to some Infections - post-modernism, for one, And free verse, for another. I’m glad, too, I never caught, as my late brother did, The Sinhala nationalist flu. An early shot Of Marxism, perhaps, took care of that.
2
When I was young, I said to my friend HerbertA fine designer of stage-sets, a cook Of creative genius, a treasury of lore Of all things Lankan - If you’d only Stuck

Birthday Apology and Apologia: 73
To one thing, Herbert, you’d by now have been The top of that tree. But, putha, how boring To stick to one thing! Now, at eighty, I know I've been, like him, a fickle butterfly a Flitting from field to field, from flower to flower. The kindest word they’ll find to say of me ls versatile. But do I really wish It had been different? What a bore to be The sovereign of some scholarly half-acre, Crowned for a thesis on Semiotics of Consonant Clusters in Six George Keyt Poems'
To change the entomological metaphor, I'm Grasshopper, not Ant, in the old fable (Or Gracehoper, in James Joyce's version). Writing, I have enjoyed myself, laid up No masterpieces to outlast the winter, But hope I've pleased somebody now and then With a poem here, or a play there, and if My tombstone is a footnote in small print In literary history, that's okay.
3
By time's mere flux, I'm called to play the part Of patriarch I am unfitted for. But not for long, I hope. When the time comes, Ajith, Prince of Obituarists, will write, I know, a graceful piece - measured, as always, And free of flattery or fulsomeness. (A pity Ishan’t be there to read it, though.)
I don't believe there's judgment after death, Or penal court of Yama: if there were, And I were called to account, what could I say In mitigation of sentence, but stammer,

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P-please, sir, I tried not to be p-pompous ever, P-pretentious, sir, incomprehensible, Orb-boring. Would the judge pronounce severely:
A frivolous trifler. He deserves no mercy. I sentence him to fifty years of torture Translating into Serbo-Croat the texts Of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabhal
4
When you are old, you find that simple things You took for granted are no longer simple. Climbing the three steps to the office door Is now an Everest-scaling feat; crossing The street, a perilous odyssey. However, Age has its compensations. You have grown, Perhaps not wiser, but at least more prudent. You can admire a woman’s charm and beauty With no possessive demons plaguing you. Books and CDs that you once cherished dearly Are burdens now you’re glad to shed: even The sight of the half-empty shelves is pleasing. And so, to quote a poet I never liked,
Port after stormy seas. To all those friends - Too many to be named - who’ve helped me past The whirlpools and the rocks, my heartfelt thanks. This makes eighty pentameters. THE END.
15 May 2002

75
THE CAT IN ME
Regi Siriwardena
As child I knew that moving house was sad; It's still so in old age. The house you’re leaving May not have been so very nice, or one Where you were happy. No matter: when the bags Are packed, the tables, chairs and cupboards stacked Inside the lorry (or the bullock-cart In childhood), then the empty floors and walls Regard you with the averted, silent look Of a face you once loved that is now estranged. I know what exiles feel, leaning over The ship's rail as the shores of home recede; Why cats return, trekking for miles, back to A place that once was home, but never more.

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