An Inter Press Service Feature
AMMAN, Nov 09 (IPS) - Women and children in Lebanon and Palestine have suffered most from years of civil war and political and social instability in the region, say two academics attending this week's Arab region preparatory meeting for the 1995 women's conference.
They are among 320 women from 22 countries across the region who are meeting in the Jordanian capital to prepare for the Fourth International Conference on Women and Development (IWD) to be held in Beijing, China in September next year.
Dr. Fahmiyya Sharafuddin, Professor at the Lebanese University's Institute of Social Sciences, and member of the two Lebanese committees preparing for Beijing said 16 years of war beginning in the mid 1970s had left physical and mental scars on the country and its people.
"The civil war had four main effects: immigration, forced migration or expulsion, physical and mental handicaps and poverty, where women had to become the bread-winners," said Sharafuddin.
As for the effects of the war with Israel she said one would have to add the negative impact of the body and mind of being held in captivity by the enemy.
Sharafuddin and Leila Khaled, a Palestinian freedom-fighter and member of the General Union of Palestinian Women, together produced a report detailing the hardships which women and children in particular faced and continue to face due to the region's political instability.
Sharafuddin said that about 600,000 Lebanese had been displaced during different phases of the war, about half of them between 1975 and 1976, suffering from unfit residential places like offices with no sanitary facilities, bombed out buildings, or those in areas subjected to constant bombardment.
"We have no statistics," said Sharafuddin. But she added that organisations such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) had done studies on the psychological effects of the war on children and found many to suffer hallucinations, nightmares and symptoms of fear.
"We deduced that the same effect occurred on women, who with their children, had seen the horrors of the wars and the deaths of parents and other relatives," she said.
In addition to all this, many women, like men became prisoners of war. In most cases, the Israelis beat, rape and tortured them.
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