Empowered Women Create Peace On Earth

I was thinking about women as peace-makers today. As bearers of children and with natural skills in emotional awareness, they are often the ones to seek to find peaceful solutions. Women and children are indeed in the majority of cases the victims of armed conflict (refer http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/protectionwomen.htm)

This article I will post here today has been in my brief case for quite a few months. I felt pulled towards it intuitively. It is no mistake today I am contemplating the empowerment of women in conflict resolution. I started to read the article and found that is precisely what the article is about.

There are distinct differences in the mind sets of men and women. Moreover, from childhood children are conditioned to behave in ways that predefine gender. For example, boys are sent signals that to be a man is to be dominant, that typically translates into forceful behaviour. Movies reinforce this stereotype of aggression as violence asserted as power over the ‘bad’ guy. The winner is the hero. These are powerful stereotypes. As a female I can state that I was never drawn to these images as the feminine was encouraged to be passive, nonviolent and nurturing. Our instinctive ability is to communicate, particularly on emotional levels and to solve problems. Throughout my own life I have tried to solve problems through communication. These are also generalisations with awareness that there are men who are sensitive and gentle and women who are dominant, controlling and poor communicators. However, on balance I believe my observations are correct.

One of my friends is from the Congo, I met her at the Rotary Peace and Conflict Studies Program, Bangkok, Thailand. She had become a close friend and told me the troubles of her country and her own life. She had witnessed rape not only in war but as an expectation in employment. She explained to me women didn’t have a voice. She described walking down a street covered in bodies, where there was nowhere to put your foot but on a body. She used to transmit peace messages into the forest to educate people about peace. The real option. She told me some armed men turned up at her house and put a gun to her head, she urinated as she was terrified. She was concerned they would shoot her young brothers and sisters. She said they heard her voice and recognised it, decided they liked her, and she was alive to tell the story. She felt moved to be a peacemaker as she was sick of the violence, she has two young children and wanted a future for her children. She joined the United Nations mission in the Congo. After the course she told me she had been inspired by a speech I made about educating children and I interviewed the audience about their ideas around peace. She then returned to her country and with another Rotary scholar tried to educate the opposition youth who were engaged in violence with the government. Rather than the government seeing this as a peace initiative, they regarded her as part of the opposition. She was sent letters warning her to stop her activities. Then she sent her driver to pick up her children in Kinshasa, and he was shot in the drive by police. After that she tried to leave the country. She was apprehended at the airport and taken to the police. She explained to me she told the Chief of Police, our country needs a Culture of Peace. He sent her to interrogation. It was like out of the movies, a dark room with a single light. To her incredible good fortune the policeman who was to interrogate her, knew her from childhood, she didn’t know him. Apparently her father had paid for him go to primary and secondary school. He helped her escape. She came to a beach and saw dissidents escaping the country. No democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, many had to leave or be killed. She left to another country on a false passport, she is today still separated from her young children unaware of where they are and living on the kindness of others whilst awaiting refugee status to be sent to a country that will accept her. This is how some peacemakers experience the long road to peace. Many languish in jails, are tortured, or killed for trying for a better world for their children. I think of Nelson Mandela here and Gandhi. However, what is important to note here is that she actually found her spirituality and she is dedicated to peace today. Her way was nonviolence and it centred on education and developing dialogue between warring parties. This is the way of the future. War is the dinosaur that will become extinct as we mature into societies that solve problems rather than extending power to get what we want. We have weaponry that can destroy the earth 4 x over. How much is enough, we spend 1 million dollars a minute on the military. I never forget a schematic that showed if we spent 10% on education, water sanitation, disease control etc. we would have peace. So it is clear that violence is still chosen as the modus operandi of dealing with opposition.

My view therefore has been formed by the many strong women I have met who have extraordinary courage. There is much courage in standing up as a woman without a gun. I have found women to be more disposed towards solving a conflict effectively rather than engaging in silence or power games. Therefore, I would advocate for more women in positions of power who are truly peacemakers and have track records of peace making. Not as a token woman to be seen to be representative or to have women who are puppets of violent supporters, but the true feminine which seeks to nurture and heal emotional wounds of society, countries and the world. This is indeed what the world needs at this time. Moreover, it is what is shifting around the world. People are starting to question the point of wars, the cost and the reality that no-one wins. We need new approaches, conflict resolution is effective.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/10/mariella-frostrup-ivory-coast-civil-war

The article below focuses on Sierra Leone, one of the most violent conflicts on the planet.

