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Claiming a Place in the World: Home as a Woman's Human Right

Spring 1998

To create a more just and equitable world, we need to first understand the conditions that we seek to transform. But often when we try to make sense of what we see, we are faced with a bewildering blur of upheaval, flight, and displacement. We live in a time when national borders are shifting rapidly, swallowing whole countries and consolidating new states. More than 23 million people in the world today are refugees; 80 percent of them women and children.

Another 24 million (also mostly women and children) are "internally displaced"—homeless and usually hungry, but inside their national borders. These figures exclude the millions of often undocumented women and men who are forced to leave their countries each year to work as domestic servants, child care providers, prostitutes and agricultural workers in the "global market." Neither do they include those who, compelled by landlessness and hunger, migrate from their homes in the countryside in search of subsistence work in overcrowded cities.

These are the women and families who have been relegated to the slums, transit centers, and refugee camps of the "new world order." For many their dislocation is not the result of a single event, but of a process that began with the onset of colonialism and the incremental encroachment and destruction of their homes and way of life. Today, as exile, migration, homelessness and displacement become central experiences for more and more people, we need to understand the political and economic forces that converge to produce these experiences. And we need to try to understand the experiences themselves. What does it mean to be without physical shelter, or banished from your community or country? How do women ensure survival for themselves and their children in these dangerous territories of not- belonging? And what do these different kinds of homelessness teach us about our own "placement" in the world?

To lose one's home through war, forced migration, eviction, or military occupation is to lose more than just the physical shelter that enables biological survival. For while our homes might provide warmth, light and a degree of physical safety, the meaning of home reaches far beyond the material. Home is memories and history. Home is a sense of self. Home is having a place in the world. As women, we know better than to romanticize the ideal of home as an unwavering refuge: nearly one-fourth of women world-wide are physically battered by the men in their homes, and in the US 50 percent of homeless women and children are fleeing domestic violence. And yet home as both material reality and a place of belonging remains a basic necessity; a woman's human right to fight for and defend.

The loss of home dislocates people from the continuity of community life, pitching them into a zone of isolated, privatized experience. People who have been driven off their land to the slums around Port-au-Prince or Guatemala City are crowded together by the tens of thousands. But they often describe life in the shanty-towns as lonely and isolated. In fact, the many social mechanisms and cultural expressions that once enabled people to pool resources, to care for each other and to develop shared understanding, wither outside of the traditional environment in which they were developed. As these mechanisms deteriorate, so do people's sense of accountability and connection to each other. This distortion of culture and community is often the goal of mass displacement. The December massacre that drove more than 10,000 people from their homes in Acteal, Chiapas was intended, in part, to tear people from the vibrant forms of social organization that support their political resistance. This objective has already been achieved in many other communities, where displacement has engendered a loss of identity and culture, leaving people atomized, disoriented and less able to resist exploitation.

Regular eruptions of brutality, including family battering, drug abuse, rape, suicide and violent economic crime, are expressions of frustration and alienation in places where the social fabric is shredded by displacement. This violence is often depicted as evidence of the "savagery" of extremely poor and marginalized people. But the brutality that emerges from broken communities is a product of the same forces that uproot people from their homes: "low intensity" wars in which peasants are driven off their land; World Bank "austerity" programs that turn small farmers into city slum dwellers and maquila workers; and campaigns of "ethnic cleansing" in which whole populations are made refugees. In the US, some politicians and media have popularized the term "black on black crime," with no real discussion of the ways that African American communities endure the concrete repercussions of one of history's most brutal and far-reaching forms of displacement slavery. But whether the terrain is a housing project in Los Angeles or a refugee camp in the Former Yugoslavia, violence and exploitation within dispossessed communities is usually directed at the most marginalized and vulnerable—most often women and children.

When women who are refugees, homeless, migrants or displaced gather together to organize, they defy the isolation and social breakdown that is homelessness. In MADRE-supported programs at the Clinic of Hope in Kigali (Rwanda), the Casa de la Mujer in Guatemala City, Kilinik Fanm in Port-au-Prince (Haiti), and others, women who have been uprooted and dispossessed are creating possibilities to come together, to share experiences and to support one another. Through their work, they reconstitute "home" for themselves and their communities and build a basis for overcoming their dispossession.

Palestine: Exiles From History and Homeland

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is sometimes projected as an ancient rivalry or a religious war, as though it were inevitable or natural. But like the violence in Rwanda and northern Ireland, this conflict is fundamentally political—a struggle over land and residency rights. In other words, a fight for home.

