Female military peacekeepers deployed to complex UN missions often feel overwhelmed and ill-prepared when providing assistance to local women and girls who’ve been the victims of violence.

Rwandan peacekeepers in Mali in 2014. United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND

The UN expects female peacekeepers around the world to improve the effectiveness of missions by gaining access to members of local communities that male peacekeepers cannot reach. But my recent research in Rwanda showed that women peacekeepers need more support.

I looked at whether the kind of training women from the Rwanda Defence Force received before their deployment in mixed-gender battalions to the UN Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) and the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) was sufficient for the challenges they would face on their mission. I asked 24 Rwandan women from the military awaiting deployment and 22 who had returned from missions about their perceptions of the training they received, and how it related to the expectations and realities of working in UN and African Union (AU) peace operations.

Insufficiently prepared

Women waiting to deploy felt confident that the training equipped them for all protection of civilian tasks they would be assigned. But women who’d returned from dangerous peace operations felt the pre-deployment training didn’t adequately equip them. They found it especially challenging to handle complex cases where women and girls had experienced sexual violence related to conflict, were extremely traumatised, or required urgent assistance. These challenges were exacerbated by the difficulty of communicating with local woman through an interpreter – a skill that had to be learnt on the job in difficult circumstances.

A 27-year-old liaison officer, who was critical of the military training’s emphasis on processes and procedures, suggested that “more information on the psychological impact violence has on survivors” was required. She said encountering gender-based violence in camps for internally displaced people (IDP) “was not easy” and the training hadn’t prepared her for sustained engagement with survivors. She added:
 

When I was on the ground and reached the [IDP] camp, you find this person who was raped for two or three hours and the people around her don’t want to communicate, they don’t care about what happened. You get this person, you put her in touch with the NGOs, you take her to hospital, but you need to spend three or four hours with her.

The women I interviewed also felt overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the assistance local communities required in Darfur and South Sudan. One 30-year-old major who deployed as a mechanic in UNAMID said there weren’t enough female peacekeepers to make a real impact.

Gender biased training

Peacekeepers from the UN Mission in Sudan in 2011. United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND

While gender advisers and military observers receive specialist community engagement training, most tactical-level female peacekeepers, like their male colleagues, receive military-led training two to three months prior to deployment. Typically, the programme comprises a mixture of training sessions in the classroom and field exercises designed by both the UN and local military.

These sessions introduce theoretical concepts but don’t provide practical knowledge about how people behave directly after experiencing violence, forms of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, and what to do during contact with survivors. Nor does the training desensitise peacekeepers in preparation for the distressing situations they’re likely to witness. One 32-year-old second lieutenant reflected on what was missing:
 

We study gender issues theoretically, but in the mission area, when we start putting theory into practice, there are challenges. In training, my mate acts as a refugee and I act as I’m going to help her. But that is like theatre – you can’t grasp the reality well.

Gender biases also play a role. In Rwanda, senior leaders and trainers told me that female peacekeepers naturally knew how to respond to local women’s needs by dint of being the same sex. They believed women inherently possessed the required skill set, incorporating the traditional feminine traits of empathy, compassion, communication and the ability to care for vulnerable people.

There was also an assumption circulating that Rwandan women were good at providing victim assistance because of the country’s own history of conflict, where some 350,000 to 500,000 women were raped during the civil war and genocide in 1994. Women awaiting deployment on peackeeping missions appeared to have internalised this stereotype, even though more than half of those I interviewed were between 18- and 23-years-old and born after 1994. This self-stereotyping resulted in a false confidence among the trainee peacekeepers that they were equipped to counsel and support traumatised women and girls.

Training partnerships

Rwandan female police peacekeepers I spoke to who had worked in UN missions in Darfur, South Sudan and Haiti, hadn’t felt as ill-prepared as their military colleagues. According to one senior female police peacekeeper, community engagement was a big part of their day-to-day job in Rwanda and they had significant experience helping those affected by violence. Yet currently, the Rwanda National Police and the Rwanda Defence Force run separate training programmes.

