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The Case Against Mexico Joining NATO

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By Raúl Zepeda-Gil

Artwork: “Esquadron 201,” The 201st Mexican Fighter Squadron, Mexican Expeditionary Air Force Artist: Ginny Sherwood

Mexico has no benefit in joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In a pragmatic sense, the relation with the United States constrains how Mexico employs its foreign policy. Adding a new layer of complexity, coming from an international organisation that has an overwhelming leadership from the U.S., would futher hinder Mexico’s foreign policy by reducing its freedom degrees of action by excesing a neutralilty instance in international security matters.

Historically, Mexico has diverged from the U.S. foreign policy and acted in a semi-neutral basis for the rest of the world. After the recurrent invasions from the U.S. and France during the 19th Century, Mexico adopted constitutional principles enshirend in article 89, fraction X: self-determination, peaceful conflict resolution, follow international law, and the proscription to threat to use force against other State.

Mario Ojeda, one the most relevant experts on Mexico’s foreign policy, described the paradox of a relatively weak country neighbouring through a long border with the United States: it has independence in foreign policy in exchange for cooperation in everyday matters. Mexico does not engage in international security affairs of the U.S., but has intensive cooperation in other maters: border protection, migration issues, having a Free Trade Agreement, and Plan Merida for anti-drug initiatives.

In 2019, Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of NATO, in response to the integration of Colombia as a partner of the alliance, mentioned that other Latin American countries could integrate in the same way. This appeal happened in a particular geopolitical moment: Brazil had requested to join NATO to help Donald Trump pressure the rest of the member states internally.

2021 has changed the scenario: Trump is now out of office. And Joe Biden will reinforce the U.S. presence in NATO. However, before these junctures, two members of the Atlantic Council have made their case for Mexico in NATO. Skaluba and Doyle argued:

“Mexico could serve as a gateway for an intensified NATO presence in Latin America where the alliance is absent outside of a formal partnership with Colombia. Given Russia’s criticality in propping up Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela and China’s growing influence throughout the Global South, an augmented NATO role in Latin America could further democracy promotion while providing a timely deterrent effect, including on Russia’s solicitation of Mexico to increase bilateral trade and security agreements.”

This idea has been widely debated. In 2012, Christopher Sands, of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkin’s University, said:

President Obama and Prime Minister Harper should consider Mexico when they meet with other NATO leaders in Chicago. NATO with Mexico as a member could also confirm the alliance’s role as a guarantor of security and mutual cooperation against transnational security threats that contributes to the prosperity of the west, in Europe and North America equally.

Both pieces, plus the Stoltenberg declaration, do not mention why or how Mexico would benefit from a NATO membership beyond the current benefits from the bilateral relationship with the U.S. or the integration within the free trade agreement government Canada. Both quotes show that having Mexico’s main interest in NATO is to be functional to the NATO agenda. Nonetheless, history has shown that Mexico’s geographical closeness to the U.S. automatically requires Mexico to be auxiliary to the Atlantic agenda. Mexico is so entwined with the U.S. that it will choose to be with the U.S. on a global scale conflict.

Nonetheless, beyond a real common threat to Mexico and the U.S., such as the Japanese Empire during the Second World War, Mexico does not need to enter into the agenda of international conflicts of the U.S. The advantage of Mexico’s independent foreign policy is that Mexico exchanges cooperation of its own agenda without the need to be involved in issues that are not geopolitically relevant to Mexico. For example, the George W. Bush administration pressured Mexico to enter the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq in 2002. Nonetheless, México denied joining that endevour initially because it was not supported in the UN Security Council. Afterwards, with the negative vote of Mexico in the UN Security Council in 2003, the Iraq War was not athorised, therefore, giving Mexico the main reason to deny any future involvement: it was against the Mexican constitutional principle of following the international law. Indeed, diplomatic tensions arose, but the bilateral agenda continued as usual, and Mexico did not embark in a conflict; it not needed be involved.

For a country so dependent on the U.S. economy, joining to NATO would mean relinquishing degrees of freedom in foreign policy. Mexico is in line with North America’s defence by cooperating with the U.S. Northern Command and follows constitutional principles of peaceful resolutions of conflict and democratic values. However, joining with NATO would mean that Mexico could be pressured to integrate to conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya, Bosnia, or Yemen, contentious by themselves in other multilateral forums.

