Zainab Salbi: Women, wartime and the dream of peace

I woke up in the middle of the night

with the sound of heavy explosion.

It was deep at night.

I do not remember what time it was.

I just remember the sound

was so heavy

and so very shocking.

Everything in my room was shaking --

my heart, my windows,

my bed, everything.

I looked out the windows

and I saw a full half-circle

of explosion.

I thought it was just like the movies,

but the movies had not conveyed them

in the powerful image that I was seeing

full of bright red

and orange and gray,

and a full circle of explosion.

And I kept on staring at it

until it disappeared.

I went back to my bed,

and I prayed,

and I secretly thanked God

that that missile

did not land on my family's home,

that it did not kill my family that night.

Thirty years have passed,

and I still feel guilty about that prayer,

for the next day, I learned that that missile

landed on my brother's friend's home

and killed him

and his father,

but did not kill his mother or his sister.

His mother showed up the next week

at my brother's classroom

and begged seven-year-old kids

to share with her any picture they may have

of her son,

for she had lost everything.

This is not a story

of a nameless survivor of war,

and nameless refugees,

whose stereotypical images we see in our newspapers

and our TV

with tattered clothes,

dirty face, scared eyes.

This is not a story of a nameless someone

who lived in some war,

who we do not know their hopes, their dreams,

their accomplishments, their families,

their beliefs, their values.

This is my story.

I was that girl.

I am another image and vision

of another survivor of war.

I am that refugee,

and I am that girl.

You see,

I grew up in war-torn Iraq,

and I believe that there are two sides of wars

and we've only seen

one side of it.

We only talk about

one side of it.

But there's another side

that I have witnessed

as someone who lived in it

and someone who ended up working in it.

I grew up with the colors of war --

the red colors of fire and blood,

the brown tones of earth

as it explodes

in our faces

and the piercing silver

of an exploded missile,

so bright

that nothing can protect your eyes from it.

I grew up

with the sounds of war --

the staccato sounds of gunfire,

the wrenching booms of explosions,

ominous drones of jets flying overhead

and the wailing warning sounds

of sirens.

These are the sounds you would expect,

but they are also the sounds

of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds

screeching in the night,

the high-pitched honest cries

of children

and the thunderous,

unbearable

silence.

"War," a friend of mine said,

"is not about sound at all.

It is actually about silence,

the silence of humanity."

I have since left Iraq

and founded a group called Women for Women International

that ends up working

with women survivors of wars.

In my travels and in my work,

from Congo to Afghanistan,

from Sudan to Rwanda,

I have learned not only

that the colors and the sounds of war are the same,

but the fears of war are the same.

You know, there is a fear of dying,

and do not believe any movie character

where the hero is not afraid.

It is very scary

to go through that feeling

of "I am about to die"

or "I could die in this explosion."

But there's also the fear

of losing loved ones,

and I think that's even worse.

It's too painful. You don't want to think about it.

But I think the worst kind of fear is the fear --

as Samia, a Bosnian woman, once told me,

who survived the four-years besiege of Sarajevo;

she said, "The fear

of losing

the 'I' in me,

the fear of losing

the 'I' in me."

That's what my mother in Iraq

used to tell me.

It's like dying from inside-out.

A Palestinian woman once told me,

"It is not about the fear of one death,"

she said, "sometimes I feel

I die 10 times in one day,"

as she was describing the marches of soldiers

and the sounds of their bullets.

She said, "But it's not fair,

because there is only one life,

and there should only be one death."

We have been only seeing

one side of war.

We have only been discussing and consumed

with high-level preoccupations

over troop levels, drawdown timelines,

surges and sting operations,

when we should be examining the details

of where the social fabric

has been most torn,

where the community has improvised

and survived

and shown acts of resilience

and amazing courage

just to keep life going.

We have been so consumed

with seemingly objective discussions

of politics, tactics,

weapons, dollars

and casualties.

This is the language

of sterility.

How casually

we treat casualties

in the context of this topic.

This is where we conceive of rape and casualties

as inevitabilities.

Eighty percent of refugees around the world

are women and children. Oh.

Ninety percent of modern war casualties

are civilians.

Seventy-five percent of them are women and children.

How interesting.

Oh, half a million women in Rwanda

get raped in 100 days.

Or, as we speak now,

hundreds of thousands of Congolese women

are getting raped and mutilated.

How interesting.

These just become numbers that we refer to.

The front of wars

is increasingly non-human eyes

peering down on our perceived enemies

from space,

guiding missiles toward unseen targets,

while the human conduct

of the orchestra of media relations

in the event that this particular drone attack

hits a villager

instead of an extremist.

It is a chess game.

You learn to play an international relations school

on your way out and up

to national and international leadership.

Checkmate.

We are missing

a completely other side of wars.

We are missing my mother's story,

who made sure with every siren, with every raid,

with every cut off-of electricity,

she played puppet shows for my brothers and I,

so we would not be scared

of the sounds of explosions.