To help mitigate some of the issues I’ve found in my research, the police and military could share good practice and develop joint pre-deployment training sessions on the implementation of the UN’s protection of civilians mandate, including providing assistance to victims. At the same time, the UN, regional organisations and those countries that contribute troops to peacekeeping missions should continue to work together to strengthen their training.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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One pattern characterises every war that’s ever been fought. Frontline fighting in warfare is primarily and often almost exclusively a male activity. From a numbers perspective, bigger armies obviously have greater chances of success in battles. Why then, are half of a community’s potential warriors (the women) usually absent from the battlefield?

Shutterstock

Previous hypotheses have suggested that this is the result of fundamental biological differences between the sexes. But our new study, published in Proceedings B, finds that none of these differences fully explain why women have almost never gone to war, and nor are they needed to do so. Instead, this state of affairs might have more to do with chance.

Some researchers have proposed that since men are on average stronger, taller, and faster than women, they are simply more effective in winning battles. Others have suggested that this pattern occurs because the costs of warfare are lower for men, as the risks of dying or being injured are offset by the opportunity to obtain more sexual partners in case of victory. This isn’t true for women because they can only produce a limited number of offspring and so there’s little or no evolutionary advantage to obtaining more partners.
Others still have argued the answer can be found in the fact that females in groups of ancestral great apes and humans were more likely to migrate. This supposedly means that women are less genetically related to their social group than men, and so are less keen to risk their lives for their communities.

Granted, these hypotheses all suggest plausible reasons why more men than women participate in wars. But they fall short on explaining why the fighting is almost always done by men. We set out to answer this question, developing a mathematical model of the evolution of male and female participation in warfare, building on some of our previous work in this area. Our model looks at the consequences of going to war on a person’s fitness, and for the fitness of their genetic relatives, to work out the probability that a person will join in the fighting.

Modelling the evolution of warfare

Before investigating each of the proposed explanations in detail, we decided we should better understand the simplest case where there are no sex differences. We designed a model that looked at men and women as two identical groups, and didn’t take account of the sexes’ different characteristics when working out the probability of an individual joining in a war. To our surprise, we found that exclusively male warfare could still evolve in this case.

Instead, our model showed that what was important was how many members of a person’s sex were already taking part in warfare at any given point, and how that affected sexual competition for mates with other people of the same sex. For example, if lots of men are already fighting, then the risks to an individual man would be lower and the potential rewards higher, but the there would be much less incentive for a woman to take part.

This evolutionary pressure means that, if there was then even a small reason why men might be more likely to fight, over many generations the incentives for men to join in would grow until warfare became an almost exclusively male practice.

But as our hypothetical model worked on the basis that men and women were identical, for every potential evolutionary trajectory that led to exclusively male warfare, there would be another that led to exclusively female warfare. Whether male-only war or female-only war evolved in our model depended only on the initial question of which sex was more likely to go to war to start with.

So, if both outcomes are equally plausible, why is warfare in fact almost exclusively male? Our study also suggests that male competition over mates and resources – an aspect of what biologists call sexual selection – might have caused men to evolve to be generally more aggressive than women. This was probably enough to make men more likely to go to war from the outset. And our model explains why this would ultimately lead to male-only war parties. Greater physical strength, together with lower costs and higher genetic links to the rest of the group, may have then helped reinforce this pattern.

But initial conditions could have – in theory – been different. Had women been naturally more aggressive, they would have become the warring sex and we would now live in a world of Amazon-like female-only wars. Interestingly, this is the case in some other animal societies that engage in inter-group conflicts. In spotted hyenas, for example, only females attack other packs.

Women in combat roles are increasingly common. Shutterstock
 

The past and the future of war

One implication of our study is that past ecological conditions can have very long-lasting effects. The evolution of men as the more aggressive of the sexes led to a pattern of male-dominated warfare that was unlikely to be altered by changing technological or ecological forces.

Consider the role of weapons, for example. When warfare initially evolved, men were likely more aggressive and might have been more effective at fighting, because primitive weapons relied on brute force. As a result, they went on to become the warring sex. Later, inventions such as the bow and arrow made physical sex differences in strength less important. In more recent times, further technological advances have effectively equalised men and women in their ability to fight opponents. But, as male-only war has already evolved, these technological changes have little or no impact. Only initial conditions matter.

