A critically important lesson from the ’Let’s build peace, here and now’ conversations with local peacebuilders has been about the centrality of women in peacebuilding. From Serbia to Northern Ireland, local peace efforts not only involve anti-war activism, but also women coming together on issues of day-to-day concern to them – not just peace. This breaks down stereotypes and built relationships that went far beyond the sometimes-divisive concept of ‘peace’. However, the role of women in peacebuilding remains largely unrecognised and underfunded. As indigenous ‘activist funders’ the Foundations for Peace Network members recognise and support the role of women in peacebuilding.
Below we recount some of the ways in which women around the world have rallied for peace. Our aim is to bring to light the essential things that help build peace and encourage funders to support this often unseen yet vital aspect of peacebuilding.
On the frontline, but not officially
Dressed in white, dressed in black, dressed as death but affirming life. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina even wore their children’s – their ‘disappeared’ sons and daughters – nappies as headscarves. Embroidered on them were the names of their children together with the words Aparición con Vida (a loose translation: back alive).
Women in Black….
During the Balkan wars of the 1990s, every Wednesday, dressed in black and in silence, dozens of women protested in Belgrade against the war. ‘We know that despair and pain must be transformed into political action. With our bodies, we declare our bitterness and hostility against all those who want and wage war. During meetings, we remain silent, sometimes whispering encouragement and support to each other when passers-by insult or anger us,’ said their Declaration in 1996. Women in Black (Žene u crnom) were the first to organise themselves to condemn the massacre in Srebrenica, of thousands of Bosnian men and boys by the Serb army. News of this event was suppressed and denied by the Serbian government, but the Belgrade Women in Black took to the streets regularly to draw attention to it and protest the action under the slogan ‘Not in our name’. They are still fighting for the genocide in Srebrenica to be officially recognized, Black and silent: black ‘as the colour of mourning. We mourn all the victims of the war, but above all we mourn those who died in our name’ and silent ‘because silence is the most powerful form of expressing our opinions. Silence symbolises respect, seriousness and dignity: it is an alien space, a space without violence. Silence, when used deliberately, is the most powerful sound.’
But if silence is sometimes an appropriate means, at other times, communication is crucial. What made Women in Black’s work additionally important throughout the war and still keeps them relevant today, says Galina Maksimović, Programme Coordinator for the Reconstruction Women’s Fund in Serbia, was their practice of staying in touch with women in the region. (This wasn’t always easy; during the war, the telephone or fax connection was frequently interrupted. They would communicate by sending fax messages from Belgrade through several points in Europe to Zagreb). These connections enabled timely actions – sheltering refugees, supporting women, supporting conscience objectors throughout the region.
The office of Women in Black has always been in Belgrade but their work has always been decentralized. Throughout the wartime and afterwards, they worked closely tied to activists in other places across Serbia, supporting political articulation and direct action in smaller environments, especially in those places that mobilized the most men for the wars.
Women in white…
Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace started in 2003 to protest the brutal civil war in the country. Organised by Crystal Roh Gawding and social workers Leymah Gbowee and Comfort Freeman, the movement began despite Liberia’s extremely limited civil rights. Thousands of Muslim and Christian women from various classes staged silent, non-violent protests. When the movement’s representatives extracted a promise from President Charles Taylor to attend peace talks in Ghana to negotiate with the rebels, a delegation of Liberian women also went to Ghana. Two hundred women, dressed in white, surrounded the room, refusing to allow the men to leave (though some apparently tried to jump out of the windows to escape) without a resolution.
On the frontline…in war and peace
Their protests may be non-violent, but in both conflicts and in peacemaking, women are on the front line, metaphorically, if not actually. Listen to this from Galina Maksimović: ‘women are leading the struggles against wars and against militarism. I will just remind us that it’s not just because women are left alone during the wars because the sons and the husbands are at the battlefields, it’s also because women are victimised in wars through sexual violence mainly, which is also a war weapon. So women do not have a choice about being there at the front.’ In fact, activists working at the intersection of anti-war and feminist movement (including Women in Black) have contributed to rape becoming internationally recognized as a crime against humanity.
Or Jelena Memet from the Alternative Centre for Girls in Kruševac who says that ‘all women suffer the same, no matter what country they live in, they are all victims of violence in the war, but also in the peace.’
Sometimes the frontline is not simply metaphorical. There is an ironic connection between many women’s peace movements – the hostility and anger they provoke. The sit-in by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo outside the presidential palace in Buenos Aires was broken up when the government declared a state of emergency and expelled them. During the commemoration in 2005 of the events in Srebrenica, Serbia’s Women in Black had tear gas bombs thrown at them. As recently as November last year, Serbian nationalist symbols, the legend ‘Kurve u crnom’ (Whores in black) and the name of Ratko Mladic, Serbian war criminal tried for his actions during the Bosnian war were daubed on the door of the organisation’s premises.