Let women lead the way to peace in Africa, by Mariella Frostrup, The Observer, 10th April, 2011.

They are uniquely placed to mediate in civil wars, so why aren’t we listening to them?

Men with guns are littering Ivory Coast with corpses while my female companions in P.A’s Ribhouse in downtown Monrovia outline inspired, achievable solutions to ending that conflict. In the same gentle voices that cajoled Liberia’s bloodstained dictator Charles Taylor into resigning his presidency (he is now facing war crimes charges at the Hague) they explain their plans.

These women understand only too well the violence taking place across the border. These lawyers, businesswomen, human rights activists, community leaders and village elders and even a Nobel nominee are the traumatised victims of their own brutal civil war. But they are also the victors.

It wasn’t the African Union or the UN but Liberian women who brought the warring sides to the peace talks and subsequently, on the back of that success, have played a major part in conflict resolution in Sierra Leone, Sudan and Rwanda. Now they’re worrying about Ivory Coast, the festering sore threatening to pollute the bloodstream of a whole region.

They have good reason to be afraid. The 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone claimed tens of thousands of victims. In Liberia, under the bloody reign of Charles Taylor, women and children were brutalised, sexually violated and murdered.

Now in Ivory Coast, the battle for supremacy between the Catholic, polygamist Laurent Gbagbo, who lost the last election, and the widely recognised winner, the Muslim Alassane Ouattara, has created an ethnic division that threatens to plunge the region into a similar orgy of bloodletting. Eight hundred people under UN protection were found dead in one village alone, thousands have died in Abidjan and mass graves are being uncovered in the west of the country. “The rebels have guns, they rape women and take children to go and fight,” said an eyewitness.

Meanwhile, gruesome images of people being set alight and macheted are an all too grim reminder of the unprecedented anger among a divided population that won’t simply disappear when their leader is forced from the presidential palace. As a result, the refugee crisis on the Liberian border, with thousands of traumatised Ivorians arriving daily, is creating resentment among desperately poor people only just recovering from their own war. It’s a power struggle that has the potential to create unbearable tensions in a region which had only just begun to believe in peace.

Yvette Chesson-Wureh, of the Angie Brooks International Centre for Women’s Empowerment, Leadership Development, International Peace and Security, a grand title for a small, ambitious project training women in those desperately needed skills, has organised this women’s lunch to discuss plans and share concerns about the situation over the border. “We begin with grassroots women’s groups and work up to the leaders’ wives and then the leaders themselves. You have to have support from the bottom to the top to stop the fighting,” Yvette explains.

This isn’t specious guesswork. Their combined track record in conflict resolution is impeccable. From Sierra Leone to Liberia and Rwanda, they have proved that when it comes to encouraging and facilitating peace they have unique skills.

So why are they having to lobby the AU and the UN just to be “allowed” to participate this time? they ask. Why are those charged with maintaining peace only now turning to women’s groups such as Femmes Africa Solidarité, with a history in ending conflict, when innocent blood has already begun to flow again in the streets of West Africa?

To the frustration of my companions, the AU and UN appear to have more faith in bureaucrats from far-away continents and well-intentioned Scandinavian negotiators than the women on the ground who know the issues intimately and have experience in ending the killing. They want these lumbering, patriarchal institutions to wake up to the fact that when it comes to peace building and maintenance there are no better advocates or custodians than the 50% of the population who will otherwise, along with their children, make up the majority of the victims of war.

The day before my meeting with the peacemakers, I’d watched women from all denominations and political persuasions, including Charles Taylor’s estranged wife, applaud the achievements of Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and her recent gong, the FAS African Gender Award, at the City Hall in Monrovia. It was inspiring to witness their determination to collaborate across the political, cultural, tribal and religious divide to raise their children in peace and achieve gender equality.

There are thousands like them on this continent, eager to participate in the future stability of their countries and the management of peace, yet training facilities are rare and international support for their initiatives hard-won. Major-General Patrick Cammaert, former UN peacekeeping operation commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said: “It is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in modern conflict.” Doesn’t that earn them the right to have a voice, an amplified one at that, at every negotiating table?

Mariella Frostrup is a trustee of The GREAT Initiative (Gender Rights & Equality Action Trust), hosting its launch event on 19 May in aid of Femmes Africa Solidarité’s PanAfrican Centre for Gender, Peace & Development and the GREAT and FAS Gender Awards