Australia: WRANs Honoured

From the Warrnambool Standard:

MARGARET Morton remembers her time in the Royal Australian Navy with great affection. “I loved it,” she said of her stint in the Women’s Royal Australian Navy (WRAN) Service at HMAS Cerebus from 1945-1946.

As an 18-year-old WRAN, her roles included working as an officer’s stewardess, and in the kitchen and serving meals.

The naval jacket she wore as a WRAN is one of a number of items in the Women in Uniform exhibition on display at the Warrnambool RSL.

Mrs Morton, 83, of Warrnambool, said she was pleased the contribution of women to Australia’s armed services was being recognised by the sub branch.

She said she loved the camaraderie of the WRANs at Cerebus and continued to enjoy the company of fellow ex-servicewomen who met at the Warrnambool RSL on the first Monday of every month.

Mrs Morton said she joined the navy to make a contribution to Australia’s effort in the World War II and “just made it in” before the war ended.

While Mrs Morton’s memories of her time in the armed services are happy ones, they contrast sharply with the war experiences of the late Mona Wilton, of Naringal, whose war service medals and citation are also in the exhibition.

Ms Wilton, 28, was killed during World War II when she was serving as a nurse.

The exhibition will be open until September.

Deanna Violette

Interesting article from "The Two Malcontents" on Deanna Violette:

Deanna Violette is also the first woman in Air Force history to take command of a squadron of tactical air controllers.

Women on the Frontlines

From Times Online:

The ban on women serving in frontline infantry roles alongside male soldiers is to be reviewed, the Ministry of Defence announced yesterday.

The last time that this issue was examined in any official capacity was in 2002 when the Service chiefs and ministers decided to maintain the policy of using only male personnel in close-combat roles. Women have always been barred from serving in infantry battalions, the Royal Armoured Corps, the Royal Marine General Service, the Household Cavalry and the RAF Regiment.

Because this taboo on equal treatment for women breaches European legislation, the Government is obliged to review the rules every eight years. At the moment just under 10 per cent of Armed Forces personnel — about 17,600 — are women.

There's also a link at Ohio.com

Women's role in Nazi crimes

From the Telegraph:
"In Nazi art, films and magazines, women were always portrayed as the fairer sex, fighting on the home-front as their menfolk fought on the battlefields.

But a new book by the historian Kathrin Kompisch has revealed a very different reality.

Many women were in fact used as assistants to the doctors who sterilised and murdered disabled people and as guards in the concentration camps - like the character played by Kate Winslet in her Oscar nominated role in the film The Reader."

US Deserter Expelled

From BBC News:
"Canada has ordered the deportation of the first woman US soldier to have sought asylum in the country to avoid being deployed to Iraq.

Kimberly Rivera, a mother of three, had requested permission to remain in Canada on humanitarian grounds but her appeal was rejected.

She could face up to five years in prison when she returns to the US.

Some 200 deserters from the US military are believed to have fled to Canada, some living incognito.

Mrs Rivera served in Iraq in 2006 but deserted a year later after refusing to be redeployed.

The War Resisters Supporters Campaign, who are backing Mrs Rivera, said her experience in Iraq was "a huge awakening" which convinced her that "the war was immoral and that she could not participate in it".

Mrs Rivera and her family have been told they must leave Canada by the end of January unless the court order is reversed.

Last year, the Canadian parliament passed a non-binding motion granting asylum to deserters from the Iraq war.

But correspondents say the governing Conservatives opposed the motion, not willing to risk upsetting Washington over the issue.

So far Canada has deported only one US deserter, Robin Long. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison on his return. "

Famous Five

No, not the book series by fictional author, Enid Blyton, but five famous female spies.

Who are there - here is the list according to CNN:
1. Mata Hari: Margaretha Geertruida Zelle MacLeod (1876--1917) - Having spent time in Java with her husband, Captain Campbell MacLeod, Margaretha returned to Holland and sued for divorce. To make ends meet she took up exotic dancing and the name Mata Hari (meaning "the light of day" in Malay). With her sensual performances becoming the attraction of the major European cities came the men and the gifts for her favors. Many of these favors came from royalty and high-ranking French and German military officers.

2. Noor Inayat Khan: Khan was born in 1914 and at a young age moved with her family first to England and then to France. In 1940, Khan, along with her mother and sister, escaped back to England just before France surrendered to Germany. On September 13, 1944, Khan and three other female British spies were executed by the Nazi SS. In 1949, Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross.

