A new play looks at the brutal effects of war on its most tragic victims, women and children, reports Christine Madden
Who are the victims of war? In the West of the 21st century, our impressions of the atrocity and absurdity of officially sanctioned violence has frequently become sanitised into images from computer games, with just about as much relevance.
Yet some realities do trickle in. Conor O'Clery last week reported in this newspaper of the unusual images broadcast in the US of Italian military chiefs saluting their dead brought back from Iraq; television stations in the US are forbidden to show images of US corpses arriving back to their loved ones. Coincidentally, a recent new Prime Suspect dealt with the horrors perpetrated on women and children during the conflicts in the Balkans, and the shock waves these events sent into their reconstituted, "normal" lives in the UK.
Women Acting for a Better World, a project sponsored by Smashing Times Theatre Company, has developed a play, May Our Faces Haunt You, to draw attention to the countless impotent victims of war: the women in war zones and their children. "It's a fact that the majority of wars are started by men," asserts Mary Moynihan, the writer and director, "yet the majority of the people butchered and displaced are the women and children." The project has involved workshops with several groups, such as Cáirde and the Northwest Inner City Women's Network, to further development education. "There's no one definition of it," explains Moynihan, but "it aims to link experiences of people in local environments with those of others in the rest of the world." They conducted theatre exercises to explore ideas more physically instead of just discussing them. "Issues of injustice, racism and refugees kept coming up, and we wanted to expand on that." May Our Faces Haunt You developed out of workshops and research carried out by Moynihan - which was difficult, as reliable, documented information about women in war and the hardships they suffer is not easy to come by. Moynihan downloaded a UN report - she could not locate a hardcopy to purchase in Ireland - called Women, War, Peace - the Independent Experts' Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women's Role in Peace-Building.
The report details atrocities inflicted on women during times of war, and also discussed the fact that women are largely excluded from the peace processes in the aftermath.
"I wanted to write a play about women and war, to use drama to raise awareness," says Moynihan. "Everything in the play has actually happened; I just put it in dramatic form." Actors Bibi Larsson, Ann Sheehy, Mary Healy and Hope Brown have already performed the play for Outreach and women's groups before they bring it to the Focus Theatre this Sunday. During one of these performances, Moynihan got a chill through her limbs when an African woman in the audience said: "All this has happened to us."
Connected through narration, the three sections of the play move across the globe from Afghanistan to Africa and finally Bosnia. The two sisters dramatising their situation in the first section describe what happened to them under the Taliban, and how they found ways to fight back. "They also make references to the fact that, while supposedly 'free' now, there is currently a government there that treats them no better than under the Taliban; things have improved very little for women." The section on Africa focuses on human trafficking and sexual slavery. The action, taking place in perhaps Sierra Leone or Liberia, depicts the massive movement of people displaced by war, mostly women and children, and what happens to them in the camps in which they seek refuge.
"The women in these camps sometimes have no rights, no say in the running of the camp. Sometimes they don't even have sanitary towels provided for them; little things you never think about." More serious abouse involves women being kidnapped and sold into prostitution, when they become "debt slaves". "This also happens without war, but during wartime, everything is broken down and women are far more vulnerable; it's fertile ground for human trafficking. These women frequently have no choice, they have to feed themselves and their children." And so they enter a situation of bondage in which, to free themselves, they must earn enough money to buy themselves out of ownership, which is almost impossible, as the money they earn goes to their "owner". "It's not just in developing countries, either. A journalist in Italy found out that a woman can be ordered and bought over the phone to be brought to a brothel."
Sex crimes don't stop there. Moynihan also explores the gruesome phenomenon of the Bosnian rape camps in the third section. "The order came down from the top," she says, to set these places up. "They were told to go and mass rape the girls and women, purposely to impregnate them so that they would have Serbian children." In the mind of a man, there is perhaps no more effective weapon or reprisal than defiling a man's most vulnerable "possessions" - his wife, daughter or mother - and destroying him spiritually through sexual jealousy. The devastating humiliation, pain, powerlessness and permanent physical and emotional damage inflicted on women doesn't, for these violence-crazed men, factor in the equation.
Putting scenarios on paper that portrayed such horrors proved no simple task for Moynihan. "It was difficult to keep writing. At one point, when I was finishing the script, I had to put my head down. I said, 'I can't do this, it's too horrific, too much'. It might make you lose your faith in humanity, but everywhere women are surviving to tell their stories. They want them articulated. There's a small group of people destroying everything - and for what? All of us have to take responsibility to do something."
May Our Faces Haunt You will be performed at Focus Theatre on Sunday at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Information and booking at Smashing Times, tel: 01-8656613