Women s participation and leadership in conflict: from theory to practice

Transcription

1 Women s participation and leadership in conflict: from theory to practice Lesley Abdela, Shevolution Main contents of her speech: October sees the 10th anniversary of 1325, one of the greatest resolutions ever passed by the UN Security Council. From the moment it passed, women/war/peace was on the international agenda. In the same year, one month later, a similar Resolution was passed by the European Parliament in support of A recommendation accompanying the EP resolution calls for at least 40% women s representation in all levels of decisionmaking in peace building.1 As yet, both 1325 and the EP resolution are mostly honoured in the breach. Peace-making and peace-building ought not to be left so overwhelmingly to men, for one practical reason: they don t seem to be very good at it! Currently some 50% of conflicts break out all over again within 10 years. Part of the problem lies at the heart of deeply flawed peace-process attempts where women s voices are almost completely excluded from the top-table. From working in conflict zones in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, Aceh and Nepal I have learned two principal lessons. One is that although in deadly conflict women suffer horribly, brief windows of opportunity open up. One third of the 26 parliaments in the world with over 30% of women Members are as a result of post-conflict elections. The other lesson is that among the major obstacles to women participating meaningfully in peace processes are the parallel universes. In one universe women leaders in Civil Society, community-based organisations, NGOs, advocacy groups and women s wings of political Parties are active in informal peace initiatives. The other universe with its formal hierarchies is inhabited by Political Party leaders, high-ranking Military officers, Warlords, Government Ministers, Diplomats, each holding or having access to political and economic power. These are mostly men and they maintain primary and close contact with counterparts of the same rank and sex. The peace processes from the start are top-down, leaving almost no space for women s voices to be heard. Take Kosovo, which burst on to the world s horrified attention in 1999, just a year before the UN Security Council passed The UN Secretary-General s Special Representative to the UN Mission in Kosovo failed to appoint even one woman to the Kosovar Transitional Governing Council. Senior diplomats in the UN Mission in Kosovo justified this by saying Kosovar women would not be interested in politics, it isn t part of their culture. One said, You ve seen the women in the fields around here, come on, political participation is not even part of their mentality. These international diplomats were clearly ignorant of the fact in the former Yugoslavia, women had been judges, professors, trade unionists and political activists. During the ten years of the Milosevic regime women risked their lives running over 500 underground schools. In person or through family loss and rape, women took the brunt of the ethnic cleansing. Throughout the Balkans, women s organisations stayed in contact with each other to try to build peace. 1 European Parliament Resolution - Gender Aspects of Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding A5-0308/2000 1

2 Finally, after Kosovar women leaders met with the then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to protest the absence of women, 3 women were appointed to each of the two tiers of Governing Councils. 3 years down the line, a letter to Iraqi women s organisations from the Kosovar Women s Network chaired by Igbal Rugova, revealed how strongly Kosovar women still felt about having their opinions ignored: We greeted joyfully the decision that put Kosova under a UN administration. UN was to us the revered international organization that developed and passed key documents that stipulated women s rights and promoted their integration in all levels of decision-making. But when we returned home we were, unfortunately, disappointed by the UN Mission in Kosova (UNMIK)... most of those agencies did not recognize that we existed and often refused to hear what we had to say on decisions that affected our lives and our future got off to a very slow start. Years passed during which women continued to be excluded from top level talks. Networks and NGOs from across the Balkans made it clear that in line with 1325 women wanted to be equal partners at the top-table in the talks on the future status of Kosovo brokered by the International Contact Group. The NGO Women in Black in Belgrade and the Kosovo Women s Network comprising 90 women s NGOs conducted an impeccable, peaceful, democratic advocacy and lobbying campaign. They demonstrated and lobbied their own politicians as well as Members of the European Parliament and the International Contact Group for the right to be included as equal partners in negotiations. The Contact Group led by Special Envoy (now Noble Peace Prize Laureate) Martti Ahtisaari simply ignored the Balkan women s peaceful requests. The Contact Group included four permanent members of the UN Security Council, i.e. four of the very States who had unanimously voted for 1325 in the United States, United Kingdom, France and Russia. They ignored their own Resolution, sidelined women and missed an unrepeatable opportunity to set a precedent for Peace Talks in this terrible Age of Conflict. At about the same time as the talks on the status of Kosovo were being held, peace talks were taking place in Nepal after a decade of armed conflict. During the insurgency the United Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) took control by force of much of the countryside in the rural Western Terai. Caste, ethnic and Gender-based discrimination, a rich/poor divide, structural poverty, inequitable distribution of resources and political infighting contributed to the roots of the armed conflict which left more than 14,000 people dead and around 200,000 people displaced. Appalling crimes of violence and rape were committed against women by all sides. (As yet there have been no prosecutions.) In the absence of the men, women took on leadership roles in villages and across Civil Society in grassroots peace-building, Human Rights and disarmament movements. Women became leaders of households and risked their lives negotiating for survival with armed combatants, both Government security forces and Maoists. Women and girls who joined the Maoists systematically subverted traditional Hindu symbols of the subordination of women, for example rejecting the tradition of Dalit caste women being untouchables. 2 Nepali women s organisations were at the very forefront of the struggle for Peace and Democracy. Women led impressive demonstrations and lobbied for Peace and Democracy. 2 This note by Lyn Bennett reports on the findings of a DfID-commissioned study to assess social change in conflict areas of Nepal. 2