3. Belle Boyd (aka "La Belle Rebelle"): In 1864, Confederate president Jefferson Davis asked Belle to carry letters for him to England. The Union Navy captured her ship, but the officer in charge fell in love with Belle and let her escape. The officer, Lieutenant Samuel Harding Jr., after being courtmartialed and discharged from the Navy, traveled to England, where he married Belle.

4. Elizabeth Van Lew: After developing a hatred for slavery, Elizabeth returned to Richmond and freed all her family's slaves. She also went so far as finding where her freed slaves' relatives were and purchased and freed them also. When the citizens of Richmond found out that Crazy Bet was an act, they shunned her. However, at her death, the state of Massachusetts placed a memorial marker on her grave.

5. Sarah Emma Edmonds (or Was It Frank Thompson?): In 1861, Frank (Sarah) enlisted in the Second Michigan Infantry and over the next two years not only fought in a number of Civil War battles, but also served as a spy for the Union Army. Solders in her unit called Frank "our woman" because of his feminine mannerisms and his extremely small boot size. However, none of her comrades ever figured out that Frank was really Sarah.


Who would have made your top five list.

Congo: Rape Rampant

Unfortunately for Congalese women, rape is on the rise - it has become so endeminc that the United Nations has called the scale "horrific" and possibly ".. the worst sexual violence in the world.."

From the International Herald Tribune:
"Tens of thousands of women, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been raped in the past few years in this hilly, incongruously beautiful land and many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.

After years of denial and shame, the silence is being broken. Because of stepped-up efforts in the past nine months by international organizations and the Congolese government, rapists are no longer able to count on a culture of impunity.

Of course, countless men still get away with assaulting women. But more and more are getting caught, prosecuted and put behind bars.

European aid agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars building new courthouses and prisons across eastern Congo, in part to punish rapists. Mobile courts are holding rape trials in villages deep in the forest that have not seen a black-robed magistrate since the Belgians ruled the country decades ago.

The American Bar Association opened a legal clinic in eastern Congo in January specifically to help rape victims bring their cases to court. So far, the work has resulted in eight convictions. Here in Bukavu, one of the biggest cities in the country, a special unit of Congolese police officers has filed 103 rape cases since the beginning of this year, more than any year in recent memory.

The number of those arrested is still tiny compared to the perpetrators on the loose, and often the worst offenders are not caught because they are marauding bandits who attack villages in the night, then melt back into the bush.

United Nations officials say that the most sadistic rapes are committed by depraved killers who participated in Rwanda's genocide in 1994 and then escaped into Congo. These attacks have left thousands of women with their insides destroyed.

But the Congolese Army, a ragtag undisciplined force of teenage troops who sport wrap-around sunglasses and rusty rifles, has also been blamed. The government has been slow to punish its own, but Congolese generals recently announced they would set up military tribunals to prosecute government soldiers accused of rape.

No one - doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers - can explain exactly why Congo's rape problem is the worst in the world.

The attacks continue despite the presence of the world's largest UN peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops. Impunity is thought to be a big factor, which is why there is now so much effort put into bolstering Congo's creaky and often corrupt justice system. The sheer number of armed groups spread over thousands of miles of thickly forested territory, fighting over Congo's rich mineral spoils, also makes it incredibly difficult to protect civilians."

From the Globe & Mail:
"At the Catholic parish office, on the cramped and crowded ledger pages where they list rape victims, at least half the names appear more than once: women who have been victims of sexual enslavement or public gang rape by rebel groups or the Congolese army; women, 30 in an average month, who have come to the parish to get help reaching a hospital to repair their injuries; women who have been healed, come home and a year or two or three later, been gang-raped again, during another small surge of the conflict. The youngest victim on the list is 6. The oldest is 74.

The epidemic of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, without doubt the most horrific and persistent abuse of women anywhere in the world, has flared in a vicious new outbreak in recent weeks with renewed fighting in the country's troubled eastern region.

Mass rape began here with the civil war in 1996. That conflict quickly sucked in all of Congo's neighbours, and killed an estimated five million people. “And it brought systematic, planned, ordered, collective public rape – rape used as a weapon of war – it is a war within a war,” said Mathilde Muhindo, who heads Centre Olame, one of Congo's oldest women's organizations, founded nearly 50 years ago. Rape was used as a tactic by every single armed force here – each with their signature style: some raped women with guns and shot them off as a finale, some raped girls, some forced sons to rape mothers.

Congo moved into a fragile peace in 2003, and the rate of rape declined. Much of the country came under the nominal control of the central government – but not the volatile, mineral-rich east, home to no fewer than 23 armed groups. Here the conflict simmered for years, and flared once again into full-on fighting in late August because, it seems, a glacial peace process threatened to cut off warlords and neighbouring-country governments from their access to the illegal mineral trade.