As stated before, Mexico usually disagrees with NATO countries in the UN on international security matters. For example, Mexico has never supported Responsibility to Protect as a policy, instead prefers diplomatic mediation. And has never supported military responses for international security matters, rather than just peacekeeping operations.

The previously mentioned authors argued that Mexico would benefit from the Security Sector Reform (SSR) framework that NATO implemented in Eastern Europe. Is it necessary that Mexico join NATO to ask for bilateral or multilateral cooperation in implementing SSR framework? The authors were not aware that bilateral cooperation with the U.S. in anti-narcotics agenda has involved some SSR programs under the Merida Initiative signed during the George W. Bush administration. Nowadays, UN peacekeeping is a more effective way to engage in SSR reform in the defence sector than NATO initaitives. Mexico has established a new peacekeeping educational centre for its recent engagement in UN peacekeeping since 2014, after a long absence from any peacekeeping since the late 1950s. Therefore, there are no apparent benefits in cooperating with NATO.

Finally, we remember why NATO was founded: to combat Soviet influence Undeniably, Mexico also was under the influence of Cold War global politics. However, instead of following the US foreign policy agenda, Mexico has followed a foreign policy agenda based on promoting peaceful resolution of conflicts, neutrality in conflicts, and the promotion of de-nuclearisation. Mexico has developed a diverse portfolio of multilateral initiatives in the UN that are possible because it does not follow U.S. foreign policy: migration agreements, small arms trafficking and recently, promoting the global vaccine alliance for developing countries. Close cooperation in real bilateral problems with the U.S. allows Mexico to act with more freedom in global issues. Joining NATO would hinder that freedom.

it is not a problem to argue that a country has a role in the global scenario. But, the problem with the Atlantic Council’s arguments is that they do not consider any of the current foreign policy traditions of Mexico. In simpler terms: they did not even mind asking or thinking in Mexican terms why would it be useful to be in NATO, beyond a random menu or SSR reform, without knowing what is happening in its SSR agenda. In even more practical terms: if there is something that unsettles the U.S. about the Mexico’s bilateral relations with Russia or China, a phone call between the State Department and the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs would be more effective than a long and exhaustiative process in joining NATO.

 

Raúl Zepeda-Gil is a Mexican PhD Student in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. He holds degree in political science by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a master’s degree in political science by El Colegio de Mexico. One of his research topics is Mexican multilateral foreign policy and civil-military relations. You can follow him on Twitter at @zepecaos.

Trump’s Pentagon: An Opaque Legacy

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By Hannah Papachristidis

(Georgia Tech, 2020)

In August 2020, a letter was sent to Senator Christopher Murphy (D-CT) blocking a declassification appeal. The appeal in question referred to the classification of the War Powers Act notification following the drone strike which killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Until January 2020, all known previous War Powers Act notifications were unclassified (accompanied on occasion by a classified annex), making Trump’s act of war not only highly belligerent, but also a threat to the principles of transparency and public accountability in times of war and crisis.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to ‘declare war’, meaning that presidents cannot independently declare war. It is generally agreed, however, that the Commander-in-Chief role allows the President to initiate military action to repel attacks against the country. The distinction between low-level hostilities or other situations which may not count as war and war itself is blurry, and is the source of much controversy. The War Powers Resolution, therefore, was Congress’s move to stake their claim on the power to declare war in the face of presidents who waded into the grey areas. It requires that, if a president takes unilateral action, they must inform Congress within 48 hours and that such military operation can only continue for up to 90 days without congressional approval. These requirements, however, have been deemed an unconstitutional infringement of Congress on presidential powers by every President since 1973.

Trump justified the strike on Soliemani as an attack of ‘self-defence’, the first time a nation has invoked self-defence as justification for carrying out an attack against a state actor in a third country. Invoking self-defence requires evidence, in this case of the ‘imminent attack’ referenced by Trump. Trump’s failure to produce such evidence meant the attack was an unlawful, arbitrary killing by the US.

Much has been written debating the event, the legality of Trump’s actions, the effectiveness of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, and the validity of using the ‘2002 Authorisation for Use of Military Force’ to justify the drone strike. What receives less coverage, however, is the way in which the classification of the War Powers notification fits within a wider pattern of opacity and secrecy by the Trump administration, particularly with regards to issues of defence and security. Whilst it is not unusual for a sitting president to challenge the War Powers Resolution, the desire of the Trump administration to shroud such an outrageous act of war in secrecy and over-classification makes Trump’s actions more disingenuous than his successors.

