Hell Hath No Fury (43 page)

Jinga's task was to secure the return of her brother and enlist the help of the Portuguese in expelling a rival tribe from Ndongo territory. To curry favor, Jinga shrewdly allowed Portuguese missionaries to baptize her and her two sisters, acquiring in the process the name Anna de Sousa. Her siblings became Lady Grace and Lady Barbara. Her encounter with the governor was, if the legend is to be believed, an indication of her composure and sense of style. When he insisted that she remain standing while he was comfortably seated, Jinga summoned a slave, ordered her to go on all fours, and settled on her back. Some versions have Jinga killing the slave after the meeting, explaining that a queen never uses the same chair twice.

Jinga's brother died in 1624, possibly at her hands. She is also credited with the death of a nephew, whose heart she devoured, in the style of Hannibal Lecter or Idi Amin. She was now ready to abandon her hastily acquired Christianity and take power. This prompted reprisals from the Portuguese, who appointed a puppet chief to supplant Jinga and drove her into exile.

Jinga's response was twofold. First she struck an alliance with a neighboring tribe, which closed the slave routes to the Portuguese. She then led her own people to the kingdom of Matamba. Here she overcame the cannibalistic Jaga tribe and adopted wholesale their grisly rituals, which included infanticide as a means of promoting tribal strength.

Jinga's military strength stemmed from a Dutch mercenary, who led her bodyguard and left a detailed record of her remarkable rule. He noted that she donned male attire for ritual sacrifice and was festooned fore and aft with animal skins. She carried sword, axe, and bows and arrows and, although well into middle age, was extraordinarily agile. In addition to her ritual clothes and formidable personal armory, she also repeatedly hammered at two iron bells: “When she thinks she has made a show long enough, in a masculine manner, then she takes a broad feather and flicks it through the holes of her Bored Nose for a Sign of War.” Jinga was now ready for the first sacrifice. The victim was selected, his head cut off, and the blood gathered in a cup, which she drained in a great gulp.

Jinga may have had a “masculine manner,” but like
Catherine the Great
(see Chapter 2) she had a legendary appetite for men. She kept a harem of male concubines (“concubators”), who could take as many wives as they pleased, provided they dressed as women at all times. There was a sinister edge to this playful role reversal. If a young man failed in his obligations, he would never be seen again.

By shutting down the slave routes at their source, Jinga forced the Portuguese to mount ever longer expeditions into the interior. Seizing the advantage, the Dutch cut the Portuguese supply lines and in 1641 took Loanda, after which they struck a treaty with Jinga, which in turn enabled her to harry rival tribes and the Portuguese. She recorded a string of successes, but in one engagement the Portuguese captured her sister Mukumbu (Lady Barbara). Her other sister, Kifunji (Lady Grace), had long been a prisoner of the Portuguese, who drowned her in October 1647.

In August 1648 the Portuguese recaptured Loanda, forcing Jinga to fall back on her stronghold in Matamba, where she negotiated peace terms with them in 1656, principally to obtain the release of her sister. The price of the deal was the provision by Jinga of 130 slaves and her agreement not to interfere with Portuguese slave trade. She also abandoned ritual sacrifices and allowed Christian missionaries into Matamba. In return the Portuguese pledged military help whenever she needed it. The grizzled old warrior was buried with a bow and arrow in her hand.

Reference: Ronald H. Chilcote,
Portuguese Africa,
1959.

MUKAKIBIBI, SISTER THEOPHISTER

Roman Catholic Nun and Genocide Perpetrator, n.d.

In November 2006, Theophister Mukakibibi became the first nun to be convicted in Rwanda for participating in the genocide of 1994, when some eight hundred thousand people were butchered. Using her position as a Roman Catholic nurse in the National University Hospital in the town of Butare, she systematically murdered Tutsi patients, starving some to death, denying others life-saving drugs, and handing others over to machete-wielding gangs.

