(Illustration by David Benque)

Cold, drenched, and hanging from a telephone pole on a rainy March day 16 years ago, Cathy Mulder decided she’d had enough.

Mulder had been with the telephone company for 11 years and was active in the union.  This was her sixth year as a cable splicer, a dangerous but well-paying position she landed after filing numerous gender discrimination complaints.

“I found myself hanging from a pole and decided I could do more for workers than getting soaked,” says Mulder, a 46-year-old labor studies professor with a straight-shooting Jersey accent. A year after the revelation on the pole, the Teaneck, New Jersey native quit her job and went back to school full-time. Two years later, she graduated summa cum laude from Stockton State College with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

Spurred on by her Stockton State professors, Mulder went on to do something she never thought she would do: She enrolled at Temple University and started pursuing a Ph.D. After two years at Temple, she took a terminal master’s and transferred to the University of Massachusetts to finish her doctorate. She has passed her comprehensive exams and is now completing her dissertation.

While race and gender diversity among university faculty and graduate students has increased substantially in recent decades, class diversity has lagged behind, making stories like Mulder’s less than typical. Many working-class academics say it is still unusual to find a Ph.D. colleague who is not the child of a doctor, lawyer, corporate executive or other middle-class professional. Working-class Ph.D.’s have written papers, dissertations, and even books about feeling out of place and misunderstood in the ivory tower.

Since for most fields, graduate school is the only route to becoming a professor, class bias within doctoral programs must necessarily translate into a bias in faculty hiring. But trying to get a statistical handle on that bias is nearly impossible. None of the organizations contacted for this article — the National Center for Education Statistics, The College Board, and UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) — could provide statistics on the class backgrounds of graduate students. Information on faculty class backgrounds is also tough to find. However, the studies that do exist indicate, as expected, a strong middle-class bias among the nation’s professoriate.

When Seymour Lipset and Everett Ladd analyzed the results of the 1969 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Faculty Survey in their 1979 paper “The Changing Social Origins of American Academics,” they found that roughly 60 percent of the fathers of the over 60,000 survey respondents came from professional, managerial, and business backgrounds, while only 25 percent were “of working-class origin.”
Looking at faculty makeup in the 15 years following the Lipset and Ladd study, researchers Joseph Stetar and Martin Finkelstein reported in 1997 that the percentage of faculty from professional and managerial-class families had scarcely changed between 1969 and 1984, although the class demographics of university students changed “significantly” during that time to include more students from low-income families.

In 2001, Kenneth Oldfield, an emeritus professor of public administration at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and Richard Conant from the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, conducted a small-scale survey of the faculty at a Big Ten university. Over half of the 567 professors who responded said they had parents who were doctors, lawyers, or other professionals. Less than 2 percent of the respondents said their parents had jobs in the lowest 20 percent of the socioeconomic scale, in fields like farm work or dry cleaning.

What education destroys

Many people who identify themselves as working-class cite a family history of jobs involving manual labor, service work, and rock-bottom pay. Some, like Mulder, have earned a good living working with their hands. However, the social status of a well-paid manual laborer can be quite different from that of a well-paid white-collar worker.  

Growing up, Mulder used to accompany her father, a plumber, to his weekend jobs. She says that although he earned as much or more than many of the people in the suburb where she grew up, she was “treated differently” because she was a plumber’s daughter.

For Mulder, being working class is about more than money. It is about knowing how to “get your hands dirty,” something she thinks many Ph.D.’s have little experience doing.

Carolyn Law is an editor with fellow working-class academic, C. L. Barney Dews, of This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, a book that features narratives of scholars from working-class and poor backgrounds. She observes, “For poor and working-class people, access to higher education is all about class.”

In This Fine Place, Law and Dews examine the “oxymoron” of the working-class academic label. In theory, earning a Ph.D. should propel a person into the middle class. It is not that simple, however. A college degree does not change a person’s past, and many working-class intellectuals feel deeply connected to their blue-collar roots.

Law still remembers the conversation she had years ago with her mother, a widow who worked a number of low-paying jobs to keep the family going after her husband died. “Education destroys something,” she told her daughter. Law agrees. “It was a break, and it did break something,” she says.

“It comes out in the way I talk. I can hear myself as different from my family now.” To illustrate her point, she contrasts what she calls her “higher education-educated accent” with the Ozark hillbilly twang of her relatives.

Law did graduate work in modern literature at the University of Minnesota, but left the school to pursue a full-time editing career. Her most shocking encounter with class in the classroom occurred while she was an undergraduate in Missouri. The professors in her education courses often talked about “at-risk” children — kids who have no books at home and whose parents do not read to them. Such kids, they warned, would always be a “problem” in the classroom.

“They kept painting this picture of a culturally deprived and deficient home that created this culture of at-risk children,” Law remembers. “And I was one of them.” That was the moment when she concluded that “to be valued in society, I’d have to shift my allegiance. I’d have to buy into the professors’ message, and turn a very critical eye on my home life.”

Law, who was raised in a home with no books, said the professors’ words made her ashamed and ambivalent. “You, on the one hand, hate your past, but want to defend it,” she explains. Her experience might explain why it is so difficult to pin down numbers of working-class Ph.D.’s. Scholars who study the class dynamics of academia use the phrase “class closet” to describe the mentality of Ph.D.’s from working-class and poor families who refuse to talk about their class origins out of fear that their middle-class colleagues will look down on them.

Hidden bigotry

Some working-class Ph.D.’s, like Marjorie Gurganus, think their professional progress has been hindered by middle-class colleagues who buy into negative class stereotypes. Gurganus is a law student who spends her spare time doing pro bono tax work in low-income communities. Before starting law school, she earned her Ph.D. in genetics at North Carolina State University. Her father made his living as a factory maintenance worker while pursuing his law degree at night. Though he eventually finished law school and set up his own practice, he never made much money as a lawyer, and the family still qualified for food stamps.

Gurganus, who worked at McDonald’s for two years while in high school, recalls one Ph.D. who would make fun of her for having worked at a fast-food job. She says that, instead of being impressed by her hardscrabble skills and work ethic, ”He was just horrified” and viewed her as “a contamination” in the lab. She thinks academics from working-class and poor backgrounds take a professional risk when they talk to colleagues about past jobs or problems with money. “Some of them have always worked in a nice, clean place that was always advancing their career,” says the Jacksonville, North Carolina native, who did her undergraduate work at Cornell University. She thinks some middle-class Ph.D.’s have trouble relating to people who have to “deliver pizzas for eight dollars an hour rather than work in a lab for five” just to make enough money to buy groceries. “They start viewing you as someone who has these problems,” she says.

Gurganus left the genetics field in part because she was unsuccessful in landing a position as a professor, a circumstance she feels was partly related to her class background. She describes the Ph.D.’s she was competing with as “more established.” She says many of them already had the standard middle-class accoutrements — “a home, a couple of cars, a stable family, hobbies” — in addition to strong scientific backgrounds. Gurganus believes that, when choosing among candidates with near-equal academic credentials, middle-class professors have little incentive to hire someone from the working classes. She sums up the mindset this way: “If there are several of you who are smart, why take the one who doesn’t have the same background as me?”  

Blue-collar bonding

There is an irony inherent in academic elitism. After all, school is supposed to help level the playing field for people from economically underprivileged backgrounds. Students from working-class and poor families often expect a college education to increase their professional options and provide them with opportunities that their parents did not have. When that optimism butts with class realities, the effects can be painfully disillusioning.

Barbara Peters is a working-class academic from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who teaches sociology at Long Island University’s Southampton College. “When you’re brought up in working-class and poverty-class situations, you’re taught that education is the ticket out,” she says. “It’s like Nirvana: You’re going to go to college, and your life is going to change. So you’re kind of idealistic.”

Acknowledging that a degree doesn’t offer the access it seems to promise, in 1993, Peters founded an online support group called Working-Class Academics, where professors, Ph.D. students, and independent scholars can discuss what it feels like to be working-class in academia. The group, which started with just 25 members, now has between 250 and 300.

“It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of in my academic career,” says Peters, whose mother was a school cook.

Not everyone is impressed by her activism, however. Peters’s views were once challenged during an online discussion with fellow intellectuals. One person criticized the concept of class labels, saying that people change classes throughout their lives. The same person said that she herself had chosen to be working-class by taking a job as a waitress.

“If you chose to be working class, then you aren’t working class,” Peters replied. That exchange prompted Peters to start the Working-Class Academics list.

Peters, who walks with crutches due to a degenerative arthritis condition, points out that being disabled adds another dimension to her concerns about discrimination. She also notes the challenges faced by women and people of color in the academy. “It’s a matrix of oppression,” she concludes.

Despite the criticism she has faced (some have called her a “reverse classist”), Peters is determined to keep reaching out to working-class intellectuals. “We are here. It would be wonderful if people from the upper classes would listen.” Citing growth in the Working-Class Academics list’s membership, she adds, “I think there are more working-class academics out there than we’d even realized.”

Money too tight to mention

While in graduate school, Amy Feistel worked multiple research assistantships to avoid taking out loans she knew she could never repay. She says she was criticized for spending too much time at work and not enough time on her studies. She remembers one scholar telling her that she was “not cut out for academic work” and would “be better as support personnel than as a scholar.”

Such comments did little to bolster Feistel’s image of herself as an academic. “I felt like I was not provided with the appropriate support to build the analytical skills required to be a scholar,” she says.

Feistel, whose parents struggled to support five children on modest missionary salaries, did graduate work in cultural politics at a top-ranked university. Her family history reveals a mix of classes. She describes her father’s relations as upper-middle-class and college educated, “with well-provided, secure futures.” Relatives on her mother’s side, however, have always had financial problems, often raising large numbers of children on low military salaries.

While Feistel appreciates the support she received from some of her professors, she insists that “one or two people hardly make up for a difficult system.” She adds, “I have always been forthright about my circumstances, but have found the circumstances often make others uncomfortable.”

For working-class academics with few financial resources, the economic obstacles to graduate education begin long before the courses start. “It’s just difficult at every step of the way.” says Paige Adams, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Baylor University. She had to scrape together nearly $100 just to take the GRE, a large investment for a woman who waited tables, taught aerobics, and took out $35,000 in loans to finance her undergraduate degree at the University of Houston. She handwrote all of her applications to graduate school because she could not afford a computer. To make matters worse, some of the schools to which she applied did not offer application fee waivers.

“This whole idea that you have to have all of this money upfront puts aspiring working-class scholars at a disadvantage from the start,” Adams insists.

Most Ph.D. students put up with long hours and low pay as teaching and research assistants. However, Adams thinks those from working-class and poor families have it especially hard. “Most people I knew in graduate school had parents that helped them out,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of students there from poor families.”

Feistel remarks, “Working-class academics face the usual issues that all academics face, but I believe the issues are exacerbated by the concerns for daily living: income, housing, food, transportation.”

Jennifer Gibbons, a pharmacology Ph.D. student at Duke University, relates, “I find that many people here in graduate school went to private high schools, or at least large schools where they had the opportunity to have honors classes and take Advanced Placement tests.” Her own high school offered “no real honors classes” and only one AP test: English. The Indiana native continues, “I feel as if I had very many lost opportunities at my school, but had no choice — my parents couldn’t afford to send me anywhere else.”

Carol Williams, a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, felt similarly disadvantaged coming into graduate school. “Poor results on the GRE is perhaps where I felt most disabled coming to graduate school initially,” Williams recounts. “I felt I came to the exam already lacking basic skills. No account is taken in standard testing for cultural or economic differences, and I feel this favors not only Caucasians, but those from wealth.”

A different world

Sociology professor Michael Schwalbe relaxes in his paper-packed office where a poster for his book, Remembering Reet and Shine, a biography of two working-class African American men living in the South, hangs near the door. Sporting shorts and sneakers, he talks about his journey from Boys Technical School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “I haven’t pursued my career in a conventional way,” says Schwalbe. On his way to becoming an academic, Schwalbe worked as a mechanic, a bartender, a music promoter, and a nature writer.

He calls his decision to buck family tradition and pursue a non-vocational path “risky but freeing,” though he admits he was a little lost at first. “I didn’t know what you do to become a professor.” When he decided to pursue his Ph.D., he considered only two schools: Washington State University for its natural surroundings and the University of Texas at Austin for its folk rock music scene. That way, he figured, if the sociology path did not work out, he could easily pursue one of his other passions. He did not even consider applying to the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, though one of his professors urged him to do so. At that time, Schwalbe had no concept of what he calls “the prestige factor,” and how going to a school like Berkeley might influence his professional future.

Most of the working-class Ph.D.’s interviewed for this article say they grew up knowing much less about the academic world in general than their middle-class peers. “You mean there’s school after this school?” was working-class academic Beverly Rockhill’s reaction when her undergraduate cohorts at Princeton started talking about doing a Ph.D.

The language of academia shocked Jodie Lawston more than anything. “They were talking very theoretically and using language I had never even dreamed of,” recalls the sunny-voiced Long Island native. She describes the students in her graduate program as being from wealthy families and “worlds ahead” in terms of vocabulary. Lawston found their theoretical lingo intimidating at first, but now pokes fun at the bulky phrases. Her answering machine greeting instructs unsuspecting callers to leave their name, phone number, and “a brief ontological explanation of women’s existential dilemmas.”

“The academy is a place for ideas and not for activists.”

During one of her graduate seminars, Lawston suggested that scholars put social theory into practice. According to her, a classmate erupted, “The academy is a place for ideas and not for activists.” Lawston was stunned. She later heard a similar comment from another colleague.

Lawston, whose father is a construction worker, grew up having to deal with things like the phone being disconnected and the heat being cut off in the middle of the winter. “We were not philosophizing at the dinner table,” she laughs. She thinks some of her middle-class counterparts take a hands-off attitude toward social activism because they have not had to do without basic necessities. “Even though they study classism, that’s all they do — study it.” she says. “They don’t really struggle with it.”

Working-class academics themselves struggle with it in different ways. Monique Lyle, a Ph.D. student in Duke University’s political science department, remembers being “really class-conscious” when she began her studies at the elite school. But for Lyle, class has always been a question of both money and race. “In a lot of ways, class distinctions are along racial lines,” notes Lyle, who is black.

Jason Allen, an assistant research professor at Duke, came to the United States from Barnsley, England, and earned his doctorate in exercise physiology from Louisiana State University. He lives with his pal, Gordon, a tomcat who paws for attention during our phone interview. Allen sums up the difference between the United States’ and England’s ideas about class this way: “In England, they care where you came from. In America, they care where you’re going.” Allen thinks American class distinctions are based more on money than birth, but, like Lyle, he also believes those distinctions are impacted heavily by race.

Allen, whose mother works in a bakery factory, has found that many American academics hold British people in high regard. He believes the Yorkshire accent that might have hindered his professional advancement in his native land actually worked to his advantage here in the States. “I moved from working-class to upper-middle class in the blink of an eye,” he says.

The discomfort of straddling

Several working-class academics speak of feeling torn between the world of their families and that of their peers. Carol Williams had a tough time explaining her academic ambitions to her mother. “When I was raising money to attend my program in a master’s degree in England, she stated, ‘Why all this trouble and pain to get a few letters after your name?’” Williams recalls. “She didn’t comprehend the motives for advanced education, nor did she understand what exactly we did there.”

Lyle has had similar troubles. “[My mom] thinks I talk like a white girl,” she laughs. Though she has a strong relationship with her family and loves going home, she does not think they have a real sense of what she does. She feels removed from her extended family and worries that she does not fit in with the black working-class community where she grew up.

Despite the challenges they face, most of the working-class Ph.D.’s interviewed say they benefited from going to graduate school. “I just had a great graduate school experience,” says Adams. “I had a great job, a great boss  …  It just felt like a family. I made a lot of good friends.”

Like Adams’, most of Mulder’s experiences in academia have been positive. Still, Mulder admits, “I don’t know anybody else like me.” Mulder now teaches labor studies to workers and unionists at a satellite campus of Indiana University, a job she got in part because of her unusual life path. “That’s precisely why they hired me,” she notes. “There are not too many Ph.D.’s that know how to be a worker.”

The hybrid advantage

The same family relationships that can complicate a working-class Ph.D.’s relationship to academia can also be a vital source of support. In working-class families where no one has attended college, there is often a sense of vicarious accomplishment in watching one of their own go all the way.

Paige Adams’ mother has been her biggest cheerleader, urging her to pursue the college education she herself always wanted. “She always felt that she missed out by not going to college,” says Adams.  

Jodie Lawston thought of dropping out many times during those first few years of graduate school, but her mother’s words helped her stay the course: “You gotta do it ‘cause we never did.”

In the end, having a foot in both worlds might be one of the working-class academic’s greatest assets. “I’m resigned to a sort of hybrid status, which, as I grow older, I recognize gives me a unique and under-represented intellectual perspective on many issues,” Rockhill says.

Feistel, who now works in educational administration, says her experiences have made her more understanding of the challenges facing working-class students. “I’m in a better position to understand a working-class student,” she remarks. “I’ve been on both sides of the system, and I know how the system works.”

“Mostly what makes me different is a consciousness of what work really means,” adds Law, whose father made his living digging basements with a bulldozer. “To hear some tenured professor talk about their work environment like they’re some kind of miner  …  it really hurts me.”

Other working-class academics, like Schwalbe and Allen, say their life experiences have made them extremely adaptable. “You can move in almost any environment and function with almost any group of people,” says Allen.

Jodie Lawston, who felt “so inferior” to her middle-class colleagues when she started graduate school, now views her working-class background as an asset. “I think it gives you a stronger perspective on everything. I think you’re able to relate to people better,” she says.

STORY INDEX

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Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class by Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey

In The Fray Contributor

Berkeley residents defeated Measure Q, in part, because of fears that an increase in prostitution would result, adding to unsavory detritus in the neighborhood.

Scarlot Harlot, a self-proclaimed “unrepentant whore, activist and artist,” sauntered into the Missouri Lounge on November 2 looking more like a patriotic Scarlet O’Hara on a tempestuous Saturday night. Joining sex workers and friends to await election returns inside the saloon-esqe Berkeley venue, Harlot sported an American-flag-turned-18th-century-period gown that swayed playfully over white knee-high boots.

Otherwise known as Carol Leigh, Harlot was energized by the buzz of election night, occasionally turning her attention from the blare of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” to watch a televised U.S. map gradually cloak itself in Republican red. Yet, while voters in the historically left-leaning city of Berkeley slumped their heads as swing states bent toward re-election, Leigh had reasons to celebrate: Measure Q, a local initiative that would have made prostitution the lowest police priority, managed to re-ignite a highly publicized debate surrounding the world’s oldest profession — a dialogue that continued despite the initiative’s defeat.    

“I am so miserable about the state of this nation,” said Leigh, her glittery magenta-coated lips smirking in disapproval. “But tonight I could not be happier. This is a huge milestone in the history of prostitution in America. People have begun to accept us as sex workers.”

Leigh is a member of the Berkeley-based Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), the outspoken prostitutes’ rights group that served as the political mouthpiece for the Measure Q crusade. Arguably one of the more provocative issues on the Berkeley ballot, Measure Q was rejected on election day by a nearly two-to-one margin. But for Leigh and SWOP members, there was a larger victory in growing awareness of sex work.