Senator Murphy’s challenge of the classification of the notification outlined the irregularity of such an approach, and he wrote; “I suspect the Notification was classified to restrict debate, rather than for national security purposes”. Murphy reviewed the notification as an authorised clearance holder and, with this in mind, he outlined in his challenge that the information included in the notification was already public record, providing no grounds for classification. Classifying the notification, therefore, was not a matter of national security but a direct attack on transparency, a key principle of good governance.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO), an independent watchdog organisation that focuses on waste, corruption and abuses of power by the US government, put together a timeline documenting the changes to the Department of Defense (DoD) and national security policy that limited and undermined public access to information under Trump. The timeline starts with memos sent in 2017 from then Defense Secretary Mattis, the Chief of Naval Operations, and a Pentagon spokesman all warning staff against ‘over-sharing’. From there, a downward spiral into secrecy unravels, marked with long periods without televised press briefings, and the classification of data previously publicly available. The US Air Force, for example, ordered a freeze on media access and public outreach in 2018. In January 2019, the DoD stopped issuing ‘strike releases’, reports providing information on bombings targeting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The strike releases were previously highly detailed, and useful for cross-referencing claims of civilian harm by monitoring groups.

An important milestone was the decision to no longer publish the number of troops in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan announced by Trump in August 2017. These numbers were previously published every quarter. There is little evidence, therefore, that publishing these numbers would suddenly constitute an operational risk. Transparency around troop levels guides public understandings of ongoing conflicts and levels of troops at risk. Hiding the scale of the US military presence in war zones from the public, therefore, is a huge step towards undemocratic war waging. These policy changes illustrate how the Pentagon, led by Trump appointees, disengaged from the public and broke with previous information sharing practices. In doing so the DoD normalised secrecy without due justification, promoting a culture of over-classification in favour of transparency and accountability.

Much of this secrecy can be attributed to Secretary Mattis’ leadership; his successor, Mark Esper, reintroduced televised press briefings and was purported to favour greater transparency. Full transparency did not resume however, as the classified 2020 War Powers notification illustrated. Furthermore, in March 2020, the Department of Defense asked Congress to rescind the request for the Pentagon to provide an unclassified copy of the Future years Defense Program database, data which provides spending projections for five years in the future, key details which provide the public with outlines of DoD future investments. Although this hasn’t taken place yet, that the DoD would consider denying the public, civil society organisations, and independent watchdogs the opportunity to review and scrutinise projected expenditure, future acquisition plans, and personnel management plans, is a critical warning sign of continued desires to shut down important civil society oversight and dialogue on the use of taxpayer funds.

Transparency in the national security space is a constant push and pull, with those within defence and security institutions claiming defence exceptionalism and those outside pushing for greater accessibility. A balance is possible, in which classification is used as a tool for national security not a coverup for abuses of power, conflicts of interest, and corruption. Overclassification, as seen with the 2020 War Powers notification, is a pernicious issue, which not only threatens public understanding but ultimately undermines classification standards and information regulation.

With the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, there is hope that greater transparency and accountability will return to the US defence institutions. Biden has made some commitments to transparency but nothing specific regarding national security. He has the opportunity to reverse the policies and practices that emerged under Trump and to encourage a more transparent and accountable defence sector, and civil society should hold him to this.

 

Hannah Papachristidis is a project officer at Transparency International Defence & Security, where she manages research outputs for the 2020 Government Defence Integrity Index. She holds an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and is an Emerging Expert at Forum on the Arms Trade.

Financial institutions as enablers of global conflicts: the implications of the FinCEN leaks

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By Sandra Huang

Protesters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia calling for then Prime Minister’s resignation over 1MDB embezzlement scandal in August 2015

The fundamental role of the global financial system is often overlooked when it comes to the discussion of international conflict, where attention is primarily concentrated on the state actors involved. However, what is alarming is the actor that is beyond the state control. Given that the financial system is an essential instrument for conflict actors to access their resources and carry out their activities, global financial institutions play a critical role in blocking the flow of money and intervening such activities. Nonetheless, the fact that the financial system is globalised and run by the profit-seeking private sector has made an effective state control challenging and resulted in numerous scandals of its misuse across multiple jurisdictions by the ill-intentioned actors. Consequently, the potential of financial institutions to enable global conflict warrants further scrutiny.

