WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY:
CHECHNYA

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"The source of money in the family is now the women, its really the woman. Only women can bring in a piece of bread since those few miserable men who are still there---because many of them left and there are practically none left in the republic-- well, the ones who stayed cant even travel from one checkpoint to the next. […] My husband is at home. He's a lawyer […] but since 1994 he's been at home [...] Im the one going to the market to sell things. I go places and bring food home--we try to survive. And for him, as a man, that’s very difficult to live with. And that’s the way it is for most of the population. The woman has become the real bread-winner, and changes in the economic order inevitably transform interpersonal relations and values. Women have begun to fulfill traditionally male functiopns. It’s the start of a matriarchy, a kind of revolution.

Madina 2000

”I have been told about how soldiers have raped women in villages and in prison camps. Often the rapes have been systematic and a part of the warfare. For example, there have been reports of prison camps where on some days all the prison guards were ordered to rape all the female prisoners...Rape is the most shameful thing that a woman can experience. If it becomes known that a woman has been raped, she is often blamed for bringing disgrace upon her family. Given this fact, it is not strange that women are reluctant to talk about what has happened. Women have been killed by their own families after it has become known that they have been raped, all in the name of family honour."

Nino Makhashvili, psychiatrist in the Georgian Centre for Psychosocial and Medical Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, Tbilisi, Georgia where she offers psychosocial support to Chechen refugees.