The world is shaking from another terrorism attack, each nation mourning the victims in Moscow, realizing that they could just as easily have been their own citizens. The news is full of the body count of victims – 37 and counting. But my mind wanders from the shocking images on You Tube to the two women who did this.
No doubt their names will soon be released, but I am wondering about the other things that make us who we are. Did their mothers sing them lullabies when they were children? When was the last time they laughed, wore something pretty, fell in love? What was the thing that drove them to this? How did they fill in their last hours? Did they have babies? Did they have a photo they kissed as they embarked on their last job on earth? Did they really believe that soon they would be in a better place? If so – what horror were they living through to have made death and murder seem better?
I try to imagine the life of a woman who decides or is forced into what has become known as a black widow, or shahidka - female suicide bombers.
A Chechen woman has the rights of a Saudi woman without the money or influence.
If a Chechen woman is raped – a crime perpetrated on them both by Russians and Chechen fighters – she can never marry or have children. On top of that, she will be thought to have dishonoured her entire family and is only fit to offer herself up as a suicide bomber.
Once a Chechen woman marries, she is a property of her husband and his family. If she is widowed – and there are tens of thousands of those in Chechnya - she can be enslaved by her in-laws to work, or thrown out of the house like garbage, with no rights over her children. And people who have researched the lives of these female suicide bombers often mention the stories of those who were sold to a warlord to be suicide bombing fodder. Fatima and Khadzhad Ganiyeva were two young sisters who were killed in the Moscow Dubrovka theatre siege in 2002; they had been sold off by their brother – a Chechen fighter – to a local warlord for $1,500 a piece and then forced into the suicide mission.
In this enlightening article they’re called “pawns in a man’s game” and that “far from being freedom fighters with an equal right to die for their beliefs, Chechnya’s female martyrs are more likely to be forced, blackmailed or brainwashed to their deaths.”
The Russian government is issuing all kinds of statements on revenge and vindication – another excuse for more repression in the Caucasus which in turn will lead to more attacks and so the cycle goes churning up more blood, more grief, to infinity. Meanwhile in some places, the sorry lives of the women who again, are nothing but meat in men’s wars goes on as it has done since the ancient times.
Photo on Flickr by Rinoturno06