As a standardised control measure, financial institutions in most countries are required by law to submit suspicious activity reports (SARs) to the authorities if a customer activity is suspected of being involved in financial crimes. In the US, SARs are filed to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the US Treasury dedicated to combating financial crimes. In 2019, news agencies and investigative journalists worldwide received over 2,000 leaked SARs submitted to the FinCEN between 2000 and 2017 as well as other government reports. Their investigations of the leaked files, publicised in September 2020 and known as the FinCEN leaks, attributed the suspicious financial activities to organised criminals, prominent officials, terrorists and sanctioned individuals who were linked to a number of high-profile security incidents over the last two decades.

Those ill-intentioned individuals exploited the complexity of the global financial system to launder their money so that the illegal aspects of their activities could go undetected. Although the leaked files only reflected pure suspicions of compliance officers in financial institutions, they nonetheless provided valuable trails of scandals in the past and underlined the inadequacy of control measures in curbing financial crime, which has led to a variety of security issues beyond the financial arena.

Among those security issues are socio-economic grievances and associated social unrest. They are usually triggered by the poor governance that failed to utilise public funding to provide better living conditions. For instance, the investigations into the FinCEN files revealed that the Venezuelan construction magnate, Alejandro Ceballos Jiménez, received over $146 million between 2013 and 2014 from government contracts to build public housing, while an excessive amount of the money was suspected of having been diverted to his family members through a money laundering scheme set up by Swiss lawyers. In 2015, an investigation into the housing project suggested that it was overcharged and that it was not properly furnished. The close relationship between the Ceballos family and the ruling elites has granted the family business numerous government contracts and sustained a luxurious lifestyle that can be witnessed through their high-end properties in the US; contrastingly, the ordinary Venezuelans are still suffering from the collapsed economy, poverty and insecurity. Notably, this is only a minor part of more than $4.8 billion involved in SARs related to Venezuela from 2009 to 2017, nearly 70% of which involved public money.

On the other side of the world, Malaysia was struck by large-scale protests between 2015 and 2016 over then-Prime Minister Najib Razak’s alleged embezzlement of billions of US dollars from an economic development fund, 1 Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). The scandal, which was brought to light in 2015 following a leak from a former Swiss banker, revealed a complex money laundering scheme, which spanned across multiple jurisdictions and involved Razak and his close associate Jho Low. While the trial over the case has been ongoing, the FinCEN files further revealed suspicious transactions involving over $2.5 billion between 2009 and 2016 linked to Jho Low and the 1MDB fund. Despite strong suspicions, those transactions were still carried out by multiple multinational banks throughout the whole period. Among the banks involved, Goldman Sachs was charged with the largest penalties of $5 billion by multiple jurisdictions for its role in facilitating and profiting from the money laundering scheme of the 1MDB fund. Troublingly, suspicions of corruption and money laundering revealed by the FinCEN leaks are not limited to these countries but are observed on a global scale, largely connected to powerful and well-connected individuals who pursue their self-interest at the expense of public good.

Another security issue stems from terrorist financing, which refers to the way terrorist groups gain access to financial resources to support their operations. To combat terrorist financing, financial institutions are on the front line to detect and block the flow of money that fund terrorist activities. However, there is much to be improved in this area. Among the most notable examples revealed in the FinCEN leaks were transactions involving over $4 billion to and from Iraqi banks in SARs filed by Deutsche Bank’s US branches and Bank of America in 2014 and 2015. During this period, the extremist Islamic State (IS) group controlled a large swath of territories in Syria and Iraq and seized over 120 Iraqi banks. Although the SARs submitted did not clearly state the senders or recipients, which made direct attribution unfeasible, considering IS’s funding sources and financial activities, there is a high possibility that related transactions were made by the IS to channel its funds into the legitimate banking system in order to purchase weapons or receive funding from overseas charities. After all, SARs were filed by the banks with delays, by which point the transactions of suspected terrorist money had already been processed through the global financial system, representing a loophole in the global counter-terrorism efforts.