We are missing the story of Fareeda,

a music teacher,

a piano teacher, in Sarajevo,

who made sure

that she kept the music school open

every single day

in the four years of besiege in Sarajevo

and walked to that school,

despite the snipers shooting

at that school and at her,

and kept the piano, the violin, the cello

playing the whole duration of the war,

with students wearing their gloves and hats and coats.

That was her fight.

That was her resistance.

We are missing the story of Nehia,

a Palestinian woman in Gaza

who, the minute there was a cease-fire in the last year's war,

she left out of home,

collected all the flour

and baked as much bread for every neighbor to have,

in case there is no cease-fire the day after.

We are missing

the stories of Violet,

who, despite surviving genocide in the church massacre,

she kept on going on,

burying bodies, cleaning homes, cleaning the streets.

We are missing stories of women

who are literally keeping life going

in the midst of wars.

Do you know --

do you know that people fall in love in war

and go to school

and go to factories and hospitals

and get divorced and go dancing and go playing

and live life going?

And the ones who are keeping that life

are women.

There are two sides of war.

There is a side that fights,

and there is a side that keeps the schools

and the factories and the hospitals open.

There is a side that is focused on winning battles,

and there is a side that is focused

on winning life.

There is a side that leads the front-line discussion,

and there is a side

that leads the back-line discussion.

There is a side that thinks

that peace is the end of fighting,

and there is a side that thinks

that peace is the arrival

of schools and jobs.

There is a side

that is led by men,

and there is a side

that is led by women.

And in order for us to understand

how do we build lasting peace,

we must understand war and peace

from both sides.

We must have a full picture

of what that means.

In order for us to understand

what actually peace means,

we need to understand,

as one Sudanese woman once told me,

"Peace is the fact that my toenails

are growing back again."

She grew up in Sudan, in Southern Sudan,

for 20 years of war,

where it killed one million people

and displaced five million refugees.

Many women were taken as slaves

by rebels and soldiers,

as sexual slaves who were forced also

to carry the ammunition and the water

and the food for the soldiers.

So that woman walked for 20 years,

so she would not be kidnapped again.

And only when there was some sort of peace,

her toenails grew back again.

We need to understand peace

from a toenail's perspective.

We need to understand

that we cannot actually have negotiations

of ending of wars or peace

without fully including women

at the negotiating table.

I find it amazing

that the only group of people

who are not fighting and not killing

and not pillaging and not burning and not raping,

and the group of people who are mostly --

though not exclusively --

who are keeping life going in the midst of war,

are not included in the negotiating table.

And I do argue that women lead the back-line discussion,

but there are also men

who are excluded from that discussion.

The doctors who are not fighting,

the artists, the students, the men who refuse to pick up the guns,

they are, too, excluded

from the negotiating tables.

There is no way we can talk about a lasting peace,

building of democracy, sustainable economies,

any kind of stabilities,

if we do not fully include women

at the negotiating table.

Not one, but 50 percent.

There is no way we can talk about the building of stability

if we don't start investing

in women and girls.

Did you know

that one year

of the world's military spending

equals 700 years

of the U.N. budget

and equals 2,928 years

of the U.N. budget allocated for women?

If we just reverse

that distribution of funds,

perhaps we could have

a better lasting peace in this world.

And last, but not least,

we need to invest in peace and women,

not only because it is the right thing to do,

not only because it is the right thing to do,

for all of us to build sustainable and lasting peace today,

but it is for the future.

A Congolese woman,

who was telling me about

how her children saw their father killed in front of them

and saw her raped in front of them

and mutilated in front of them,

and her children saw their nine-year-old sibling

killed in front of them,

how they're doing okay right now.

She got into Women for Women International's program.

She got a support network.

She learned about her rights.

We taught her vocational and business skills. We helped her get a job.

She was earning 450 dollars. She was doing okay.

She was sending them to school. Have a new home.

She said, "But what I worry about the most

is not any of that.

I worry that my children

have hate in their hearts,

and when they want to grow up, they want to fight again

the killers of their father and their brother."

We need to invest in women,

because that's our only chance

to ensure that there is no more war

in the future.

That mother has a better chance to heal her children

than any peace agreement can do.

Are there good news? Of course, there are good news. There are lots of good news.

To start with, these women that I told you about

are dancing and singing every single day,

and if they can,

who are we not to dance?

That girl that I told you about

ended up starting Women for Women International Group

that impacted one million people, sent 80 million dollars,

and I started this from zero,

nothing, nada, [unclear].

(Laughter)

They are women who are standing on their feet

in spite of their circumstances,

not because of it.

Think of how the world can be a much better place

if, for a change,

we have a better equality,

we have equality,

we have a representation

and we understand war,

both from the front-line

and the back-line discussion.

Rumi, a 13th-century Sufi poet,

says, "Out beyond the worlds

of right-doings and wrong-doings,

there is a field.

I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full

to talk about.

Ideas, language,

even the phrase 'each other'

no longer makes any sense."

I humbly add -- humbly add --

that out beyond

the worlds of war and peace,

there is a field,

and there are many women and men

[who] are meeting there.

Let us make this field a much bigger place.

Let us all meet in that field.

Thank you.

(Applause)