Global Policy Forum

By Selima Ghezali*

To acquiesce to the political economy put forth by, among others, the G7, is to accept the massive lay-offs, unemployment, and the exploitation of women, workers and children in the poorest countries. It means accepting that the world, with its cities, its countryside, its men and women, its languages and cultures, submit to the law of the market. This means simply submitting to the unilateral interests defined by a group of multinational financiers whose power today is greater than that of sovereign states Thus power is removed from citizens: this happens even in the developed countries and states where citizens exist in their own right and not simply as statistics. To surrender to the law of the market is also to acquiesce to a new world order with its murderous conflicts, its epidemics caused by odious merchandise, its famines, its pollution, the rise of extremism, racialism and fanaticism, simply by claiming powerlessness. Whether it is ex-Yugoslavia, Algeria, Somalia people always talk about helplessness, while this helplessness is actually organised.

To acquiesce to all this is to give up the rights of men and women, the right of societies and peoples to participate in forming their present and their future. This renouncement is not simple. It has dire consequences. It means, and I weigh my words well, a regression that is quite unprecedented in human history, because here we have a regression progressing without any ideology and without any religion; it is a regression that is happening under the apparently neutral aegis of the market. There are those who claim that there is no alternative to the medicines prescribed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the G7because of the market imperative. But in doing do they create a fate supposed to be inevitable. But this fatalism carries its own darkness; a dimming of possible horizons, with their crowds manipulated and led to kill themselves. A darkness of the horizon of despair and nihilistic terror. It is vital to resist this. Here I bear witness to an infinitesimal part of the resistance.

I was born thirty years ago in a country at war. All my childhood I was as if bathed continually in the whispering of the women and certain recurring words: arrest, torture, liquidation, assassination, bomb, cut throats, vengeance, war...All these words constituted the background of my childhood. The men were not visible, they were at war. Even when they were present, they were not visible, we didn't see them. It was only when they came back, after military victory, as warriors, that we saw the men and did not see the women any more. This visibility caused by military victory was to have a disastrous effect and we are still living them. The warriors came home, attired in their glory. They eradicated the last traces of any other kind of resistances, of all the forms of struggle that were not violent, that were not relationships of might. This attitude that they developed when they took power after national independence, installed the relationship of brute power as a structural element in all the relationships to the interior of society; citizens with their administrations and their governors, of men with their women, parents with their children. All the relationships in society were structured around this idea of the relationship of power. Might is right.

Today there is a new war in my country. I have children and they are growing up with this murmur of war and the same words are back: torture, bomb, cut throats, rape, kidnapping, concentration camps. All these words are back. Quite simply the world has evolved, and the leaders, with an extraordinary subtlety and sophistication, have refined the ways in which to oppress people. Today the struggle has been fragmented, so that all the struggles that should be going in the same direction of liberation are back in fictive duality, opposed to each other and maintaining the system of the oppressor. Today the question of identity, as expressed for example in Algeria by the Berber question, by the question of Islam and by the Arab identity is fragmented and put into conflicting positions, each parameter one against the other.

Today the claim to a right of identity, of the right to cultural is placed in conflict with the right of universality. The rights of women are set against the rights of men and the other way round. So that at the level of the Islamists, the fundamentalists or traditionalists who are not Islamists. They all constructed their discourse on a negation of womanise' rights, on the right of men to control women. But today, in the middle of the war, the Islamists focus hypocritically on the rights of women - in order to conceal the violations of Human Rights committed by the authorities and the government. Thus while ten years ago we mobilised as feminists to claim the integration of the rights of women with the Human Rights, and we demanded that womanise' rights should form an integral part of Human Rights; our purpose was not to use this today to protest against the violation of womanise' rights as a protest against violations of Human Rights.

It is this fragmentation in the wake of economic globalisation that is the underlying cause of the price that women in Algeria are paying the price for today. They are paying physically with rapes, kidnapping, assassinations, but also with the flesh of their flesh: with their children, arrested, imprisoned, and massacred. They pay a high price in their function as citizens, as citizenship is denied them, since legislation does not recognise the majority of women, does not recognise the rights of women. They pay also on a symbolic level the abject instrumentalisation by power instead of its claimed defence of the rights of women. It uses women as a justification for repression of men, and this is absolutely inadmissible.

More, the partial mobilisations are counter-productive mobilisations. In fact, a mobilisation against one kind of violence that is not a mobilisation against all kinds of violence feeds one or the other of these kinds of violence. The war and all those who support it in any manner have abandoned the struggle for women's' rights. The struggle for women's rights requires peace in order to make itself heard, in order to impose its own logic and in order to participate in a plurality of expressions. Today it is arms that have the say; those who chose their camp have their say. For either one is in the camp that tortures, or else one is in the camp that cuts throats. But there is no way one can be in the camp of those who say "No. I refuse to dirty my hands with blood." I claim for everyone the duty and the obligation to sit round a table, to discuss without allowing free play for confusion, without allowing the Islamists to say that women are stealing jobs. It is not women who are stealing jobs it is the structural adjustment plan. the World Bank and the economic choices that rob men of their jobs. All the consequences of globalisation lead to oppression of the people, and therefor to oppression of women. All forms of oppression: unemployment, exclusion, war, pollution, all this is felt also by women, and therefor is part of the women's struggle.

If we decide to go together in order to prevent fictive dualities it is to prohibit the struggle, to induce solidarity and to create a better world, a world that is not regulated by the struggle that legitimises violence against another violence.

*Selima Ghezali is editor in chief of La Naiton, Algeria.

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