One example of silent resistance took place in the small town of Kaiama in western Ijaw. Here, on 11 December 1998, representatives of over 40 Ijaw clans issued a communiquà © known as the Kaiama Declaration and created the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) to administer the affairs of the Ijaw youth. The communiquà © called for an end to 40 years of environmental damage and underdevelopment in the region and asserted the right to ownership of resources and land by the indigenous people. In response, the Nigerian government created a Naval Special Task Force and, on 29 December, sent 1,500 federal troops to the nearby state capital at Yenagoa and occupied it and the surrounding area. Following a massacre, rape and burning of properties in Yenagoa on 1 January 1999, the army invaded the town of Kaiama on 2 January. On 4 January, using Chevron helicopters and boats, the army invaded seven other Ijaw towns.
During interviews with women, one woman stood out because she was not interested in speaking. We learned that her son had been killed on the day of the invasion. Whereas most people had fled upon hearing that the soldiers were coming, he had run back to the house to collect an item he had forgotten and was fatally shot in his stomach. Standing face to face with her silence was an overpowering experience which conveyed her profound grief and loss at least as effectively as speech. In this case, a woman had survived by a silence that allowed her to disengage herself from her surroundings and she continued to live and hold herself with a dignity that denied her violators any sense of victory. Given that Kaiama is still under occupation today, she lives a situation in which she has to face her son's murderers everyday, possibly even having to sell them foodstuffs from the stall she runs in order to earn a living to support her surviving children. Her silence, her stance and her body language thus serve her well in an inescapable situation, that many other women living under occupation share.
RESPONSES TO SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Rape, sexual slavery, and forced prostitution by the military are all acts of violence and demonstrations of power used in times of war and conflict. Rape serves to gratify the soldiers, feeding their hatred of the enemy while also being used as an effective weapon of war, especially to spread terror amongst the people (Turshen and Twagiramariya, 1998). In this instance, rape also has an ethnic dimension as the military and police deployed in the Niger Delta are not indigenous to the region, with many of them coming from the north of the country.
In the Niger Delta, rape and other forms of sexual violence such as forced prostitution have taken place repeatedly in communities that have been invaded by the Nigerian army, where paramilitary forces have been used to quell demonstrations, or simply to make a particular town or village an 'example' of what would happen should the people assert their human rights.
Blessing, one of my interviewees, explained that the soldiers and police often forced girls to 'befriend' them. If they refused, they were threatened with rape and beatings. She had managed to avoid being 'befriended' by her lack of fear and sheer stubbornness. She explained that at first she had tried to make friends for protection and was bought drinks following which the soldiers attempted to force her into having sex with them. She said, 'the pressure was terrible and most girls just gave in.'[6] Another woman reported seeing a soldier walking into the bush with a girl of about 12 years. After the abuse (the woman did not know what actually took place) they came out and the soldier gave money to the child.
The responses to rape have varied from community to community. Several factors explain the varying responses of the women, the male members of their families, and their wider community. Using two different incidents of rape in two different ethnic groups, I will examine the different responses.
The town of Choba is an Ikwerre community in Rivers State and the headquarters of a pipeline construction company called Wilbros Nigeria Ltd (a subsidiary of Wilbros Group, a US company). Community relations between Wilbros and the people of Choba were poor, mainly because of two reasons. The company demonstrated disdain and disinterest in Choba and its people and they failed to employ local people, even at lower unskilled levels. This led to a number of demonstrations against Wilbros. In June 1999 the youth of Choba began a series of demonstrations and sit-ins outside the company gates. The youth demanded that Wilbros replace 600 of their employees with Choba residents. On 28 October, the mobile police Â- a paramilitary group Â- invaded Choba and once again unleashed murder, the destruction of property and rape on the people of the town. The rapes of women by soldiers were captured on film by a journalist and published in the Nigerian daily press. President Obasanjo's response was to declare the photographs a fake, asserting that his soldiers would never do such a thing. The response of the women of Choba was one of insulation, turning inward towards their community. These women not only had to cope with the trauma of being publicly raped but also with the shame that they and their community felt when the photographs were published in the newspaper. Some months later, a local journalist spoke anonymously to some of the rape survivors.
'It is a taboo to rape a married woman...(now) these women cannot sleep with their husbands and cannot cook for them. It is our tradition and we have to respect it, not just for the sake of respecting our custom but because there are grave implications for disobedience...'
'At the time, we rallied our women to protest to the wife of the governor so that she can help us to push the case but we were arrested and detained for four days. It took the intervention of well-meaning elders before we were released... We, the women of Choba, appeal to those behind the ugly event to come and do the necessary things to appease the gods... This is important to us because without this, these women are as good as divorced.'
The community did not judge the women survivors totally negatively. On the contrary, they acknowledged the women's pain and suffering. The women supported each other and organised themselves according to traditional ways. They sought help from their village elders and the governor's wife. Their response was part of their healing process and, seemingly, of the community, so they could all move past the trauma to some kind of normalcy in their lives.
The responses of rape victims and their families in Ogoniland were very different from those of Choba. The Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR) was launched on 26 August 1990. The OBR, like the declarations and communiquà ©s of other ethnic groups, articulated the basis of a struggle for ethnic autonomy and self-determination for the Ogoni peoples and challenged both the Nigerian government and Shell's legitimacy to determine the economic and political affairs of the Ogoni people and the entire Niger Delta communities (Ekine, 2000). The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni peoples (MOSOP) was to become the mechanism to carry out the objectives of OBR along with the Federation of Ogoni Women's Organisations (FOWA) (Turner, 2001). The troubles in Ogoniland came to a head in November 1993 when the Nigerian military government began a three-year campaign of violence, murder, rape, burning, looting, beatings and torture, against the Ogoni people.[7] For the Ogoni women, resistance was a daily norm as they faced both the impact of Shell's destruction of their environment and the presence of the Nigerian army and mobile police everyday. Women were harassed on the way to their farms, on the way to their markets, in their villages minding their homes, and at night when they were asleep.
In interviews with members of FOWA, woman after woman stood up, said their names, and described in graphic detail the rapes and other types of sexual violence they had been subjected to.
'They started beating the women, dragging them into the bush. And they started loosing their cloth and raping them...my mate was with pregnancy. One army man just used his leg and hit her stomach and she miscarry. That was the beginning of suffering in Nyo Khana.'[8] (Comfort Aluzim)
'They started beating us; all that we were carrying to the market to sell, they took. They took our things, our bags. They asked us to raise our hands and jump like frogs. There was an old woman with us that could not jump. What the army man did was to use his double barrel gun to beat the old woman's back and she fell down.' (Mercy Nkwagha)
'One day we were demonstrating. We sang as we moved from our town to Ken Khana. Singing near the main road we met face to face with the army...they asked us to lie down on the road. After using the koboko (whip) on us they started kicking us with their foot. They dragged some of the women into the bush. We were naked, our dresses were torn, our wrapper were being loosed by a man who is not your husband. They tore our pants and began raping us in the bush. The raping wasn't secret because about two people are raping you there. They are raping you in front of your sister. They are raping your sister in front of your mother. It was like a market.' (Mrs Kawayorko)
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