With the fighting came a resurgence of rape. Admissions at the two hospitals in the east that can repair the injuries of rape victims have spiked in the past six weeks. Many more victims are assumed to be, as in previous years, trapped deep in the bush, cut off from help by the lack of roads, lack of transport, lack of any money or by the fighting.

But ending rape here depends on more than pushing the state to protect or prosecute. “Unless the war ends and unless the militias stop fighting, we will be sewing up vaginas for eternity – and unless the foreign governments who are benefiting from the resources in the Congo face pressure to cease the fighting and withdraw the troops, we will be here forever,” said Eve Ensler, the New York playwright best known as the creator of The Vagina Monologues, who has become an impassioned advocate for Congo's women over the past two years."

Liberian Women & Warfare

From allAfrica:

"Female ex-combatants are twice as likely as men to take up weapons again to escape poverty, based on a recent US-funded survey of more than 1,000 former fighters in Liberia. Almost 30 percent of the people surveyed said they were willing to take up arms again to earn a living wage, family and community acceptance, and respect for their tribe or religion.

Researchers concluded that ex-fighters at risk of returning to violence can destabilise a country still recovering from war.

Surveyors with the US-based non-profit CHF International, formerly known as Cooperative Housing Foundation, focused mostly on former fighters in rural Lofa county. The former seat of recruitment for both government and rebel forces and current home to many of Liberia's former fighters is 65km northeast of the capital Monrovia.

One-third of those surveyed by CHF International said both the army and rebels had promised them cash, education or jobs for fighting during the civil war. Among these 312 respondents, 19 percent said they would be willing to fight again."

India: Women in Armed Forces

A decision on whether women officers will be granted a permanent commission in the Indian Defence Force will take place very shortly.

From Newkerala:
"The top brass of the armed forces have already agreed on opening up more avenues for women officers and granting them permanent commission in non-combatant branches.

“The decision to grant permanent commission to women has been agreed in principle and the announcement will be made very shortly,” the official told IANS adding that an announcement on this is likely within this month.

The Chiefs of Staff Committee has approved the recommendations of the three wings of the armed forces to grant permanent commissions to women and has sent this to the defence ministry for approval.

Women are currently eligible for a permanent commission only in the medical, nursing and dental services of the armed forces. They are also eligible for short service commissions in these services, as also in the supporting but non-combatant arms of the armed forces.

Currently, 5,137 women officers serve in the armed forces. They include 4,101 in the army, 784 in the air force, and 252 in the navy.

In the army, women serve in support arms like the Corps of Signals, Army Ordnance Corps, the Corps of Electronic and Mechanical Engineers, and the Army Service Corps.

In the air force, women are inducted in all streams, barring the fighter stream, while in the navy, there are restrictions on posting women officers aboard ships and submarines."


From India Defence Reports:
"India is just a step closer to having women as permanent commissioned officers in its armed forces, with the tri-services giving their consent to a proposal from the government in this regard.

The four years time (till 2013) was required to work out modalities of the permanent commission and to customise the Academies' courses and infrastructure to accommodate the women cadets, who would be brushing shoulders with their men counterparts at these academies on an equal footing, he said.

At present, the Indian armed forces offer only short service commission for women of five years service, extendable to a total of 14 years. India started enrolling women as officers in the armed forces in 1992 and at present the tri-services have a cumulative strength of about 2,000 women officers mainly in the non-combat streams, with the Army employing half of the pack.

However, the debate at present over the permanent commissioning of women was over the streams they could be accommodated, as combat streams increase the possibility of coming in contact with enemy during conflicts. The COSC is currently discussing possible streams, arms and services of the Army, Navy and Air Force, where women could be given permanent commissioning.

Currently, women officers are given short service commission in streams such as Education, Signals, Ordnance, helicopter and transport aircraft flying, navigation, and such arms and services. "There certainly are differences between war- and peace-time duties. Yes, permanent commission for women will be in non-combat streams till we accept the fact that they will come in contact with the enemy if in combat streams," Mukherjee said.

The government is not likely to heed to the demand for combat roles for women, though it is likely to clear the permanent commission in non-combat roles, with Defence Minister A K Antony spelling out his support for the latter recently.

With the Armed Forces are already facing a shortage of about 13,000 in officer cadre and the military academies suffering from fall in number of new recruits, the move of the government to provide permanent commission for women could well turn out to be the answer to the recruitment troubles of the academies."


Indian Defence Review: Women in the Armed Forces (2007)