As such, this long-lasting effect of ancestral behavioural differences might help explain why women’s presence in the armed forces today is still limited. Yet, perhaps culture is now having a greater role, at least partially overriding the biological basis for exclusively male warfare. The countries that have opened military combat roles to women in response to changing attitudes, and the recent reports of Kurdish women fighting Islamic State are testaments to that.
 

Alberto Micheletti, PhD Candidate in Evolutionary Biology, University of St Andrews

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Barely two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked the “surgical strikes” by the Indian Army across the Line of Control, a fresh controversy erupted over the parity of the armed forces officers with their civilian counterparts.

A circular dated October 18, issued by V Anandarajan, a joint secretary in the ministry of defence, tried to establish a parity between serving officers and their civilian counterparts, by defining a rank equation between the two categories of officers based on duties and functional responsibilities.

Within days of the circular, the ministry was abuzz with protests from serving officers from the armed forces that this was an attempt to downgrade them and equate them with lower ranks.

As the story hit the stands with several media organisations reporting it on the same day, projecting it as the military having been brought a notch down, it was clear that planned briefings had been carried out by serving officers to ensure maximum coverage.

A usually reticent set of serving officers, it seemed, were not happy with the circular.

Conflicts and confrontations

But the build up to this civilian-military clash has to be seen in perspective, for which one has to go back at least a couple of years, when the retired community of military officers started agitating for the One-Rank-One-Pension scheme.

The OROP scheme, as envisaged by the military veterans, proposed the same pension, for the same rank, for the same length of service, irrespective of the date of retirement. The pension was earlier drawn as a percentage of the last drawn pay, as a result of which someone who had retired in an earlier year, at the same rank, would be paid less than someone who retired later. The OROP promised to change that to ensure that even if officers of the same rank retired decades apart, they would still get the same quantum of money.

Clearly, OROP had fiscal challenges and the military veterans hit the streets, asking for its early implementation. However, the agitation saw frayed tempers as the Delhi Police tried to evict the protestors from Delhi’s Jantar Mantar area, when the agitation was at its peak.

The OROP agitation was quickly followed by anger over the pay hikes granted to services personnel by the seventh Central pay Commission. The services felt that their representations had not been heard by the Pay Commission, and in an unprecedented move, the army, navy and air force sent a signal to all serving personnel that they would not accept the pay hike until their demands had been met. The Defence Minister had to step in and request the three Chiefs to accept the hikes, while he looked into the matter.

But while the dust was yet to settle on the pay hikes and OROP, a series of moves by the defence ministry let to another round of confrontation between the armed forces personnel and their civilian counterparts.

Protest at New Delhi . Image: PTI

While the rank parity circular of October 18 had created much resentment, an order issued earlier, on October 13, by the army’s Engineer-in-Chief was interpreted as a putdown.

This stated that a new position was being created to monitor all engineering works by the Military Engineering Services, a body that carries out all civil works for military personnel, such as building and maintaining living accommodation, training establishments and offices for the services across India.

The order appointed VK Rajan, an Indian Estates cadre officer as the new Additional Director General (North), thus handing over command to a civilian, with serving military officers reporting to him. Traditionally, serving military personnel rarely report to their civilian counterparts.

These series of confrontations made the military feel isolated from their civilian counterparts – the OROP and the seventh pay commission had already brought them in conflict with their counterparts in the Indian Administrative Service, Indian Police Service and other services. The circular declaring parity with civilian counterparts in the defence ministry and the creation of a new civil engineering post led to a fresh confrontation.

In addition to that came media reports that on the same day as the surgical strikes, the central government had “slashed” the disability pensions of the military veterans. A furore followed.

Quietly and steadily, the delicate relationship between the armed forces and their civilian counterparts has been under strain, unfortunately to the detriment of the military.