“In this day and age, I believe the most important thing to end the stigma and oppression of women in the sex industry is to decriminalize prostitution,” said Robyn Few, a 46 year-old former prostitute and executive director of SWOP. “Measure Q was never a failure because it put the word out there, had it circulating in the media and thriving in the form of national dialogue.”

Residents on both sides

In June 2004, Few, a charming, energetic Kentucky native, helped put Measure Q on the November ballot after collecting 3,200 signatures, well more than the required 2,100 to qualify as a city initiative. The symbolic measure was known as the Angel Initiative, named for Angel Lopez, a San Francisco transgendered prostitute murdered in 1993. Measure Q could not repeal laws against prostitution at a citywide level, but would have instructed city officials to lobby the state legislature for the decriminalization of prostitution and to require from local police a semi-annual report of prostitution-related law enforcement activity.

A teenage runaway, Few was standing up for herself long before launching the decriminalization campaign in October 2003. She turned to exotic dance and prostitution to pay the bills before getting convicted in June 2002 on one federal count of conspiracy to promote prostitution. Few received six months house arrest with electronic monitoring and three years probation. Outraged by what she saw as a total lack of protection and rights for prostitutes, she began pushing Measure Q while under confinement.  

“Without being arrested, I would’ve hidden behind closed doors, but I chose to speak out and fight back,” said Few, who on election night had donned a black suit with a “Smoke Bush in 2004” bumper sticker stuck to her bum. “We’ve rekindled a fire smoldering, re-sparked a flame and provoked a very important issue in the Bay Area. The world is watching; this is not just about Berkeley.”

But on November 2, Measure Q was about Berkeley — particularly among voters in District 2, where most of the city’s prostitution takes place on San Pablo Avenue. A heavily trafficked north-south corridor that cuts through the city’s sprawling residential and commercial districts, San Pablo Avenue is also the city’s red-light district. When night falls, this concrete pocket is often littered with hypodermic needles, used condoms and abandoned liquor bottles — unsightly byproducts that, according to many South Berkeley and bordering West Oakland residents, would have become more common had Measure Q passed.  

Laura Menard, who moved to South Berkeley 23 years ago, said Measure Q’s laissez faire policy would have aggravated already-existing social ills. She had heard that prostitution and heroin use were “rampant” near her house from 1973 into the 80s, and described the nearby park as littered with needles and unsafe for her two kids when they were growing up.

Yet District 2 resident Rachon Harris, who says there are so many prostitutes in his neighborhood that they’re “like streetlights,” supported Measure Q because he believed prostitution deserved a low priority with police. Leaning against the Rosa Parks Environmental Science Magnet School building, his black baseball cap hung low, Harris said prostitution is a choice. Getting pulled over because of the color of his skin, however, is not.

“We have more important issues here like guns on the streets, the crooked police, racial profiling, domestic violence, and homelessness,” said Harris, each sentence punctuated with a fist against his palm. “The police shouldn’t have to worry about johns and sex.”

Though his support was not mirrored by the city at large, backers of Measure Q said they are not discouraged. Carol Stuart, co-author of San Francisco’s “Equal Benefits Ordinance,” said although those who voted against Measure Q feared losing their neighborhoods to hookers and johns, Measure Q forced the city council to address the needs of sex workers for the first time.

“Prostitution is an issue that divides households,” Stuart said. “But we want an end to prohibition; we’re bringing sex work out of the darkness and into the light of day. The threat of arrest and criminal status of their work is hindering women from access to basic human rights.”  

For Berkeley voter Dafney Blanca Dabach, the criminal status of prostitutes is what swayed her vote for Measure Q. Although she thought the initiative sounded more like a college paper — poorly written and ideological — she ultimately supported the measure after she heard about a woman who could not find a job because of her prostitution-related criminal record.

“The weight of a criminal record makes it harder for women who are poor and vulnerable to transition out of prostitution; it hinders them from finding other forms of legitimate work,” Dabach said. “Instead of worrying whether Berkeley will become a haven for prostitutes, we should ask why prostitutes are considered criminals.”

Dabach’s friend disagreed. Adrian Bankhdad argued that prostitutes in Berkeley are “women who are often addicted to crack, not in control of themselves and degrade themselves for a fix.” What they need, he said, “is not a measure that will reduce the stigma of prostitution; they need positive intervention from the legal system.” Bankhdad, who voted against the measure, was among the 64.2 percent of voters who opposed decriminalization.  

“Berkeley made the right decision to vote for what is best for their city and for our most fragile citizens,” said Nara Dahlbacka, the campaign coordinator for the Committee Against Measure Q. “People in Berkeley want to be groundbreaking and progressive, but are not going to go for a knee-jerk reaction, which is what Measure Q was.”

Members of SWOP gather at a local tavern after putting up door hangers in Berkeley.

Feminists for and against

But for Ron Weitzer, a George Washington University sociology professor, Measure Q’s defeat does not indicate failure for the legalization campaign. At the minimum, he said, the initiative triggered thoughtful dialogue around prostitution and law enforcement practices — a rare occurrence in the United States.

Measure Q’s largest accomplishment was perhaps achieved by merely getting on the ballot. Weitzer estimates the initiative is the first in over two decades to call for reduced enforcement of prostitution laws. Occasionally, a state legislator or city council member will propose such a change, but it has not occurred in the United States since 1971 when Nevada successfully legalized brothel prostitution in rural counties.

“The very act of getting the measure on the ballot, holding public discussions and debates about it, and raising the issue of prostitution policy in the public’s mind — all may be considered victories of a sort,” he said.

Prostitution as a back-door reality for residents of South Berkeley also gained the attention of many scholars around the nation, who believed Measure Q held significant bearing on the legalization movement in the United States. Laurie Shrage, a philosophy professor at Pomona’s California State Polytechnic University, believes the major challenge to decriminalizing prostitution is resuscitating the long dormant and marginalized dialogue over sex for sale. Similar to same-sex marriage — which took more than a decade to make headline progress — prostitution is an issue that despite increasing public support faced major setbacks in recent polls.

“It takes a long time to build electoral majorities that can change the way our society operates,” said Shrage, a pro-decriminalization feminist scholar. “Making progress will require keeping the issue in the public spotlight so that voters’ fears and concerns can be discussed and addressed.”

Similar to abortion, the issue of legalizing sex work has long been contentious for feminists around the nation. Does prostitution represent a form of oppression or is it instead a hallmark of female empowerment and independence? Measure Q, despite its rejection and localized domain, sharply divided leading feminist scholars and raised the question of how to define feminism itself.

“There is no one form of feminism, although the overarching campaign is to promote the safety and status of women in our society,” said Wendy Chapkis, a University of Southern Maine women’s studies and sociology professor. “It’s the strategies to securing those goals that are the source of great debate.”

Chapkis, author of Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor, supported Measure Q because she said decriminalization improves the safety and wellbeing of women by providing legal safeguards and social acceptance for prostitutes. Prostitution, according to the pro-decriminalization feminist camp, is a legitimate occupation beleaguered by stigma and exploitation that arise from sexual double standards. Women in prostitution are vilified for being promiscuous or victimized via a socially paternalistic desire to “protect” women from sex. According to one scholar, punitive laws against prostitution symbolize double standards of sexual morality that result in stigmatizing not just prostitutes, but many unconventional women, as “sluts or whores.”

Class clash

Other feminists who oppose decriminalization maintain that those who defend prostitution — generally white middle-class intellectuals — know little about the practical realities of the daily lives of sex workers.  In Berkeley and elsewhere, most sex workers are poor, uneducated, immigrants; women of color; or have substance abuse problems and few other life options. Celeste Robinson-Hardy, an Oakland-based former prostitute and heroin addict, opposed Measure Q for that reason. Now 43 years old, Robinson-Hardy spent over three decades prostituting in the Bay Area to support her drug habit. Although prostitution also economically supported her four children, it was an occupation that put her life in danger each time she entered a john’s car. When she was a teenager, a male customer drove her to a remote hill, put a gun to her head, raped and robbed her.

“He left me up there butt naked, and my hard head went back to work the very next day,” she said. Now a peer counselor in Berkeley, Robinson-Hardy devotes her life to helping women transition out of prostitution. “What are these girls doing with their bodies? That’s God’s temple and they’re just tearing it up. There are no high-class hookers here.”

Janice G. Raymond, a women’s studies professor at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst, believes the prostitution debate is problematic when groups that claim to represent sex workers are led by women who are not in systems of prostitution —meaning, they have done it casually, or do it as an ideological form of women’s resistance.

“There are two groups of women in the prostitution debate,” said Raymond, also author of Sex Trafficking of Women in the United States: International and Domestic Trends. “The first group is characterized as being articulate, and engaging in outlaw sexuality or sexuality as a form or resistance. The second group is out on the streets, in brothels, trafficked, poor, and of mainly African, Latin or Asian descent.”

The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, an international human rights organization that combats prostitution and sexual trafficking, defines prostitution as a function of female oppression. Experts in modern feminism echo this sentiment. Andrea Dworkin, the iconic feminist critic wrote in a speech entitled, “Prostitution and Male Supremacy,” “When men use women in prostitution, they are expressing a pure hatred for the female body.”

Raymond opposed Measure Q because she insisted it would grant men legal and moral permission to engage in more sexual exploitation of women. A common argument for anti-prostitution scholars is that although women should not be arrested in countries such as the United States, where prostitution is illegal, decriminalization of the total practice will merely turn pimps into third party businessmen, and brothels into supposed “houses of protection.”

“Most women would not be prostitutes if they had another option or choice,” Raymond said. “Women in prostitution want one thing: they want to get out.”

Another argument against decriminalization is that it would condone the influx of pimps recruiting girls as young as 12 into street prostitution. Debbie Hoffman of the Oakland Police Department, said pimps — called “boyfriends” by the prostitutes who work for them — often lure girls into sex work with the false illusion of love. Yet Measure Q supporters maintained that arresting prostitutes does little to restrain the sexual or economic exploitation of women and children.    

Shrage, who supported Measure Q, notes that decriminalizing adult sex work would result in sharper political focus on far more serious and harsher practices, including minors in prostitution, forced and child labor, slavery and indenture, and violence. Rather than prohibiting prostitution, she said, sex work must co-exist with an environment of tolerance. Shrage also noted how the production of cheap consumer goods is linked with appalling labor and living conditions in many third-world countries. “I wish that those appalled at feminists for their support of voluntary, adult sex work were at least equally appalled by the practices that make cheap consumer goods available to them.”

Shrage observed that contemporary “third-wave” feminists, especially those who emerge from lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered movements, tend to defend prostitution as an occupation because sex workers are similarly stigmatized by mainstream society for their sexual practices. By contrast, many “second-wave” feminists of 30 years ago linked female prostitution with slavery, dismissing the entire sex work industry as immoral or demeaning.

Despite this historical feminist divide, the current prostitution debate marks another evolutionary step in the often discord-ridden tableau of American feminism. Anti-prostitution views, according to Raymond, are now progressive and feminist whereas before, they were tainted by the moral indignation of neo-Victorian thought.

“We’re not right-wingers and we’re not conservatives — we’re feminists,” Raymond said. “Prostitution is certainly an issue that divides some elements of the feminist community but issues divide a lot of groups. To present it as a catfight among feminists is feeding into the stereotype that we women just can’t get it together.”

For Robyn Few — a woman who got it together enough to put a hotly-contested measure on the map — the discourse and discussion it triggered made at least a dent in the national vista of American politics. “Measure Q allowed us to speak out as political actors and demand better working conditions. We, as sex workers, are part of the political landscape.”

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Sex Workers Outreach Project
URL: http://www.swop-usa.org/

Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
URL: http://www.catwinternational.org/

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Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women by Alexa Albert
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Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry by Ronald Weitzer
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In The Fray Contributor

A squat military van parked in the middle of Pushkinskya Street last summer.  Surrounded by military schools and bases, soldiers crossed this pedestrian mall every day. In Rostov-on-Don, the military enjoyed particular freedoms with parking and traffic laws.  

Last summer, hundreds of soldiers strolled down the leafy sidewalk on Pushkinskaya Street daily, enjoying the pedestrian mall that crisscrosses the heart of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia. In July, they wandered past neat-trimmed grass, flower gardens, outdoor cafes with plastic patio furniture, and past the concrete dividers that border them.

This street was named after a poet, but warriors dominate the city founded along the Don River, a century-old shipping route and crucial frontier, less than 500 miles away from Chechen border. Two military bases, two military academies, a regional recruiting station, and the headquarters for the Great Don Cossack Army all lay within walking distance. The city’s 1.2 million inhabitants have spent their entire lives surrounded by military outposts that are a microcosm of the troubled Russian army. Civilians mingle with a sea of uniforms: boy-soldiers in camouflage, officers in crisp dress, and off-duty recruits in khaki civilian clothes and sunglasses to hide their eyes.

At the end of last summer, wreckage from an exploded airplane fell just outside this city, changing everything for these soldiers. The guerilla war in Chechnya had jumped the border to Russia with renewed intensity. In just a few weeks, Chechen suicide bombers had destroyed two airplanes, bombed a Moscow subway stop, and murdered hundreds of children in a Beslan schoolhouse. In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin summoned military forces to tighten borders, pacify Chechnya, and protect Russia.

The increased attacks, however, only highlighted problems with Russia’s military that have been brewing for years. Russia’s terrorism policy rests in the hands of thousands of young men from the Rostov region, pulled into the army every year under a confusing set of draft laws that many find ways to evade. According to many active soldiers and their advocates, the army is a poorly financed and demoralized force. Although the government responded last January with initiatives to build a contracted army, it is unclear how effective the reforms will be or how they will help extricate Russia from a war that it cannot win.

As troubled Iraqi elections loom — and the logistics of a deadly American commitment to Iraq become more problematic under a protracted occupation — the state of Russia’s military after a decade-long conflict offers a troubled example for Americans.

Pushkinskya Street is the community center in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. During the day, cars parked haphazardly outside the shops and offices lining the long stretch of flowery sidewalks. In the evening, residents strolled past countless outdoor cafes and chatted with their neighbors.

Filling the ranks through “coffin money”

A few blocks away from Pushkinskaya, kitty-corner to a grade school, lies a sprawling red brick building guarded by recently graduated teenagers with machine guns. The Southern Region Recruiting Station was the first station to institute a new set of military reforms earlier last year, trying to fill the army ranks with a better kind of soldier.

This station began accepting applications last January, part of the military’s plans to convert half the army into contractors by 2007. For years, the army found soldiers under a mandatory conscription law, drafting soldiers for two years from a nationwide pool of 1.2 million young men between 18 and 27 years old — drawing boys into complicated conflicts for which they were ill prepared. While small numbers of contractors have also served in the Russian army and navy for many years, the army now plans to dramatically increase this pool of voluntary fighters.

As Vice-Military Commissar of the Rostov Region, Colonel Valery Tolmachev supervised the contractor recruiting drive last year. He explained that the current, drafted army suffers from an “intellectual poverty.” While the Russian draft calls hundreds of thousands of young men, wealth and education often determine the final cut. Recruits can avoid the draft through special work and university deferments, and many wealthier draftees pay to keep their names off the register. The army is struggling, even in this military-saturated region.

Too many of the best and brightest have managed to escape service, leaving the poor and undereducated to lead the ranks. Accusations of hazing and power abuse sometimes filter down through the ranks, reflecting the difficulties of an army staffed with unwilling or unhappy troops.

With a cautious smile Tolmachev expressed hope in these new contracted soldiers, expecting that this additional force of willing and experienced fighters will replace the weaker, drafted soldiers. “People were eager to serve under contract; even women came to sign up.”

In contrast to draftees, contract soldiers are paid at higher rates with additional pay for wartime experience or special skills. For instance, contract soldiers in the 42nd Motor Rifle Division earn 15,000 ($510) rubles a month for service in a Chechnya hotspot — almost 10,000 ($340) rubles more than the average, drafted recruit.

Colonel Tolmachev estimated that contractors now compose 25 to 30 percent of the whole army, only a small rise from last year. However, increased contractors have also lowered the mandatory service requirement to one year, loosening the two-year draft policy that forced thousands of young men into the army. So far, the change has mostly affected “commandants,” placing contractors at military outposts in highly dangerous conflict areas.

While American contractors perform similar services in Iraq, repairing the battered infrastructure, leading supply convoys through the desert, and running dangerous military missions, the U.S. government has not yet raised the pay-stakes as dramatically as the Russian army. However, as that conflict’s resemblance to the guerilla nightmare of Chechnya increases, the pressure for improved compensation to avoid a draft builds.

Tolmachev called the high-risk incentives paid to contractors in dangerous Chechen outposts “coffin money.”

A tug floats along the Don River last summer. For centuries, this long river watered agriculture and guided freight ships through the vast southern interior of Russia.

Curator of misery

Tolmachev’s term appropriately gestures towards the military quagmire that the Chechnya conflict has become. In the mid-1990’s, the Russian military crashed into this unconventional war. It sent thousands of drafted soldiers into the fiercely independent Chechen region — without preparing them for the duration or tactics of the conflict.

The latest insurgency is an outgrowth of longstanding tensions between the Russian government and Chechnya. Though an autonomous Chechen-Ingush republic was established under Soviet rule, World War II brought a vicious crackdown under Stalin when thousands of Chechens were deported for allegedly collaborating with German forces. The Chechen republic was reestablished in 1958, but the earlier exile of its citizens scarred its relationship with Russia.

Post-Soviet chaos bred violent separatist movements in Chechnya, and these rebels mounted waves of terrorist attacks on Russian soil — demanding an autonomous state. The Russian government resisted, and sent troops to break up terror cells in Grozny in 1995. Soon the insurgency situation degenerated into crisis.

Just like the U.S. military in Iraq last year, Russian forces discovered that full-scale occupation could not stop suicide bombers and urban guerillas. The military was not able to pacify the besieged country, and the insurgents evaded military control. These tactics led to a protracted conflict, and a second war commenced in 1999. Since then, thousands of troops have died, and a string of terrorist attacks have squandered hopes for a clean exit strategy.  

Svetlana Arsenyevna Lozhkina, chair of the Rostov Region Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, has seen the consequences of this bloodshed firsthand, and she has a large supply of stories about the soldiers who have suffered or died in this conflict.

Nestled on the bottom floor of the colonel’s recruiting station, her office is a cozy space plastered with newspaper clippings about boys hurt, lost, or killed over the last 10 years of military action in Chechnya. Her committee formed in 1989, created by mothers who had lost children in war. Lozhkina joined the group after her son returned safely from his mandatory service, turning her motherly concern into a public service project. Over the past 15 years, Lozhkina has filled dozens of ledger-books with complaints from drafted soldiers, documenting the struggles of young men trapped in dangerous posts.

Despite the tired wrinkles around her eyes, Lozhkina speaks intensely. “I don’t keep track of numbers, but at least seven people come in here each week during the summer. Many more people come during the Army’s fall recruitment drive to complain about their service.”

Lozhkina reads a letter from a soldier stationed in North Ossetia — the site of the then-unexpected Beslan massacre. Private Vilady alleges that two soldiers were infected by hepatitis during routine flu shots and that officers beat soldiers hard enough to rupture organs. The soldier concludes, “We don’t care what we have to do. We’ll do anything to get out of this hell.”

