TV Reviews : Mothers’ Peace Movement Focus of ‘Women in War’

A sincere idealism runs through the two-part report, “Women in War” (Sunday and March 4, 8 p.m, on the Arts & Entertainment cable channel)--an idealism that tends to project both a sense of hope and an air of simplifying complex issues. Host Pat Mitchell, of the “Today” show’s “Woman to Woman” segment, voices the idealism, but without the verve and color that a Linda Ellerbee might bring to the story.

The first “Women in War” program on Sunday covers the turmoils in Northern Ireland and Israel’s West Bank and Gaza Strip; the concluding segment travels to El Salvador and gang-ravaged streets in the United States. This juxtaposition places our domestic strife within a broader context of war, while making the efforts of inner-city mothers to organize and change their neighborhoods heroic and universal.

That mothers’ basic concerns are the same across the globe is surely true; as leading Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi states (and as her Israeli women allies agree), women have a deep stake in preserving life and halting war. It is just as doubtless, though, that the intifada, the Northern Irish “troubles,” the Salvadoran civil war and the inner-city battles derive from horribly complicated circumstances with economic, religious and cultural sources. Mitchell is mindful of this but, in the end, seems assured that women can band together against the odds.

Her own report raises doubts about such optimism. Dozens of activist Salvadoran women have lost their lives demonstrating peacefully. Northern Ireland’s non-violent, mothers-led movement, Peace People, went from Nobel Prize-winning fame in the mid ‘70s to virtual dissolution in a few short years. Strife between Palestinians and Israelis has only accelerated, as it has in America’s ghettos and barrios.

“Women in War” contains many portraits of women who have found power within themselves in disempowering conditions. Perhaps they are the only hope; one only wonders if they are enough.