3 During this period, UNFPA, UNIFEM and Nepali women s organisations and international aid organisations were clearly intent on injecting 1325 into the peace processes, but their siren calls to the political Party leaders, including the Maoists, and the Nepal government, to include women in the peace negotiations went unheeded. The Party leaders, the Nepali Coalition Government and the Maoist rebel leaders sidelined women from the series of longdrawn-out negotiations. But since then, and with support of foreign donors, Nepali women s organisations have taken advantage of the post-conflict window of opportunity. The big breakthrough came when a clause calling for affirmative action was incorporated into the Interim Constitution with the result that at the 2008 election a record 33% of the elected Constituent Assembly Members were female. Some are highly-educated and leaders of women s organisations, others are from poor and marginalised groups, including widows, Dalits and Janjaratis. And almost certainly because of their presence, the Interim Constitution includes women s rights as a fundamental right, pledges of non-discrimination on the basis of Gender, and other key measures. Women are also represented on all thematic committees set up to discuss the draft of a new Constitution, giving them an unprecedented opportunity to influence National decision-making and the development of the new Constitution. Women s organisations with support from international donors have carried out many activities to promote The UN Agencies set up the UN Peace Support Working Group 1325 co-chaired by UNFPA and the Norwegian Embassy - as a UN and Donor coordination and cooperation forum to ensure participation and representation of women and girls in all aspects of Nepal s peace-building process. PSWG1325 has also provided support for the development of the Nepal 1325 National Plan of Action. If completed before the end of 2010, as hoped, this will make Nepal the first country in South Asia to have a 1325 National Action Plan. The disconnection between community-level experiences and priorities in peacebuilding and National/governmental and international processes are a major challenge. One of the latest 1325 developments is the set of UN indicators for monitoring 1325 progress under four pillars: Participation, Protection, Prevention, and Relief-and-Recovery. A set of indicators which recognise grassroots level women s participation needs to be added to the list. A woman I met in a very small community in a highly conflict-affected rural area in the Nepal said: The Peace Process is for the power groups rather than for the people. This is the wrong focus. If they asked me I would tell them, build a peaceful village, a good village. This is where I would start from calls on all actors to support local women s peace initiatives. Particularly through the women s empowerment work of groups like CARE Nepal and their local partners, knowledge about 1325 is seeping out from the capital Kathmandu to the Districts and onward to the poorest and most marginalised local communities. With the Austrian Development Agency s support, CARE Austria and CARE Nepal and partners are conducting exciting and important women s empowerment projects in the rural areas. The hubs of their community work are Reflect Centres - local meeting-places where women gain confidence through regular meetings. This has made poor and marginalised women feel sufficiently empowered to claim their rights and to participate actively in peacebuilding activities. In one remote centre I visited, there was a large poster pinned up on the wall with key points in Nepali on One of the results of these grass-roots programmes has been the creation and training of community level Peace Ambassadors. A major challenge for the second decade of 1325 is - how do we women bridge the parallel universes? In country after country, from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone and Kosova to 3