Every day, she carefully prints the name, address and complaints of new soldiers in a five-inch thick notebook. She’s a curator of misery, and 2004’s ledger was already half full in July.
Every day, the American military records similarly grim statistics. There’s no draft randomly pulling out college-aged soldiers, but already American soldiers have been forced to extend their tours while more reservists have been pulled into the conflict. The streets of Grozny are as untamed as the shadowy walls of Falluja in Iraq. If the insurgency and American occupation should drag on for another five or 10 years, some mother will have to fill ledger books with the names of American soldiers.

A view of Rostov, taken from a ship floating along the Don River last summer. The Don Cossack ethnic group settled along these green banks, raising horses and training generations of proud warriors.

A special breed of soldier

Lozhkina’s ledger captures the fear and inexperience of young draftees, the kind of problems the army hopes to avoid with professional soldiers. Studying the contract soldier program, it is apparent that many Rostov region contractors are Cossacks — a brash group that eagerly signed up out of ethnic pride. These soldiers are reputed to enter war zones fearlessly, but they’ve also faced a new set of problems within the contract soldier system.

Inside the Rostov-on-Don headquarters of the Great Don Cossack Army, rows of training photographs decorate the skinny, dim hallways. The army is named after the Don River that flows past Rostov, the fertile water that lured this proud ethnic group to settle here in the 17th century, and defend the southern frontier. The pictures show children training in Cossack military schools: little boys in greasepaint and camouflage, teenagers scrambling up walls; recruits riding horses, kissing flags, or practicing karate moves.

While the death toll in Chechnya sends many rich Russian teenagers running from the draft, this is still a city of warriors. Out of all the military-men debating the future of the Russian army, these fighters tell the most optimistic stories.

The Cossack tradition of raising soldiers from childhood is long standing. In the 17th century, the group pledged allegiance to the Czar, but maintained sovereignty and traditional values within their communities. In the 19th century, they became an independent arm of the Russian military, establishing these Cossack outposts and schools in the region.

A giant blue, yellow, and red Don Cossack flag dangles in Vladimir Voronin’s office, decorated with the Cossack army’s seal — a white stag leaping with an arrow buried in its belly. “Cossacks are more eager to serve than other people,” said Voronin, the Commander of the Directorate of Ideology and Propaganda of the Great Don Cossack Army.

His plastic glasses perched on the end of his nose, and his unruly, moussed buzz cut sprouted in all directions.  Presented with the lack of a draft in America and ideas of alternative service such as the Peace Corps, Voronin dismissed any kind of civic service options to the Russian draft. “For me, alternative types of service are almost like an alternative sexuality,” he said. “Normal men serve.”

Last year, Voronin’s office recruited 608 Cossack men from the Rostov region to serve in the Russian army. Of those recruits, about 100 soldiers signed three-year minimum commitments to serve as contract soldiers in the 42nd Motor Division in Chechnya — one of the bloodiest corners of the war.
“Cossacks respect the traditions of people in the Caucuses region. The military is uncomfortable that we have success there and their official troops don’t,” Voronin said of these new contract soldiers.

“We were raised up by history,” said Major Boris Azarkhin, a Cossack military leader. “For modern Cossacks, our main purpose was to protect our country.” He wore a dress shirt with the Cossack crest stitched on the breast: St. George sticking his spear through a dragon’s neck.

Cossack history contrasts neatly with the centuries-old conflict between Russia and Chechnya republics. While Chechens have bucked Russian control since the 19th century, constantly struggling for an independent republic, the Cossacks have maintained a good relationship with Russia since World War II when they fought German tanks with horses, rifles and sabers. The Cossacks lived here as proud Russian citizens for centuries, still maintaining cultural traditions like colorfully embroidered shirts and community holidays. While a tight-knit Cossack leadership council presides over Cossack schools and churches, the ethnic group has always deferred to the Russian government since World War II.

The major proudly insists that his soldiers in the 42nd Division in Chechnya represent “the best soldiers the Cossacks can offer.”  He hoped the outpost would grow into a full-fledged, self-contained military community, with schools, parks, and housing projects for soldiers’ families.

“Then the soldiers won’t have any headaches like caring for their families,” he said, “They will only care about serving better.”

These brave sentiments raise some hard questions about occupation. Generations of American soldiers will someday staff precarious bases in places like Falluja or Baghdad, keeping an uncomfortable peace. Iraqi or Chechen insurgents aren’t bound by such defensive positions, and they can hide anywhere in their country.

Occupational outposts are fixed barbwire fortresses, perpetually exposed to mobile attackers. The idea that soldiers’ wives and children could grow up inside these war zones is absurd, even for a culture seeped in militarism as the Cossacks. Nevertheless, insurgencies in Chechnya and Iraq virtually require this sort of decades-long commitment.

Mercenary back-wages

While the Cossack major dreams of a professional occupation force with palatial barracks, in reality, the army has lost too many troops and resources during the Chechen occupation to start afresh. As Colonel Tolmachev explains, education loopholes and bribery have crippled the drafted forces, sending ill-equipped soldiers into a complex battlefield. Professional soldiers seem like an elegant solution, a way to eventually end the draft and fill the ranks with eager soldiers like the Cossack contractors.  

However, a few retired contractors painted a grim picture of hired guns in the Russian army. While they wouldn’t speak at length about their service, their assessment was simple:  “All army financers are traitors,” said Oleg Gubenko, a former Cossack contract soldier. “They should be shot.”

Gubenko joined the army full of ethnic pride in the late 1990s, but after serving as a contractor in Chechnya for three years, he returned home bitterly without his full pay. Last August, Gubenko organized a strike with other unpaid contract soldiers. Some members of his group alleged that the army owes them upwards of 1 million rubles for their contract service. The matter has not been resolved. As hundreds of new contracts are signed this year, these contractors wonder if it will ever be resolved.

Stanislav Velikoredchanin, a civil rights lawyer whose shaggy beard, tattered shorts and sandals clash with the brazen toughness of the soldiers that he defends in court, reflected on the fundamental issues facing the Russian military in his living-room office. “The main problem in the military is financing” he said. “Anybody would be happy with 15,000 rubles, but they actually get a lot less. The army promised them big money, but many were not paid.”

Velikoredchanin has experience defending soldiers in civil cases concerning owed wages and the intricacies of draft policies.  In 1999, he published the book ABC’s for Recruits — a 400-page manual on the loopholes and inaccuracies within Russian draft-law that could be exploited by draft-dodgers. His work helped many young men avoid mandatory service during the troubled years since the war in Chechnya began.

The civil rights lawyer said that the financial problems, troop shortages, and the conflict in Chechnya have changed the army for the worse. He served in the Soviet army in the 1960s, and shares fond stories about his time there. He muses, “Officers used to be noble people. But in times of military action, generals don’t think about quality, they just want more recruits. This fills the army with some bad parts of humanity.”

Despite such criticisms of the draft regime, conservative military analysts do not question the importance of maintaining a standing military force at all costs. Dimitry Tziganok, director of the Institute for Political and Military Analysis in Moscow, placed complete faith in Putin’s military policies — treating the Chechen conflict like a patriotic exercise. While he admitted that current draft laws let too many rich or educated young men escape service, he believed in the idea of an all-inclusive draft.  

“The son of a street cleaner and the son of a general should both serve,” he argued. “That’s their duty to their country.”

Leaders like Tziganok see the professional soldier program as a return to the glory days Soviet-era army. However, in the alternative view, Russian soldiers have not changed; their duties have. The drawn-out conflict in Chechnya that has sent many young Russians running from the draft has also sapped the military’s strength.

Contractors may ease some of the problems, replacing scared boys with expensive hired guns, but the policy change avoids a much larger question. In Iraq and Chechnya, new guerillas spring out of the wreckage left behind by occupational forces in these contested nations. This anger perpetually renews insurgency forces, creating an endless demand for more soldiers on the other side, saddling traditional armies with dwindling public support and funding. The question remains for both Russian and United States military leaders: Is it possible to fix an army entangled in a long occupation?  

Night falls on Pushkinskaya Street

One lazy night last July, a couple of soldiers mingled with their civilian friends on the sidewalk of Pushkinskaya Street. Street cleaners in orange plastic vests smoked cigarettes in the night breeze. Rich kids parked their squat, black sedans on the sidewalk, blaring American hip-hop out open windows.

A pop ditty played on a transistor radio in a café, a military song that had become curiously popular over the summer. Pop star Leonid Agutin, backed by a rock and roll orchestra, sang:

I must serve like everybody
The train will take us to the border
Cheer up boys, we’re all soldiers now.

The simple song is belied by a complex reality. Every year hundreds of teenagers sneak out of service, Svetlana Arsenyevna Lozhkina collects letters from scared soldier-boys, contract soldiers beg for money, and Cossack soldiers lose the nationalistic fever burning in that song. Still, officials like Tziganok hold on to the stubborn patriotism of that anthem, dreaming of a streamlined occupational force.

As the visible strain on America’s overstretched military stokes rumors of an impending draft reinstatement, the grim reality of Russia’s war on terror might foreshadow the future of America. The Russian military has floundered in Chechnya for five years — and they won’t be leaving anytime soon. This doomed struggle burned out a once-powerful army.

In August, terrorists smashed all illusions of safety and control with a couple pounds of explosives. Insurgent fighters don’t need to build elaborate bases, stage complicated army drafts, or worry about missing wages. They are desperate, and can cripple rebuilding efforts for years. As that plane wreckage tumbled to earth outside of Rostov-on-Don, it reminded the whole world that these are new kinds of wars — wars that no traditional soldier can win.

The song never defined the “border” its boys are rushing to defend. This border might be the frontier between boys and men, street cleaners and generals, recruits in Rostov and politicians in Moscow; perhaps it’s also about that invisible, broken line that once kept war far away from this peaceful street.  

As the cheery tune ended, the soldiers wandered down Pushkinskaya Street.

STORY INDEX

This story was written with the support of Elena Gracheva and NYU’s Russian American Journalism Institute.

BOOKS >
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Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick
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Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia by David Remnick
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The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism by Tina Rosenberg
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NYU’s Russian American Journalism Institute
URL: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/rostov/

Russia’s Military Analysis
URL: http://warfare.ru/

Pravda’s English-Language Edition
URL: http://english.pravda.ru/

The Moscow Times
URL: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/indexes/01.html

In The Fray Contributor

What surprised Sabrina Wolf, when she came out to her American Indian grandmother, was the older woman’s lack of surprise.

“I started by telling her, ‘I’m different,’” the white-haired, soft butch activist recalls. And she had this look of, ‘Yeah, I know.’ And then she said, ‘There’s people like you at home [among Indians], and it’s a good thing.”

In addition, her grandmother advised her, “You’re gonna hear … a lot in your life, that’s it’s a bad thing, here (among white people), but it’s not a bad thing, and you’ll know about it later.’”

Wolf, a lifelong San Franciscan and “urban Indian” of both white and Native ancestry, was taken aback by her grandmother’s nonchalant response — a response which, she later learned, was representative of many Native groups. The idea that various American Indian tribes historically recognized and even gave special roles to untraditionally gendered tribe members was written about in 1968, in an academic article by Professor Sue-Ellen Jacobs. But its wider acceptance has come about more recently with the development of vocal groups of queer Indians who, in addition to mining Indian history for traces of their presence, have created a modern name for people like themselves: “two-spirit.”

Coined in 1990 at an annual conference of queer-identified Native people, the International Two-Spirit Gathering, the term “two-spirit,” encompasses various American Indian traditions of tolerance and celebration of gender-variant people. Unlike modern concepts of sexuality, two-spiritedness refers less to sexual orientation than to gender, reflecting the idea that in a single person, both masculine and feminine energies may reside. Prior to the conference, the concept was referred to by different terms in each tribe: For example, winkte in Lakota, a Sioux dialect, nádleehí in Navajo, or problematically called berdache, a French word sometimes translated as “slave boy.”

As an active member of the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS), a group organized in 1998 out of Gay American Indians (a product of 1970s San Francisco), Wolf now knows that two-spirits have a long and respected history within many North American tribes. With her own knowledge of two-spirit tradition, Wolf’s grandmother was receptive to the news that her granddaughter wasn’t straight. In contrast, Wolf hardly considered coming out to her white family, who seemed hostile to queer sexuality.  

Similarly, Miko Thomas, a Chickasaw member of BAAITS, originally from Oklahoma, was relieved by his Native father and grandfather’s nonchalance at his coming out —  a far cry from his white mother’s unease.

But not all Indians have been accepting. The tradition of giving respected roles to specially gendered tribe members came under attack from colonization and Christianization, was all-but erased in official histories until the 1950s, and still finds resistance today. Reclaiming two-spirit identity is an enterprise fraught with intertribal tensions — made still more difficult by the political endangerment of the Native community. And yet it offers American Indians a unique queer space, one both cozily familiar and excitingly new, organized along different principles than the mainstream, majority-white queer world.

Harlan Pruden, founder of the Northeast Two-Spirit Society, decorates his office with photos of people who are out, proud, and Indian.

Creating a two-spirit community

In New York City, the challenge of organizing two-spirit communities has been taken on by Harlan Pruden, the square-jawed and impeccably put-together founder of the newly-formed Northeast Two-Spirit Society.  Leaning back at his desk at New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Community Center, where he works as a coordinator of an anti-addiction program, Pruden muses on history, surrounded by splashy photos of drag queens and powwows.

“There was a time on this land in which we did have full equality,” he comments. “There was a gender analysis with an open acceptance of same-sex couples and relationships. There was a place for all of it, and I think that it’s a shame that it’s been ignored.” Pruden sees this history as crucial to current two-spirit identity. “There is a model there that can be reactivated, claimed and worked on”, he says, although he adds hastily, “There is no going back to a traditional model.”

Much of Pruden’s own knowledge of Native practices and attitudes regarding queer people comes from anthropologist Walter L. Williams’ 1986 book, The Spirit and the Flesh. Drawing on interviews in a variety of North American tribes, primarily in the United States, Williams highlights how, prior to colonial interference, two-spirit peoples were privileged to traverse the gender line by walking freely between gendered tents, for example, or taking on both types of gendered work — hunting and beadwork. In many cases, specific ritual roles, like holding the eagle’s wing or blessing marriages, were designated for two-spirit people. Compensation for ritual services meant that two-spirit people often prospered within their communities, and could use their financial wherewithal to support adopted children.

Pruden notes that the current LGBT movement traces its history from events that are largely European, Western, or relatively recent, like New York’s 1969 Stonewall riots, in which gay bar patrons protested a police raid. Of this limited perspective, Pruden says, “To me, that’s bullshit.”

And there is evidence to back him up. The 1980s and 1990s saw a host of publications and research on gay Native traditions. Yet, while Pruden hopes to raise awareness of Native communities’ traditional acceptance, tolerance, and even reverence of gender-variant people, and to draw strength from an authentic queer history, he has no illusions that a complete history can be uncovered, or should be.

According to Pruden, the history of acceptance toward queer identity in American Indian culture has been concealed by two major factors: colonial suppression of Native sexual tolerance, and Christian Indians’ rejection of traditional practice.

Thus, for most American Indians, identifying as two-spirit is a process of discovery, not an organic outgrowth of living in modern communities. Pruden explains that, “even if there is a reactivation or an honoring of two-spirit people, sometimes there’s not even an explanation because of the stigma associated with it.”

Pruden recalls being approached, after a lecture on his Woodlands Cree reservation in Northeastern Alberta, Canada, by a woman who said she finally understood why, during the men’s sweat lodge, the medicine men permitted her gay cousin to hold the eagle’s wing — a role of honor traditionally accorded to a two-spirit person. “[T]hat elder was reactivating and staying true to the tradition,” explains Pruden, “by finding someone who was queer-identified and giving him that high office.” Prior to Pruden’s talk on two-spirit traditions, however, the man’s cousin “had no point of reference, as a straight woman, to know what was happening before her.”

“You have to start looking for things that are incredibly subtle,” continues Pruden, “and if you’re an outsider, or it’s not of your tradition, you can’t even see what’s going on.”

Seeking suppressed traditions of tolerance

Jeannette Torres, the only female member in the nascent Northeast Two-Spirit Society, angrily recounts the violence visited upon two-spirit people in the colonial era. Torres is of both Peruvian and Puerto Rican heritage, but she identifies mainly with her Incan lineage, having been raised by her father’s Peruvian family who immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. With her pixie haircut, men’s clothing and lipstick, she seems an apt illustration of the gender play inherent in the two-spirit idea. Her black eyes flash as she describes the brutal treatment of two-spirit people by European colonists. “When these colonists came, British and Spanish, they practically decimated us,” she says. “The communities kind of hid what was left of their [queer] people — either hid them, or kept it on the down-low.”

On top of colonial persecution came Christian rejection of the two-spirit tradition. Miko Thomas was combing through his great-grandfather’s Bibles in his native Oklahoma when he found a sermon condemning a Choctaw stomp-dance leader who “either condoned homosexuality or he himself was homosexual.” For Thomas, it was proof-positive that two-spirits had existed previously. “This was the first time that I ever saw anything like this about my tribe.” Previously, a Christian elder in his tribe had told him, “‘There are no gay Indians. There were never any gay Indians.’”

Pruden likewise contends that he has “met elders that just lied to me — Christian elders, rather than traditionalist elders.” At an American Indian men’s health summit, Pruden says, he asked an elder what the word was for “the two-spirit folk. And he’s like, what is two-spirit? So I explained, and he goes, ‘I know what that is — the word is wiktigu.’ Wiktigu is a cannibalistic spirit … a way of keeping kids close to the camp.”

Harlan says his confusion cleared, however, when he heard the elder speak, claiming that the medicine bow is a symbol for the Christian cross, and that braided sweetgrass symbolized the holy Trinity. “I just dismissed what he said, and since then I went seeking actual, traditional elders.”

The lack of open, explicit dialogue about queerness in Native culture means that most two-spirit people, as Thomas laments, “have to go through a book to find where you’re represented as a gay Indian.” The dearth of research on specific aspects of two-spirit life can be frustrating; there’s a notable lack of information on two-spirit women, a gap that Pruden attributes to male privilege: “We live in a patriarchal society. Who has the choice and the power to sit around and write?” He points out that Walter L. Williams himself is a white gay man.

However, some two-spirit people have found that tolerance is nonetheless expressed in Native communities — if not through explicit practice, in quieter, everyday behavior.  Ben Geboe, one of the founders of Wewa and Barcheampe, a previous effort at two-spirit organizing in New York City, found that in his Native community, being queer set him apart but did not isolate him. Blue-eyed and pale-skinned, he is usually read, racially, as white, but is of both Sioux and Norwegian descent, and grew up on a reservation in Mission, South Dakota. Growing up, Geboe recalls, “People knew that I was very effeminate.” Though he was sometimes called winkte, a Sioux word that translates, roughly, as “woman’s way,” Geboe explains that “it was never derogatory, never meant as an insult. It was more a kind of joking, a subtle ribbing.” Both his Sioux and his Norwegian family were supportive of his coming out.

Torres shares Pruden’s frustration with the lack of research on women, and adds that she remains uneasy with some extinct two-spirit traditions, as uncovered in books like Williams’s. She explains that two-spirited peoples sometimes did not self-identify, but were designated as such. In a family of five boys, Torres posits, the youngest might be chosen to be two-spirit, and raised accordingly. Selection might be based on a child’s predilection to gender-bend, but it was nonetheless an elder’s selection.