Political surgical strikes

On September 29, as the Director General of Military Operations Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh announced that Indian Special Forces had made surgical strikes on terror launchpads along the Line of Control, the politics of the event were just beginning to take shape. Within days of the strikes, defence minister Parrikar first stated that it was the Modi government which had given the army the freedom to carry out the strikes. A few days later he also credited the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for giving him and the Prime Minister the gumption to order such a strike.

Narendra Modi with VK Singh at Rewari, Haryana. September 2013 Image: PTI

But the use of the army as a political tool had started much earlier, even before the 2014 general elections took place. For the Bharatiya Janata Party, identifying closely with the armed forces helped it shape its message of patriotism and nationalism at a time when far more pressing economic issues were dominating the landscape. In September 2013, Modi, as the party’s prime ministerial candidate addressed a rally of military veterans in Rewari, Haryana, using the occasion to target the United Progressive Alliance government at the centre. This was, in many ways, a strategical use of the military to shape a political message that had not been seen since the 1971 Indo-Pak war.

“The problem is in Delhi. And hence the solution to this problem has to be found in Delhi itself. The problem will be solved only when a competent, patriotic and people-oriented government is formed at the Centre,” Modi told the largely cheering crowd of military veterans.

Naturally, expectations of the military began to soar, in the hope that a National Democratic Alliance government would be far more sensitive to their needs than the UPA.

Not much after the surgical strikes, posters began to appear in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh, highlighting the military action as proof of the good and robust governance that the BJP could provide to the state. At the national executive of the RSS, the surgical strikes were a big talking point, with the understanding that they would be used in the heated election campaign in the coming months.

In 1999, when India was at war with Pakistan in the heights of Kargil, the then DGMO Lieutenant General NC Vij, had been sent to the BJP headquarters on Ashoka Road to brief the party leadership. It had created a big political brouhaha, with the Congress-led opposition claiming that the government was politicising the military. While it was not clear why the government had asked a serving military officer to brief a political party, the surgical strikes this time certainly became a platform to address and re-energise the BJP's political constituency.

Truth as a casualty

To return to the recent media reports, in some ways, the truth about the perceived belittling of the military officers by their civilian counterparts lies somewhere between reality and perception. The story that the military officers had been brought down a notch was partially correct – but only partially. While Major Generals continue to be equated with Joint Secretaries in the government of India, those in lower ranks feel that they have been downgraded.

A Group of Ministers led by Pranab Mukherjee in September 2008 had ruled that officers in the ranks of Lieutenant Colonel to Brigadiers would be placed at a higher pedestal than their civilian counterparts in terms of pay and perks. However, this seems to have been diluted by the recent order of the ministry of defence.

But even if it is so, it does not create any operational problems for either service.

The issue of reduction of disability pensions is also only partially correctfor which, as Major Navdeep Singh, a lawyer and a territorial army officer has argued, “fudged data” given to the Central Pay Commission was responsible.

Lieutenant General Vijay Oberoi, former Vice Chief of Army Staff, who lost a leg as a Captain in the 1965 war with Pakistan but soldiered on bravely for 36 years with an artificial leg, had to approach the courts thrice to get his pension after his retirement in 2001. “From the 5th pay commission the government had accepted a percentage of the last drawn pay to decide the disability pension," Oberoi said. "This time, this was converted to a fixed quantum." Compared to the percentage system, Oberoi pointed out, this shift to a lump sum payment means the soldiers lose out on the amount they would have received under the older system.

Image credit: Major DP Singh on Facebook

However, the government officers disputed this and argued that while officers will partially lose out, the soldiers will get a higher quantum of money. But this will only apply to soldiers who may get disabled very early in their careers. “But that is a rare case," Singh argued, "and the majority are disabled later in service.”

The military, clearly, is no longer prepared to be a silent participant. Armed with a new language of politics and relevance, it is beginning to make noise in the humdrum of politics. Several retired Generals, cultivated by the ruling party, are routinely in TV studios, raising the “patriotism and nationalism” slogan whenever, for example, Dalit and student agitations threaten the party’s narrative, thus sharpening the military and civilian divide.

But lost in this din is the slowly eroding apolitical ethos of the Indian armed forces. As they battle for equal rights and relevance against their civilian counterparts, they are in danger of being exploited for narrow political gains, particularly as elections loom large on the horizon in the immediate future.

