EMMA BONINO European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid

If anyone imagines, on hearing the female dimension of humanitarian action referred to, that it is yet another rhetorical artifice inspired by feminist ideology, (to which, moreover, I am no adherent), then he or she is mistaken. One needs few data on major humanitarian disasters of the last few years to prove this.

Women share, together with children, the privilege, if one car' call it that, of surviving the ever more bloody wars of the end of this century. Wars in which the civilian population becomes more and more often the declared target of war-time operations.

Among the survivors of these catastrophes provoked by man, one can count today more than 40 million people among refugees and evacuees. As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees tells us, 80% of these are women and children. The latter are called upon to pay, in exchange for survival, a two-fold price:- the horrors of war and the sacrifices of the post-war period.

Sometimes, as the writer Predrag Matvejevic regarding Ex-Yugoslavia maintains - "the post war period risks being much longer and much more painful than the war itself".

In the first place, concerning women, there is something else to add. In fact, statistics tell us that in countries where there has been fighting one habitually finds a demographic imbalance of the sexes so accentuated that the vast majority of families find themselves with a woman as the head of the family.

That is not all. War imposes particular suffering on women. Rape, used as a weapon in ethnic cleansing, or more simply as torture, is aimed exclusively at women. As all forms of torture, it aims to hit, dominate, and humiliate the body of the enemy and destroy mental integrity.

The majority of victims of land-mines are women, another barbarious testimony that reigns in today's conflicts. Also the use of food, or rather hunger, as a weapon to weaken the resistance of the civilian population hits women first. It is usually incumbent on them to search for daily food.

These same women, who during conflicts constitute one of the most vulnerable categories, can become, in the post-war period, one of the driving forces towards reconciliation and rehabilitation. This is because, compared to men, women show a greater inclination towards pence rather than war. They, more often than men, reject ethnic, linguistic, or religious barriers. They do so for very practical motives: they want to continue cultivating the fields, maintain access to essential goods, and safeguard "mixed" marriages and families. Moreover, as experience sbows us, women, compared to men, demonstrate a greater degree of adaptability and flexibility in assuming new social and economic roles enforced by the post-war period.

There are, of course, disadvantages to overcome. Disadvantages which are nothing

new. The subordination of women, for example, remains so deeply rooted in the vast majority of contemporary societies that one even meets it, unchanged, in the refugee camps, in the heart of a community living in conditions of collective ruin.

So, not even desperation, not even common prostration manage to wipe out the man/woman hierarchy. I am speaking from direct experience, having seen with my owneyes the condition of women in those alarming artificial cities, which are the large refugee camps in the African region of the Big Lakes.

Every cloud has a silver lining, one feels like saying This is because it is precisely in those refugee camps that the absurd becomes insupportable, and someone, reasoning, will uncover the evidence. Evidence will emerge that, if depriving the female universe of power is incongruous in normal social conditions (where women represent half the available human energy), it is aberrant in a situation where women are in the majority, and where, what's more, everything has to begin again from nothing.

This is why I believe that understanding the specific situation of women in emergencies (as for other specific social groups, defined by age or by ethnic-religious background, etc.), constitutes, for those working in humanitarian action, more than an act of solidarity and intelligence. It is a necessary condition for better managing the crisis and, above all, for evaluating the human resources available among those often superficially considered as an indistinct community of "victims".

Knowing how to read the female dimension in humanitarian crises, and draw the right conclusions from it, can render our intervention much more efficient and infinitely more human. The experience, well described in this book, which is linked to an interesting emergency progect carried out by Cooperazione Italiana in collaboration with the European Administration of the city of Mostar, is an experience leading precisely in this direction. I believe it is a model of intervention to be evaluated with the utmost attention.