Furthermore, the sexual aspects of some two-spirit traditions, not practiced today, are another source of discomfort for Torres. For instance, in some traditions, a male-to-female two-spirited person would be expected to take a formerly straight male lover. “This man considered it a privilege to be taken sexually or just picked, in general, by a two-spirit person as their partner —  it’s like being chosen by a god,” she explains. Sometimes this partnership was only temporary, its duration determined by the two-spirit partner, “And this man [the straight partner] would go back to being straight again.”

Torres is reluctant to revere such practices, which she finds incredible from a contemporary vantage point. “I can’t see taking on a straight lover even if it’s for a million dollars,” she muses. How could a straight man, she wonders, be expected to take on a gay one?

A gender emphasis – “it’s not about who you’re fucking”

Pruden acknowledges the tension between modern, sexuality-oriented identifications and the two-spirit concept. “It’s a gender theory — it has nothing to do with sexual orientation,” he says. “Some nations have as many as five distinct genders. Each has a role and a responsibility as well as a sphere within the context of the community.” However, because “today, it’s gay-identified Native Americans who are two-spirit identified . . . that component of gender is basically taken out in practice.”

For example, Pruden notes that while some two-spirits in reservation settings are taking up traditional two-spirit roles again, such as ceremonial cooking, healing, and telling sacred stories, they “do couple up with other two-spirited people in a contemporary way,” rather than taking a straight identified partner as was tradition. As Torres mentions, it’s not a change that most two-spirit people today would lament.

However, as Pruden points out, the traditional emphasis on gender, rather than sexuality, expands the discussion from sex to society. “It’s not about who you’re fucking — it has nothing to do with sex.” Unlike sexual orientation, gender “something that is distinctly ours — that we perform within the community,” argues Pruden. Two-spirit people, he says, must grapple with the question of “‘What is our role within the community at large?’ not just ‘Who am I sleeping with?’”

The emphasis upon a socially-situated role is, for many Native Americans, a welcome change from mainstream queer communities, which often focus on personal identity as separate from the political, cultural and spiritual spheres that form the foundation of two-spirit groups.

Due to the myriad modern threats to American Indian communities, such as marginalization, poverty, poor education, alcoholism and other diseases, Ben Geboe says, people who identify as two-spirit “are more concerned about the racial and ethnic issues than they are about gay and lesbian issues.” Issues such as gay marriage, argues Geboe, are petty compared to American Indians’ struggle to survive as an ethnic community. “We’re still fighting for land, we’ve still got these social problems, we have the highest incidence of disease,” he says.  

Thomas agrees that his primary allegiance, as an activist, is to the Native community. Growing up on his Oklahoma reservation, he explains, “this whole structure around you … says that you need to be politically active,” especially in the hostile political climate generated by anti-Native groups such as One Nation, which has advocated against tribal sovereignty.

Wolf agrees that “gay is second to our role as a two-spirit person walking in the world.” In her view, two-spirit identity is informed by the deep spirituality inherent in Native tradition. “A lot of two-spirit people view themselves as called to a kind of spiritual service,” she remarks.  

Wolf feels that this spiritual emphasis, compounded with the problems of “alcoholism and drug addiction on the rez”, lends two-spirit gatherings a different tenor than mainstream queer events. “Our meetings aren’t all about partying,” she says, noting that almost any two-spirit event will include a prayer or speech by an elder.

“There are people of color who are gay, and there are white people who are gay”

The communal concerns of two-spirit people can generate discomfort for them in mainstream queer communities. “The LGBT movement is fighting for equality,” argues Pruden, “but it’s equality in a model that is being basically driven by white privilege.”

Geboe perceives a racial divide in urban gay life: “You can be [white and] gay, live in Minnesota, and come to New York and feel that you’ve arrived in this mecca, and that everything in this world is there to promote your survival as a person.” In contrast, he continues, “You can come to New York as a Native American from South Dakota, and if you’re a person of color, immediately understand that there are two [queer] societies —there are people of color who are gay, and there are white people who are gay.”

Besides their shared political and spiritual concerns, two-spirit people take comfort in not being tokenized in Native settings, the way they frequently are in the larger queer community. Before Wewa and Barcheampe formed, Geboe explains, ”it seemed like we were doing more for the overall gay and lesbian community than we were doing for ourselves,” constrained to perform as ethnic “representatives” symbolizing the diversity of the gay community.

Wolf complains that “in the gay community at large, we’re sort of a novelty, or we don’t exist — because in mainstream society, we don’t exist.” Two-spirit gatherings are one of the few places where Harlan says he doesn’t feel a need to “take count” to determine his comfort level. Normally he says he asks himself, “Is this safe or is this not safe?  How many people of color are here?  How many other gays?” However, he feels, “When I go to these two-spirit gatherings, I never count. I don’t have to count. It’s very affirming.”

Two-spirit people also draw from experiences of poverty on the reservation that, Wolf notes, are typically far removed from the experience of white Americans. Thomas explains that, for rural gay Indians in particular, the cultural connection is essential as they seek new communities in larger cities. “For us it’s very important to connect with people we identify with. Growing up impoverished is something that unites us.”

Thomas reflects, “You can’t just joke around with Caucasian people, saying, ‘Yeah, when I was a little kid, I used to have to haul water, so we could take a bath.’” In his experience, such anecdotes are often met with disbelief or derision. For the approximately 1.2 million American Indians who live on reservations, however, “That’s just a part of our lives!”

Creating two-spirit culture across tribes

At the same time, the intertribal reach of two-spirit organizing presents its own problems. “Some tribes don’t have a tradition of tolerance of lesbian and gay activity,” Geboe remarks. Consequently, there are a number of Native people who view two-spirit traditions “as an outside thing coming in, and not as something that’s always been there and now is more visible.” He discovered this hurdle himself in an “uncomfortable confrontation” at a Native conference, in which “this elder got up and said that everything we [two-spirit organizers] were doing was wrong.” Intertribal respect, however, prevailed, and it was agreed that the tribes’ traditions differed.

Within two-spirit groups, tribal diversity can also be problematic, but, paradoxically, may produce greater solidarity. “When we come together,” Wolf explains, “we have different traditions around how you say the prayers, and how you have rituals and ceremonies. The interesting this is, when we get together and ask [those questions] we find that, you guys may do this little thing a little bit different” but there’s a basic “connectedness.” In a way, she remarks, “we’re creating two-spirit identity all the time.”

At a time when the queer community on the whole is grappling with its priorities and considering new privileges such as marriage, military service, and adoption, two-spirit organizations like Pruden’s offer an alternative model of queer empowerment.

Reflecting on two-spirit and mainstream gay communities, Geboe summarizes the difference: “The gay way,” he says, ”is that you become gay, you live in the gay community and you do things that identify you with the gay community. The two-spirited way is that you’re a Native American first, and that’s your culture, but there’s also this gayness. But it’s integrated with your culture. It’s something you don’t leave to become.”

Author’s note
Tribal names have been chosen in accordance with the preferred terms of those interviewed. For the purposes of this article, the terms ‘American Indian’, ‘Native American’, and ‘Native’ have been used interchangeably to describe persons descended from the original, tribally-organized peoples of North and South America.

In this article, the term ‘queer’ is used to describe all people who either do not identify as straight, do not identify as the same gender as their biological sex at birth, or both.

STORY INDEX >

The Northeast Two-Spirit Society meets on the 2nd Wednesday of each month, from 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at New York City’s LGBT Center.

BOOKS >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spiritualityby Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, Sabine Lang
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0252066456

Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America
by Will Roscoe
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0312224796

Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology
Edited by Will Roscoe
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=031203475x

Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture                     by Walter Williams
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0807046159

ORGANIZATIONS >

Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits
URL: http://www.baaits.org
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center
URL:http://www.gaycenter.org

Northwest Two-Spirit Society
URL:http://www.nwtwospiritsociety.org/index.html

“

In The Fray Contributor

The OSU College Republicans registration tent.

In a 200 seat classroom at The Ohio State University, before an American flag tacked to the chalkboard, the College Republicans overflow into the aisles. Their meeting opens with a recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, during which one member yells “under GOD!” emphasizing the controversial phrase on which the Supreme Court avoided passing judgment this past June.

A screen drops down from the ceiling and the room goes dark. A trailer begins for the new anti-Michael Moore documentary “FahrenHYPE 9/11.” There are cheers and laughs. The Republicans plan on filling a 600 seat room for a screening of the film five days before the election.

Most of the meeting, though, is dedicated to plans to counter and ridicule the Democrats’ efforts. For vice-presidential candidate John Edward’s visit, the College Republicans plan on attending the rally with a pair of giant flip-flops in tow. And in response to a question posed by an audience member about the legality of driving people to the polls on Election Day, one officer replies, “I’m sure [driving people to the polls] is [legal]. I’ve heard of Democrats paying homeless people with liquor to vote. I’m pretty sure that’s not legal.”  

No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio and its 20 electoral votes. While the two candidates’ numerous visits since March of this year, (15 for Bush, 25 for Kerry) show they are paying attention to the battleground state that has lost many manufacturing jobs over the past several years, neither seems to be courting the most passionate and politically impressionable demographic in the electorate: students.

Perhaps this neglect is reasonable. The large numbers and ideological fervor that students bring to the table are weakened by poor voter turnout. 25 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 25 turned out in 2000, compared with 66 percent of voters between the ages of 65 and 74. Yet Democratic-aligned groups like Vote Mob, ACT Now, Hip Hop Teen Vote, MoveOn.org, and Howard Dean’s grassroots group Democracy for America have poured unprecedented time and money into organizing the nation’s students for the 2004 vote, while, on the other side, College Republicans seem to be bearing the largest part of the burden. Visits to The Ohio State University in Columbus, and Miami University, 35 miles north of Cincinnati, reveal campus conservatives feeling underappreciated in the state that, according to conventional wisdom, Bush must win to get re-elected.

Students crowd the Republican Voter registration tent.

Outnumbered by Hollywood

Smack in the middle of Columbus, the large Ohio State University, with an undergraduate population of some 37,000, is anything but picturesque. Located near a litany of tattoo parlors and coffee houses, fast-food restaurants and second-hand music shops, there are large areas of grass where students lounge in the sun studying, reading, and talking politics. Copies of OSU’s student paper The Lantern blow in the wind. The front page reads: “Political Parties, Voter registration groups reach out to voting students.”

Nearby, on the corner of Neil and 17th Avenue, the OSU College Republicans are working a voter registration tent to help take back Franklin County, which narrowly went to Gore in 2000. A quick and unscientific poll of 20 random people on the quad suggests that John Kerry appeals to 55 percent of the voters, Bush only 35 percent, and 10 percent remain undecided. While anyone can register, many of those who sign up to vote at this tent take a Bush/Cheney “04 placard with them and tuck it under an arm or roll it up into a tube on their way to class. Several shift workers comment on the lack of animosity.

Zack Blau, tall, fair-haired, and wearing glasses, explains that his efforts to register voters have been met with some hostility, but not as much as he expected. “One or two people walk by saying ‘fuck Bush, or go Kerry.’ Not too bad. Every once in a while, you get a guy who wants to start an argument, but that’s about it.” The College Democrats’ table, usually set up nearby, has been absent in the last few days.

Eric Little, however, does not share Blau’s optimism. He wears a red-striped Polo shirt and jeans and has a Bush/Cheney sticker secured to his left breast-pocket. He is thin and obviously tired. Having worked for the campaign for almost a year, the labor has taken its toll. He is grateful for the opportunity but expresses confusion over what seems like a lack of involvement from the rest of the campaign. The Franklin County Republicans charged OSU Republicans with the responsibility of registering 2000 new voters before the October 4 deadline, and following up with them in the final days before the election.

“We are given a huge task and not much money to do it,” he says. “If it were more important to get people turning out to vote than just registering them, then you think they would give us a bigger chunk of the budget.”

For Little, the task of competing with the numerous democratic groups is tough. “The Dems have Vote Mob and Hip Hop Summit. We aren’t given much money and we don’t have any celebrities. We are outnumbered and outspent by people and groups that are not students and who aren’t affiliated with the university.”

The huge task is made even bigger, Little says, by the harassment he receives from anti-Bush groups. Chairman of Buckeyes for Bush and a member of the College Republicans, Eric often takes the lion’s share of the labor, working the voter registration tables when others are unable or unwilling. “There’s no greater frustration than working [a voter registration table], doing something we think is a public service and somebody runs by and swears at you.”

His frustration is compounded by a rumor he’s heard from several people that Vote Mob is discarding the registrations of declared Republicans. “These kinds of rumors breed apathy toward the election,“ says Little. “People end up thinking that politics is this corrupt animal and that we’re going to end up throwing away their forms as a result.”

Little’s feeling that the Democrats are outgunning the Republicans on campus by using “Hollywood” influence is supported by the visible presence of celebrities at student-led events. The OSU College Democrats recently held a rally attended by Kerry“s stepson Andre Heinz, actress Claire Danes, and Boston Public star Rashida Jones. That same week John Edwards visited Columbus to attend a debate-watching event, which was also promoted by the OSU College Democrats.

More recently, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., spoke to a crowd of roughly 300 in OSU’s Campbell Hall. He received applause when he said that the Bush administration’s assault on the Clean Air Act has caused 10 times as many deaths every year as the September 11 attacks attacks, and got laughs when he described the scientists that the administration depends on as “biostitutes.”

And on October 28, just five days before the election, Bruce Springsteen accompanied Kerry on one last swing through the swing state. The Lantern reported that 40,000 people attended the campus concert.

One of many posters for anti-Bush concerts and rallies.

When Buchanan isn’t enough

Over at Miami University, 35 miles north of Cincinnati in Butler County, which went to Bush in 2000, the political atmosphere is more subdued. Some 15,000 undergrads at what is considered a “public Ivy“ don’t see the large public rallies and visible recruiting effort on the part of Democrats and Republicans at places like OSU. Rather, Miami students seem almost closeted about politics. Anyone wanting to join a political discussion or club must actively hunt for one.

Despite the generally reserved and conservative bent of the school, College Republicans don’t feel that their views are always respected.

For example, several students have complained that Dr. Laura Neack, a professor in the political science department, has a pro-Kerry approach that stifles criticism. “Dr. Neack has said in class that if Bush is re-elected, she is almost certain there will be a draft,” says student Matt Nolan.

According to Nolan, there was no mention of the fact that the bill to reinstate the draft, House Resolution 163, was written in 2003 by Democratic Congressman Charles Wrangle of New York, and that the bill was defeated in the house by a vote of 402-2. Nolan also says that when anyone who supports the President attempts to divulge such information in class, they are told to sit down and be quiet.  

When contacted, Dr. Neack refused to comment.

Miami College Republicans Steve Szaranos and Nathan Colvin, (president of the group), say they are frustrated by the way material is presented by liberal professors. “It’s like [professors think] “I’m your elder and I’m going to bestow this knowledge on you. You conservatives don’t know what you’re talking about,”” says Szaranos.

But what really irritates them is the way, in their estimation, they were shut out of the selection of guests for a debate on October 4. Pat Buchanan, who has publicly opposed the Iraq War, was chosen to debate Andrew Cuomo, a decision that Colvin feels was unfair. “With the Iraq war as the hot button of this campaign, to have a ‘conservative’ that is against the war is an injustice to the students,” Colvin says.

Colvin was able to lobby successfully to have the Bush twins visit campus on October 20. But then Howard Dean spoke on campus the following day. To even the score, Colvin and the College Republicans booked Ann Coulter, conservative provocateur for October 28. Although Coulter is a heavyweight in the conservative circles, she’s no match for the Boss in drawing crowds.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTORS >

POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS >

College Republican National Committee
URL: http://www.crnc.org/default1.asp

College Democrats of America
URL: http://www.collegedems.com/

In The Fray Contributor

Children of Wasa King

In a ramshackle school house deep in the jungle, angry members of the Mayangna community, Nicaragua’s oldest indigenous tribe, plot their next move in the fight to reclaim their land. Lumber prospectors and Mestizo farmers, with or without land deeds, have been cutting into large sections of the once lush forest, and the Mayangnas, long considered the caretakers of Nicaragua’s rain forest, have had enough. “I’m tired of talking,” says Luis Beltran Alfaro, a land trustee in Mayangna’s second capital, Wasa King. “We’ve talked and talked and nothing gets done. We have to take matters into our own hands.”

Thirty-two native inhabitants of Wasa King, all men, stand shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter of a largely open classroom, stepping forward one at a time to vent their frustration. “We want to kick them out peacefully,” Emilio Fendley says of the 150 Mestizo families settled nearby. “But we can’t; they won’t go.”

Mestizo farmers have been coming to the region for over 50 years now, but it is the brutality of the latest migration, the ones who have come in the last five years, that has triggered the rage of the Mayangnas. Despite a 2003 law that grants ownership of undeeded land to indigenous groups, trees continue to fall to the new Mestizos’ tactics of slash-and-burn agriculture. The Mayangnas fear that the forest, their traditional hunting ground, will be lost.

“They come and see some forest, and think, ‘nobody is here, we can farm here,’” says Fendley. “But we are here. This is our forest.” He bangs the large wooden stick he holds in his hand on the wood-plank floor. “The only way left to us,” he concludes, “is to spill blood.”

A group of Mayangnas meet in the school house, including Luis Beltran Alfaro,(far left in khakis), Emilio Fendley (in red pants), and Ismal Milado (seated in middle).

Forgotten Peoples

Wasa King is located in the heart of the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN). Hennington Tathum Perryman, a high-ranking government official in the RAAN, says that the central government’s interest in the region goes as only as far as the gold, lumber, and fish that the RAAN is rich in.

Perryman says that central government’s indifference to the problems in Wasa King stems from a deep cultural and physical divide between the RAAN and the Pacific side of Nicaragua, home to the country’s capital, Managua.

The RAAN is home not only to a large population of Mayangnas and Miskitus but also to a dwindling number of Black Creoles. None of these three groups is found in any great number on the Pacific side, and they feel that the central government has done nothing to protect their cultures from the continual encroachment of the Spanish-speaking majority represented by the central government.

“No president of Nicaragua will ever care about the Atlantic,” says Perryman in his thick Creole accent. “80 percent of the population of Nicaragua lives in the Pacific, so that’s where they get all of their votes.”

In many ways, Wasa King is to RAAN what RAAN is to Nicaragua: a remote community that feels its unique culture is being threatened while an indifferent government looks on. The nearest town, Rosita, has only one truck that can make the arduous trek over the gutted dirt road leading into Wasa King. The muddy, jostling drive is so hostile to outsiders that the people of Wasa King seldom encounter foreign visitors. When someone does manage to make the trek, throngs of half-naked children surround the truck and guide the visitor past scattered thatch huts, over the narrow suspension bridge, and into the center of town. There, a weathered clapboard church that was once painted white stands prominently, flanked by a long, single-story wooden structure that serves as school, community center, and housing complex.

In January 2003, the government passed a law apparently intended to benefit indigenous people in places like Wasa King. The wording of Law 445, which was supposed to stop the onslaught of destructive migration into the forests, mandates a surprising degree of protection for indigenous land claims, granting the Mayangnas and the Miskitus, the region’s other indigenous group, a right to all forest land that had not already been legally deeded. However, the law is poorly enforced, which means that Mayangnas in Wasa King still have no real means of protecting the forest from the Mestizos.

Children play outside the Wasa King classroom.

