Tuesday 29 October 2013

Competing Voices: Gender and Ideology in Egypt

Original Source: http://thedailyjournalist.com/the-strategist/competing-voices-gender-and-ideology-in-egypt/


Secular and Islamist discourse in Egypt share a core essence of masculine dominance.
Egypt and the wider Middle East are undergoing major change following revolutions. But what is the best way to plan for and navigate the future?
A number of post-Arab Spring political and strategic analyses have managed to move beyond a focus on the state to identify trends in order to propose solutions. Among the significant trends, changes can be seen within ideology — which is borne not merely at the state but also at the grassroots level.
But the attention given to what can be leveraged or rather contained is misplaced. Some of these works are pointing to the grassroots level but are superficially fixated on ideology.
The quick conclusion often drawn is the inevitable end of the Muslim Brotherhood. Despite the acknowledgement of lower-level politics and ideological leanings in the shaping of the state, indeed, one pivotal aspect of this political configuration is virtually absent: gender.
The Gender Question
Leaving gender out of a discussion on ideology and its impact on the future is of enormous consequence. Whether we speak of an Islamist discourse or that emanating from the secular stream, especially in the post-revolution Middle Eastern countries, there are virtually nocreative solutions for diplomatic intervention or real steps towards building trust between those of all ideological stances and thus fostering reconciliation.
Brute force, obstinate stances, and the squashing of women’s and minority rights were part and parcel of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government and also the current military rulers in Egypt.
What we have is that although critique has included ideology — to be precise, Islamist ideology beyond the state level — the larger discourse driving this critique is mainly about secularism vs Islamism. The persistent obsession with this ideological split blinds to the fact that both standpoints share a core essence of masculine dominance. With this current essence comes rivalry, mistrust and, significantly, violence.
Women’s oppression is due to a shared ideology on the role and position of the female gender. Islamist politics cannot be singled out as the only arena for the oppression of minorities and women.
It is this shared essence — rooted in the individual’s ethics and consciousness that is going to determine how the masculine or feminine essence will be expressed in home life — in shaping societal norms, laws related to women, human rights or the lack thereof, and the core essence of state politics.
More than an Imbalance in Numbers
This is important to highlight. Women are sorely underrepresented in positions of power and decision-making. However, when the gender aspect is marginalized, the consequence is not that of an imbalance in numbers.
Critically, we witness an imbalance in and distortion of a crucial essence for true transformation. Ideological positions are irrelevant; they are superficially understood. Their essence or what directs discourse on choices and capacities for civility and peace is core.
Women tend to — though not always — produce the critical feminine voice that must account for half of all the ideas, plans, aspirations and insights expressed. That includes the prioritizations around children’s needs, women’s access, diplomacy, peace, and the innate drive for renewal and restoration.
Indeed, men can and sometimes do produce that greatly needed feminine aspect more aptly than women. In my interviews with men leading up to, during and following the Arab Spring in Egypt, I gained insight into the ability of many men to imbue their activism and politics with both feminine and masculine aspects appropriately and in complementarity to produce actions, for example, of compassion; yet, necessarily assertively so.
However, in my personal interaction, interviews and observations, I gained a strong sense that the masculine essence was so distorted and in such form so aggressively dominant that women’s voices around agendas, such as addressing women’s rights or getting their children’s needs protected through appropriate policies, more often become suppressed.
Tactics include not only marginalizing women from “hard” politics in numbers, but also using laws to discriminate against them. They include banning the wife or daughter from educational endeavors of her choice or sometimes in various ways from having her own income.
Indeed, I learned about the various tactics so many women experience from their home life to public life that disable them from fully contributing their passionately felt ideas and capacities. Very recently, I witnessed an Egyptian husband abruptly stop his wife at the dinner table from speaking, reminding her that she is not allowed to speak about politics, as he continued to do so. And in the scheme of it all, that was not an extraordinary event.
The Feminine and Transformation
I also learned from many female, Egyptian activists how important they knew their feminine aspects were to transformation. For example, women expressed that the most important aspect in dealing with people of different ideological orientations and thinking that has been critical to their struggles during the Arab Spring and today, is patience.
Various forms of an inner capacity to tolerate, cooperate, reciprocate and trust were expressed and observed. Such are the core ingredients for civility to grow and civil society to be sustainable — the bedrock for successful transformation. But how many of us will acknowledge that seemingly apolitical forms of interaction in the home and in civil society organizations are absolutely critical to the future of the Middle East?
There is absolutely no other way of moving forward from a consciousness of mistrust, polarization and fear without a capacity to be civil, which is imbued by what I have experienced as largely feminine capacities for compassion, tolerance, forgiveness, receptivity, trust, empowerment, and patience.
Although men can and must contribute to a transformation through such aspects, too, and women do not always live up to any such nurturing, creative or reciprocating role, the torch of the feminine must be carried forward firstly by women.
The majority of NGOs that I entered and studied were mostly populated by women. What is needed, at this point, is that the pivotal actors behind a future transition to peace and prosperity in the Middle East are recognized and embraced for their most essential capacities at the state level, in the judiciary, in strategic planning, and the various projects and initiatives for democratic development.