This history is usually narrated either as a story about the Jewish need for refuge in the wake of the Nazi genocide or as a tale of Israeli aggression and Palestinian displacement. This either/or framework has dominated our understanding of the conflict, implying that to acknowledge one story, we must discount the other. But if the project of progressive politics is to challenge all ideologies and conditions of oppression, then we must create a conversation complex enough to historicize and account for the particular persecution and displacement of Palestinian Arabs and European Jews; to tell each story on its own terms and learn to articulate a relationship between them.

Before the founding of Israel in 1948, a small Jewish minority lived in what was then called Palestine. Free from the anti-Semitism of Europe, Jews in Palestine co-existed with their Arab neighbors. But at the turn of the century, the Zionist movement, which combined historic Jewish religious and cultural attachment to the biblical Land of Israel with modern European notions of ethnic nationalism, began to assert an exclusive Jewish claim to the territory of Palestine. Since 1948, successive Israeli governments have invoked this claim to displace the indigenous Palestinian population from their land and deny them equal rights as citizens. In the United States and Europe, histories of racism and colonialism made it easy to ignore the displacement of the Palestinians. A combination of Western sympathy and guilt towards the survivors of the Nazis further eclipsed the Palestinian experience, which often remains unrepresented and misunderstood.

This year, as Israelis celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, Palestinians around the world mourn 50 years of dispossession and exile. For them, the policies that the new state pursued meant the loss of home on a profound scale. In the war of 1948, Israeli forces demolished over 450 Palestinian villages and exiled half of the entire population (more than 700,000 people). This condition of homelessness on a national scale, which Palestinians call al-Naqbah or the Catastrophe, largely defines what it means to be Palestinian in the second half of the twentieth century.

Today the refugees of 1948 number three and a half million people, including the children and grandchildren of those who lived through the war. They are dispersed throughout the world, nearly half of them in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Life in these camps is circumscribed by squalid, overcrowded conditions and severe poverty. With no government or state of their own, the refugees in Arab countries have been vulnerable to political persecution ranging from the denial of civil rights to wholesale massacres. In the West Bank and Gaza, all Palestinians, including the refugees, have endured severe repression by Israeli forces over the last 31 years of military occupation.

The "people of nowhere," as some refugees have called themselves, have forged a new national consciousness from the condition of exile. Central to this identity is the act of remembering and maintaining attachment to their Palestinian homeland. Refugee families cherish the rusting keys to their old houses and frame the tattered deeds to their land. Streets, schools, neighborhoods and even children in the camps are named after lost ancestral cities. Young people in Jordan or Lebanon who have never set foot inside the heavily militarized borders of Israel declare without irony that they are from Maliha or Dir Yassin—Palestinian villages that have long since been bulldozed and replaced by Israeli housing developments.

The motif of "return" to Palestine has dominated Palestinians' cultural vocabulary since the 1950s. The phrase "sa na'ood" or "we shall return," evokes the same emotional and political resonance for the refugees as the phrase "we shall overcome" holds for African Americans. For decades the refugees' "right of return" has been at the top of the Palestinian national agenda. This right has been echoed by numerous United Nations resolutions since 1948, when the General Assembly first declared that, "The refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date." But fifty years later, there is little hope of this promise being fulfilled or even acknowledged. In fact, not one Israeli leader has ever formally acknowledged his or her country's role in the "Catastrophe" of the Palestinians.

In 1993 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat signed the first Oslo Agreement, a US-brokered deal outlining their intent to resolve the issue of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. That agreement fails to address many of the worst aspects of Palestinian dispossession, including the fate of the refugees. Many in the Middle East therefore see the Oslo Agreement not as a peace accord, but as a formula for establishing the "new American order:" the reconfiguration of national borders, alliances and economic relations better known in the West as the "new world order." They point out that the Oslo process is a blueprint for creating a NAFTA-like economic bloc in the Middle East, with Israel at the center and the US calling the shots.

For some in the refugee camps, the failure of the Oslo process to deliver either peace or justice has reinforced a nostalgic, ultimately unproductive nationalism. But many Palestinians continue to pursue progressive and realistic solutions to the refugees' plight as a key to creating real and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Supporting their demands for dignity and justice requires rethinking US policies that relegate Palestinians to the role of perpetual trespassers in their own country.

Demolishing Peace One House at a Time

In 1967, Israel occupied the remainder of the Palestinian homeland in the West Bank and Gaza, displacing tens of thousands more people, many of them for the second time since 1948. Like all people confronted with military occupation, Palestinians responded with resistance. And Israel, like occupying powers everywhere, found that it could only maintain its rule by crushing this resistance with force. Over the years, much of this violence has been embodied in policies designed to erode Palestinians' connection to their homes and land in order to facilitate Israeli territorial control. Deportation, land expropriation, uprooting of orchards and trees, and severe restrictions on building, agriculture and water use are some of the policies that have caused acute hardship to Palestinians in the occupied territories. For women and their families, one of the harshest abuses is the practice of demolishing Palestinian homes.

