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Keepers of the Peace, Nesreen Barwari
:Newsweek
9.11.2005
Nov. 14, 2005 issue |
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Nesreen Barwari |
Countries ravaged by war
are turning to female leaders as the key to healing.
They are far more likely to build bridges than to
tear them down.
At the age of 14, Nesreen Barwari was thrown into
one of Saddam Hussein's political prisons. At 24,
she was a Kurdish refugee, struggling for survival
on Iraq's Turkish border. A decade later, in 2003,
she became the only woman to hold a cabinet post in
Iraq's first post-Saddam government. Unlike the
typical Middle Eastern leader's ascent to power,
Barwari's journey reads like the life of a charity
worker. |
The
Harvard-educated minister headed up the United
Nations' Rebuilding Iraq project after the Gulf War;
later she led the Kurdistan Regional Government's
reconstruction of 3,000 destroyed villages. When she
became minister of Municipalities and Public Works,
she set out to convince the Governing Council of the
vital role women should play in rebuilding the
country. "At first they were against it," she says.
"They would say, 'We don't have enough qualified
women,' and I would say right in their face: 'We are
all building the new Iraq!' "
Nowhere are women leaders more essential than in
countries devastated by war. Studies from the World
Economic Forum and Harvard-based nonprofit the
Initiative for Inclusive Security show that women
are better at creating and keeping the peace in
post-conflict societies because women
are—generally—less violent than their male
counterparts. Increasingly, citizens in such
societies are recognizing that and turning to women
for help. In Rwanda's most recent election, women
won 49 percent of the seats in Parliament—the
highest proportion in the world. The Iraqi
Constitution, passed by referendum last month,
guarantees women 25 percent of the seats in
Parliament. Liberians hoping to secure peace after
decades of civil war could become the first African
country with a woman president if they elect Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf in the final round of balloting on
Nov. 8.
Perhaps the greatest hope is that increasing the
ranks of women in government will help prevent
future wars. Swanee Hunt, head of The Initiative for
Inclusive Security, a multimillion-dollar nonprofit
supporting the work of women in conflict zones,
says: "During the [Bosnian] war, I asked the prime
minister of Bosnia, Haris Silajdzic, 'If half of the
people around the table at the very beginning had
been women, would there have been a war?' And he
said, 'No. Women think long and hard before they
send their children out to kill other peoples'
children'."
Are women actually more peaceful than men? Looking
at Cameroon, Bolivia and Malaysia, a recent World
Economic Forum study found that when women have a
greater say in spending priorities, they spend less
on the military. "When women reach 30 or 40 percent
of government, you get much more funding for health
care and education," says Hunt. And according to
Harvard psychologist Rose McDermott's
simulated-conflict studies, the more money a country
spends on its military, the more likely it is to go
to war. Based on 500 hours of interviews, the
Initiative for Inclusive Society reports: "Women are
particularly adept at bridging the ethnic, religious
and political divides."
Countless anecdotes tell the same tale. During the
peace talks that led to Northern Ireland's Good
Friday agreement in 1998, male negotiators walked
out of the sessions in frustration, while women kept
the dialogue alive. "Men are stubborn," says Monica
McWilliams, a signatory to the agreement. "Women are
more comfortable seeking compromise. They see it as
a strength, not a weakness."
In the aftermath of war, societies often rely on
women to rebuild because many of the men are dead or
injured. In Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan, women's groups
set up centers dedicated to helping rape survivors
reclaim their lives. "[After the genocide], the role
of women changed from reproduction to production,"
says Aloisea Inyumba, a Rwandan governor and former
head of the National Unity and Reconciliation
Commission, who helped find homes for 500,000
orphans—often persuading survivors to take in their
enemies' children. "We were the wives left as
widows, the mothers whose children died. We are the
owners of the postwar issues." In Iraq, after the
Gulf War, Barwari risked death by returning to
Baghdad to earn a degree in architecture, then used
it to help build housing for refugees. "I felt so
victorious, as though I'd taken my degree from the
heart of Saddam's regime," she says.
Today the global average of women in parliament is
just 16 percent—ranging from as little as 7.7
percent in the Arab states to 39.8 percent in the
Nordic countries. According to the World Conference
on Women, they should represent at least 30 percent
of Parliament—a target adopted in 2000 by the U.N.
Millennium Development Goals. Reaching that goal
certainly won't solve all the world's problems
over-night. But it can bring hope for peace in
countries once mired in blood.
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032542/site/newsweek/
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