Monday 21 October 2013

Women Leading in Post Conflict Nations: Peacebuilding and Development at the Embassy of Sri Lanka


On a Tuesday evening in mid-July, the Embassy of Sri Lanka in Washington, DC opened its doors to celebrate 51 female leaders from the Wilson Center’s Women in Public Service Project Institute at Bryn Mawr College, a program co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of State to advance the leadership capacities of women in post-conflict countries. Among the women in attendance were journalists, high court judges, social workers, mentors, civil society activists, and members of parliament who were accepted to the Institute as a result of their work to further facilitate the process of peace in their communities.

Women Leading in Post-Conflict Nations: Peacebuilding & Development at the Embassy of Sri Lanka
Earlier in the day, the delegates attended a two-part panel in their honor at the Wilson Center for International Scholars moderated by Dr. Rangita De Silva de Alwis, director of the Women in Public Service Project. Among the panelists were Dr. Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution and author of the panel’s namesake, How Change Happens: Politics and Policy in America; former Ambassador to Cambodia, Carole Rodley; Afghanistan’s first and only female mayor, Azra Jafari; State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Partnerships and Learning, Jerry White; Kathleen Kuehnast of the U.S. Institute of Peace; Tamara Wittes of the Brookings Institution; South Sudan’s Deputy Minister of Housing and Physical Planning, Mary Nyalung Ret; and Adviser to the President of Serbia, Snezara Kresoja.
The panelists’ remarks focused on the theme of women “outside the power structure acting as agents of change” in their communities. Ambassador Rodley shared her experience working in Cambodia, touching on the importance in post-conflict countries of dropping what so often becomes a “backward-looking narrative” in favor of her strategy of “changing attitudes, changing behavior, and changing the rules” in order to move forward in peacebuilding and development. Rather than forcing foreign perspectives and notions of development, Rodley asked “who is better to know what needs to be done” in a post-conflict society “than the people who live there?” She expressed the importance of “training...survivors to tell their own stories” as a mechanism of empowerment for domestic ownership of a nation’s history. She spoke of the issue of sex slavery in Cambodia and how important it is that the women involved saw themselves as survivors rather than victims, allowing them to help other women out of the trade by sharing their experiences to empower and educate in the fight against sex slavery. She encouraged the delegates from the Institute in the audience to “have a vision, make it a big vision...[and to] find a way to tell the story.”
Azra Jafari spoke of her experience as Afghanistan’s first female mayor, several times eliciting swelling applause for her bravery and strength in the position in such a volatile environment. She provided a picture of the situation for many women in Afghanistan, detailing the tribulations of her journeys to Kabul for mayoral duties. Because “security is the main problem in Afghanistan for women in rural areas” and Jafari must travel from the central Daykundi province over 270 miles to Kabul, she must switch vehicles several times and cover her face completely so as not to be recognized by the Taliban. Given these challenges, it was quite hard to believe when Jafari then explained that the Afghan government is in talks to form a peace agreement with the Taliban. This proposal, Jafari explained, is as alarming to many women in Afghanistan as it was to the audience.
In such post-conflict societies it is imperative that we “don’t wait for the revolution to be over to claim women’s rights.” For Afghanistan, this means not succumbing to what Tamara Wittes described as a tendency of leaders in post-conflict societies to set women’s issues aside as a luxury. Engaging in peace talks with an organization that would assassinate Jafari if they could is not the way to do this. Wittes explained that there are consequences of “that silence” that can shroud women’s issues in post-conflict negotiations—that “gender issues are not only relevant, [but] they’re essential” to an inclusive and humane society. She encouraged the delegates to “organize [their] collective voice and constantly bring it forward”, to provide social accountability to documented human rights norms to which their countries may be signatory but not necessarily practitioners of. This means bringing women into the official negotiation process so that they are present at the peace-making table. Wittes encouraged the delegates to incentivize their inclusion in these talks by representing themselves as a constituency that their governments need, to “demonstrate that there is a critical mass in society that cares” about the fate of women.
Taking these words of advice, the 51 delegates later joined guests from all over the city at the Sri Lankan Embassy for an elegant evening of storytelling, networking, dance, and exquisite cuisine. In celebration of their completion of the two-week institute, the delegates enjoyed the opportunity to extend their experiences to those outside of the Wilson Center and Bryn Mawr college, discussing the circumstances in their countries with actors in the non-profit and private sectors around Washington, DC. While the Ambassador himself was unable to attend, the party enjoyed his country’s hospitality—mingling in an enclosed terrace decorated with figures of the Buddha, enjoying a traditional Sri Lankan dance performance, and feasting on an extensive buffet including cashew white curry, brinjal moju, papadam, chicken curry, yellow rice, soya meat curry, fruit salad, and cake.
Most of the delegates I spoke with were heading back to their home countries after they returned to Bryn Mawr College that night. Although their experiences in the program and around DC over the two weeks contrast highly with the work they will return home to do, they are now equipped with the strength and support of each others’ stories, and the vision that activism and social justice are more than buzzwords, but actually the key pieces of an emergent global approach to realizing change.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's September/October 2013 print edition.