A Lumber Mogul and an Easy Target

The Mestizo farmers are not the only ones with a stake in RAAN land. Kamel Ben, a lumber prospector, has laid claim to land near Wasa King. The mere mention of Ben’s name brings a torrent of abuse from Mayangnas. Ismal Milado, a 73-year-old who has come to the classroom to hear how the younger members of his community plan to fight for their land, calls Ben “Osama bin Laden’s brother.” Many in the room nod in agreement.

Ben and the Mayangnas of Wasa King are in the midst of a long legal battle that will determine who is the rightful owner of the 3000 hectares Ben currently harvests. The court has been hearing the case for two years, and it may be at least another year before a verdict is reached.

Pulling up to a coffee shop in Rosita on a new Enduro motorbike, Ben seems more congenial than evil. His sharp Middle Eastern features and graying moustache give him the appearance of a younger Omar Sharif. Puffing on Marlboro Reds, Ben speaks openly about all of his dealings in the region. He dismisses the bin Laden accusation with a laugh. “You see,” he says, “this is the kind of mentality that we are dealing with.”

Ben’s good nature is surprising given the danger he faces in everyday life. Having Middle Eastern features in a region where foreigners are about as common as politicians from Managua makes him an easy target.

“I’ve had two death threats,” says Ben, his signature smile retreating from his face. “I was eating my dinner when the owner of the restaurant rushed up to me going, ‘There’s a whole mob of them coming up the street. They’re going to kill you.’”  His smile begins to resurface as he recalls, “It was not the time to negotiate, so I escaped through the back door.”

Ben says that the Mayangnas’ hatred for him has more to do with their interest in the lumber on his land than with protecting the forest. “There is no economic activity here, so they want money from the wood.” He points out that four Mayangnas have already been arrested for illegally cutting down trees. Government officials in Puerto Cabezas confirm that a “wood mafia” is operating with little restraint in the region, poaching mahogany and other less valuable trees. The mafia is said to pay indigenous people good money to cut trees for them. Ben claims that such activities undercut the image of the Mayangnas as stewards of the rain forests. “It is false,” Ben says of the Mayangnas’ good reputation for environmentalism. “Absolutely false.”

The author (right) with Kamel Ben.

Dwindling Patience and Looming Disaster

The slow speed of the litigation has many in the region worried. As patience with the court proceedings wears thin, the prospect of the Mayangnas following through on their threats increases. No one in the area is taking those threats lightly. In Layasiksa, a Miskitu community 90 kilometers southwest of Wasa King, Misikitus’ anger over a Mestizo settlement on their land exploded on February 7 of this year, when some 100 Miskitus marched on to the settlement. Mestizo homes were burned to the ground, and a gun fight erupted. When it was over, two Mestizo farmers and one Miskitu had been shot dead.

Hurtado Garcia Baker, the governor of RAAN and leader of the largely Miskitu YATAMA party, warns that what happened in Layasiksa could happen again in Wasa King. According to Baker, “The Mayangnas’ defense of their land will be even more fierce that in Layasiksa. There are eighty men there waiting to use their machetes.”

The atmosphere of Garcia Baker’s office lacks the stuffy formality typical of North American politics. Government officials and ordinary citizens mingle in the hallway outside his open door and spill into the office itself. Garcia Baker prefers to talk while standing or sitting on the large sofa in one corner of the room while his desk sits idly against a back wall.

When asked about the President of Nicaragua, Enrique Bolanos, Baker’s face contorts as though tasting a bitter lemon. “[Bolanos] has not given one dollar to implement Law 445,” Baker complains. “It is part of the central government’s strategy. They didn’t like the law, so they won’t give the money needed to enforce it.”

Baker believes the solution to the Wasa King situation hinges on the enforcement of the law. But the Bolanos government, he contends, has little incentive to enforce a law that would make it harder for them to herd land-seeking Mestizos into the RAAN. The scarcity of land in the country has created a huge population of landless Mestizo’s roaming the Pacific countryside in desperation, and the government simply does not know what to do with them. The Nicaraguan government would ordinarily never have given the indigenous people of RAAN such powers, says Baker. But the law was passed under political pressure stemming from a corruption scandal involving former president Arnoldo Aleman. “Once Bolanos got into power, he couldn’t believe that such a law had passed, but it did, and he couldn’t do anything about it.”

Garcia Baker seems neither to know nor care where the Mestizos end up. “They’re not from here,” he says. “So they are not our problem.” Rather, Baker has made it his mission to demarcate all of his region’s land in order to grant legal claims to the indigenous people. Once that happens, the protections of Law 445 will begin to take effect. “We’re going map our own land,” Garcia Baker says, “even if Bolanos won’t send us a cent.”

Diplaced Mestizo farmers compete for land and raise the ire of RAAN locals.

The Displaced as Displacers

The massive influx of Mestizos into the RAAN has made them the largest single group in the region — and the least popular. But even though the locals see them as aggressive invaders, the migrants claim to be no less victims of displacement than the indigenous peoples resisting them.

Despite their numbers, Mestizo farmers have little representation in the government. Newly arrived Mestizos are largely uneducated, very poor, and in contrast to the Miskitus, politically unorganized. Many end up razing the forest for cattle fields because the crops of beans and corn that they grew on the Pacific side are not suited to the rainforest’s wet climate.

In Susun, a Mestizo settlement 20 kilometers outside Wasa King, Mayor Noel Palacio Garcia Delgado gathers together a group of Mestizos who have recently arrived in the RAAN. They are thin, their clothes are worn, and their rotting teeth lack the silver caps that more prosperous farmers display. Two women, one with a newborn, and eight men sit before Delgado. They are slow to answer questions, finding it hard to comprehend the level of hatred that the Mayangna in Wasa King feel for them.

“We don’t know where else to go,” says Pedro Antonio Espinoza, a 48-year-old father of nine. “Our lands [on the Pacific side] have all dried up, and we need to feed ourselves. If the don’t want us here, then just tell us where we should go.”

Espinoza bows his head and looks to the floor. When the threat of Mayangna violence is brought up, he speaks while still looking down: “We are worried,” Espinoza says, slowly looking up. “They are the ones that have the guns.”

Miro Brcic provided translation help. The writer would like to thank Tom and Lois McGrail for their contributions, which made this article possible.

STORY INDEX

PLACES >

The Autonomous Regions of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast
URL: http://www.yorku.ca/cerlac/URACCAN/Coast.html

INDIGENOUS RIGHTS ISSUES >

The Nicaragua Network
URL: http://www.nicanet.org/archive.php

Mayanna People’s Statement on Proposed Sustainable Development Project in Nicaragua

URL: http://nativenet.uthscsa.edu/archive/nl/9704/0086.html

”Land Grab In Nicaragua,” commentary by Bill Weinberg, Toward Freedom, 1998
URL: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/41/229.html

In The Fray Contributor

Go to part one

Building solidarity among women

Women’s organizations may offer the best chance for Rwanda’s future. Avega Agahozo has a project in the southern city of Butare, involving orphans, and both genocide widows and the wives of genocidaires  who make traditional baskets to sell at craft shops. Countless other associations have similar projects targeting rural women.

I met Laurence Mbarishimana, a female farmer in her 30s, on a steep roadside in Ruhengeri. She said she has benefited from an association called Twisungane, which brings together Tutsi and Hutu widows and helps them with agriculture. “Before the genocide I must admit I was very ignorant,” she said quietly. “Before I used to harvest 30 kilos of beans, but now I harvest 50 kilos.” Mbarishimana also thought that the two groups could coexist: “There is no reason that people should not live together, especially if one group is willing to ask forgiveness.”

Rwanda’s violent history may even provide common ground for women. “Now Rwandan women know that all women can be raped,” said Marie Immaculee Ingabire of Pro Femmes. “We have to build solidarity between us because we are targets in the same way in a conflict situation.”

After the parliamentary elections last fall, Rwanda now boasts the highest percentage of women in parliament of any country in the world (48.4 percent). Some Rwandan women are still skeptical that this will make a difference in their own daily lives.

Agnes Musabyimana, 33, is another woman farmer in Ruhengeri. Clutching a leather-bound Bible as she left a prayer meeting, she told me that in her village, women have unhappy marriages and live hard lives. She said that there are an equal number of male and female leaders, but there hasn’t been any change. “They’re not working for our benefit,” she said flatly. “It’s for their own benefit.”

Nevertheless, Ingabire felt that the recently elected women in parliament would be subject to pressure from their constituents. “This is very important for us, because now even these women who are in parliament, if they are not able to make changes, we can change them,” she said.

Moreover, she said the fact that so many of those left to rebuild the country in the wake of the genocide were women has been important in changing traditional social attitudes.

“I don’t know that genocide can have a good side, but I think that because of the genocide, the mentality now has changed in this country. Because Rwandans saw that now women are able to do something, are able to build the country. So they have to give them the opportunity,” Ingabire said.

In the end, many survivors are not sure that the much-vaunted reconciliation is likely or even desirable right now, but they hold it out as a possibility for the future. Aurea Kayiganwa of Avega Agehozo said tolerance and justice must come first. “It’s very hard for us, to lose your family and be asked to make unity and reconciliation. We can’t imagine that, but we do it for our children.”

Lake Kivu, on Rwanda’s western border.

Telling the world

On a hill above Kibuye, the church of Home St. Jean overlooks the luxuriant green shores of Lake Kivu. Its stonework and beautiful stained glass windows are unusual for a church in this part of the world. It is such an idyllic place that it is difficult to believe the horrors that happened here. But directly in front of the church is something it shares with so many other Rwandan churches: a genocide memorial. The memorial is simple, several concrete tombs with new wreaths on them, and a sign saying that several thousand people were killed here in 1994. I saw the church and memorial before I met Mbezuanda, so I had no idea of the life and death struggle that had gone on inside.

When I was done interviewing Mbezuanda, we stepped out of her house and took photos. As we posed I put my arm around her shoulder. I didn’t realize that such a simple gesture would mean so much to her. She grinned and clasped my hand. We walked down the steep, red dirt path to the car, with her holding my hand the entire way. I was used to seeing women hold hands with each other in Africa, so I didn’t feel strange. As we got to the bottom of the hill, Mbezuanda was still smiling and she remarked that holding hands with me reminded her of her husband, and how they used to hold hands.

I realized at that moment that Mbezuanda’s isolation was not merely social, but physical. The immense stigma of being HIV positive, added to the strange position of being a living reminder of events that many would rather not think of, meant that Mbezuanda probably had little physical contact with anyone but her orphans. It was a harsh and unexpected situation for a woman living in one of the world’s most densely populated countries.

On my way back to Kigali, I passed the church again. After hearing Mbezuanda’s harrowing account, it now looked sinister. Though Mbezuanda’s husband and children were in those tombs, she was not. Instead, she was telling the world about what had happened to her, and however difficult the task, it meant that the genocide did not succeed.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
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The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa
by Bill Berkeley.
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0465006418

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow we will be Killed with Our Families
by Philip Gourevitch.
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When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda
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A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide
by Linda Melvern.
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A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
by Samantha Power.
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The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide
by Gerard Prunier.
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Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda
by Peter Uvin.
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ORGANIZATIONS >

Frontline: The Triumph of Evil
URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/

Human Rights Watch 1999 Report: Leave None to Tell the Story
URL: http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/

Rwanda 10
URL: http://www.rwanda10.org

The Rwanda Project: Through the Eyes of Children
URL: http://www.rwandaproject.org

The Survivors Fund
URL: http://www.survivors-fund.org

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Skulls at Nyamata genocide memorial.

Mbezuanda (who only gave her first name) is a tall, frail woman who often holds her jaw because of a toothache. She is one of the few Tutsis in the small town of Kibuye, who survived the Rwandan genocide 10 years ago. But as with so many other survivors of the massacres, her story does not end happily.

Now, at age 47, she lives in a mud-and-wattle shack with a dirt floor, caring for seven orphans. She has HIV and is getting sicker by the day. Unable to work, she is often short of money to buy food, and the children pick wild guavas and passion fruits to sell in the market. Through an organization that helps genocide widows, she receives free medicines to treat her secondary infections, although they cannot yet afford to give her anti-retrovirals to treat her HIV.

In the end, Mbezuanda regrets having survived.

“When I sit down and think about what happened,” she says unhappily, “I think the best solution is suicide.”

A history of holocaust

Rwanda erupted onto the international scene in April 1994 with a lightning-quick genocide that observers estimate killed tens of thousands of people in the first five days. In the West, the conflict was initially thought to be a civil war, but it soon became clear that it was an attempt by the Hutu majority to eliminate the Tutsi minority. Though media outlets have often described the violence as tribal, scholars to this day disagree about the origins of the Tutsis and Hutus and whether or not they constitute different tribal or ethnic groups, especially since they share the same language, customs, and religion.

The two categories of people became solidified in the 1930s, when Rwanda was under Belgian control and the colonial government issued each Rwandan an identity card specifying his or her “ethnicity.” The Belgians also used Tutsis as overseers of exploited Hutu plantation workers, thereby fueling a lasting sense of resentment among Hutus, and a growing Hutu Power movement. When the country gained independence in 1962, it became a Hutu dictatorship. Every decade or so there were outbreaks of violence, mostly against Tutsis. These episodes were often driven by events in neighboring Burundi, which was dominated by a harsh Tutsi government.

By the late 1980s, there were over 1 million Rwandan Tutsis in exile, many of them in Zaire and Uganda. In late 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) — an army of Rwandan exiles made up of mostly Tutsi, but including some Hutus who grew up in Uganda and opposed the Rwandan status quo — invaded Rwanda from Uganda.

A civil war ensued, and over the next few years, anti-Tutsi rhetoric escalated while killings of Tutsis became increasingly common. In August 1993, President Juvenal Habyarimana signed a peace agreement with the RPF, establishing a plan for a transitional government and eventual multiparty elections. A small U.N. peacekeeping force was deployed in the country.

But the wobbly peace did not hold. On the night of April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali, the Rwandan capital. It is still not known who shot down the plane, but many scholars believe the perpetrators were probably disgruntled extremist elements within the Habyarimana government. In any case, radio propaganda advocating extermination of Tutsis had intensified through the early days of April, with broadcasts warning of big events to happen on the 7th or 8th. Within an hour of the plane’s destruction, roadblocks were set up in and around Kigali, and Tutsis attempting to flee were slaughtered.

The genocide continued for three months. Many of the killings were carried out by the ruthless Hutu militias known as the Interahamwe. Armed with machetes, spears and occasionally guns, they went door to door, looking for Tutsis or Tutsi sympathizers. In some places, they were given lists of Tutsis by local mayors or politicians, and set out each day to make sure each and every one was exterminated.

The small and under-equipped U.N. peacekeeping force was unable to help, and Western governments were reluctant to intervene in what they insisted was a civil war. Finally, a French peacekeeping force arrived in late June. By then, most of the killings had already taken place. By early July, the RPF gained control of Kigali. The old regime fled, taking close to a million Hutu refugees with it into Zaire. A new government consisting of the RPF and some Hutu opposition figures was sworn in on July 19, 1994.

The generally accepted estimate of the death toll is 800,000 people, including Tutsis and moderate Hutus who opposed the genocide. This April, however, the Rwandan government said that 937,000 bodies have been identified, and more are expected to be found.

I went to Rwanda in April for the 10th anniversary of the genocide, looking for evidence of reconciliation. I had read some hopeful articles about development projects involving Hutu and Tutsi widows rebuilding their shattered communities, but I found much more rebuilding than actual reconciliation.

The government of Paul Kagame — first elected in 2000 and re-elected in September 2003 — has attempted to eliminate old divisions and create a new national identity, an idea many Rwandans have responded to positively. But national identity and national reconciliation are two different things. And many people question whether it is appropriate to talk of reconciliation when so many of the killers are unremorseful, and the survivors — particularly women — are languishing in poverty and hopelessness. The reality in Rwanda today is that people live together, mostly in peace, because there is simply no other choice.

Inside Nyamata church. The altar still bears a cloth with bloodstains from the killings. The bones behind the altar were to be reburied in a ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide.

Haunting memories

I traveled to Kibuye, in western Rwanda, to find survivors and possibly perpetrators, because I had read that 90 percent of the Tutsis in this little town were killed. Mbezuanda was walking along the main road as I was negotiating with a local woman to rent a car and driver for the day. When she heard I was interested in speaking with survivors, the businesswoman brought Mbezuanda over.

Mbezuanda was known in the town, it seemed, for having given testimony to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Because she did not want strangers to hear what happened to her, and said that she was terrified of crowds because of what they did in 1994, we drove around for nearly an hour looking for safe places, and finally, ended up at Mbezuanda’s house.

My translator and I sat on wooden benches in Mbezuanda’s hut. It was dark inside, lit only by the open doorway. Pages torn from newspapers, mostly ads for prayer ceremonies featuring born-again Christian preachers, adorned the earthen walls. She introduced her oldest orphan, a young woman who appeared to be in her late teens and was taking care of the other children. On Mbezuanda’s instructions, the young woman lifted up her batik skirt to show us a huge wound stretching the length of her thigh. The orphan was raped and attacked with a spear during the genocide, Mbezuanda said.

Mbezuanda said that she and her family had first sought refuge in the town stadium, where the local authorities told them to gather in the first few days after the plane crash. When the Interahamwe attacked the crowds in full view of those authorities, Mbezuanda and her husband ran to the church of Home St. Jean, a few kilometers up the hill from the stadium. But Home St. Jean was not safe either. The Interahamwe threw tear gas and grenades into the church, and Mbezuanda’s husband and twin children were killed. Hours later, she found herself lying under the bodies of others who, like them, had hoped for safety in the church.

As she tells it, Bible still in hand, Mbezuanda crawled out, accompanied by a young girl. But outside the church they ran into a group of armed men. They raped and brutally murdered the girl while Mbezuanda got away by paying them off. However, there was another group just behind them, and they tortured and gang-raped her too.

Left and then threatened by a new group of armed Hutu men, Mbezuanda was rescued by a neighbor, an old Hutu woman, who told the attackers that she was already dead. The woman hid Mbezuanda and several other Tutsis in a trench at the back of her banana plantation. When the Interahamwe came looking for Mbezuanda, following rumors she wasn’t dead, she and the others were forced to spend three days in the latrine pit. Finally, the RPF took control of the town and Mbezuanda emerged from her hiding place.

The interior of Ntarma church. This church, now a memorial, was left largely as it was found after the massacre.

The emptiness and the echo

The outlook for Mbezuanda and many others of the estimated 400,000 Tutsi survivors in Rwanda is bleak. Though the country of just over 8 million has been physically rebuilt, and more than 500,000 exiles have returned, survivors’ lives are fraught with difficulties. Not surprisingly, women — who make up a majority of the post-war population — have borne the heaviest burden. Many complain that they are not receiving any aid, even though foreign development organizations and donors are active in Rwanda.

Poverty especially afflicts women survivors. In a country where the average per capita annual income is just $252, survivors such as Mbezuanda struggle to care for orphaned children.

“A lot of them live in housing that is held together literally by a nail, so they don’t know what will happen to their children once they’re gone, and that’s the greatest worry,” said Elizabeth Onyango, program coordinator of African Rights, a human rights organization that has been collecting testimonies about the genocide and its aftermath.

Moreover, the thousands of children born of rape have grown and are making greater financial demands on the family, requiring school materials and clothing. Worse yet, Onyongo added, they are asking about their fathers. For those saved the burden of mouths to feed, loneliness and emotional distress are common.

