A woman reads an International Committee of the Red Cross message card, which is sent to the committee by families and incarcerated relatives (Photo courtesy of the ICRC) By Taylor Luck
AMMAN - Rowaida has not seen her husband or son for nearly three years.
After being detained in an Israeli prison for several months along with her Palestinian husband, the 28-year-old is now back in Jordan struggling to piece her life together, separated from her spouse and unable to be reunited with her son.
Her husband is still in an Israeli jail and her son is in Nablus in the middle of a custody battle.
“My life would be so much easier if my son was with me. I think about him every second, sometimes it hurts,” she said.
The pain is also still fresh for Um Alaa, who lost her son in Iraq.
Alaa was working for the Education Ministry and finishing his PhD studies in Baghdad when he was arrested by US coalition forces in 2004 on accusations of backing the insurgency.
“He was just a student. All he would do was study 10 hours a day. Why did they take him?” she exclaimed.
For nearly five years, Alaa has been shuttled between detention centres in Iraq as Um Alaa and her family remain in limbo, hoping for news of his release, which was due over a year ago.
Not a moment goes by when Um Alaa doesn’t think about him, she said, stressing that now there is a great void in her life that can never be filled.
“He was such a good boy… he used to live with us and take care of us, but now all that is gone. What am I supposed to do?”
Without the family’s main bread winner and caregiver, Um Alaa says not only is her life more uncertain as she enters old age, but her health is also failing as she is unable to sleep at night.
Rowaida and Um Alaa are just two of thousands of overlooked women, the forgotten victims of conflict.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) protection and tracing department attempts to reach out to women and families torn apart by war, working to try to determine the fate of loved ones who have gone missing in order to provide closure or relief.
Through its office in Amman, the ICRC has helped Jordanians locate family members who went missing in Israel, southern Lebanon, Kuwait and now Iraq, where 60 per cent of missing persons remain untraceable.
Through Red Cross messages, women such as Um Alaa and Rowaida are able to send word to their loved ones and maintain familial bonds through times of uncertainty.
But in areas where the ICRC is not granted access, such as Iraqi-run prisons, contact is lost, and, as in the case of Um Alaa, families are left wondering about their relative’s fate, according to the Amman delegation.
Even when attempting to move on with their lives, conflict has a prolonged and continued impact on women in the region as many are pressured by their families to divorce their incarcerated husbands and left to try to unite families separated by war zones, or work extra jobs to offset increased financial burdens.
Oftentimes, however, the negative impact on women is much more direct.
In many areas of conflict in the region, women are detained to be used to place pressure on their spouses or relatives to confess to crimes, or simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
At the time of her detention in Nablus 2006, which she said was designed to make her husband confess to a crime he did not commit, Rowaida was unaware that she was two months pregnant.
Only through a medical checkup during her detention at a prison in the Negev did she realise that she was with child.
“I never could have imagined it. It was like a nightmare,” she said.
For six months Rowaida lived in unsanitary prison conditions without medical care and little more than analgesics to maintain her health.
When it came time for her release in early 2007, Rowaida was a month away from her due date. Unable to return to Nablus, her only option was to come to the Kingdom and live with her parents.
When she was transferred from prison to the border for deportation, bureaucratic issues caused Rowaida to wait for over 10 hours, during which she noticed she was bleeding.
The stress from the transfer process caused a miscarriage.
“It is a tragedy to place women in prisons and have us treated in these conditions. We do not deserve it. It shouldn’t happen in our time,” she said.
Now studying translation at Zarqa Private University, Rowaida expressed hope for the future, stressing that although she is still saddled by the burden of her losses, she aims to overcome.
Rowaida said that despite her tumultuous journey, she and millions of other women uprooted, injured and traumatised by war have only one thing to do.
“We must work hard, move on, become stronger and learn from our experiences. Because no one else will.”
~Posted by Karin at 12:32 PM
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