The Idea of Home by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

colleagues in the right to cover war. As ‘embeds’ in military units, reporters are cut off from the ability to cover civilian suffering, and all too often become stenographers for the military point of view. So I would like to reconsider a proposition that I, as a feminist, have for so long found self-evident: that if a barrier to women’s participation in any field of endeavour exists, the breaking of that barrier should be cause for unalloyed rejoicing. My experience as a woman correspondent covering war has caused me to question this assumption.
    The wars I covered were mostly in countries not noted for gender equality. So it was surprising to realise that the first right a woman generally is granted, in a society that affords her very few, is the right to fight and die as a soldier. This is true in conservative Arabian Gulf countries and in many places in Africa. I covered these stories, because they were interesting. A diffident tribal girl in Eritrea becomes a respected military commander. A veiled woman of the United Arab Emirates is admitted to Sandhurst. Covering thelatter story, I met Janis Karpinski, who was the US army officer in charge of training the Emirates’ first class of women military recruits. A decade later, the Eritrean soldier has been betrayed by her movement, which, like the Algerians and many liberation movements before them, neglected gender equality once the war ended. The women of the United Arab Emirates still struggle for the most basic rights. And Janis Karpinski, demoted and disgraced, has become the only senior scapegoat for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Generals Miller and Sanchez, her male superiors, who were far more deeply implicated, continued to prosper in their careers.
    Since then, reports have emerged of US servicewomen’s role in the interrogation of Muslim prisoners, where they have been required to violate the prisoners’ sense of sexual propriety and religious taboo by engaging in lewd behaviours, such as straddling them suggestively or smearing them with fake menstrual blood. These are not aberrant behaviours by a few out-of-control sadists on a night shift: these are sanctioned tactics, reviewed at thehighest level. The US military has sunk to pimping its female personnel.
    In war, women may have won the right to be in the firing line, but I believe it is a right that women should approach with a pair of tongs and a Hazmat suit. If the point is courage, or proving love of country, or providing useful service, I believe it can be done in many other places, the barricades of domestic protest not the least of them. Most wars end at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield. Yet the tedious work of negotiation is not aggrandised, nor are diplomats lionised like military heroes. And some of the bravest people in the war zones I covered as a journalist were the unarmed, underpaid aid workers. Stuart Cameron, a Brisbane man of forty-five years, was one of them. Mr Cameron was a regional manager for Care and was implementing a winter survival plan designed to deliver heating fuel and food rations to destitute Kurds in the aftermath of the first Gulf war. In 1993, an ambush left him dead with seventeen bullet wounds. It was part of a terror campaign aiming to drive foreign aid groups out of Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq. Mr Cameron had been loved and respected by the people he helped. When the car carrying his body pulled out of the hospital on the first leg of its long journey home, thousands of Kurds lined the footpaths and rooftops. Some had brought their weapons, and shouldered them in a military salute. Others just stood in silent farewell. On a few walls, hastily lettered posters in fractured English struggled to express their feelings. The one I remember best read simply: Kurds Will Not Forget Stuart.
    In almost every conflict I covered as a reporter, I ran into Australians, many of them women, working to make things a bit better for the suffering