Women have a multitude of relationships to militarised ecomonies. They can
command regiments, enlist or be conscripted as soldiers, work in the arms industry,
clean military bases; but the majority of women who participate in military
economies are those who voluntarily, or as victims of trafficking, engage with the
military as prostitutes. The extent of militarised prostitution is such that, for
example, at the end of the American war in Vietnam around 300,000 South
Vietnamese women were working as prostitutes.
A military presence has a massively disproportionate impact on the local economy,
and in particular on the economic opportunities open to poor women. The economics
are simple: in countries devastated by waror in countries of the south such as the
Philippines, where 70% of the population live below the poverty line prostitution
offers women an opportunity to earn a living: womens bodies become a commodity.
At the height of the US presence in the Philippines, for example, more than 60,000
women and children were employed in bars, night clubs and massage parlours
around the Subic Bay and Clark Naval bases alone. Estimates of the total numbers of
Filipina women and girls engaged in prostitution and other sex-based industries
range between 300,000 and 600,000.
But militarised prostitution is not merely a simple transaction between a woman and
her client. It can and does involve bars and brothel owners, local and
internationalpolice, mayors and public health officials, organised crime and
national and foreign government departments. All have an interest in the provision
of sexual services to the military. Figures produced by the US in 1981 claimed that
presence of their bases contributed around $170 million into the Philippine economy
in that year alone2. The R&R (Rest and Relaxation) Agreements agreed by the US
and, respectively, the Japanese, Philippine and South Korean governments both
sanctioned and created militarised prostitution; less explicitly, SOFA (Status of
Forces Agreements) can do much the same. At no point are women themselves
involved in the process of creating this industry, nor are their protests heardabout
the conditions they work in, the enforced vaginal examinations they are subject to, or
the violence perpetrated on them by their military clients.
Keeping the peace
As Madeline Rees has observed, the presence of 30,000 peace keepers in Bosnia
where war had left a devastated infrastructure, massive unemployment and a barely
functioning economyprovided both organised crime and entrepreneurial
individuals an ideal opportunity to enter the free market economy3.
Combined with the former Yugoslavias transition into a free market economy and
assisted by their location at the edge of eastern Europewhere the economic
hardship that accompanies the former communist blocs painful transition to a
market economy has lead to growing involvement of eastern European women in
prostitutionboth Bosnia and Kosov@ (with over 45,000 peacekeepers) have proved
to be a lucrative market for those who traffick and trade in women.
Elsewhere, as in Angola, Cambodia, Mozambique and Rwandaas Kane has
documentedthe presence of a population displaced, dislocated and impoverished
by war, combined with the presence of UN peacekeepers, has also produced a
massive growth in both adult and child prostitution.4
The peacekeeping military also brings its own breed of camp followersnot the
women who traditionally accompanied armies, servicing their needs from sex to
laundry, but the battalions of aid workers from international NGOs who follow in
the wake of war.
The involvement and, in some cases, the complicity of international actors has been
observed byamongst others Medica Zenica, a womens NGO in Bosnia, and
(more recently) by the International Office of Migration, an international NGO
working in Kosov@. The latter have directly attributed the creation of a booming
market for the trafficking of women forced into prostitution to the influx of foreign
soldiers, aid workers and bureaucrats into Kosov@5.
Militarised tourism
And after the war is over or after the army of occupation has gone, what happens to
the women? Demilitarisation can have very different effects on the local ecomomies
and on the women on whom part of that economy depended. In the Philippines,
despite campaigns by local women, in the years following the withdrawal of US
forces, there were no government programmes to enable women who had worked as
prostitutes to find economic alternatives. As a result, many women moved to South
Korea, Japan or Guam, where the US military maintained a presence.
In Vietnam, though, after US withdrawal in 1975, the massive decline in prostitution
was accompanied by government programmes intended to re-educate women and
provide them with economic alternatives. Yet by the 1990s, as the Vietnamese
government sought to make an economic recovery, organised prostitution was back,
this time as a tourist industry; the groundwork laid by militarised prostitution, it
became part of another economic package seeking to attract foreign investment. In
Korea too, militarised prostitution developed into a sex-tourism industry, in what
Enloe describes as the less talked about side of the 1960-77 Korean economic
miracle.6 Thanks to the courage and persistence of many Korean and Japanese Comfort
Women the extent to which the Japanese government and military were officially
complicit in forced sexual enslavement of an estimated 200,000 women during the
Second World War has been revealed. Perhaps less well known, is the complicity of
the same governmentwith the US governmentin mobilising women as
prostitutes to service the US forces who occupied Japan following 1945.
Military complicity in the organisation may not be as explicitly expressed in post
cold-war military policy, but for economically vulnerable womenlike the
Moldovian women sold in Brcko for DM4000the effects of militarised prostitution
remain unchanged.
Notes:
