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IFOR’s Women Peacemakers Program
‘War is a Very Gendered Activity’
‘Saying you are sorry is the beginning of justice, the beginning of the healing process. So many grievances have never been addressed. Immediately the atmosphere changes when someone says: I am sorry. I did not know that this hurt you.’
Maria Hadjipavlou-Trigeorgis, a Greek Cypriot, was speaking of her work to bridge the divide between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities on Cyprus. Together with Turkish Cypriot activists like Sevgul Uludag, several thousand Cypriots have been trained in conflict resolution skills during the past few years. ‘We try in our workshops to begin with the development of empathy. You have a right to your story and I won’t judge you. That is a very powerful experience for participants,’ said Uludag. On an island where UN peacekeeping forces, stationed for the last 16 years, have been unable to stop periodic violence, such empathy is sorely needed.
Apology as a first step towards reconciliation was recognized, too, by Vesna Terselic of the Anti-War Campaign Croatia. ‘Saying you are sorry is recovering a sense of dignity, of respect,’ she said. ‘When I think of presenting a concept like justice publicly, maybe using the idea of dignity is important. Nationalists teach people that so-and-so hasn’t allowed us our dignity. What is at stake is not national identity, but dignity. The word peace is useless in my country, but people still react and listen when we use words like dignity, respect.’
The women were speaking at the first IFOR Women Peacemakers Program’s consultation for women in conflict situations. The European consultation was the first in a series of three regional consultations, which will culminate in the year 2001 with a fourth intercontinental consultation. The programme receives core funding from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Though some IFOR (the International Fellowship of Reconciliation) branches and groups were already working for women, the Women Peacemakers Program is IFOR’s first systematic attempt to increase the nonviolent empowerment of women. Spurred on by the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women and the Beijing Platform for Action’s very concrete recommendations regarding women in conflict situations, the Women Peacemakers Program is bringing an awareness of gender into all of IFOR’s work. Several branches, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Zimbabwe, have now established their own Women Peacemakers Programs.
The Women Peacemakers Program is an experiment in developing and integrating a gender perspective into peace and reconciliation work. The programme recognizes that women play multiple roles in conflict -as victims, occasionally as perpetrators- and most of all as leaders with innovative ideas about peace-building. The challenge became how IFOR could systematically support and encourage women in such work; how women’s perspectives and experiences of war, of reconstruction and reconciliation, could be mobilized and utilized; how women’s solutions and ideas could be disseminated to a wider audience.
‘We’ve struggled for 10 years for democracy,’ said a representative
from the Burmese Women’s Union. ‘The movement is at a deadlock.
Participating in this consultation has given me ideas about possible
ways forward.’ She was speaking at the end evaluation of the WPP’s
Asia consultation, held in India in late 1998. Almost half of
the participants in this consultation were refugees or working
in exile. They came from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia,
Kashmir, Nagaland, Nepal, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Tibet.
The Asia Consultation
The participants worked in a variety of organisations. The Tamil
and the Sinhalese participants worked with the Family Rehabilitation
Center, counselling torture victims and their families. The Cambodians
had joined the newly formed Forum for Peace Through Love and Compassion,
in order to spread the principles of peaceful conflict resolution.
‘Everything is politicized in Cambodia,’ said one participant.
‘It is dangerous to speak of peace, because different political
parties see peace as threatening. But we link peace with traditional
Buddhist values, which everyone respecs.’ One special feature
of the Asia consultation was the meal and cultural night organized
for participants by members of the Tibetan exile community in
Kochi.
The WPP consultations offer ‘enemy’ women the chance for face-to-face dialogue. The European regional consultation took place in early 1998 in Budapest, Hungary, and brought together women from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Cyprus, Ingushetia, Israel, Northern Ireland, Palestine and Serbia. Activists invited from Abkhazia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and North Ossetia were unable to attend because of being denied visas, or, in one case, because of shooting at the airport, illustrating some of the difficulties that face women working in conflict situations.
‘The idea had been to get together women who had substantial experience, both of conflict and of working with it; women who would have a great deal to teach each other and to learn from each other; women who would value support; women who would also be able to pass on the benefits of this opportunity to a wider network of women,’ said co-facilitator and former IFOR President Diana Francis. In order to pass on lessons learned from the consultation, at least one facilitator of the next regional consultation also participates.
The programme included presentations on conflict resolution, dialogue, justice and power issues, and the model of social analysis developed by IFOR Honorary Presidents Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayr. The difficult - but essential to reconciliation - issues of identity, responsibility and guilt, were tackled by participants in small group work. They discussed organisational aims, strengths, weaknesses and needs, with funding being identified as a major need by most participants. There was a fundraising workshop and hands-on training in using video equipment. During the last sessions, participants worked in small groups, then came back into the larger group to reflect on what would be useful to initiate in the next few months in their organisations, and what steps could be taken to make these changes. In presentations of their small group analysis, many women identified the need to provide civic education for women, and to increase women’s influence in political decision making.
| ‘Nationalists teach people that so-and-so hasn’t allowed us our dignity. What is at stake is not national identity, but dignity. The word peace is useless in my country, but people still react and listen when we use words like dignity, respect.’ |
‘It is easy to speak with the women here. They understand what you are saying. We need solidarity, and I feel that here from these women,’ said Leila Yunosova, who worked with the Azeri Ministry of Defence in hostage negotiations during the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Participants found this sense of trust and of being understood empowering, especially as many shared an experience of being considered traitors because of their work for peace. The consultation helped to break down a sense of isolation. This feeling, compounded by a sense of helplessness, blocks many from working for peace. ‘We work so hard and long, only to have the government destroy all our work in a day,’ said Alexandra Zikic of the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Resolution in Serbia. ‘The kind of things we do never get press coverage, so we always feel we are failing,’ said Yaala Cohen of the Israeli women’s group Bat Shalom. ‘We’ve learned to judge ourselves by the media.’
Another common experience was an increase in gender violence during conflict, especially domestic violence. ‘Men bring home this macho, gun culture,’ said Orla Moloney of Northern Ireland. Christine Acheson, from Northern Ireland’s Protestant community, agreed. She also pointed out: ‘Women have learned a great deal about domestic violence, and recovery from it, which can be used in the wider context.’
Acheson also pointed out the differences between more recent ‘crisis’ conflicts, such as those in the Caucasus region, and conflicts that may have a lower level of casualties but that have continued for generations, such as the Northern Ireland conflict. Gulnara Shaninian of Armenia’s Democracy Union found the comparison important. ‘My generation had personal relationships with Azeris, lived side by side as neighbours, had good friendships. This generation only knows enemy images and war. This will make it harder to build peace for the future,’ she said. Both Yunosova, and Fatima Yandieva of Ingushetia, were very interested in learning from the Northern Irish participants about the effects of long-term conflict on children.
Conflicts have an impact on women and girls in very specific ways, ways which have too often been ignored or unrecognized: as primary caretakers of children and the elderly, as victims of war rape, as refugees, increasingly as armed combatants themselves. War is a very gendered activity, and activists dedicated to eliminating war must incorporate a gender perspective in their work.
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| Lively discussions at a Life and Peace workshop in Somalia. Photo Susanne Thurfjell |
| ‘Women have learned a great deal about domestic violence, and recovery from it, which can be used in the wider context.’ |
1. Prevention of violence. This is being met through the Cross
the Lines component: the regional consultations of women.
WPP’s objectives
2. Education and training in active nonviolence. Such training
helps grassroots women’s organisations develop skills in nonviolent
conflict resolution, mediation, and leadership. The first such
training took place in the Chittagong Hill Tracts with 30 tribal
women; other training are scheduled in Uganda, Nigeria, Chad and
a special training for young women in Nepal.
3. Documentation and analysis of women’s peace initiatives. This
involves collecting and making available existing materials that
explain the links between militarism as an obstacle to development
and women’s role in reconstructing societies broken by conflict,
in building peace and reconciliation, and in strengthening civil
society. Women’s strategies and experiences are documented through
videos and various publication. An annual May 24 International
Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament action packet, produced
in cooperation with the International Peace Bureau, has been published
with networking information, profiles on women’s peace groups,
suggestions for actions, and contact addresses. In addition, the
WPP publishes the newsletter ‘Cross the Lines’ (in French, Spanish
and English) three times a year, with news of women’s peace initiatives
and discussions on strategies.
4. Support for the building of self-reliant and sustainable women’s
groups. Requests for help, from peace researchers, or groups who
want to get on email or submit a grant proposal, are linked by
the WPP with organisations that can provide technical and financial
support.
Another problematic issue is the definition of peace itself. What is the exact difference between ‘peace time’ and ‘war time’ to a woman being beaten by her male partner or a girl being sold into prostitution? According to a study commissioned by the World Health Organization, some 40 to 60 percent of women and girls in any given culture will experience rape, domestic abuse and/or incest. How does this ‘private’ violence humanity differ from the ‘public’ violence of armed conflict?
Yet another issue is the crucial question of increasing women’s access to political power and political decision making. Women are not just victims. Groups like the Liberian Women’s Initiative and Sudanese Women’s Voice for Peace; the experiences of female United Nations election monitors in South Africa; the role of church women in ending Bougainville’s brutal war. These cases and more show that women are leaders in peace and reconciliation efforts. Yet without access to political decision making, women’s solutions go ignored.
The challenge for women peacemakers is both to gain political power and to transform political structures and processes into more democratic and egalitarian forms.
The Women Peacemakers Program grapples with all these issues. While this four-year programme has only finished its first year, we have discovered that women’s approaches to peace are myriad. Women see the links between human rights education and the need to build more democratic governments, especially the need to educate women about our human rights; the connection between violence in private life and public acceptance of war; and the need to build a sound economic base for sustainable peace. Most of all the Women Peacemakers Program has seen how, with support in the form of training, solidarity actions, and finances, women can lead the way to peace.
This article has been written by Shelley Anderson, Program Officer for the IFOR Women Peacemakers Program.
Feedback please to
j.verhoeven@euconflict.org