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The Other Side of War by Zainab Salbi (National Geographic) The Other Side of War is a poignant and important look at the forgotten victims of world conflict - the women and children who are displaced and deserted in times of crisis. Article rating: 7.95

“Women and children make up 80 percent of refugees worldwide.” -- Zainab Salbi 

I am not going to start this out with some grandiose, sugar coated “we are the world we are the future,” type introduction. Instead, I am just going to give it to you real and drop you into the book. “Research shows that women are more likely to be displaced as a result of war, more likely to be sole providers of children and the elderly, and more likely to die of disease caused by lack of sanitation war creates,” the author, Zainab Salbi, writes in The Other Side of War. “When a man is injured in war, he is a hero. But when a woman is raped or mutilated because of rape, she is more likely hidden, an object of shame.”        

On September 19th, National Geographic will publish this heart rendering book authored by Zainab Salbi, president and founder of Women for Women International, a non governmental activist group founded in 1993 that empowers marginalized women survivors of war and assists them in the rebuilding of their lives with job skills, rights awareness and leadership education. A survivor of war herself, Salbi’s name may sound a bit familiar. Released last year, she wrote her memoirs entitled Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam in which she revealed her life growing up in Iraq where her father was Saddam Hussein’s pilot. The books powerful images are the work of world famous photographers Susan Meiselas, Sylvia Placy, and Lekha Singh

The structure of this book is pretty simple. It provides a keen focus on the text, allowing the quotes and photographs to add a complementary dimension. The book’s six sections separately cover different countries in various states of conflict, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Columbia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Rwanda. For those not aware of the struggle in these war torn places, a brief overview of how the history led to the current conflict at hand is featured at the beginning of the each chapter as well as a map of the region.

The meat of this book is the memories shared by individual women or groups of women in the Women for Women International program. Every word feels so intimate that it is almost as if you are sitting there with the each one as you read. Difficult atrocities such as rape, mutilation, HIV, death and enslavement are touched upon but there are also narratives of hope.  Despite the tragedy the women have endured, they often rise above and several have received educations and started businesses.

The 120 or so color and black and white photographs by award winning photographers Susan Meiselas, Sylvia Plachy, and Lekha Singh add a wonderful element to the stories and reinforce hope. The images provide not only faces to these women, but briefly lets you into visit their families and homes. Engaging photographs illustrate children smiling, an aunt dancing or brothers and sisters learning to read together.     

This hardcover book opens with a brief introduction to the organization and leads into a powerful preface written by Alice Walker, a human rights activist and prolific author, most known for the novel The Color Purple and her recent appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Walker and Salbi put into perspective that before the wars in the countries covered, gender inequality was prevalent and ingrained within the bedrock of these societies. Once everything was torn part with the seams of the social fabric undone, the burden was left on the women to clean up the mess and to begin to sew the nations back together.

Walker reinforces this notion when she writes in the preface that she noticed on the road she was traveling, that only men were driving the trucks and cars that passed her. She correlates this to the bigger picture with her poetic approach, “An ill omen, I think for the society at large, because it speaks to an ingrained gender inequality that drastically curtails the mobility and involvement in life of women and girls and will undoubtly undermine any dreams of progress and societal stability. After all, how can a society flourish, a country attain democracy and health, children grow into intelligent beings, sensitive to the needs of an ever more fragile and endangered planet, if half its people are kept out of the driver’s seat? How can a world right itself and find its true direction, if only men are taught to steer the vehicle that would take it there? Alas, the roads resemble only too closely the country’s political and spiritual leadership, all of it masculine.”    

Mind you, this is not compendium of statistics, nor a book about male bashing, but rather an enlightening, empowering look at the world, putting a spotlight on a problem of which many are still ignorant. “If we are to understand war fully, we need to understand not only what happens on the front lines, but what happens on the back line as well, where women are in charge of keeping life going,” Salbi shares in the introduction. “This book is meant to go beyond the bullets, the battles, and the politics to present nuanced views of war held by the women who have lived through it. The stories they tell are of incredible loss and cruelty, but they reveal an equally incredible degree of courage and creativity that shows women in their full agency, not merely as victims.”

One cannot help but take a moment after reading this book and letting its content set in.  The delicate words in The Other Side of War provide indelible impressions of the everyday consequences of war that do not make the headlines.  The text is not cumbersome or overwhelming, but the memories and stories being told require a certain amount of emotional endurance.

As Walker says, “This is not just another book.” It is the beginning of awareness. The first piece of the puzzle needed to figure out “how we can survive, intact, as the manifestation of the healthy and autonomous feminine that is essential to bring the Earth back to balance.” With this we can learn from these women how to transform destruction into a new start.

“Stronger women build stronger nations.” -- Zainab Salbi

Visit: www.womenforwomen.org to learn more about Women for Women International and to purchase this book for $28.00, which will go towards funding the programs for the organization visit shop.nationalgegraphic.com

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Much needed research. Great work. Posted by: Prema Murthy Sep 17, 2006 @ 5:50 PM EST

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