4 Kathmandu, persuasion and national/international advocacy on 1325 has been ineffective for bringing women to top level peace-talks. A recent UNIFEM study shows women comprise fewer than 10% of all participants in peace negotiations. In a sample of 21 major peace processes since 1992 only 2.4% of signatories to peace agreements were women. 3 The reason persuasion and advocacy has failed is simple: 1325 contains no carrots and no sticks no incentives, no penalties, no sanctions and no time-frames. These are the weaknesses built into 1325 from the very start. This must be addressed urgently as we move into the second ten years. My personal recommendation is that the UN and its Member States should only provide resources and funding to peace talks where at least 40% women and at least 40% men are participants at all levels of negotiation, including the top table. UN Member States who contribute civilians and Military to peace operations and Peace talks should ensure at some point all their Diplomats, Arms Monitors, Political and Election officers, Police and Military have mandatory gender training including instruction on implementing 1325 and 1880+, and on practical actions to address and prevent Gender- Based violence and sexual exploitation. Staff career appraisals should be linked to a commitment to the implementation of 1325 and the subsequent related Security Council resolutions. The vital use of quotas for getting women into parliaments even as a Temporary Special Measure, and at Peace Tables and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions would become a valuable starting point as breakthrough mechanisms to help overcome the cultural stereotypes so deeply entrenched in most communities. But numbers on their own are not enough. Once women are elected or appointed we need to set them up for success by provision of support groups and training so they can participate as meaningful agents of transformation to lasting peace. At the same time, there must be no impunity on offer for Gender Based Violence in Nepal or any other region in conflict. Military Officers or political overseers of armed forces must be held legally accountable for conduct of their subordinates (as specified in UN Resolutions). For this to happen, it is vital at least 40% of the Commissioners on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions should be women. UN Member States should set up a monitoring and reporting process on implementation of 1325 and successor resolutions, possibly linked to the CEDAW cycle for reporting. To sum up: progress has certainly been made - 22 countries (out of 192 UN Member States) have developed and published a National Action Plan for implementing Other States are in the process of developing a NAP.4 There has been growing international recognition of women s roles (and needs) in conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Across the decade the Security Council passed Resolutions 1820, 1888 and 1889 specifically to strengthen But despite hundreds of conferences, speeches and 3 UNIFEM, Women s Participation in Peace Negotiations: Connections between Presence and Influence NAPs - Austria (2007), Belgium (2009), Bosnia Herzegovina (2010), Chile (2009), Côte d Ivoire (2008), Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (2009), Denmark (2005), Finland (2008), Iceland (2008), Liberia (2009), the Netherlands (2007), Norway (2006), the Philippines (2010), Portugal (2009), Sierra Leone (2010), Rwanda (2009), Spain (2008), Sweden (2006), Switzerland (2007), Uganda (2008), and the United Kingdom (2007). 4

5 declarations, significant barriers remain to the full integration of a Gender perspective in conflict prevention and peacebuilding processes. Most of the progress on 1325 has stemmed almost entirely due to strenuous, dedicated worldwide activity of women and women s advocacy groups. In the aftermath of dictatorship and conflict, everyone talks of human rights and democracy yet women find themselves having to fight for any voice at all. Representatives from West African women s organisations in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea built a network to search for ways out of the armed conflicts in the conflict-plagued bulge of Africa. This network played a decisive role in bringing warring parties to the negotiating table. In Sri Lanka, women s NGOs have worked on community peace initiatives: ditto the Middle- East and throughout Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America. But 1325 has not yet penetrated that parallel universe of men who hold the reins of power. That is the challenge we all face women and supportive men alike - in confronting the second decade of the remarkable tool If I were a sales person I would say the world s women have made the sales pitch. Now, we together with a growing number of men who sense wisdom in our words and actions must clinch the deal. Quick-fix stabilisation using current paradigms for peace, including holding out offers of impunity, may bring temporary absence of fighting and not steady development and long-term peace. We must change the dynamics of who sits at the Peace talk tables and sets the peacebuilding agenda. What we want is a true Partnership for Peace - women and men together! 5