The FinCEN leaks also revealed other SARs involving large international banking institutions related to the financing of the sanctioned extremist groups Taliban and Al-Qaeda. This brings about another issue that is closely related to international security: sanctions evasion. Sanctions are a series of measures implemented by a country, a regional body, or an international body against targeted countries, groups or individuals for military, social or political reasons in a variety of forms, including financial restrictions, in order to effect changes to the sanctioned targets. On the first line of defence of the financial sanctions are financial institutions, whose compliance is key for a sanctions programme. Regrettably, several global banking institutions have undermined the US sanctions regime over time. For instance, in 2013, the Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) submitted the SARs against its Iranian clients following the whistleblowing of its former employees to the US authorities regarding its breaches of sanctions against Iran. The whistleblowing and the follow-up investigations by the authorities did not give the SCB penalties that were harsh enough to cut ties with Iran. Furthermore, in 2016, an Iranian-Turkish gold trader, Reza Zarrab, was arrested by the US authorities for carrying out transactions on behalf of sanctioned Iranian entities. The SCB only filed SARs against Zarrab and these entities months after the former’s arrest. Despite a number of penalties the bank received for its sanctions violations, the FinCEN files suggest that it had continued to report suspicions on Iran-related transactions until at least 2017, most of which were processed even though an SAR was filed.

Certainly, for financial institutions, gaining lucrative business deals that are likely to come from ill-intentioned actors and protecting the integrity of the financial system are two conflicting goals that are inherently difficult to maintain at the same time. By examining previous FinCEN files, it appears that the penalties imposed by the authorities have not had deterrent effects in the long term. Moreover, under the pressure of legal requirements, filing SARs has become more of a box-ticking exercise to ensure compliance, rather than a serious effort to combat money laundering, terrorist financing and other financial crimes. This is reflected in the FinCEN files where the leaked SARs were either submitted with severe delays, without sufficient information, or in a significant volume. This leads to an inefficient allocation of resources by the FinCEN as it may invest unproportionate amount of time in delving into irrelevant transactions and have limited capacity left to investigate into plausible money laundering cases, hampering its efforts to timely, effectively detect and suspend related illegitimate activities.

To respond to this challenge, the close cooperation between the public and private sector is essential to assist financial institutions in building effective compliance programmes that meet the needs of the authorities. The prevalence of transnational transaction activities also underlines the need for global coordinated efforts to curb financial crimes. These include standardised criteria in compliance requirements across different jurisdictions so that no gaps can potentially be exploited, and a mechanism to effectively share financial intelligence among different countries to facilitate cross-border investigations.

The leak of the FinCEN files has faced criticism because it disclosed confidential information and may impede the investigations by the authorities. Financial institutions may also be reluctant to trust the authorities and file SARs in the future. However, the insights revealed by investigative journalists – who have connected the dots of security events across the world – highlighted the scale of the problem and emphasized the pressing need to improve the current system in order to safeguard not only the integrity of the financial system, but also security at the global stage.

 

Sandra recently attained her MA with distinction in Intelligence and International Security at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Previously, she worked as a security consultant in a private company in Beijing and London, collecting and analysing open-source intelligence regarding travel security in Asia-Pacific, Europe and parts of Africa. Her research focuses on financial intelligence and its use to combat transnational corruption and the security implications of global financial crime. You can connect with her on LinkedIn. (Disclaimer: opinions expressed in the article are those of the author and do not represent any organisation.)

Voices from Strife: A reflection on cooperation and Principle - International Women’s Day 2021

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This is a letter from Deputy Editor-in-Chief Isabela Betoret Garcia on the occasion of International Women’s Day reflecting on the role of women in the fields of security and conflict. Over the past two years, Strife has gone through a conscious effort to improve the representation and engagement of women at the blog and journal.

In 2020 52% of our contributors were women. The Women in Writing Mentoring Programme kicked off in October 2020 with the objective of inspiring more women to write. As of March 2021, 47% of our staff is female.

I joined Strife in the second year of my undergraduate. I remember joking that I did not have a choice. My seminar leader, who had been with Strife for years, had often talked to me about writing for the blog but I never felt like I had anything worth saying. Eventually, he approached me with an open position for BA Representative and it did not feel like a question anymore. The offer said: you want this, and you are not letting yourself do it.

Ever since I was a child I remember wanting to lead. Ever since I was a child, I remember being made to feel guilty for it.

The saddest part is that those who made me question my value, those who made me feel that my strengths were my weaknesses, and what made me feel strong was just being stubborn, were other women.

Perhaps it is because we have been told that there is not enough space for all of us at the top, perhaps it is because we were taught to react against what society perceives as ‘unfeminine, or maybe it was just jealousy that one of us was brave enough to be herself in a world that is screaming against it.