Monday 7 October 2013

Bangladesh's War Toll on Women still remains undiscussed

Original Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/world/asia/25iht-letter.html?_r=0


The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to becomeBangladesh.
The American feminist Susan Brownmiller, quoting all three sets of statistics in her 1975 book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” compared the rapes of Bangladesh with the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers at Nanjing in 1937-38.
Accepting even the lowest set of figures for Bangladesh forces a horrifying comparison — the 1992-95 Bosnian war saw one-tenth the number of rapes as did the Bangladesh war. The rapes of Bosnian women forced the world to recognize rape as “an instrument of terror,” as a crime against humanity. But so far no one has been held to account for the sexual violence against Bangladeshi women in 1971.
As the 40th anniversary of the 1971 war approaches, the Bangladeshi government has set up an International Crimes Tribunal to investigate the atrocities of that era. But human rights advocates and lawyers fear that the mass rapes and killings of women will not be adequately addressed. They hope to ensure they are.
“There has been a denial by certain political groups of the history of the war, and a failure to account for the crimes of sexual violence against women,” said Sara Hossain, a human rights lawyer based in Dhaka.
For years, the experiences of women — the independence fighters, the victims of rape, the widows — during the war received little attention, their stories seldom told, the violence they experienced rarely acknowledged.
“As a young teenager in 1971, I had heard a lot about female university students, young village girls and women being raped and held captive, effectively forced into sexual slavery, in the military cantonment. But after the war, very soon, one heard nothing more,” said Irene Khan, former secretary general of Amnesty International.
“Yes, we talk often of the hundreds of thousands of women who were raped, forced into sexual slavery, sexually attacked, but rarely are there any names or faces or individual stories,” said Ms. Khan, who was born in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, and studied in England and the United States. “A conservative Muslim society has preferred to throw a veil of negligence and denial on the issue, allowed those who committed or colluded with gender violence to thrive, and left the women victims to struggle in anonymity and shame and without much state or community support.”
In Dhaka, Meghna Guhathakurta, executive director of the nongovernmental group Research Initiatives, Bangladesh, insists that the plight of these women must not be ignored. “The issue of women’s roles in the war of liberation has been foregrounded from time to time by women’s groups. It cannot be evaded any more.”
Later this year, the first English-language translation of an important oral history, “Women’s 1971,” will be published. This gathers the testimonies of women who were not just victims, but fighters like Taramon Bibi, one of only two women decorated for their combat service during the war, or who, like Ferdousi Priyobhashini, now a sculptor, used their experiences in the war as a springboard for self-transformation. Of the 19 women whose stories appear in this collection, 15 are Muslims, 2 are Hindus and 2 are Buddhists.
Ms. Guhathakurta writes in her introduction to the book: “Out of the 19 interviewees, 9 were rape victims. The rest spoke of their trials and tribulations after members of their families were killed.”
The trauma of those who survived rape and other violence has been insufficiently addressed in Bangladesh, she says. “We feel it is necessary for officials, civil society and the international community to revisit the issue of sexual violence and war crimes.”
Some believe that breaking the decades of denial is crucial.
“The major challenge,” said Mofidul Hoque, trustee and member secretary of the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, “is how to read the silence. I am confident we will hear lot of new voices, witness the breaking of the silence.”
One of the major events planned for the 40th anniversary next year is a documentary film festival focusing on the 1971 war and human rights, with a special section on women. Another project focuses on research into the lives of the children born after 1971 to the “birangonas,” or “blameless ones,” as they were called by the new Bangladeshi government in 1972, in a not entirely successful attempt to persuade families to accept back the women who had suffered sexual violence.
And this war yields haunting stories. A young filmmaker, Ananda, documents the continuing trauma of the village of Shohagpur in his film “The Village of Widows,” which will also be screened next year. In July 1971, Pakistani soldiers descended on this quiet hamlet, which was suspected of supporting the Mukti Bahini, the independence fighters. They rounded up all the men and killed them. Four decades later, as Mr. Ananda records, Shohagpur has no old men. The women live alongside the graves of their dead.
Is justice, after so many decades, possible? Is it even being demanded? The International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh has begun issuing indictments.
However, said Ms. Hossain, the lawyer: “It is not clear if crimes of violence against women will be addressed or form the basis of prosecutions. There are no women among the tribunal members, or prosecutors. But we hope that the investigators will highlight this issue — and that the government will ensure a safe and secure environment for women to testify before them.”
Ms. Khan, whose career as a human rights advocate has taken her to Bosnia, Sierra Leone and other theaters of war, is more skeptical.
“It was only after Bosnia that the Rome Statute,” the treaty that set up the International Criminal Court, “made rape a war crime. Forty years ago, gender violence as a weapon of war was poorly understood, not just in Bangladesh but worldwide,” she said.
“Bangladesh is only now grappling with war crimes — and with great difficulty, given the way the issue is mired in the politics of religious fundamentalist parties,” she said. “The gender dimension of the atrocities is not fully acknowledged, nor is the huge contribution that women made to the liberation struggle as fighters and supporters. Bangladesh remains a conservative, patriarchic society where women’s role continues to be undervalued — past or present.”