(This article was first published on Scroll.in)
 

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India is and has been, since 2011, the single largest importer of arms in the world, accounting for 14 per cent of total arms imports of the world and the sixth largest spender on arms in the world, the second largest from Asia, second only to China.

Pakistan our bête noir is much lower down in the arms import scale, making up only 3.3 per cent of the world imports. China, which has the largest number of military expenditure in Asia, however, accounts for only 4.7 per cent of the total world imports, when it comes to arms.

So not only are we spending more on arms but our dependency on foreign powers for defense equipment (not indigenous manufacture) adds another factor to the relationship. India’s imports are twice the second largest importer country Saudi Arabia’s imports, which makes up for 7 per cent of the total world imports.

These figures are irrefutable, coming as they do from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Images: SIPRI

India is the sixth largest spender in the world, when it comes to military expenditure and is second largest from Asia, following China, also according to SIPRI. In 2015, India’s expenditure on military was $ 51,257 million as against Pakistan’s $ 9,510 million. However, South Asian countries are far behind the expenditure of the United States, which is whooping $ 596,024 million and quite behind China’s $ 214,787 million as well, according to SIPRI. (The extensive map by SIPRI showing military expenditure by different countries in an interactive graphic format can be found here.)

And this is while, even according to conservative estimates put out by the World Bank, India accounted for the largest number of people living below international poverty line in 2013, with 30 per cent of its population under the $1.90-a- day poverty measure. Placing the figure of the total of India’s ‘poor’ at a staggering 224 million, the recently released report 'Poverty and Shared Prosperity', also indicated that ‘extreme poverty worldwide continued to fall despite the global economy's "under-performance".

So while we puff up our chests on the surgical strokes against our neighbour and turn a blind eye to the pitfalls of sabka saath sabka vikas paradigm within, maybe its worth taking a deep breath and looking at this, the other side.

In the last two months, Maharashtra capital, Mumbai–a state regarded as being high on both the ‘financial capital’, business, and ‘progressive social values’ index’ has seen at least 12 deaths of infants as a result of malnutrition. Palghar district, situated at a distance of a hundred kilometer from the state capital, has recorded 600  deaths of children due to malnutrition within a four-month-period (April – August 2016), and as per some of the news reports, close to 4,000 children in the district are suffering from either severe or moderate form of malnutrition.

The United Nations (UN) says that in India, 2.1 million children die before reaching the age of five, every year. And, malnutrition is only one of the issues in the country, where 21.9 percent of the population is below poverty line, 68 million people still live in slums and suffer because of the unsanitary and uninhabitable living spaces.

On the other hand, India’s relation with the neighbouring country Pakistan is at its worst after Uri attack, skirmishes that have been taking place since and an anticipated war scenario. Some have been stressing on the need to modernise the Indian military and want the government to spend more in order to strengthen its defence. Many more deals to purchase modern aircraft and equipment for Indian Army are in the pipeline. Beneficiaries as we have seen with the recent Rafael deal are none less than India’s favoured few, the crony capitalists.

India is the largest client for Russia and the second largest for UK and Italy. Several deals to purchase Rafael fighter jets, Apache and Chinook aircrafts, Kamov helicopters and M777 lightweight Howitzer guns have either been signed or are going to be signed in near future, at a cost of approximately 1.5 lakh crore (SIPRI).

These figures pose a serious dilemma in front of a developing country like India, which is the second most populous country in the world, and ranks low on the list of countries with high human development index.

In India’s annual budget this year, however, the government allocated a budget of 2.58 lakh crore to defence, 38,892 crore for health and of 72,394 crore to education. A massive 13.04 per cent of the country’s annual budget, therefore, goes to defence as against the 1.96 per cent to health and 3.96 per cent to education. India’s defence spending spending went up by ten per cent (9.76 per cent) of the budgetary allocations (2.58 crores) as compared to the revised estimates of 2.33 lakh crores for 2015-2016. The finance minister Arun Jaitley had, conspicuously, made no mention of the defence allocation for 2016-17 in his Budget speech, however.
 
