The courage of women under fire

There is something viscerally repellent about TV images of prisoners of war. When five bewildered and frightened Americans were paraded before the cameras by their Iraqi captors last weekend, the shock was made worse by the presence of a black woman, 30-year-old Shoshawna Johnson, whose darting eyes vividly conveyed her terror. An American official, Elaine Donnelly of the Military Readiness Centre, said that being taken prisoner was worse for a woman, because "she doesn't have the same chance to defend herself that a man does".

Tony Blair's claim that two British soldiers had been murdered in cold blood, after their dead bodies were displayed on the Al-Jazeera TV channel, suggests that such optimism about the fate of male PoWs is misplaced. But it became clear that a second American servicewoman, 19-year-old Jessica Lynch, was missing, underlining the changing composition of America's war machine. One in every seven members of the US armed forces is a woman and the fear is that they are more vulnerable, when captured, to sexual assault.

That is what happened to Major Rhonda Cornum, a US army surgeon who was held for eight days by the Iraqis after her helicopter was shot down during the 1991 Gulf War. Cornum has described how she was groped by Iraqi soldiers on the way to Basra, but insists that the experience of sexual abuse is eclipsed by the fear of imminent death. The reality is that women in Western military uniforms, armed and trained to defend themselves, are less likely to become victims of sexual assault in war zones than female civilians.

What we saw in the civil conflicts of the 1990s was rape as an instrument of war, with thousands of women violated systematically in Rwanda and Bosnia. A young Bosnian poet, who lived through the siege of Sarajevo, suggested to me that Serb soldiers were encouraged to rape Muslim woman as a way of dehumanising people who had been their neighbours. Sadly, although the experiences of these woman are cited sometimes by politicians as a justification for war, we rarely hear their stories.

It is also the case that US military power is so overweening that it comes as a shock to see its personnel implicitly threatened in this way, which is why Saddam Hussein's regime has adopted these abhorrent tactics. Some conservative

US and British commentators are suggesting that women should not serve in combat zones, an argument that has been given unnecessary weight by the taboo that forbids virtually all discussion of male rape in war. When TE Lawrence was seized by Turkish soldiers in Syria in 1917, he was viciously beaten and gang-raped, an experience described by his biographer, Jeremy Wilson, as inflicting "terrible psychological damage".

Lawrence himself recorded that such incidents "made the thought of military service in the Turkish army a living death for wholesome Arab peasants". But it is now those "wholesome" Arabs whose conjectured treatment of captured US servicewomen causes such revulsion. So it is worth pointing out that the other US servicewoman taken prisoner by the Iraqis in 1991, Melissa Rathbun-Nealy, said on her release that she had been treated well. A Lebanese friend recalls that her sister, who lives in Kuwait, was threatened with rape during the occupation by two Iraqi soldiers – and saved by a third, who threatened to shoot them if they did not desist.

Women soldiers are nothing like as much a novelty in the Middle East as has been suggested. They serve in the Iraqi, Syrian and Israeli armies, and played an active role in both Christian and Muslim militias in the Lebanese civil war. Indeed Ms Johnson's gender may have less impact on her treatment than her race, as black Americans are more likely to be regarded as victims of the dominant white culture represented by George Bush, and detested by many Arabs.

As women play a greater role in combat, it is inevitable that some of them will be captured or killed, but only a misplaced sense of chivalry would contend that women have not always suffered privations in war. Ms Johnson's anxious face may be destined to become one of the memorable images of the war. But we should not forget that in recent conflicts, where the ratio of civilian to military casualties has been eight-to-one, it is ordinary non-combatant women who have borne the brunt of the suffering.