As a Hutu, despite her professed religious faith, Mukakibibi enthusiastically embraced the chance to act when her tribe turned on the Tutsis, the minority in Rwanda, in an orgy of killing that spared no one. She played a strategic role in the Hutu massacres, selecting Tutsi patients for murder, with a special emphasis on wiping out children and pregnant women. She disconnected others from drips or medical machinery. In the words of the judge, Jeane Baptiste Ndahumba, presiding over a
gacaca
(village) court, “she controlled the switches of life and death.” When these methods proved too slow, she handed patients over to face the machetes of the Interehamwe, the blood-stained militia leading the genocide, either for summary slaughter or more protracted deaths.

Mukakibibi was not acting alone. In 2005, a court in Belgium convicted two other nuns of participating in the genocide, and complicity in the Rwanda holocaust reaches up to her religious superiors and beyond. The majority of Rwanda's 8.5 million people are Roman Catholics, and there is clear evidence that senior figures in the Church aided the genocide or actively participated in mass murder.

In 2006 Mukakibibi, a lowly player among thousands who escaped, was jailed for thirty years by a village court.

Reference: David Blair, “Nun Is Jailed over Rwanda Genocide,”
London Daily Telegraph,
November 12 2006.

PLAVSIC, BILJANA

Serbian Politician and War Criminal, b. 1930

Dubbed Bosnia's “Iron Lady,” Plavsic was sentenced by the International War Crimes Tribunal to eleven years' imprisonment in 2003 for crimes against humanity.

Plavsic entered politics late in life, after a career as a biologist in which she published more than one hundred scholarly papers. In 1956 she was appointed Professor of Biology at the University of Sarajevo, and subsequently she took up academic posts in Czechoslovakia and the United States.

In the 1992–95 war in Bosnia, Plavsic became deputy to Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, who in 2006 remained at the top of the International War Crimes Tribunal's wanted list for the “ethnic cleansing” of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats. Even in the company of men whose hands were dripping with blood, Plavsic was seen as a radical. She once observed, “There are twelve million Serbs, and even if six million perish on the field of battle, there will be six million to reap the fruits of the struggle.”

Her frequent outbursts led the president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, to question her mental health, while his wife, Mirjana Markovic, called her a “female Mengele,” in reference to the infamous Nazi doctor who operated on women and children in the Holocaust. In 1992 a widely circulated photograph showed Plavsic stepping over the body of a dead Muslim to kiss the notorious Serb warlord Zejko Raznatovic (aka Arkan). Nevertheless, Plavsic backed the 1995 Dayton peace accord for Bosnia, which accepted the separate existence of Bosnia and Croatia in return for the lifting of US sanctions.

In 1996, Plavsic was elected president of the Bosnian Serb republic and was welcomed in the West as a “moderate” who condemned Communism for subjecting the Serbs to slavery. She also drove the Bosnian Serbs' wartime commander, Ratko Mladic, into retirement and secured the dismissal of his chief lieutenants.

She then formed her own breakaway faction, the Serbian Popular Alliance, but in the summer of 2000 began to withdraw from politics after suffering a setback in local elections. She resigned her seat in the Bosnian Serb parliament the following December. In January 2001 she turned herself in to the International War Crimes Tribunal, having learned that there was a sealed indictment against her.

Plavsic initially rejected the war-crimes and genocide charges brought against her, but as the trial deadline approached, she shifted her position. She pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity, and in return the prosecution dropped the charges of genocide. In her statement accepting responsibility for the killings and deportations, Plavsic named Slobodan Milosevic as the mastermind behind the ethnic-cleansing campaign. The court also took into consideration the testimony by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and others that Plavsic had played an important role in the negotiations at Dayton. In 2003 she received a sentence of eleven years in prison, less the 245 days she had spent in jail since her surrender. Milosevic died in The Hague in March 2006 during his trial for war crimes.

Reference: Colonel Bob Stewart,
Broken Lives: A Personal View of the Bosnian Conflict,
1993.

SUICIDE BOMBERS (1985–2006)

The phenomenon of the female suicide bomber, most commonly associated in the West with the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine, evokes a series of disturbing images and prompts uneasy reflection. Nevertheless, it is as well to remember that the notion of female martyrs is a thread that also runs through Western cultural and military history, from the host of martyred saints celebrated by the Catholic Church, of whom
Joan of Arc
(see Chapter 3) is one of the most notable, to SOE women such as
Noor Inayat Khan
(see Chapter 11) who died at the hands of the Nazis in World War II. On the darker side of the coin, postwar Europe and the United States have seen women terrorists fighting with Italy's Red Brigades, Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang, and the American Weathermen.