An unofficial history
Women’s peace activism has a long documented history and undoubtedly a far longer undocumented one. The UK saw the formation of a Women’ Peace Society in 1874. The Women’s Peace Crusade which arose in Glasgow in 1916 and spread, largely in northern England and the midlands between then and 1918, wanted a ‘people’s peace’, a negotiated end to the First World War without annexations or indemnities. It faced opposition from both the government and police, with members being arrested and reportedly threatened. If it’s often the women who first say ‘no’ to the violation of rights, to the onset or continuation of violence in its many forms, they seldom feature officially. According to statistics cited by the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, women have comprised only 2 per cent of mediators in major peace processes, 5 per cent of witnesses and signatories, 8 per cent of negotiators. But this is not about statistics.
On the contrary, it’s about solidarity and sisterhood, a word that features prominently in Foundations for Peace’s Let’s Build Peace Here and Now dialogues. Jelena Memet said in the most recent of these dialogues, that ‘the history of the anti-war movement is very important to us and, every time, we bring our feminist “mothers”, feminists who started the anti-war movement in the 90s, to speak about their experience, about their sisterhood, about how they helped each other, how they helped refugees, about how neither borders, nor wars stopped them from doing that.’
It was the affirmation of this idea that led the Alternative Centre for Girls to ‘organise a feminist school, so that we could renew our friendships and sisterhood, and work together towards building peace.’
Jelena’s mention of the words ‘mother’ and ‘border’ recalls other movements of women’s peace activism; the Mães de Maio, the Mothers of May, for example, a network of mothers, family and friends of victims of state violence in São Paulo, Brazil. It came about after the so-called Crimes of May 2006, when police and paramilitary death squads linked to the police carried out what they called a ‘wave of response’ to crimes committed by the First Command of the Capital, a criminal organisation. The result was the murder of at least 493 people, over 400 of whom young afro-descendant, indigenous-descendant. The group’s mission is to fight for truth, memory and justice for all victims of discriminatory, institutional and police violence against the poor, indigenous and afro-descendants then and now.
Crossing borders
Women in Northern Ireland, in particular, played a vital role in the peace process and continued this cross-community dialogue long after the Good Friday Agreement was signed. They did everything from supporting victims of sectarian violence and victims’ families, to lobbying politicians and organising mass protests. The Derry Peace Women, five women from the Bogside and Creggan areas of Derry, came together following Bloody Sunday in 1972 to campaign for peace, lobbying politicians, consulting military chiefs and ‘putting the cause of peace to militant republicans,’ as the Belfast Telegraph put it at the time.
And crossing or dismantling borders. In 1976, Betty Williams helped to collect over 6,000 signatures on a petition for peace when she saw a car crash into a young family after the driver had been shot by the British Army. Three children died, and their mother was seriously injured. Together with an aunt of the children, Mairead Corrigan and Ciaran McKeown, she organised peace rallies. The special significance of this was not just the thousands who attended, but that, at one in particular, held in the Shankill Road, the heart of Protestant Belfast they reached out to welcome thousands of Catholics over the peace line. What was important in all of these activities was that women came together on issues of day-to-day concern to them – not just peace. This broke down stereotypes and built relationships that went far beyond the sometimes contested concept of ‘peace’. And this reminds us (memory is another important word – Srebenica commemorated by the Women in Black, the Mothers of May campaigning for memory, truth and justice) of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace who brought together both Muslims and Christians, of the ambition of the Feminist Spring School in the Balkans to bring together ‘young women activists who want to speak together, to learn together about themselves and about the other, to bring them closer together, to make them break prejudices about each other’ and of how often is has been women who have proved more capable of reaching across borders.
Another image comes to mind – of how, in December 1982, 30,000 women joined hands around the base at US air force base Greenham Common in the Embrace the Base event, in response to the third anniversary of NATO’s decision to house nuclear missiles in the UK.
Courage is the classic military virtue. It enables tribes, countries, communities of all sorts to prevail in wars. Women have turned this around and shown it is equally necessary to secure peace.
Sources:
https://www.herstory.ie/photo-essays-2/2019/9/12/women-and-the-northern-ireland-peace-process
https://atalayar.com/en/content/women-black-thirty-years-defying-serbian-nationalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_Liberia_Mass_Action_for_Peace
https://www.theguardian.com/news/video/2007/dec/12/greenham
Andrew Milner is a freelance writer, researcher and editor specializing in the areas of philanthropy and civil society. He is a consultant to Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace. He is also a regular contributor to and Features editor of Alliance magazine.