It was not a conscious choice, it was not a vow, it was simply a matter of principle: I have made sure that I never tear another woman down but help uplift her. I have surrounded myself with brilliant minds; women I admire, women I want to be like, women who I would walk into battle for because they would do the same for me.

Reaching the top has certainly been a battle.

We are women in a field that has been dominated by men for centuries—but not because we were not present. Women have always been a part of the history of conflict; year by year we tore ourselves out of the footnotes onto the pages, the covers, the titles, the authors.

From nameless figures to victims, to martyrs, to fighters, and finally to the ones holding the pen. The ones who make the calls, the ones who say how the story goes.

I think of a very young me and the fear of being in the spotlight inspired. I was not afraid because I did not want it, I was afraid of wanting it too much and that the longing for it without the validation or the support would destroy me.

Women reached this place by walking through fire only to realise that we could not get burnt. We reached this place by seeing that there is room for all of us and more. By reaching out and calling and saying: you want this, and I am here to show you: you can have it.

I am incredibly proud of the team we have built at Strife. A team that looks for talent and skill, but also stops to look for it in places that were once neglected.

We have a strong team because we, men and women, look out for each other, support each other, and celebrate each other’s talent.

I can only hope the world will one day look like the one we have built for ourselves here.

Happy International Women’s Day to all our staff—it is only possible because of the efforts of each and every one of you.

 

Isabela Betoret Garcia
Deputy Editor-in-Chief

Isabela is a first-year part-time Terrorism, Security, and Society MA. She graduated from King’s College London in 2020 with a BA in War Studies and History, and she is also a graduate of King’s Foundations. After writing her dissertation on the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right Rally’ she became fascinated by the topic of radicalisation and the alt-right. She knits in her spare time.

Isabela originally joined Strife during her second year as a BA representative and then moved on to manage social media before being handed control over our newest outreach programmes, including the Women In Writing Mentoring Scheme.

You can follow her on Twitter @isa_betoret

Gendered Partition of India: An Untold Story

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By Akshara Goel

Women during the partition. Source - Sabrang India.

‘Partition has caused the politics of the belly’ - Francois Bayart.

On 15th August 1947 India attained independence from the two hundred years of British rule, but, witnessed its secondly, partition into present-day Pakistan and subsequently Bangladesh. The date, 15th August, is chiefly remembered as the victory from colonial domination? achieved through non-violence. Concurrently, its bemoaned for partition the narratives which are limited to national leaders, political causes and high politics dominated by the upper-class male perspective leaders. However, Indian feminist scholarships have argued that this recollection has disregarded the gendered understanding of wide spread communal violence – the story of displacement and dispossession and, the process of realignment of family, community and national identities. Women survivors of partitioned India occupied a distinctly marginalised space in the partition violence. They were not only subjected to barbarity from men of the ‘other’ community but also from their family members and community which began in the pre-partition period (before 1947), and carried on until the 1950s. The ‘other’ here refers to ‘enemy community’ who were not part of the dominant ethnic community of India or then West Pakistan or Pakistan.

Women partition survivors were made attached to their male family member or community as they were assumed incapable of making their decisions on migrating to the other side of the border. Consequently, theywere compelled to agree with the twin concept of ‘Azadi’ - translated as Freedom - that was the loss of community, networks, identity and more or less stable inter and intra-personal relationships . Simultaneously, they witnessed double jeopardy. Firstly, by many human right discourses that were packed up recognize them as victims during the conflict occurred at the time of partition. Secondly, since males couldn’t perform their “role of protector” or unable to participate in “income generation activities” it drove to the domestic violence or resurgence of religious practices. This resulted in re-composition of the patriarchal structure which got disintegrated under the partition conflict, wherein, it led to greater control of women rather than, letting providing them with a mechanism to create their agency otherwise their agency was limited to the act of producing or reproducing the nation, according to the Indian government.

The predominant memory of partition for these destitute women consisted of confusion, dislocation and severing roots. The day-to-day violence caused by the partition formed the everyday experience for these women. They were exposed to distinct forms of sexual violence that carried the symbolic meaning designated to their status in the male dominated -patriarchal society where gender relations are arranged along the beliefs and traditions of the religious and ethnic communities. The most predictable form of violence was sexual assault inflicted the men of one community upon the women of the ‘other’ community to assert their own identity and ‘subduing the other by dishonouring their women’. However, the most notorious action was the sadistic pleasure these perpetrators sought from the humiliation of women.