Nor are the activities of the female suicide bomber confined to the Middle East. In 1991 a female Sri Lankan separatist, Thenmuli Rajaratnam (aka Dhanu), a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), succeeded in killing herself and former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Since then similar bombings have occurred in Turkey, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Iraq, as well as Israel. In Russia, the separatist Chechen cause has attracted female suicide bombers, including those who were part of the multiethnic group that launched the seizure in September 2004 of a school in Beslan in the Caucasus, which resulted in the killing of more than 330 hostages, 172 of them children. A month earlier two Daghestani women of the al-Islambouli Brigade of al-Qaeda, blew up in midair one of two Russian airliners that were downed in a synchronized terrorist attack. This atrocity occurred only days after a female suicide bomber killed ten people outside a Moscow subway station.

In the Middle East, one of the first women to become a suicide bomber, or
istishhadiya,
was nineteen-year-old Loula Aboud, a Lebanese Christian who blew herself up in 1985 as Israeli troops occupied the town of Aoun in southern Lebanon. The first Palestinian would-be suicide bomber was Atef Eleyan, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) activist, who planned to carry out a suicide attack with a car bomb in Jerusalem in 1987 and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment by the Israeli authorities.

The role of the female suicide bomber has inevitably become entangled with the region's violent political and religious crosscurrents. Tight Israeli border-security measures made it all but impossible for unmarried men under forty to obtain legitimate permits to cross into Israel and obliged militant groups to consider the use of female suicide bombers. In addition, the antagonism of conservative Islamic clerics discouraged women from playing an active role in society and in the intifada, the struggle against the continuing Israeli occupation of Arab land. By contrast, radical groups such as the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade cynically used suicide bombers to break down the frail barriers that in the Middle East continue to draw a distinction between combatants and noncombatants, terrorists and innocent civilians.

In the late 1990s, using reasoning reminiscent of that employed in World War II by the
Special Operations Executive
(see Chapter 11), the Palestinian Islamic Jihad began to recruit women in the northern part of the West Bank. Calculating that young women would be less likely to arouse suspicion than young men, and would also blend more easily into the Israeli “street,” the PIJ recruiters focused attention equally on highly educated and qualified young women and on those with neither education nor career prospects.

They also found Islamic justification for the use of female suicide bombers in the teaching of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the militant Islamist organization Hamas, who supported suicide bombers both male and female, provided that they attacked only Israeli military targets. The sheikh was killed in 2004 in an Israeli raid on Gaza. Another supporting voice was that of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whose view of women's martyrdom (suicide) operations was that “when jihad is obligatory, as when an enemy invades a country, the woman is summoned to jihad with the man, side by side…. A woman must act, even without the permission of her husband.”

The bombing campaign that followed threw into sharp relief the PIJ modus operandi. On May 19, 2003, Hiba Daraghmeh, a nineteen-year-old student, detonated an explosive device strapped to her body in front of a shopping mall in Al Afoulah, killing three civilians and injuring eighty-three. On October 4, 2003, Hanadi Jaradat, a trainee lawyer from Jenin, blew herself up in a Haifa restaurant, killing twenty-one people and injuring fifty-one. In June 2003 Jaradat's brother and a cousin, both of whom were PIJ militants, had been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The twenty-seven-year-old Jaradat was unmarried—a stigma in Palestinian society—and was grieving the death of her brother and cousin when she was approached by PIJ, who expertly manipulated her grief and desire for revenge.

Sexual stigma is the leitmotif that runs through the story of Reem Raiyshi, the twenty-two-year-old Palestinian mother of two small children, who in January 2004 became the first female bomber used by Hamas. Raiyshi was compelled to undertake the mission as an atonement for her adultery. Her husband, a member of Hamas, was active in urging her to “purify” herself and restore her family's honor. His wife blew herself up inside a security office at the Erez crossing point into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Four Israelis died in the blast.