“You have people who had eight children and they have nothing now,” said Onyango, “just the emptiness and the echo.”

Mamerthe Karuhimbi, another survivor, struggles with the void that the genocide left in her life. She was 19 in 1994, and lost all of her family except for her mother. She remains traumatized by her memories of horrible killings and of her own rape; like most survivors, she has not received psychological counseling. A decade later, she has a boyfriend, but has never married and has no children of her own — unusual for a Rwandan woman who is nearly 30.

When I asked her how she feels about her life now, she answered, “There is no life, because I don’t have a family or children.”

Karuhimbi has also never held a steady job, and has no hope of finding one in Nyamata, the small town where she lives. Though it is only one hour outside Kigali, its one dusty main street lined with decrepit concrete shop-fronts lends it the feel of a dying frontier town. As in most Rwandan towns, there is little commercial life: no supermarkets, no restaurants — just a gas station and a traditional market.

Karuhimbi at least lives in an area where there are other survivors, though she didn’t know of any local survivors’ organizations or support groups. In some places, the vast majority of Tutsis were killed, and the survivors have very little company. Human rights organizations have reported cases of intimidation and even a few murders of witnesses. But it seems likely that most intimidation is subtler, and goes unreported. Even here, like other survivors, Karuhimbi was afraid to speak in public about her experiences. Rwanda is a crowded place, and every time we stopped somewhere, people gathered and stared. Finally, we drove down the road to an empty lot past the gas station, and Moses, my taxi driver who doubled as a translator, periodically shooed away the groups of children that gathered around us.

Prolonged genocide

HIV is the most recent time bomb to hit women survivors such as Mbezuanda. In a recent report, Amnesty International stated that at least 250,000 women were raped during the genocide, and that 70 percent of the female survivors are estimated to have been infected with HIV

Some believe those numbers are an underestimate. “We are sure that 90 percent of Tutsi women were raped,” said Marie Immaculee Ingabire, a spokesperson for the women’s organization Pro Femmes Twese Hamwe. “We are sure that [the women] have not all told,” she noted, citing the immense stigma around rape in conservative Rwanda. But now, Ingabire added, testing positive for HIV is spurring some women to talk about their experiences.

African Rights recently published a report focusing on 201 women survivors in Rwanda and Bujumbura, Burundi. All had been raped, and many were HIV positive. Others did not want to get tested because they felt their situation was hopeless anyway. “A lot of them see themselves as dead already,” Onyango explained. “It’s sort of a prolonged genocide. I don’t know which is worse, dying immediately or dying over 10 years.”

Many Rwandan activists are furious that the genocide suspects awaiting trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), in Arusha, Tanzania, are receiving anti-retrovirals (ARVs) and good medical treatment. Pro Femmes and the London-based Survivors Fund are currently trying to persuade the ICTR and the United Nations to provide ARVs to women survivors so that they can stay alive long enough to testify.

The genocide widows organization Avega Agahozo runs a small clinic in Kigali for 600 HIV positive women, but at the time of my visit, it was only able to provide ARVs to 22. Aurea Kayiganwa, an adovcacy, justice, and information officer, said that Avega Agahozo’s aid has dried up since 1999.

“During the genocide, we didn’t have international solidarity,” Kayiganwa maintained. “What we want now, 10 years after, we want people to help the victims of genocide.”

Since April, funding from the Bush administration and the Global AIDS Fund has made free or heavily subsidized ARVs more widely available in Rwanda and in much of sub-Saharan Africa. But they are still reaching only a minority of the infected, and for some, it is already too late.

Turning a blind eye

Benoit Kaboyi, executive secretary of the main survivors organization Ibuka — which means “remember” in kinyarwanda — is a busy and rather tense man in his 30s.

I arrived early one morning at Ibuka’s cramped offices on the third floor of a concrete building in the center of Kigali. After a long wait, I was ushered into a cluttered room, to the chagrin of a Japanese journalist who got there a few minutes after me. Kaboyi, himself a survivor, was tired of talking to foreign journalists, and a little macho when confronted with a female reporter. He answered my questions rapidly, but with strong, unfeigned emotion. We were constantly interrupted by phone calls and by people sticking their heads in the doorway. It was the day of a major international press conference about the genocide commemoration events, at which Ibuka was scheduled to appear.

Although the Rwandan government has set up a small fund that pays school fees for genocide orphans, they are still discussing how to fund a compensation package. Kaboyi thinks the world has a responsibility to help. “We have to honor the million who were killed while we were watching television,” he argued.

Kaboyi said that donors balk at giving aid to victims because under the rubric of unity and reconciliation, giving special consideration to genocide survivors would be divisive.

“The reality we are facing now is that they say if we support you there will be no unity and reconciliation,” he said. “Imagine unity and reconciliation! The killers have rights to return to their property. They don’t pay anything and they say I will not support you but I will support perpetrators who return home.”

Kaboyi was referring in part to the perceived bias of Western aid agencies toward Hutus in the aftermath of the genocide. Following the mass flight of Hutus to Zaire and Tanzania, hundreds of thousands landed in refugee camps that soon became squalid and disease-ridden. Aid agencies and journalists flocked to the camps, lamenting the dire refugee situation, and mostly ignoring the fact that the camps were controlled by the Interahamwe.

Meanwhile, Tutsi survivors in Rwanda were left to their own devices to reconstruct their lives. In the following years, there was also an emphasis on resettling Hutu returnees, though some critics of the government believe this was simply a way of keeping an eye on people. All the same, there was less concern about resettling survivors because many had never fled the country.

The stance of the United Nations and Western countries during the genocide remains a troublesome topic in Rwanda. In the weeks leading up to the anniversary of the April 6, 1994 plane crash that sparked the mass killings, Rwandan President Paul Kagame repeatedly blamed world powers for the way they ignored the genocide.

Kagame repeated this theme at a commemoration ceremony at Amahoro Stadium in Kigali on April 7. Lacking an official press pass, I slipped into the stadium just as the events began. The audience of about 10,000 was largely silent and somber. Then, when a group of female survivors came out to sing, women in the crowd started to cry noiselessly. As a male survivor took the microphone to give his testimony, the crying turned to sobbing, and shrieks and wails punctured the calm. Soon, several women were carried, limbs flailing, out of the stadium. Every few minutes for about half an hour, another woman erupted and was lifted up and then taken away. Their screams were still audible even when they were in the medical tents outside the stadium.

Toward the end of the ceremony, Kagame addressed the stadium and castigated the international community for disregarding the warning signals and allowing Rwandans to die.

“It is clear that the world had the capacity to stop the genocide but deliberately chose to turn a blind eye on Rwanda,” Kagame said.

While African heads of state including South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, and Kenya’s Mwai Kibaki spoke at the ceremony, the Belgian prime minister was the only Western leader to attend.

Uncertain justice

Picturesque as it is, Rwanda also is a very closed place, where people are wary of others. Because it is such a tiny country, people have no choice but to live close together. Some survivors see people who killed friends and relatives walking around every day. It has been peaceful in the last few years, but that doesn’t mean the divisions are gone.

“There’s a lot of mistrust,” said Onyango of African Rights. “You have survivors suspicious of everybody they live around and you have the general population suspicious of survivors.”

The old labels of Hutu and Tutsi are now banned. They are no longer used on national identification cards. The official discrimination of the past regime is long gone, though the Kigali elite is definitely Tutsi-dominated. I was appalled to hear my young translator in Kibuye say that Hutus are “rude, not polite, so it is hard to talk to them.”

Clearly the old categories still resonate for some. “Whoever you are, you don’t want to go through that horror again, but definitely, you know who you are,” Onyango explained. “People are cautious anyway, but they are even more cautious now.”

Nevertheless, there is some evidence that this may be changing, albeit very slowly. For example, Moses, the taxi driver who drove me to Nyamata, was born and raised in Uganda as the child of exiles and moved to Kigali shortly after the genocide. Without being prompted, Moses said that he didn’t know about the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis until he saw the massacres on Ugandan television. And he said he didn’t think about himself or other people in those terms. Perhaps there are others in the younger generation of returnees who feel the same, or at least strive to think that way.

In many other ways, Rwanda is moving on from its past. The economy has rebounded in some parts of the country and Kigali is a rapidly expanding city. Tourism is back, with intrepid travelers once again making their way to see the mountain gorillas. In April, an attractive national museum and memorial center dedicated to the genocide opened in Kigali. But questions of justice and reconciliation always lurk in the background.

Although the ICTR is trying the leaders of the genocide, there are still close to 80,000 lower-level suspects in prison in Rwanda. Given the limited number of judges and lawyers, the government has launched an ambitious plan to try these suspects in local people’s courts known as gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha). These courts, which finally started up this summer, are supposed to involve investigations of what happened in each community, as well as voluntary confessions and apologies from suspects. The panels of judges are all regular community members, and area residents are expected to provide testimony in support of or against suspects. Those who confess will be freed if they have already served jail terms or sentenced to community service.

Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, however, have expressed reservations about gacaca. Richard Haavisto, Amnesty’s Central Africa researcher, said that communities are not fully participating in gacaca because they don’t have confidence in it. Those who might be willing to give evidence are afraid of retribution, and others are afraid to defend the unjustly accused for fear of being accused themselves.

“The Rwandan government must create a climate which convinces people that there is an equitable justice system at work,” Haavisto argued.

Many Rwandans, though, are willing to give gacaca a try. At the Nyamata church, not far from where Karuhimbi lives, 20,000 people are said to have been massacred. The site’s caretaker, Rwema Epimague, himself a survivor, told me that soldiers and the Interahamwe massacred 10,000 people in and around the church over a period of five days, and another 10,000 in the surrounding areas. The numbers may be exaggerated, as the church does not look big enough to hold more than 1,000 people, but there are undoubtedly a huge number of skeletons at the site.

Unlike some of the other memorials, which have been left largely as they were found, Nyamata was cleaned up and most of the bodies were placed in a huge white-tiled tomb behind the church. There is an opening on top, and a ladder descends into a long, dark hallway, lined by shelves of bones from floor to ceiling.

Inside the church, light pours in through the hundreds of bullet-holes in the tin roof and there are still bloodstains on the walls. As with many other churches around Rwanda, crowds of Tutsis crowded into the church and its grounds, thinking they would be safe. But the Interahamwe fought their way inside after throwing grenades and tear gas. They left piles of bodies behind.

One of the survivors of the massacre is now a teenage boy with a huge scar on his shaved head. Edmond Cassius Niyonsaba, a high school student, said that he stayed alive by hiding under the corpses of his mother and father inside the church. Edmond followed me around with a sweet smile, and his speech was somewhat slurred.

On the day I visited Nyamata, workers were busy digging up bodies from the grassy fields near the church. Inside, there were at least a dozen partially mummified corpses lying on a blue plastic tarp, ready for the anniversary reburial on the 7th. Bits of clothing were still visible on the bodies, as were the ropes that bound their wrists.

Epimague informed me that there were bodies like these still in the ground all around the church, and all over the country as well. He was less concerned about justice than with finding the bodies. Epimague hopes that gacaca confessions will reveal the locations of yet more mass graves. “It helps prove exactly how many people were killed,” he said.

On a visit to the former Hutu stronghold of Ruhengeri, a mountainous area where the Interahamwe militia once found a great deal of support, I spoke with several farmers about their lives. Most Rwandans were extremely careful about criticizing the government, especially in the current climate in which opponents can easily be accused of promoting genocidal ideology. But these farmers were quick to say that not much has changed for them economically. “I was poor before the genocide and I am poor now,” one woman told me.

Though the woman farmer used the genocide as a time marker, she, and others, evaded my questions about what happened here in 1994. Most Hutus are extremely loathe to discuss the genocide. The only answer I could extract was one older man’s very quiet admission that many people died in his community. Yet most of those I spoke with said they approved of gacaca and thought it was a good solution.

On the long drive back through the mountains back to Kigali, I wondered if it was easier to accept gacaca if you weren’t the one whose whole family was murdered.

’How Can You Get Them to Answer to Their Crimes?’

Despite the fact that there were so many killers during the genocide, it was hard to find anyone out of jail that admitted to having taken part. Most of the leaders and the hardcore extremists were either awaiting trial at the ICTR or have fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Though Rwandan survivors often claimed that the perpetrators were still living in their communities, they would not help me find them. The closest I got to a perpetrator was Musavimana.

A mechanic in Kibuye, Musavimana (the only name he gave me) was only willing to speak to me if we went to a little island nature reserve where there was no one else around. He was a nervous, hard-looking man who seemed much older than his 24 years. Musavimana, unlike some Hutus, did not deny that the genocide happened, or that it was a genocide committed by Hutus against Tutsis.

He described the events in the town from April 7 onward, insisting, “The people involved in the killing were Hutu, the Tutsi didn’t kill anyone.” He added that the massacres in Kibuye were well-organized, planned ahead of time, and carried out quickly.

Musavimana said that after the RPF took over in 1994, he was arrested for a crime he did not commit. He claimed that he buried a Tutsi boy who had been killed by some Hutu boys. He witnessed the murder because his family had provided shelter to the boy behind their house. He said that a Tutsi woman saw him with the body after the killers had fled, and later reported him to the police. Musavimana spent over eight years in jail. One day during a work release, he saw the killers, and convinced them to confess to the killing in the special prison gacaca. Those who confessed in prison were released, and so they took the opportunity to do so, taking the blame off of Musavimana, who was also released.

He praised gacaca, but cautioned, “Not all people will welcome gacaca, because some people who did bad things are still free, and they will do everything possible to fight it.”

As we clambered back from the island onto the shore and walked toward the road, we were met by several men who called out to Musavimana. Clearly they wanted to know what he was doing with foreigners and a Tutsi. My translator was nervous. I tried to give Musavimana some cash nonchalantly so it would look like he was just acting as a guide, and thanked him for showing us around. We drove off quickly, and I looked back before we rounded a corner to see Musavimana talking with the men. All I could do was hope that they were friends.

Was Musavimana’s story true? If so, it was both a sad story of the miscarriage of justice, which suggests that there are probably innocent people in jail, and a sign of hope, that there are ordinary Hutus who think that what happened in 1994 was wrong. It seems unlikely that he would have agreed to talk to a foreign journalist if he had something to hide. On the other hand, even the minority of prisoners who have confessed to committing crimes in 1994 have refused to take full responsibility. Most insist that they were forced to do what they did, or that they only acted as accomplices and didn’t carry out actual murders.

Some survivors such as Kaboyi and Mbezuanda doubt that there will ever be justice in Rwanda. Mbezuanda said that she may be dead before her time comes to testify in the gacaca court, and Kaboyi wasn’t sure justice could ever be possible.

“I don’t know,” he shrugged, toward the end of our conversation. “Imagine more than 1 million killed. Imagine more or less than 1 million participated. How can you get them to answer to their crimes? I don’t know.”

When I asked Onyango of African Rights about whether she thought gacaca was worthwhile, she answered that it was not ideal, but that it was the only viable solution out there.

But even with gacaca, she said, reconciliation takes time. “The whole idea of unity and reconciliation sometimes is touted too much,” she warned. “It’s not what’s really happening and it’s not going to happen that suddenly.”

Go to part two

In The Fray Contributor

Go to part one

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > CHINESE MIGRANT WORKERS >

“Hope for China’s Migrant Workers”
A detailed report on labor migration policy and its impact on women in the new Chinese economy from the China Business Review
URL: http://www.chinabusinessreview.com/public/0205/ye.html

“Dagongmei” — Female Migrant Labourers
An article from the China Labour Bulletin by Australian researcher Tamara Jacka
URL: http://www.china-labour.org.hk/iso/article.adp?article_id=5282&category_name=Economic%20Reform

“My Life as a Migrant Worker: Women in Rural-Urban Migration in Contemporary China”
Another article by Tamara Jacka, from Intersections
URL: http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue4/tamara_intro.html

TOPICS > CHINESE BEAUTY INDUSTRY

“China Plans Regulation to Guide Beauty Industry”
A March 2003 article from the People’s Daily
URL: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200403/30/eng20040330_138927.shtml

“World ‘beauty makers’ knocking China door”
A June 2004 article by Mark Godfrey in China Today
URL: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-04/06/content_321064.htm

TOPICS > CHINESE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

“China’s Divisive Development — Growing Urban-Rural Inequality Bodes Trouble”
A 2001 article by Joshua Levin in Harvard International Review
URL: http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/index.html?id=977&page=5

Michelle Chen

Xiao Yanzi and Xiao Li waiting for customers at Jin Mei Salon.

Under the salon’s sterile lights, the hairdressers sat in the waiting area — some in chairs, some squatting in a typical Chinese fashion that hinted at a provincial upbringing. Despite their neat hairdos and smart maroon polo shirts, the girls at Jin Mei, a salon in Shanghai surrounded by construction zones and high-rises, could not escape their slightly country looks, having migrated from rural villages in other provinces into the city.

They were celebrating the first night of Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, in front of the television in the near-empty salon, busily gnawing guazi, or sunflower seeds, spitting the shells in a garbage can while glaring impatiently at the last customer of the day. Since Chinese New Year is the biggest holiday of the year, they were supposed to get off work at 5p.m., but at 8 p.m., Xiao Yanzi, the stylist, was fixing the last hairdo of the Lunar Year. The boss always orders them to keep serving customers as long as they keep coming.

Jin Mei’s employees mostly hail from Anhui Province, a relatively poor region that exports a large portion of its farming population to Shanghai, several hours away by bus or train. Most of these girls migrated around age 18 or 19 after leaving school. Most ended their schooling at middle or high school; the prospects of attaining a higher education in the impoverished rural school system are few, so extra years of school tuition seem like a waste when city jobs are readily available.

Shanghai’s booming economy, which grew 15 percent this past year and leads China in gross domestic product, has been drawing thousands of hopeful youth from the countryside for over a decade. Before the Reform Era began in 1979, peasants were essentially chained to the land. The government, fearing disorder, used a draconian household registration system — the “hukou” system — to enforce a huge economic gulf between the countryside and the industrialized cities. But over the last two decades of frenetic modernization in China, regulations have been loosened to facilitate economic development, and the massive tide of labor in the cities has inflamed the cultural and economic tensions along the rural-urban divide dating back to Chinese antiquity.

As I’ve researched the cultural identity of migrants over the past several months, certain patterns have become evident, both disturbing and banal. Youth are being siphoned into different strands of urban culture, from the seedy underground to the neon and polyester trappings of the twenty-something mainstream. I see them as individuals caught up in a mass phenomenon of unprecedented social change — some sink, others rise, and still more just drift. The Jin Mei salon is an unwitting laboratory, as its girls are transformed into passive recipients of modern ideas of beauty and leisure, as well as, for the first time in their lives, agents in control of their economic and social destinies.

Testing the waters

Though rural parents tend to guard their children closely, especially girls, the drive for economic advancement has eroded centuries-old child-rearing convention. Traditionally in both rural and urban China, youth are expected to remain at home until marriage, and afterwards, to serve their parents when they become financially self-sufficient. But the girls at Jin Mei revealed that their parents for the most part supported their leaving home for work, since even the lowest-paying job in the city is still viewed as a step up from “spending a life with your face to the ground and back to the sun” — an old saying describing a farmer’s toil. Farmland in China has historically been a ball and chain for peasants, especially under the household registration system, so it’s no wonder physical mobility in the Reform Era has been equated with economic mobility.