According to anecdotes by the women partition survivor, they were raped in front of their male family members and some of them were paraded naked in the market or danced in gurudwaras (holy shrine of Sikhs). For the stigmatization purpose and its legacy onto the future generation, the perpetrators sexually appropriated these women by desexualizing her as wife or mother through mutilating or disfiguring her breasts and genitalia (tattooing-branding on their breasts and genitalia with triumphant slogans like a crescent moon or trident) so that they no longer remain a nurturer. The motivation was to make her an inauspicious figure by degrading into an unproductive woman. These barbarian acts reflected the thinking of the patriarchal community wherein women are just considered objects of honour constructed by the male. Women survivors of Partition encountered or witnessed the episodes of violence from their family members and community as well. The latter, coerced their women to death, in some cases women were forced to kill themselves, to avoid being sexually offended and to preserve their chastity along with the shielding the honour of individual, family and community. According to the anecdote by Taran, a partition survivor who successfully came to India in 1947- “We girls would often talk about death – some were afraid, others thought of it as a glorious death – dying for an end, for freedom, for an honour. For me everything was related to freedom (from British colonial rule), I was dying for freedom”. Fortunately, she didn’t have to go through the ‘choice’ of death while her women friends were planning how to prepare for their death- an interview was taken by the Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin – Indian feminist writer and activist, respectively. However, women were made to ‘volunteer’ for death coerced to poison, put to the sword or drowned or set ablaze individually or collectively that is with other younger women or women and children (Butalia 1998 cited in Chakraborty, 2014, pg. 41-43) .

Some of the partition survivors were women who got abducted by ‘others’ and went through the identity crisis concerning the dominant ethnic community. They were abducted as Hindu (dominant community of India) married as Muslim (dominant community of Pakistan) and again recovered as Hindus and eventually had to go through a lot of bitter and painful “choices”. Women who were brought back ‘home’ after getting abducted, following the 1947 partition period with Pakistan, weren’t given choice to decide their home. It was assumed that Hindu women will retreat to India while Muslim women will be transmitted to Pakistan (during 1947 partition). Their space of home could have changed wasn’t given consideration. It wasn’t the boundary of domestic that defined home but it was the boundary of a nation, yet, they met the fate of non-acceptance from their natal families. In theory, everyone had a choice to move or stay but in practice staying on was virtually impossible. The ‘choice’ of whether to move, stay or return was a decision being made for women, by the patriarchal nation-state and their families. Women’s agency wasn’t a principal concern in any of the conflicts and its aftermath .

The partition of violence affected the everyday world and the lives of women. This concept of the “everyday world” was promulgated by Dorothy Smith (1987). She maintains that “everyday world” refers to lived reality in the private sphere in which women’s representation and gendered lives on the domestic space gets effected and affected by the major events in the political sphere – “the domain of men”. The primary meaning of “everyday world” is to connect the political space with domestic (private) lives of women in a given historical instance. In other words, women survivors of partition have illustrated that there is a definite continuity between the “everyday world” and “extraordinary historical times” of the partition era. This everyday world consists of the private/domestic space in which a woman identifies herself’ and a ‘safe space’ as assumed by the patriarchal structure. However, in the partition violence, their ‘safe space’ gets threatened and compromised as they get dragged into the turmoil of public/political space where their male counterparts take an authoritative position but with no or negligible space for women. The patriarchal mechanisms decided everyday belonging of these women survivors. The fate of these women become tied to that of the nation-state or family and community which dictated how the women should live their life in post-partitioned independent India.

The partition violence and Indian nation-state – their efforts and narratives towards the women survivors- have played a crucial role in deconstruction and reconstruction of the women’s identity, space and role. It can be observed that the national belonging for all the partition women survivors was meditated through the institution of the heterosexual and patrilineal nuclear family and community concurrently they were disenfranchised as sexual commodities, patriarchal properties and communal commodities by the nation-state and their respective community and family. After partition, the Indian patriarchal state has explicitly infantilized women survivors by denying them to represent themselves and this process eventually has caused their disenfranchisement.

 

Akshara is a prospective PhD candidate and has completed her Master of Arts in Diplomacy, Law and Business (2020) from Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, Delhi-NCR, India. Presently, she is a Commissioning Editor in E-International Relations and Associate Editor of Law & Order.