Since the Oslo Agreement was signed, the Israeli army has destroyed a total of 560 houses. Most are in Jerusalem and other places in the West Bank where Israel aims to consolidate its territorial hold. By driving out Palestinian inhabitants, Israel hopes to legitimize its claim to "empty" areas. It has therefore stepped up house demolitions in an effort to create new demographic realities to influence the final land settlement of the Oslo process.

For the Israeli army, a house demolition is not merely a bureaucratic procedure. It is a show of force designed to turn one family's tragedy into a theater of fear and insecurity for the entire community. By now the scenario of destruction is familiar to Palestinians throughout the West Bank. At dawn on the day of the demolition, soldiers herd the family out of their home at gunpoint. A wide radius around the house is already swarming with hundreds of armed soldiers, bulldozers and trucks hauling explosives. The area is usually declared a "closed military zone" to keep out the press and potential protesters. Huddled around their salvaged belongings, the family stands at a safe distance from the demolition's deafening explosions, flying stone and blinding dust, watching helplessly as their home is razed to a pile of rubble.

In the aftermath, it is Palestinian women who are primarily responsible for the health and well-being of the traumatized family. It is they who bring the children out of the psychological abyss of nightmares, bed-wetting and constant fear. And it is they who continue to cook meals, wash clothes, and ensure children's safety and hygiene, whether the family is lucky enough to be taken in by relatives or is making do under a cardboard shelter. Girls are often forced to drop out of school to help their mothers with the sharply increased work-load of keeping a homeless family together. In some cases, daughters as young as 14 or 15 are pressured into marriage to lighten the parents' burden of finding shelter for their children.

Clearly, the calculated destruction of a family's home is a violation of the most basic right to shelter, guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other instruments of international law. In fact, the occupation itself is patently illegal, though the international community has done little to enforce its condemnation. Israel provides the US with a strategic foothold in the Middle East and a willing partner in the execution of US foreign policy. In exchange, the United States has made itself the number one funder and diplomatic backer of the occupation, using its UN veto and long economic and military reach to defend Israeli policies, including human rights violations.

While the consequences of house demolitions are particularly severe for women and girls whose work and social standing center around the home, the policy has meant trauma, despair and economic ruin for thousands of Palestinian families since the occupation began. The acceleration of house demolitions more than four years after the signing of the Oslo "peace accords" is a terrible demonstration of Palestinians' ongoing vulnerability to the worst abuses of military occupation. Palestinian and Israeli peace activists are still deeply engaged in the work of documenting, publicizing and protesting gross human rights violations, including house demolitions. International support from progressive people remains as crucial as ever to their project of creating conditions for real peace.

Guatemala: Squatting in the Shadow of Neo-Liberalism

Like Palestinians, Guatemalans recently witnessed the signing of accords that officially marked an end to declared hostilities in their country. And like the Oslo Agreements in the Middle East, the accords of December 1996, fail to resolve many of the root causes of conflict in Guatemala. The country's most fundamental crisis, the unequal distribution of land, remains a major problem, with 2 percent of Guatemalans controlling 68 percent of land resources. This inequality was the core of Guatemala's 36-year civil war, the longest and bloodiest of this century's Latin American conflicts. The war was fueled by US-backed efforts to monopolize land for the benefit of agribusiness. Behind the smokescreen of "fighting communism," military groups trained and funded by the US killed 150,000 mostly indigenous people and destroyed 440 Mayan villages. More than a million people were uprooted from their homes and over a quarter million became refugees in surrounding countries.

Sustained state terror was needed to compel the majority of Guatemalans, who are rural, indigenous people, to submit to policies favored by US and Guatemalan business elites. Today these policies take the form of "neo-liberalism," an economic approach designed to integrate Guatemala into the global market by increasing foreign investment and free trade. These goals are generally achieved at the expense of the poor, through "structural adjustment programs" that suppress wages to attract foreign investors, cut government social welfare programs and privatize government-run utilities, transportation systems, schools and hospitals. The role of the peace accords in this scenario is to create the political stability necessary to implement a neo-liberal agenda.

In Guatemala, as elsewhere, policies like structural adjustment have caused unemployment to soar to 70 percent, while the minimum wage hovers at less than a third of what it costs to meet a family's basic needs. 80 percent of the population lives in abject poverty and less than half that number have access to healthcare. In the cities, women displaced by the war compete for poorly paid work under abusive conditions in the maquila factories that have become emblematic of Guatemala's role in the global economy. Meanwhile, in the countryside, small farmers continue to lose their homes and land as the push for open markets bankrupts those who cannot compete with the low price of US imports.

