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Many of the organizations also focused on improving the material conditions of women by addressing their most basic needs, as well as providing material support to women combatants. As Jeanette Urquilla explained, “The main concern of our members was not to die of hunger during the war.”115 Accordingly, various political organizations distributed food through the women’s organizations. Women in ASMUSA, for example, cultivated beans and corn in the various communities. The women’s organizations also attempted to improve women’s economic conditions by providing them with more opportunities to produce goods. ORMUSA, for example, had a clothing production center in one of the communities, and AMES provided sewing classes for its members. They also provided women combatants with boots, clothes, sanitary napkins, and spending money; food was also provided for their children.116 Moreover, women members of the FPL leadership began demanding that the FMLN-FDR adopt a “Minimum Women’s Program”—a program of basic women’s demands.
Resources and Funding
During the war, most of the funding to mass-based women’s organizations was predominantly from committees of women’s organizations based abroad, from solidarity organizations, and from women’s organizations based in other countries, especially in Europe.117 Most of the popular women’s organizations in El Salvador had committees or women members who were responsible for fundraising. ASMUSA representatives, for example, fundraised in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Costa Rica.118 Similarly, the FPL set up a committee to organize solidarity work and raise funds in Nicaragua and Mexico for their women’s groups.119 These organizations also received funding from abroad, especially from solidarity NGOs whose primary raison d’ȇtre was to fundraise or lobby for the Salvadoran left. Among these solidarity NGOs were the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador and the Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research, and Education Foundation.120 These solidarity groups seldom distributed the funding directly to the women’s organizations, but rather funneled it through their affiliated political organizations.121 Besides the payment to women combatants, almost all women’s work in the organization was voluntary, and therefore members were not paid for their work.
Conclusion
As in the Palestinian case, among the important accomplishments of the different Salvadoran women’s organizations during the 1980s was their ability to recruit women from all walks of life and locations, including the remotest parts of El Salvador, and to address their most basic needs, while involving them in decision-making when the situation allowed. By the early 1990s, the Palestinian and Salvadoran women’s sector shared substantial similarities in terms of their social and political organization, their functions, their social reach, and their relationship to political organizations. Ultimately, the unfolding political settlements in these two societies, and the mediating role of Western donor assistance that was introduced to buttress these processes, resulted in dramatically different outcomes for the women’s sectors in these two contexts. In what follows, I discuss the contrasting political settlements that emerged in the Palestinian territories and El Salvador.
3
Political Settlements and the Reconfiguration of Civic and Political Life
Life, Works
… Discovering,
deciphering,
articulating,
setting in motion:
the old works of liberators and martyrs
that are our obligations now …
—Timoteo Lue, pen name for Roque Dalton, student of law and Salvadoran poet; born in Suchitoto in 1950
In the early 1990s, the Palestinian territories and El Salvador began their conflict-to-peace transitions. A key difference between the evolving settlements in the two cases was the level of inclusivity. This distinction would have important implications for how the political organizations would develop in the postaccord period, especially related to their patterns of professionalization of their mass- based organizations, their relationship to mass movements, and the creation of national and local government institutional openings. Understanding the variation in mass movement activity in postsettlement cases requires an appreciation of how these agreements came to shape associational and civic life.
Palestinian Territories: From the Madrid and Oslo Accords to the Post-Oslo Era
On 13 September 1993, the PLO and the state of Israel signed the historic Oslo Accords. Fatah, as the leadership party, negotiated these agreements on behalf of the PLO. Although, these accords were only meant to serve as interim agreements and their authors emphasized that their contents would not “prejudice” the outcome of permanent status agreements,1 the accords failed to meet minimal Palestinian nationalist aspirations. Ultimately, the Oslo peace process and initiatives related to this process would enjoy narrow support in Palestinian circles, and would marginalize important sectors of Palestinian political life. The establishment of the PA, and its associated institutions, would serve to reinforce these dynamics.
Palestine: Negotiations from a Point of Weakness
The circumstances under which the negotiating parties came to the table in many ways portended the outcome. Three factors decisively propelled the PLO to begin negotiations with Israel at a less than opportune time, when conditions were not in favor of the Palestinian bargaining position: (1) the PLO’s military defeat in Lebanon; (2) international geopolitical changes, specifically the demise of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s; and (3) the PLO’s near bankruptcy after it was estranged from Egypt and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf following the Gulf War of 1991. By the end of the summer of 1982, Israel had destroyed the PLO in Beirut—not only its military potential, but also the entirety of its administrative and political apparatus in Lebanon.2 The PLO’s military defeat in Lebanon and its expulsion to Tunisia thereafter made clear that a military solution to the conflict was not a feasible option. Then, in 1988, during the PNC’s nineteenth session, the PLO made two momentous decisions that would forever alter the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict: a renunciation and rejection of armed struggle, and a declaration of a willingness to negotiate “directly” with Israel on the basis of UN resolutions 2423 and 338.4 These decisions tacitly implied acceptance of both Israel’s right to exist and a two-state solution. The shift in international public opinion and the new urgency that the international arena assigned to the conflict obliged the United States to turn its attentions to the region. With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, many Arab regimes, particularly Syria, lost the economic, political, and diplomatic support they had previously received from the Soviets. Effectively, this was the end of an era for a Middle East that had previously been one of the Cold War’s most active playing fields.
Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Gulf War asserted the United States as an uncontested hegemonic power in the region.5 A deeply divided Arab world and an end to Soviet involvement in the region created an environment conducive for new US policy initiatives in the Middle East.”6 In the aftermath of the Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush announced to Congress that he would pursue new strategic goals in the region, including a just settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Then Secretary of State James Baker maintained that the Madrid Peace Conference was a necessary part of President Bush’s “new world order” after the fall СКАЧАТЬ