Learning from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
Shiluinla Jamir
Naga women’s protest yesterday happens in the backdrop of increased violence against women and the many forms of violence which are increasingly becoming intrinsic to our everyday realities in our communities. This march that we took yesterday should continue to be a process till we are able to reclaim our selfhood as women. Reading and listening to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo might help us individual women in contributing towards gender justice and our rights in Nagaland.
I learned of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo while attending a course for the Human Rights Defenders. It remained buried in my mind though every activity of theirs was inspiring and awesome. Our march yesterday enabled me to reconnect with these mothers and thought of the relevance they have for Naga women. I feel it is only appropriate that we look at some of these movements to draw inspirations and sustain a march that would ensure that our walk does not just become a nameless walk but a walk that ensures our daughters live with no fear of being raped, that our daughters no more become young widows, our grandchildren no longer be categorized and numbered as children of factional clashes.
In 1976, there was a military coup and the government was taken over in Argentina. After the military coup more and more people were forced into disappearance. The mothers started to ask around about their sons and daughters. Azucena Villaflor De Vincenti one of the founders of the group, decided that there is no point in everybody going separately to the government asking for the whereabouts of their children. She realized that they have to go together to achieve something. She then got together and said, “Let’s go to the Plaza de Mayo”. It is the square near the government building. Everything from demonstrations to celebrations is here. There were 14 mothers that day, pushed to despair by the administration’s refusal to answer as to the place where their children were being detained, met at the May square to present a demand to president Videla but were dispersed by the police. They then began to march around May Pyramid, opposite the presidential palace, called “madwomen of the Plaza de Mayo” because they dared to defy the military regime. Then they discovered the magnitude of the horror experienced by many victims, of the plan to exterminate all political opponents. Thus they converted their pain into a struggle and thereby setting up a non violent movement to which they gave the name of the square. Confronted by the inertia, silence and complicity of the institutions and having exhausted Argentina’s meagre legal machinery, the mothers called on international authorities to demand conformity with the universally accepted norms of civilization. They attempted to make their opinion in their own country and around the world aware of the seriousness of human Rights violations committed by the military regime and of the danger of maintaining a repressive machine after having amnestied all the criminals. The walk around the square that began on April 1977 that Thursday afternoon by these mothers led to the universal recognition of enforced disappearance as a crime and Adoption of the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance by the United Nations on December 20th, 2006. They did not rest there. They continued and continue to fight for an independent justice for a political transformation that ensures peace based on respect for life, and all its rights, for the freedom of expression, thought, the right to education, health and work. Their movement continues to bring together at Plaza de Mayo all those suffering from injustice, violations of their human rights and those who claim, like the Mothers, a life worth living for all. The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo do not look back to the past. The past has become a motor for their struggle and they therefore build the future by passing from the personal to the collective. They have their own rhythms and their own strategies. The extraordinary strength of their institution continues to spur women in other countries to set up similar movements.
The children of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were kidnapped and nearly all were murdered by Argentina’s military during its “dirty war” against the Left from 1976 to 1983. The current Argentine government acknowledges that some 9,000 of the leftists and labour leaders who died at the hands of the military during the dirty war are unaccounted for. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other human rights activists believe the number of dead who remain unaccounted for is more like 30,000. No one really knows for certain because these victims of the dirty war “disappeared” without a trace.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo became acutely conscious of these phenomena as they forged their campaign to demand that the Argentine government account for the whereabouts of their missing children. And as their political consciousness grew they became relentless foes of both the neo-liberal agenda that lay behind the dirty war and of those who bear responsibility for its continued implementation. Furthermore, in the process of opposing this agenda, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began to see themselves as inheritors of the ideals of their children and as responsible for carrying forward the work of their children.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have no illusions. They know that the large majority of their kidnapped children were tortured and murdered by the military during the dirty war. Nonetheless, they remain steadfast in refusing government offers of reparations for their children’s deaths. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo insist that they will not formally accept that any of their children are dead until the government comes forward with documentation to show what happened to them. This stance offers the only hope for seeing that justice is done with respect to what happened during the dirty war.
The story of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo challenges us to forge solidarity amongst ourselves as victims of rape, torture, conflicts, unaccounted deaths, violence etc. And to do this, no great effort is needed except our experiences as victims of human rights violation and our continued desire to live out our lives as human beings. Our experiences can be the bases of the beginning of our walk in initiating a movement that challenges the values and traditions that curtails us as women and as human beings.
We have been conditioned to push our struggle through a formal set up or an organization. I came across a case of custodial torture which was taken over by a particular women hoho to which the victim belonged. However the case died a silent death. And the victims continue to live without justice and culprits continue to be involved in further excesses. While the role of an organization as a caretaker/initiator is well appreciated specially because of the kind of pressure they can exert on the culprits and the community solidarity they extend to the victim but nothing can beat the solidarity the victims feel amongst themselves as victims of torture (or as victims of conflict, rape etc) is stronger and their fight more persuasive. Otherwise there is a danger of our voices getting submerged and forgotten. This is not to understate any formal organization but to encourage us women to initiate the process of justice within us, from our small villages, street corners, market places and towns.
Many women in the rural areas while talking to them about speaking for their rights express their inadequacies in terms of being uneducated, without proper backup or networking. Let us remember that the great movement of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo started off with nothing except their desire to seek justice and uphold life. And that is what we as individuals, as victims of rape, domestic violence, victims of conflicts have in us. Yes, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were simple women. Some of them housewives like many of us are, some teachers and some professionals. I remember a friend telling me how they as non-English speaking women came to Geneva and marched around the UN Plaza trying to speak their dreams and struggles to a larger platform. Yes, English is not the criteria to make our voices heard nor is formal education. It is our relentless desire for activism that nurtures life in all its fullness that counts and matters. We speak our own language, work out our own modalities and continue our journey of peace and dignity without letting small identity conflicts break our journey. In carrying out our struggle against systemic violence what we need is guts and courage to carry on the walk that would ensure that justice is crystallized. That is what the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo had: their experiences and their undefying courage which we as every Naga women undoubtedly has. That is why we have decided to march this day against all crimes that we continue to experience everyday because of our identity as women.
Yesterday’s decision to walk down the street shows our willingness to participate in nurturing and promoting life with dignity and furtherance of life as women. Amongst the many who walked, there will be a few of us who will continue to be involved in advocating women’s rights and the right to live with dignity, and some will continue to advocate right based development, while some would continue to conceptualize frameworks and methodologies of gender justice for us Naga women. Because of our commitment to uphold human rights (I am purposely using human rights as against women’s rights because I feel women’s rights are human rights too) we might come under pressure for our work. Some of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were also themselves victims of enforced disappearance. At this point, it is important for us to know who actually human rights defenders are and how we can ensure our safety with some of the international mechanisms available. Any “individuals, groups and associations...contributing to...the effective elimination of all violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms of peoples and individuals” are known as Human Rights Defenders. According to this definition, human rights defenders can be any person or group of persons working to promote human rights, ranging from intergovernmental organizations based in the world’s largest cities to individuals working with their local communities. Defenders can be any gender, of varying ages, from any part of the world and from all sorts of professional or other backgrounds. There might be threats to our lives both from the state and non state actors because of our involvement as human rights defenders. Threats here would involve killings, death threats, kidnap, beating, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, criminal or other charges leading to prosecution and conviction, harassment, defamation, etc are some acts often human rights defenders all over the world experiences. The good news is that human rights defenders in cases of such threats are entitled to be protected. Those of us involved in promoting and protecting human rights be it economic, social and cultural rights can always write to urgent-action@ohchr.org. The text of the matter should refer to the human rights defenders mandate. Maybe a cursory glance at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/defenders/challenges.htm will help us in understanding the provision that we have as human rights defenders. Not all human rights work poses a threat to our lives as human rights defender. But there has been a large scale report of reprisals and threats against human rights defenders. Infact it is the severity and scale of reprisals on human rights defenders that motivated the international community to adopt the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders and the establishment of the mandate of the special Rapportuer on the situation on Human Rights Defenders. This mandate is important for us because of the threats few development workers, human Rights advocates, and women who advocate gender justice have already received in Nagaland.
