features Fama’s Market A Way Out of Germany Refugee Doctors at TuftsAll Is Not Lost A Woman’s War think tank wellness planet tufts newswire the big day departments

A Woman’s War

Some of the world’s neglected female veterans tell their stories Story and photographs by Elizabeth Herman, A10

With the sun slipping from the sky, Rabeya Khatun gathers herself quietly in the corner of the sofa and asks me why I have come to Barisal, Bangladesh. “I want to learn about what happened to you in 1971,” I say. I ask her how the Liberation War has affected her life. Looking down at her hands, she begins a story she has told only a handful of times before. I watch as the war opens in front of her. Her tale gains momentum, twisting from her childhood to her home life to the battlefield. Her voice becomes shrill and she leaps up, bending over, motioning how Pakistani soldiers held her back as they killed her son. The diary she kept during 1971 shakes in her grasp as she sings a few lines from it, songs from the war camps. Her voice breaks at the melody’s end.

Since graduating from Tufts in 2010, I have been working on a photography and oral history project, A Woman’s War, which documents the lives of women engaged in recent conflicts worldwide, as well as their struggle for justice, rights, and their identity as female fighters. The journey has led me to five countries and the stories of 116 women, including revolutionaries of Egypt’s recent uprising, members of the North Vietnamese Army, Protestant and Catholic women of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and freedom fighters of the Bangladesh Liberation War. Most recently, I traveled to Bosnia on the Tim Hetherington Grant from Tufts Institute for Global Leadership to document the stories of women on all sides of the 1992–1995 Bosnian War.

A woman’s war is distinct. She not only has to be a fighter, but also is expected to maintain or return to her traditional role as a mother, wife, caregiver, and anchor of the family. Women in recent conflicts have served as armed combatants, spies, nurses, organizers, administrators, and weapons smugglers. They have also suffered war’s consequences: psychological trauma, physical debilitation, displacement, widowhood, rape, and the destruction of their homes and livelihoods.

Leaving the battlefield behind, however, has not meant the end of the fight for these women. In many countries, female fighters have been forced to conceal or ignore their histories in order to protect their dignity and livelihoods. Many have found themselves cast out of their families, often stigmatized and unable to find a suitor. The struggles of women, both during and after the war, remain largely unrecorded and unrecognized.

During my work on this project, the debate over women in the American military has come to the fore, and this has compelled me to bring the work home to the United States, with the support of the APA/Lucie Foundation Professional Scholarship. Although the Pentagon’s lifting of the ban on women in combat roles will open hundreds of thousands of positions to women, female troops in Afghanistan and Iraq have for the past decade faced the same stresses of trauma and redeployment as their male counterparts. Compounding the damage, military sexual trauma is rampant—reported by forty-five percent of servicewomen in an Institute of Medicine study. Female veterans make up some ten percent of the homeless population. This project will document the struggles of female veterans as they cope with the aftermath of their service.

Though the locales and conflicts within its scope vary greatly, A Woman’s War looks at vital issues that cut across time and place. These women’s families, communities, and nations need to acknowledge their stories. Only then will the countries—and the women who have given so much to them—find justice and peace.

Elizabeth D. Herman, A10, is a freelance photographer and researcher based in New York City. See more of her work at elizabethdherman.com.

“During the Liberation War, I gathered information from the Pakistani Army by posing as a beggar and going into the army camps. I relayed the information to the freedom fighters. Once, I was caught by the Pakistani Army, and they tortured me very cruelly. They burnt my body with a burning iron. I was just praying, ‘God, please don’t let me lose my passion, don’t let me lose my inner power.’ God gave me inner power and strength.”

Kakon Bibi, Dhaka, Bangladesh, September 2011.
Kakon Bibi fought in the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, but does not receive the stipend from the government that male veterans receive, despite sustaining serious wounds that still plague her. She and her family live in extreme poverty in the northeast of Bangladesh.

“When the war started, I hoped all the time that it wasn’t real, that the passions would settle down and everything would go back to normal. However, as it continued, I felt that it was going to last forever. But now, the hard memories from the war are gone. As soon as you realize that you have to proceed with your life, then you learn how to deal with these hard memories.”

Dževada Trešnjo, Ilidža, Bosnia and Herzegovina, July 2012.
Dževada Trešnjo, born in 1964 in Foca, served in the Bosnian Army Medical Corps. She lost her hand while trying to protect a young boy who had been wounded by enemy fire.

“I still dream about the war sometimes. I dream about when a bomb is about to explode, and I shout to my unit to lie down. I have seen so much—have seen eight out of ten people in my unit become wounded or die at once. War is cruel. Cruel. When you have a war, people and families are divided—between husband and wife, parent and child. Now my wish is that there is no war in the world, that we can help each other lead our lives instead of fighting. That is my message. I want peace.”

Lê Thi My Le, Hue, Vietnam, July 2010.
Lê Thi My Le, born in 1946, was a member of the North Vietnamese Army. She joined in July 1965, when she was 19, and progressed from transporting supplies to leading a unit of the youth brigade, the only female among the unit’s ten members. She had three children during the war, her youngest born with birth defects from exposure to Agent Orange.

Abla Farok Ahmed, Cairo, October 2011.
A mother of five, Abla Farok Ahmed was never active in politics. But when her son was arrested on false grounds at a protest, where he had gone to search for his younger brother, the fight in Egypt quickly became personal. She went to protests to see if she could learn anything of his whereabouts. After months of searching, she discovered he was being held and tortured at a military detention center outside Cairo. By the time she located him, he had already been convicted of the fabricated charges on which he had been arrested. With the help of No Military Trials for Civilians, an international activist group, she is pressing for an appeal for her son. She has also been organizing demonstrations, expanding from 30 to 700 the number of mothers who protest regularly against military trials.

“During the war, I used to hide weapons underneath my sari and bring them to the freedom fighters. I would sometimes have to bury them in the middle of the night to hide them from the West Pakistani Army.”

Begum Gulferdous (with granddaughter), Comilla, Bangladesh, August 2011.
Begum Gulferdous was born in 1953, one of nine children. She was involved in local politics growing up—she served as vice president of her local women’s college—and joined the Bangladeshi freedom fighters, acting as an intelligence collector and weapons smuggler during the 1971 Liberation War. She talks often with her granddaughter about the war, and believes that women’s role in the Liberation War should be more widely known.

“The transition from armed struggle to purely political struggle for me was seamless. I wasn’t handcuffed to arms. I wasn’t fighting a war for the sake of fighting a war. I fought in the absence of options. Morally, once there were options, I was obligated to seize them. Would we take the risk? And we did. We called a unilateral ceasefire. I think we made absolutely the right decision.”

Eibhlin Glenholmes, Belfast, Northern Ireland, August 2012.
Eibhlin Glenholmes joined the IRA as a young woman, carrying out missions against British troops. She was considered the most wanted woman in the United Kingdom for 23 years, until she was granted amnesty as a result of the peace talks.

“Where did we get our strength to keep fighting? We had no choice—we had to liberate our country so we could reunite with our family. I tell my children that even though we had a difficult time during the war, we overcame, so they too should overcome difficulty and study well to develop their character. Study well to help other people, help the society, help the family.”

Võ Thi Yên, Hue, Vietnam, July 2010.
Võ Thi Yên, born in 1949, was a member of the North Vietnamese Army and the eldest of thirteen children. She joined the army in 1967, working to transport food to the south, and later joined a medical team at Xã Nam station. In 1971 she transferred to become a soldier, though she continued to work mostly in the medical field. She met her husband through the nurse’s station while serving.