For a developing country like India, which is the second most populous country in the world, and ranks low on the list of countries with a high human development index (HDI), these priorities in focus pose a serious dilemma. As India settles for rank 130 in the list of 188 countries, its neighbours like Pakistan and Bangladesh have settled for ranks 147 and 142 respectively.
 
Though the budget allocated to the health sector, showed a hike of 15 per cent as compared to the last year’s allocation which had been slashed by five per cent from the previous year, the allocation is not close to what attention and funding that this sector actually deserves. The question one needs to ask here then, is:  is the Indian taxpayer’s money going where it’s really required?

As the issue like poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and dearth of infrastructure continue to plague the country, where do our priorities lie? Is the modernisation of the military the only absolute priority?

Will these questions receive any answers?

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China’s People’s Liberation Army troops (right) and Pakistani troops attend a flag hoisting ceremony at the start of joint military exercises in Abbotabad, 85 km (53 miles) northwest of Islamabad, in December 2006. China’s rise to becoming the world’s third-largest arms exporter was to a large degree helped by heightened demand from Pakistan, which now buys 35% of these exports and is Beijing’s biggest buyer.
 
China’s rise to becoming the world’s third-largest arms exporter was to a large degree helped by heightened demand from Pakistan, which now buys 35% of these exports and is Beijing’s biggest buyer (Bangladesh follows at 20%), according to this February 2016 report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
 
The military supplies are bolstered by unwavering support at a time of heightened tensionwith India and faltering ties with the US (there was a 73% drop in US security aid over four years to 2015, The Wire reported in August 2016; the US also cancelled the subsidised sale of eight F-16 fighter jets).

 

Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Link 1 & Link 2
 
Last month, Pakistan’s ministry of defence production confirmed a contract with China for the purchase of eight conventional diesel-electric submarines, which will cost between $4 billion to $5 billion (Rs. 25,600 crore to Rs. 33,200 crore), China’s biggest defence export deal.
 
The submarines could have a nuclear strategic capability–they could be used to launch nuclear-tipped land attack cruise missiles, providing Pakistan with a partial second-strike capability to rival India’s nuclear-submarine ballistic missiles.
 
The submarines are the latest of several big ticket arms purchases by Pakistan. Others:
 

• Between 250 to 300 JF-17 fighter planes jointly developed by China and Pakistan. These will form the backbone of the Pakistani Air Force. Nigeria has signed a memorandum of understanding to purchase an unknown number of JF-17 aircraft, according to IHS Jane’s, a defence/aerospace publication, making Pakistan a defence exporter.
• Four 2,5000-ton Zulfiquar-class frigates at a cost of $500 to $750 million. Three of these were constructed in China, the fourth in Karachi.
• Four 560-ton Azmat-class fast attack craft, essentially missile boats armed with eight C-802 anti-ship missiles meant for littoral defence. Three of four are being manufactured in Pakistan.
• 600 Al Khalid tanks produced in Pakistan form the backbone of the Pakistan army’s armoured corps. They are variants of Chinese Type 90-II tank.
• Nine HQ-16 medium range surface-to-air missile systems with a maximum intercept range of 40 km at a cost of $600 million.
• Four Karakoram Eagle airborne early warning & control aircraft (AWACS) at a cost of $278 million.

From 2011 to 2015, China sold $8.4 billion worth of arms, overtaking long-established arms exporters France ($8 billion) and Germany ($6.7 billion), although it still lags the leaders: the US ($47 billion) and Russia ($36.2 billion).
 

Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Figures in million US$ at constant 1990 prices
 
China’s share in the international arms exports market has risen from 3.6% in 2006-10 to 5.9% in 2011-15. France’s market share has declined from 7.1% to 5.6%, and Germany’s, from 11% to 4.7%, during this period.
 

Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
 
The period coincides with China’s emergence as a major global power, seeking to challenge US hegemony across various areas and with enough heft to keep India unbalanced, either directly or through Pakistan.
 
(Sethi is a Mumbai-based freelance writer and defence analyst.)

This article was first published on India Spend
 
 

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