One factor that enables parents to be more relaxed about their children leaving the village is that youth workers are seldom truly “on their own.” Workers in salons and other enterprises rarely arrive in a new place without contacts or work arrangements. In many cases, a friend or relative helps arrange work in advance.

Nineteen year-old Chun Xiang, who arrived at Jin Mei around the time of the Spring Festival, mistakenly thought migrating would be her first experience living without her family. A girl with blank eyes and a soft smile, she exuded the kind of sweet restlessness characteristic of girls fresh from the countryside. Her older brother had tried to convince her to move to Beijing, where he worked as a migrant, because salons had a reputation for being “complicated” — a code word for being involved with the sex industry.

Instead, she decided to go to Shanghai, lured by the prospect of more independence. But once she found Jin Mei through friends and family, there was no shortage of concerned lao xiang, or fellow villagers, floating about the salon. Her lao xiang arranged to keep her out of the dormitories — cramped rented rooms down the street, each shared by several girls — and got her a place to sleep in the back room of the salon, presumably to keep her safe and more isolated. “I guess you could call me lucky,” she said, her bashful smile lined with a touch of disappointment. (By the summer, however, her father would order her to come back home, fearing she would xue huai, or “go bad,” living so far from home.)

Even with relatives in the city to act as guardians, parents are somewhat justified in worrying over how their children will fare. The migrants in Shanghai I’ve met, not just at the salon but in other vocations as well, always tell me that the youth fresh from the village all have one thing in common: their ignorance. Kids from the countryside are dai, or slow-witted, when they first arrive, easily taken advantage of, too willing to work for nothing.

My friend from Shandong, Xiao Chen, a pretty 26 year-old who first landed in Shanghai to work in a shrink-wrap factory, giggled as she recalled that her family feared she would be kidnapped and sold — a phenomenon not unheard of in China but primarily the stuff of urban lore. According to her, you have to “learn how to take care of yourself” sooner or later, since scam artists, criminals, and local prejudice against outsiders are rampant. Her main advice to younger migrants is, “If other people look down on you here, you just look down on them back.”

The process of adapting to city life requires one to build an armor of aloofness against those who seize every opportunity to exploit rural naiveté. Though the city might not be crawling with sexual predators as some parents fear, girls soon learn that shady guys in pursuit of short-term “girlfriends” abound, especially in the underground club scene, which is linked to drugs and prostitution. Girls must struggle to balance the quality of dan cun, or “purity” — the hallmark of Chinese female virtue — with the maturity needed for survival. The two elements may seem contradictory, but as many girls discover, maintaining the dignified, virginal exterior requires a special grade of toughness.

Young male migrants also tend to wise up quickly once exposed to the harsh urban environs. Chen Da Ji, a male hair stylist who recently left Jin Mei to open his own salon, recalled how he had struggled to survive as a migrant in Guangdong. In a quiet, weary voice that suggested a fragility incongruous with his loud golden highlights, he told me that the migrant youth who come into the cities today aren’t like the migrants of his “generation,” who left home several years ago. These new kids have nice clothes and pocket money. While most salon workers these days sport cute cell phones, when Chen first struck out on his own, he was constantly out of touch with his family and friends. He spent years scrounging for money through whatever odd job he could find, and he recalls bitterly having to sleep on the street in Guangdong for a time.

Among both males and females, there is a visible divide between the migrants who have been disciplined by city life and those who have been hardened by it. Jin Mei’s workers fill the salon with a teenish buoyancy — occasionally grumpy about overwork and low pay, but well-adjusted overall. The more jaded migrants I’ve seen, hanging out at night or at other salons, have distant, slithering eyes, and even though they seem carefree, drinking and smoking with friends, their forearms betray quiet moments of self-destructive boredom: rows of cigarette burns dotting tender skin.

A New Year’s banquet hosted by a salon owner for his employees.

Homecoming and going

If I visited her village and saw how the peasants lived, Song Jing, a hairdresser from Hubei just shy of 20, told me quietly one night during the week-long Chinese New Year celebration, “tears would start to flow.” Around closing time, as the last employees dawdled in front the television watching muted music videos, the native of Hubei with a head of frizzy highlights was getting ready to turn in. She was sleeping in the back room of the salon to keep an eye on it, since crime rates shoot up around the New Year celebration. She would soon be able to sleep in her own bed in her village, but ambivalence would follow her home.

Much of the warmth she once felt toward her lao jia or hometown had evaporated since she had settled in Shanghai. Everything there, she feared, would seem unfamiliar, including the old friends she had not kept in touch with since leaving the countryside over a year ago. But she knew that she would also seem unfamiliar to the people at home. The city had aged her. When she was living in the countryside, she was “like a child,” but now, she said, she carried herself more like an adult, more cultured than her rural counterparts. “I feel like I’m in a different world,” she reflected bashfully, as if embarrassed to reveal the softness she should have left behind in her village.

Twenty-two year-old Ni Ke, a skinny hairdresser from Anhui with a shaggy bob, told me she no longer thinks about home much. When she talks about her life now, her mouth curls into a spunky smile with just a hint of a sneer. She has settled into Shanghai quite well since arriving three years ago at 19. Today, she shares an apartment with her boyfriend, a migrant from Jiangsu who works in a nearby salon. Though her parents are pressuring them to get married, she told me one night at the salon as she shampooed my hair, she values her personal space and is resolved to maintain her independence as long as possible. “There’s no point in getting married early,” she said, reflecting a modern concept of romance shared by many of her co-workers.

The financial security found through city work has chipped away at the village tradition of marrying young and settling down in the male spouse’s laojia. Ni Ke and her boyfriend have debated over where they would end up if they did get married — her hometown or his (an issue that many couples break up over, she told me). Or maybe they would opt to stay in Shanghai, free from the parental concerns that they had already shrugged off in deciding to live together.

The city also draws better-off youth, who have things other than poverty to escape. Xiao Li, a short young girl with brown bangs and a mischievous smile, came to Shanghai in 2000 at age 16 not to make money, but because her parents’ constant fighting was making her miserable. Xiao Li’s decision to leave high school for the city was outright rebellion, not filial duty. Her father was a local official who had invested heavily in the developing local economy. Her parents’ squabbling over finances, not a lack of income, drove her into the city.

Xiao Li thinks her family was happier when they were poorer. Watching their newfound wealth unravel her household taught her that “whenever you have money, it’s never enough, you always want even more.” But this February, Xiao Li went home for the first time in two years. She now finds that the rareness of a return visit makes her presence that much more valued. She also attracts the admiration of old friends who have not “experienced the world (jian guo shi mian),” and who group her among the “city girls … [who have] seen everything, experienced everything.”

Despite the economic limitations of their work, the glossy habitat of the salon symbolizes contemporary urban China in contrast with the muddy, messy countryside. Jin Mei offers an opportunity for these girls to see themselves in a different light. Instead of the drab backdrop of endless rice fields, mirrors and walls plastered with posters of models frame the girls as they lather and scrub the heads of customers with mechanical efficiency.

If the ennui of the service they provide is dulling to the senses, the city around them at least offers stimuli that they would never encounter in the countryside: chintzy, massive arcade-karaoke-entertainment complexes; the neon lights of the Bund — a famous strip of landmarks overlooking the Huangpu River, where many migrant youth spend their first awkward dates; and 24-hour convenience stores and noodle shops. Though they are not rich enough to enjoy the middle-class comforts of their wealthier customers, they are still exposed to urban life on the mammoth scale of China’s most rapidly developing metropolis. For many of them, seeing the world through the fogged glass of the salon window will wipe out the possibility of living in the country ever again.

Death by haircut

A typical migrant youth in Shanghai will tell you that his or her village is a ghost town during most of the year — populated only by elderly, disabled or incompetent people, and very young children, left in the care of grandparents as their parents work city jobs. The population exodus has been so dramatic that the domestic grain yield was at its lowest in 12 years in 2003. The only time of year when such villages ever seem full is during the Chinese New Year. And even then, not everyone goes back. The passing of Chinese New Year for Jin Mei’s workers indicates the flow of youth between the city and the countryside has worn holes on both sides of the culture gap. Of course, the workers, mostly in their late teens and early 20’s, seem hardly aware that they are products of a monumental population shift. The main shift they feel is a personal and physical one.

Soft and polished, hair carefully highlighted and layered in an approximation of the Asian celebrities featured on television screens and magazine pages, the female workers have been careful to erase signs that they were once country bumpkins. Betraying one’s rural background is anathema to the low-end beauty industry here.

The male workers trade in T-shirts for tight trousers, pointy shoes and sport jagged, streaked hair, emulating the swanky, vaguely effeminate image of Asian pop stars. The deflowering of Jin Mei’s girls begins with their first haircut — the hacking of the black ponytail. Xiao Li, who worked the register at Jin Mei through the New Year holiday, recalled that when she started her job at 16, she cried when they cut her streaming black locks and gave her a layered bronzed bob. Back then, she joked, she was so shy that when any of the male employees talked to her, she would turn bright red. Now, at 19, as she smacks her gum, grumbles about how uncool her uniform is, and flirts with male coworkers, she displays an impulsive boldness uncharacteristic of a country girl.

For Wen Wen, a petite, angelic 17 year-old — adored by older coworkers as a little sister — getting her hair dyed and cut for the first time at 14 was a jarring experience. After losing her black ponytail, which she had always liked before it was deemed unhip by the salon staff, her reflection in the mirror startled her. “I couldn’t get used to the sight of myself,” she said. But now, displaying coifed upswept locks that hint of a Japanese anime character, Wen Wen sees her new style as a step toward her dream of “making people beautiful.”

The symbolic death-by-haircut of their rural identity is a minor trauma soon to be forgotten in the midst of non-stop labor. Money is hard to hold onto in Shanghai, as the cost of living far exceeds that of the rest of the country. An ordinary female salon worker in Shanghai can hope to earn around several hundred to 1,500 yuan per month (US$180), while hairstylists (a profession reserved for men) can make around 5,000 yuan ($600). These wages are still much more than they could ever hope to earn back home, since farmers on average earn less than one third the salary of non-agricultural workers — 2,622 yuan compared to 8,500 yuan for urban residents — and the gap is growing as cities like Shanghai hurdle into the global economy.

With no dependents, young migrants feel less pressure to remit income to families back home, so they can instead save toward a new apartment or a long-term goal of starting their own business. But the work schedule and relatively low income means that employees are usually too worn out by the 70-hour work week to do anything on off-days but rest and spend extra money on Western fashions, cell phones, and Internet bars.

Yet such jobs, with set wages and hours, are coveted among migrants. Other jobs in restaurants and construction entail dangerous working conditions and perhaps even less possibility of advancement. Since kids are constantly trying to find ways to enter the city workforce, Jin Mei has easy pickings.

Workers are acquired by Jin Mei’s boss, Liu Bing, a former lawyer who found entrepreneurship more promising than the legal bureaucracy. His wife, herself a migrant who worked her way up in the salon business to the managerial level, provides valuable connections to friends and relatives in villages in her home province, Anhui.  The husband-wife team prefers youth who display a certain measure of suzhi or “class,” with some schooling and good Mandarin rather than a rural dialect, displaying docility as well as competence. The further they seem from the city dweller’s stereotype of the unkempt farmer girl, the better they are for business. As their boss and their caretaker, Liu is proud of the relationship he has with his staff. “We give them a stage,” he said, and they cultivate their own abilities until they are ready to “take off” on their own. If workers prove themselves competent enough, he gives them a share of his salon franchise.

The village girls the bosses commonly encounter are mostly eager to experience city life and the opportunities it promises. Still, some girls — who, according to Liu, don’t know what they’re missing — are reluctant to leave what is familiar. And some discover too late that they are not mature enough to handle the city, jumping from job to job in frustration, or even returning home, overwhelmed by the pressures of living and working in an urban environment.

The anything-goes atmosphere of Reform Era China leads some youth to move faster than they can afford. A 19 year-old hairdresser named Gu Xuan told me that she had already opened two salons with her parents’ savings in the town area of her laojia since the age of 17. She was unable to cope with the burden of managing a business, and both shops closed after a short time. “I don’t even like to think back to that time!” she said, remembering her parents’ deep disappointment. Now, she has resigned herself to a humbler position as a salon employee. She looks back wistfully on simpler days when she was still a student. “When you’re in school, all you want to do is just have fun. But when you’re out of school, you really wish you were studying again.”

For individual workers, mustering the drive to rise up and insist on more than just scraping by is the greatest challenge. Many of those seeking upward mobility are disappointed during the months or years it takes to establish financial stability. Unskilled jobs — entry-level positions in service industries like beauty salons — are much more abundant than skilled ones. Many migrants I’ve met have a relatively easy time finding work washing hair, waiting tables, or doing construction, but cannot break into office jobs or more skilled professions. They have an even harder time raising enough capital to start their own shops, since most people have to negotiate loans with parents or relatives, who often aren’t much better off than they are.

When they first arrive, girls are expected to pay a few hundred yuan in “deposit” money just for the opportunity to work. Some girls spend several months in the “apprenticeship” phase, during which they earn no wages. And even after the boss decides to finally put them on the payroll, economic advancement still rests upon the boss’s whim. It is a mild form of the commodification of youth, particularly females, as cogs in the global economy.

At Jin Mei, sharp gender distinctions in the workforce also impose limitations. Boys generally begin as apprentice haircutters, hoping to work their way up to stylist. Girls generally do not advance beyond hairdressing, massage, manicuring, and other beauty services, despite the fact that the apprenticeship period for women seems almost as intensive as that for male hairstylists. Gu Xuan told me one evening, kneading my arms absent-mindedly during a semi-professional massage session, that male customers don’t trust women to style their hair. In Shanghai, traditional men only trust male stylists, and the management reinforces the status quo by refusing to train female workers in a “male” line of work.

But for a typical girl from the countryside, even such limited economic opportunity was unthinkable a generation ago. Now that young women are streaming into the city and for the first time tasting independence — at least financially if not socially — many are determined to earn their way into a business of their own.

Xiao Yanzi, one of the senior hairstylists (and the only woman stylist in the salon), first came to Shanghai over ten years ago at age 17 with her cousins, to see the city and check out job prospects. Once she saw how much city life contrasted with her sleepy rural town back home, she knew she couldn’t return. She could earn up to 300 yuan  ($36) a month working in the city, more than ten times what her father was making as a rural laborer. She’s quietly worked her way up here, acquiring enough to buy a 30 percent share of another salon in the Jin Mei franchise, which includes several hairshops and a spa. She harbors distant dreams of starting her own salon, but the last time she tried, her grand opening unfortunately coincided with President Bill Clinton’s visit to Shanghai, which prompted the local authorities to crack down on all “illegal” salons that had yet to acquire a license.

She smiled tiredly when asked about her future plans. “I’ll just keep working here,” she remarked matter-of-factly. Xiao Yanzi is determined never to return to her hometown to settle down. Though she sees herself as an Anhui native — and although her new baby daughter has been sent to Anhui to be looked after by her parents — there is enough Shanghai in her and her husband to keep her firmly grounded here.

The countryside revisited

The New Year holiday or “Spring Festival” is the only occasion that brings migrant youth home in droves, if only for a few days. Every year, migrants with enough money for a ticket pack buses and trains bound for the countryside. In many villages, left desolate by the exodus of able-bodied men and women to the cities, this is the one truly vibrant time of the year, when the returnees shower family and neighbors with candy and red gift envelopes stuffed with cash.

Youth are also pressured to return home in order to maintain certain social institutions. Migrants in their twenties are often expected to xiang qin or look for marriage partners in their village. Matches are often made by parents, so the “introduction” process is accelerated.

Homecoming is also a way of making an individualistic contribution to the community, however. As young adults, migrants also find in the week-long celebration an opportunity to prove that the bitter work they have endured has finally paid off — in the warm smiles of their relatives, the feasts and dances of rural tradition, and the eagerly anticipated, if ephemeral windfall of money and gifts. In this respect, the real power of being a rural-to-urban migrant is felt not in the bittersweet benefits of city life, but in the importance a returnee acquires when demonstrating hard-won success and a cosmopolitan aura.

Then there are workers who stay in the city, either because their boss doesn’t allow them to leave or because they choose not to. Either way, their job has become the weight that anchors them to the city, the same way a fallow field grounded the peasants of the previous generation.

Wen Wen was determined to go home this year. Last year, as a new arrival, she was not in the portion of the staff allowed to go home, so she had passed the New Year in the salon. Wen Wen was at first excited to spend the holiday in the city. “As it was getting closer to the New Year, I felt really happy,” she recalled. “But when New Year’s Eve finally came, I felt very lonely.” She greeted the New Lunar Year in front of the television at the salon, bored and thinking of how happy she was as a girl when her whole family would gather in her village for feasts and traditional ceremonies. She missed her grandmother, who had raised her while her parents worked in another city situation common in migrant families.

But she has never regretted the decision to leave the village. “I felt Shanghai was really a city for young people,” she said. “I had to go there and see what it was about.” In her laojia, she felt smothered by relatives. “You can’t always depend on your mother and father,” she said, with the wisdom of a precocious child. “I wanted to live independently.”

Her mother and father at first did not want her to leave home at such a young age, but after she pleaded with them, they eventually let her take her first train ride — 24 hours — from Guangzhou to Shanghai. Two years shy of the legal employment age, she had relatives lie about her age to get her the job at Jin Mei. (By the time her boss discovered her real age, she had already ingratiated herself as a diligent worker.)

Wen Wen turned out to be a fast learner and got through her training period in just one month. Her co-workers were all charmed by her cuteness and good nature, she made friends easily, and her boss, she said, is very kind to her. She now lives with several other girls in a dormitory apartment near the salon, who play the role of older sisters. By observing the older employees, she studies how to be an adult and how to treat customers with impeccable courtesy. “I feel I’m older now, more mature,” she reflected.

This year, she was able to display her grown-up self in her hometown. She took a bus and arrived home just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. The reunion was only partial because her father had stayed to work in Guangzhou. But Wen Wen was ecstatic to see her grandmother waiting up for her, looking older than before. “I couldn’t say anything. The first thing I did was hug them. That felt good.” She repeated to her grandmother over and over that her salon job was wonderful, “just to keep her from crying more.” No one’s pride matters more to her than her grandmother’s. The first 500 yuan ($60) she earned at Jin Mei went to fulfill her promise as a young girl that “the first money I make, I’ll send home to you.”

But the initial euphoria of the Spring Festival soon passed. Her friends back home now regarded her awkwardly. “They’re not as nice to me as I am to them,” she said. “They all say I’ve changed!” When her old friends told her that she did not seem as talkative and outgoing as she was before she went to the city, she replied, “You’re just not making an effort to understand me. I’m still the old me.” But Wen Wen was not too hurt by the loss of her childhood friends, as she had made plenty of new ones among her coworkers in Shanghai.

It was as if the coziness of home had departed just as she had. “It’s not as bustling as it was before,” she said, “because many people my age and a little older have all left to work.” In the countryside, the year moves in cycles, and when the Spring Festival crowds leave, the dusty shell of a village begins another year-long wait.

Passing the New Year and passing time

Back in Shanghai, on New Year’s night, the Jin Mei workers were rewarded for their overtime with a night of singing along to overproduced Chinese pop music in a crowded multi-story entertainment center down the street. Shanghai does not offer much variety in terms of nightlife for youth of modest means, just a chance to croon along to your favorite pop singer in a cramped rented room or converse in a cubicle with a net friend or wang you. But despite the crushing density of the city, youth who are feeling out their new home manage to locate pockets of privacy, or at least anonymous gratification.