Most people who were displaced during the war have little hope of returning home now that the bombing has subsided. When they fled, the bulk of their land was swallowed up by agribusiness, and attempts to move back onto property that is now registered to these companies have been met with violent evictions. The accords propose to resolve the disparity of land ownership by creating a government Land Bank to buy and distribute property to landless farmers through credit schemes and loan programs. But most small farmers lack the resources to be eligible for credit and cannot afford government loans at 20 percent interest. In effect, the accords create the bureaucratic structures for poor families to buy back the land that was stolen from them, but without creating any meaningful possibility for the poor to be able to utilize these structures. Ultimately, the accords benefit those with the resources to invest in land. The historic inequality is maintained, but the burden of enforcing it has shifted from military to market forces.

A major outgrowth of war-time displacement are the 62 shanty-towns that mark the periphery of Guatemala City. Nearly half a million people, the majority of them women and their children, now live in these squatter settlements. For them, "peace" remains a vague abstraction as they confront hardships that many women say they could never have imagined before escaping their homes in the mountains. People live packed together under corrugated tin or cardboard shacks. In the rainy season, raw sewage overflows into sleeping quarters; in the dry season, the stench of garbage is everywhere. They face diseases that they never before encountered asthma, hypertension, tuberculosis, all associated with urban poverty and overcrowding. There is no running water or electricity and little access to healthcare or schooling. Violent economic crime and seemingly random gang assaults are rampant.

Women's lives in these "neighborhoods" revolve around protecting themselves and their children from such conditions. MADRE's partner organization in Guatemala City, GRUFEPROMEFAM (Women for the Betterment of the Family) provides crucial support to hundreds of women in this situation. GRUFE offers workshops in health and nutrition and runs job training and literacy courses in an environment where women can re-create community support systems that were shattered by displacement. Through their work with GRUFE, women develop skills and resources to survive the grinding poverty and pervasive dangers of the squatter settlements. Programs are run with an emphasis on human rights education and community organizing, giving women tools to put their experience into a political context and to understand their displacement and poverty as the product of social forces that can be changed. This consciousness remains the foundation for genuine peace in Guatemala. If the accords are to represent more than an official cease-fire, then the human rights of the poorest Guatemalans must be upheld -- starting with the right to a safe, secure home.

Rwanda: Surviving U.S. Hypocrisy

The necessity of housing as a foundation for every aspect of people's well-being is explicitly recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But this year, as people around the world mark the 50th anniversary of the Declaration, the importance of housing continues to be underrated by the international community.

Of all the places where MADRE works, the failure to respond to the crisis of shelter is perhaps most glaring with respect to Rwanda. Rwanda is a country in the midst of profound national crisis. It is a society grappling with the murder of nearly one million of its people, struggling to enact the excruciating lessons of genocide, while straining to move beyond the trauma and reconstitute itself as a nation. Rwanda's nearly unprecedented attempt at national reconciliation means that all over the country, those who survived the genocide and those who executed it must find new ways to co-exist. One of the biggest obstacles to this challenge is the critical housing shortage that endures as an after-shock of the genocide and the massive migrations triggered by the slaughter. During the 1994 massacres, hundreds of villages were razed to the ground. Despite the efforts of the current government and some humanitarian organizations, many Tutsi survivors remain homeless. Others occupy homes belonging to the more than one million Rwandan Hutu who fled the country immediately after the genocide for fear of reprisal by the new Tutsi-led government. These refugees returned en mass in 1996 to find the country still reeling from the impact of the killing and the economic crisis that precipitated it. Many of them joined the ranks of Rwanda's displaced and destitute genocide survivors in an atmosphere of instability and scarcity that threatens even the best efforts at reconciliation.

The housing crisis has particular implications for women who, in the wake of genocide, comprise nearly 70 percent of Rwanda's population. Many women who were publicly identified as rape survivors of the war, were shunned by their communities and forced to relocate to more anonymous settings, often with their children and numerous orphans in their care. Moreover, because Rwandan law bars women from owning or inheriting land, tens of thousands of women whose husbands were killed have been dispossessed. Women's organizations in Rwanda say that discrimination against rape survivors and legal inequities against women in general are major causes of displacement among women.

When MADRE Executive Director Vivian Stromberg and journalist Laura Flanders visited Rwanda last year, they were told by genocide survivors, returning refugees, government officials and members of women's organizations that the lack of housing, along with the need for justice, were the biggest issues facing Rwanda after the genocide. The international community has barely paid lipservice to the need for a justice process on Rwanda, and the housing crisis has been met with even greater disregard. In March, President Clinton finally acknowledged his failure and that of the international community to stop the genocide. But this acknowledgment is not enough, particularly given the Administration's deliberate obstruction of action to prevent the massacres. In 1994 the US failed to abide by both international law and common morality. The US must now respond to the needs of those who are enduring the worst consequences of its failure.

By Yifat Susskind, Communications Director