Shanghai spreads out before its migrants like a spilled toy box. For many, it offers at least a temporary oasis of social indulgences that make the countryside seem unlivable in comparison. For others, the city cuts deeper into them, and they enmesh themselves in a Hades of organized crime, drugs, prostitution, and gambling to obtain wealth and prestige.

Whether they are escaping pressures at home or chasing the fantasy of wealth, urban youth migrants are discovering that China’s developing economy has opened up a platform for self-exploration that never previously existed for their demographic. The decision to return home or to stay in the city for the Spring Festival plots a migrant youth on a matrix of space and time, on which two generations and two wildly different environments cross. At the crux of this clash between rural and urban cultures, migrant youth work, play, and carve out a place for themselves, and the beauty and peril lie in the fact that no one can tell just how long it will last. Whether or not the youths’ dreams ever materialize, the sense of individuality that flowers in the struggle to find one’s place in this congested city is priceless.

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Michelle Chen

(Illustration by David Benque)

Sharing the world’s longest undefended border, Canada and the United States have benefited from a long history of peaceful and friendly relations, including more than 80 treaty-level defense agreements, more than 250 memoranda of understanding between the two defense departments, and approximately 145 bilateral forums in which defense matters are discussed. Yet, in recent history, during the George W. Bush/Jean Chrétien years, this relationship endured difficulties: from the recently resolved trade dispute over softwood lumber tariffs; to the banning of Canadian beef exports after a single case of mad cow disease; to the gaffe that resulted in the firing of Chrétien’s aide, Françoise Ducros, who called Bush a “moron.”

The cooling between Ottawa and Washington reached an icy low when Canada declared its steadfast opposition to the war in Iraq, and refused to partake in the war effort. Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, made it very clear how “disappointed” Bush was with Canada’s decision.

However, after Chrétien retired in December 2003, and Canada’s new Prime Minister Paul Martin took the helm, relations had begun to thaw. A priority was placed on improving bilateral relations, including expediting discussions on Canada’s participation in the missile defense system (MDS). In a nation with a long and proud history of being pacifist and non-antagonistic, this seemed to mark a divisive shift in policy, which could have drastically altered Canada’s peaceful standing in the world.

Then, six months after taking office, Martin was forced to fight for reelection and win his own mandate to govern with the confidence of the Canadian people. The election took place amongst widespread public anger and disillusion over corrupt practices in the Liberal Party after Auditor General Sheila Fraser found that the Liberal government had funneled $100 million of taxpayer money into the coffers of Liberal-friendly advertising agencies in the forms of fees and commissions.

At the June 28 elections, Martin’s party won, but only narrowly, gaining 135 out of 308 seats in parliament. Being 20 seats short of a majority means that the party will have to compromise their agenda and collaborate on policy with the other stakeholders in parliament: the Conservatives on the right, the New Democratic Party (NDP) on the left, and the pro-sovereignty, yet largely left, Bloc Québécois Party. Teetering in the balance is whether America will gain financial and logistical cooperation in its vision of a continental missile defense system, or have the door shut in its face.

The benefits of public apathy

As early as November 15, 2003, the day after Martin’s coronation ceremony in Toronto, he stressed Canada’s eagerness to participate in discussions on the Bush administration’s missile defense system, saying: “We’re talking about the defense of North America. Canada has to be at the table.”

Martin’s priority of improving bilateral relations moved up the echelons of parliament, with the establishment of a permanent cabinet committee and a House of Commons committee on Canada-United States relations. Member of Parliament Scott Brison, who defected from the Progressive Conservative Party to the Liberals, was appointed to this portfolio. When Brison ran unsuccessfully for the Progressive Conservative Party leadership in spring 2003, he advocated a far-reaching partnership with the United States for the creation of a “seamless border.”

In the past, Canada’s position on the missile defense system has wavered from outward opposition to meek caution. Although bilateral talks proceeded between Canada’s former Defense Minister John McCallum, who served in Chrétien’s cabinet, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2003, they were highly secretive and substantial results were not revealed. One reason for the silence may have been the widespread disinterest among average Canadians.

In February, when I asked random people in Toronto’s diverse neighborhoods about their thoughts on Canada’s role in the missile defense system, most told me that they hadn’t heard anything about it, or that the topic didn’t interest them. Yet no one wanted to be quoted as an “uninformed” person.

A 28-year-old student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, who plans to teach high school in the fall, asked to remain anonymous and admitted that he doesn’t follow politics very closely. Queried about his country’s change in stance, he said: “I don’t know anything about the missile defense system. I don’t recall seeing a single newscast on this almost sci-fi thing that you’re describing.” When I asked him if he thought Canada should collaborate with the United States, he flatly replied: “I guess it would depend on how serious the threat would be. I don’t know.”

A residential youth worker who was attending a Valentine’s Day party, Michelle Hadida, 25, agreed that the subject hasn’t caught the attention of most Canadians. “Not many people know what’s going on,” she said. “You don’t hear about [the missile defense system] in the news. Usually people will flick on the 6 o’clock or 11 o’clock news for a quick update of what’s going on in the world, and because they’re not being exposed to this on the news, the chances of them looking it up on their own time is very slim.”

Under cover of public apathy, the issue had gained momentum in Ottawa. Canada’s most recent Defense Minister, David Pratt opposed the Chrétien government’s refusal to join the U.S.-led war in Iraq. However, he just lost his seat in parliament with his district of Nepean-Carlton, just outside of Ottawa, falling to Conservative Pierre Poilievre on Election Day.

Pratt was seen as more hawkish than his predecessor, John McCallum. In commenting on Pratt’s appointment to Defense and what could be expected, John Ibbitson of The Globe and Mail called him “a firm believer in the need for Canada to sign on to the continental missile defense system” and  “as Americanophillic as a Liberal can get.” With Pratt’s ouster, Canadians are now left in suspense, waiting to see whether Martin’s new appointment to the defense portfolio will follow Pratt’s lead and cozy up to the Americans or put more distance between the two neighbors.

Margaret Rao shows her solidarity with the New Democratic Party’s opposition to the missile defense shield by holding up one of the Party’s advertisements. Rao, who lives in Toronto, thinks most Canadians wouldn’t go along with plans for Canada to participate in this feat if the issue were more publicized.

Doubting Thomases

Back in February, activists like Margaret Rao, 51, a theologian, and mother of three young adult daughters, were worried about the public’s lack of knowledge. Seated at her home in Toronto’s little Italy neighborhood, Rao clutched an ad by the NDP outlining her party’s opposition to the missile defense system. “Paul Martin knew whom he was choosing [in appointing Pratt to the defense portfolio]. It’s already skewed towards making friends with the States,” she said. “We need to have a national debate on this. I think most Canadians wouldn’t go along with this — especially if we got the facts out.”

The facts Rao thought Canadians would take exception to include the highly questionable effectiveness of the system, in which a sensor in space discovers an object headed for the United States, ground-based infrared sensors and radar systems track it, and the United States launches a missile to intercept it. If the system worked, it would give the United States the power to protect itself from incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICMBs), whether launched without intent, or from what the Bush administration has commonly referred to as “rogue states,” such as Iran and North Korea, which is predicted to develop the capacity to launch a missile towards the United States by 2005.

If it worked — there’s the rub. Such things also worry Alex Carter, 27, a post-graduate journalism student at Ryerson University in Toronto. In between classes, Carter took a moment to express his doubt. “I haven’t heard anything about it possibly working,” he said. “It just seems like a waste of money, so until they can prove that it works and prove that there’s a threat, then I think we’d be doing it only to appease the Americans.”  

Although the United States has a long history of researching the viability of ballistic missile defense systems dating back to the 1940s, no definitive results have been yielded. President Richard Nixon briefly deployed a system in the mid-1970s that was then abandoned due to technical difficulties. President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of the 1980s revived the concept of ballistic missile defense. Essentially, SDI was based on exotic, futuristic space technologies and ambitiously geared towards countering the entire nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union. Due to technological problems, high cost-estimates, and the end of the Cold War, the initiative was never implemented.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, some see missile defense as unjustifiable. Such is the opinion of 24 year-old artist Krystal Ann Kraus, who has been banned from entering the United States due to rallies she’s attended in opposition to U.S. free trade agreements with the Americas. Unwinding with a Smirnoff Ice at an Irish pub in the upscale Yonge and Eglinton area of Toronto, she felt that a clear threat to justify pursuit of such an endeavor did not exist.

“It’s silly to think that we should spend our resources and energy in tax dollars in fighting some weird, almost ‘cartoonish’ type of character, like power rangers taking over space,” she said. “Altron’s not the enemy. Most poor nations can’t even dream about occupying that realm. It’s an area of the rich, and the rich are going to control it because they’re the ones with the funds to get up there.”

The Council for a Livable World, a U.S.-based organization advocating arms control, points to an analysis prepared by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in which two official reports five years apart reached a remarkably similar conclusion, affirming that missile defense deployment is “a rush to failure.”

The Center for Arms Control compared a 1998 study issued by a panel headed by former Air Force Chief of Staff Larry Welch and a report released by the General Accounting Office (GAO) in June 2003. Both reports suggest that political pressures are driving the missile defense program, leading to premature deployment of an inadequately tested system. The GAO report explains: “Because of time pressures, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), must include components that have not been demonstrated as mature and ready for system integration into a particular element …Testing to date has provided only limited data for determining whether the system will work as intended in 2004.”

Fear makes friends

In the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton agreed in principle to the need for a missile defense system, in terms of policy, he sought to remain consistent with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. Intended to set limits on defensive missile systems, the ABM Treaty is credited for what has been approximately 30 years of nuclear stability around the world. However, under pressure from members of Congress, the National Missile Defense Act was passed in 1999, allowing for the deployment of a missile defense system as soon as technologically possible.

Then in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, amid a climate of fear, Bush scrapped the ABM Treaty on December 13, 2001, and gave an impassioned speech. Of the historic treaty, he said: “It hinders our government’s ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attacks. I cannot and will not allow the United States to remain in a treaty that prevents us from developing effective defenses.”

Thus in 2002, the United States began work on adding components to allow for layered and overlapping missile defense coverage. On December 17, 2002, Bush announced the United States would deploy an initial operational ballistic missile defense (BMD) system for the defense of North America by the fall of 2004. Costs, already totaling $91 billion on the missile defense system over the past two decades — with exorbitant spending by successive Republican- and Democrat-led administrations — will continue to rise as progress is made.

While an understanding exists which exempts Canada from bearing any costs of the system as long as it allows its airspace to be used, this principle has recently been called into question. On Sunday, February 22, 2004, in a Question Period segment on CTV News, former Defense Minister Pratt refused to rule out the possibility that Canada would make a cash contribution.

York University Law student Stephen Tolfo, 24, feels that it’s in Canada’s best long-term interest to be complicit, regardless of any associated costs. A long-standing supporter of bilateral defense arrangements, he’s adamant that people need to remember there is a real threat. “Bush knows what he’s talking about, and as Canadians, we can’t afford to sit out and expect the Americans to take care of us when something goes wrong,” he said. “We need to be pro-active. The key is that it’s a defense system, not an offense system.”

An additional pressure is the fear that Canada’s role in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which was established in 1958 to monitor and defend North American airspace, would be diminished if it doesn’t sign on. Already, progress on the discussions has resulted in an agreement in principle that MDS operations would be placed under the auspices of NORAD, providing that Canada endorses the controversial system.

Protecting Canada or gaining points with the United States?

On February 5, 2004, the C. Warren Goldring Annual Lecture on Canada-United States relations at the Royal Ontario Museum in the heart of downtown Toronto drew a distinguished crowd of guests, including representatives from numerous conglomerates and Canada’s largest banks that line the city’s financial center on Bay Street. In a lecture theater filled to capacity, Leon Panetta, Clinton’s former chief of staff, delivered a speech, “The Challenge in Washington: Governing by Leadership or Crisis.”

Panetta, like many others, is concerned with the effectiveness of the system. Asked how legitimate the threat posed by so-called rogue states is and what, if any, role Canada should play in the initiative, Panetta cautioned: “Ultimately, I think we do have to be concerned about what can happen with terrorism and the weapons that can be used. But I do believe right now, that to embark on a missile defense system with all the costs associated with it, and with the questionable technology that’s involved with it, would not be in our interest.”

“Let’s be careful,” he warned,  “particularly at a time of a $500 billion annual deficit, in throwing more money at systems that ultimately can be proven as unable to protect our security.”

Despite such warnings from experienced statesmen, there is strong support for the pursuit of a missile defense system from influential corporations on both sides of the border who stand to make money from it. Pressure on the Canadian side comes from Canadian aerospace companies and business lobby groups such as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which has set up a CEO Action Group to push for closer business and military ties with the United States. Derek Burney, chief of staff to former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and current president of CAE Inc., is seen as a key stakeholder. His company is already supplying U.S. aerospace and defense giant Boeing with software systems for the missile defense system.  

While corporations are behind it, the government’s possible public expenditure on the system has Canadian citizens expressing concern. Advocating a social justice agenda, Barry Weisleder, of the activist oriented NDP Socialist Caucus, feels “it’s an incredibly lavish waste of funds.” Demonstrating outside the Israeli Consulate on Bloor Street West in opposition of the controversial wall that Israel is erecting in the occupied West Bank, he lamented: “There’s no evidence that such a system is even capable of bringing down a barrage of incoming missiles; but even if it were, it’s an attempt by the U.S. to seize control — not only of planet earth, but also of outer space. What an incredible waste of money at a time when hospitals and schools are crumbling and social programs are depleted and people are dying in the cold outdoors for lack of housing. It’s just an abomination.”

Professor Ron Stagg, chair of Ryerson University’s history department, is concerned that “the issue hasn’t been debated to the extent that it should in a democratic society like Canada.” This viewpoint was echoed in a May 2003 segment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio Commentary broadcast. Steven Staples, a military analyst with the Ottawa-based Polaris Institute, an organization that promotes principles of social justice in grassroots organizations, pointed out one of Martin’s shortcomings on the missile defense program: “He doesn’t talk much about missile threats to Canada. Instead, he seems to talk about improving relations with the Americans.”

This point has been a crucial one for a substantial amount of Canadians who see the threat to the North American continent as largely elusive. Richard Gwyn, an acclaimed Canadian political affairs writer, argues, “The missile defense program itself, is the dumbest military idea since the French nobles at Agincourt put on such heavy armor they couldn’t move in their saddles. It will provide an unworkable defense — even rigged tests most often fail against a non-existent threat. What ‘rogue state’ is going to commit suicide by lobbing one missile, even if it actually had it, at Washington?”

Paul Hamel, of Science for Peace, a Canada-based organization concerned about issues of peace, justice, and the environment, is concerned that Canada’s decision will hinge on appeasing the Americans, and become a make-up gesture for the government’s refusal to support the war in Iraq. “I think that the definitive goal of blindly signing on to such a useless and unjustified endeavor is simply to patch up relations with our neighbors south of the border who, quite frankly, still hold a grudge against us,” he said.

Similarly, Linda McQuaig, a Toronto-based author and political commentator, also sees the politics of appeasement at play here. She writes, “If Ottawa does join the missile project, it will undoubtedly insist that the decision had absolutely nothing to do with appeasing Washington, that we — entirely on our own — came up with the idea of abandoning Canada’s longstanding commitment to international arms control.”

Canadians becoming more … American?

McQuaig presents a compelling argument. After all, Canada is a founding member of the Missile Technology Control Regime that was established in 1987 as a means to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction proliferation by controlling the transfer of missile equipment, material, and related technologies. Canada was also instrumental in the development of the 2002 Hague Code of Conduct against ballistic missile proliferation, the first multilateral agreement that established principles regarding ballistic missiles.

Scott Peterson, 42, a former stockbroker and current journalism student at Ryerson University, feels that Canada’s role in the missile defense system is highly problematic. “I think it breaks a lot of treaties we have. I think it’s isolationist and protectionist in a global society and I think it’s just wrong,” he said.

Moreover, concern exists over how support for the missile defense system will threaten and reverse hard fought gains in the struggle to ensure that nations comply with non-proliferation policies. Llyod Axworthy, a former Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister and current director and CEO of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Colombia, and Michael Byers, a professor of law and director of Canadian Studies at Duke University, write, “There’s good reason to think that support for BMD [Ballistic Missile Defense] would curtail Canada’s foreign policy options. In fact, it would entail an abrupt change in our policy on the non-proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction, moving from a model of multilateral regulation and cooperation to a confrontational approach based on the threat of force.”  

Furthermore, a majority of Canadians feel that Canada, popularly labeled “a decaffeinated version of the United States” by Canadian political commentator Charlotte Gray, should struggle to level out the playing field with the United States to better assert itself as an independent nation with distinct values.

In an article featured in Maclean’s magazine on February 9, 2004, titled “Hope you Lose, eh,” an exclusive poll found that a mere 15 percent of Canadians support Bush’s re-election in November 2004. Jonathon Gatehouse wrote, “Despite a spate of polls showing a broad desire for improved relations with the United States after the often rocky Chrétien years, there is a sense that this administration isn’t one we want to do business with.”

Barry W. Cook of Toronto personified this concern in the opinion/editorial section of The Globe and Mail on November 19, 2003. Just as Martin was set to take the reins of government, he expressed apprehension over the extent to which U.S. influence permeates Canada. He wrote, “Canada is about to retire a Prime Minister and gain a CEO [referring to Martin’s business background] … Here’s hoping the head office of Canada (Limited) is not Washington, nor its chairman in Crawford, Texas.”

Such an editorial points to a popular cultural divide that many Canadians feel. The question remains whether they will demand that distinct policies be adopted in order to affirm Canada’s traditional commitment to the principles of multilateralism, disarmament, peace, and the rule of law. Yet perhaps Jonathon Gatehouse of Maclean’s put it perfectly when he wrote, “In Canada, there is still no surer kiss of death for a politician than caving into American pressure.”

With the policy-making authority of the Liberals being drastically curtailed in light of the recent election, Martin is now in the unique position of looking left or right as he vies for unabashed cooperation from the other parties in Parliament in order to stay in power and pass legislation.

While Jack Layton, leader of the NDP, affirmed that he would continue his vigorous campaign against Canada’s participation in the missile defense system, along with Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Québécois Party, whose platform also opposed such collaboration, Martin may have to look towards the Conservative Party, Canada’s version of what in effect is the “Republicans-lite” for support. Its leader, Stephen Harper, is the only politician who campaigned vociferously in support of Canada’s participation in Bush’s pet project.

After a hotly contested race, Martin and Harper may end up forming an uncanny alliance on the issue of missile defense. The two dignified politicians who spent much of their time on the campaign trail trading insults and jabs may end up standing shoulder to shoulder with one another, gazing south with stars and stripes in their eyes.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS>

Department of National Defense and Canadian Forces
URL: http://www.forces.gc.ca

United States Department of Defense
URL: http://dod.mil

Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars
URL: http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=topics.home&topic_id=1420

Council for a Livable World
URL: http://www.clw.org

Liu Institute for Global Issues
URL: http://www.ligi.ubc.ca

Science for Peace
URL: http://scienceforpeace.sa.utoronto.ca

Brookings Institute
URL: http://www.brookings.edu