AFRICA-HUMAN RIGHTS: Women Aim to Lead the Way to Peace
By Jean Baptiste Kayigamba
KIGALI, Mar 6 (IPS) - Women from African nations have launched a
continent-wide network with a view to playing a greater role in helping
prevent and resolve conflicts in Africa.
The Federation of Women’s Networks was formed at a Pan-African Conference
on Peace, Gender and Development, held here on Mar. 1- 3. For now it groups
13 countries, but the representatives of non- governmental organisations
(NGOs) who attended the meeting aim to encourage women from other nations
to join.
Women are eager to play a more important role in the prevention and
management of the various wars and conflicts raging in many parts of the
continent, the women said.
Explaining the reasons behind the network's creation, Malian women's rights
advocate Mariam Djibrilla Maiga said the absence of women in peace
initiatives and from various summits on wars and conflicts in Africa was a
lost opportunity.
''There is a social dimension that is lacking in the mechanisms and
resolutions of those conflicts. More emphasis is given to technical
aspects,'' she pointed out, adding that the population is never consulted.
''The causes of the conflicts are varied, but all appear related to
problems of governance, socio-cultural and economic factors,'' she stated
further.
According to Maiga, the Kigali meeting also called on the United Nations,
the Organisation of the African Unity (OAU) and the Economic Commission for
Africa (ECA) to take appropriate follow-up action once they pass
resolutions. In fact, one of the tasks the new federation has set itself is
to evaluate conflict- resolution mechanisms set up the OAU and other
organisations.
Other activities they will carry out include conducting sensitisation
missions in war-torn areas and organising conferences on conflict, peace
and related issues.
Maiga said the women formed the federation of networks because they felt
the urge to be actively involved in all initiatives aimed at ending wars on
the continent.
The federation groups women from Rwanda -- which hosts its provisional
secretariat -- Burundi, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mozambique, Angola,
Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia, Congo, Mali and South Africa.
The initiative is linked to a call made in the final statement issued by
the women at their conference here.
In their Kigali Declaration, they urged governments to ''recognise women's
traditional peace-making roles and their right to equal involvement in all
peace initiatives, including early- warning mechanisms and swift responses
at national, regional and international levels.''
In some parts of Africa, women have already been playing an active role in
conflict management.
Delegates from Mali said women in their country participated in the
resolution of an armed conflict between the state and rebels from the
Tuareg ethnic group in the early 1990s. A National Women's Movement for the
Safeguard of Peace and National Unity formed in 1991 conducted campaigns to
foster national unity, visited refugee camps and provided some humanitarian
assistance to people affected by the conflict, they said.
In Liberia, the Women's Peace Initiative (WPI) organisation has been
helping ECOMOG, a West African peacekeeping force, in the demobilisation of
armed factions which started last year.
WPI's Maureen Shaw said members of her organisation accompanied interim
President Ruth Perry -- Africa's only woman head of state -- to all
demobilisation centers, offering barrels of cool water to the
ex-combattants. The women also got ECOMOG to extend a deadline it had given
to the faction fighters to hand over their weapons.
For Shaw, what has been most moving is seeing truckloads of combattants
from factions that had fought one another getting together and shaking
hands, and surrendering their guns.
Some of these fighters were just boys and girls who had been dehumanised
and led to commit atrocities by faction leaders who wanted to hold on to
power and use it for plundering the country's ressources, she said.
The WPI had been making its voice heard even before the war finally came to
an end in 1996.
''Since 1993, following the Cotonou agreement (one of many between the
Liberian belligerents), we had warned negotiators that there cannot be
peace if armed factions were not disarmed,'' Shaw said.
''We took it the streets, we sent letters of protest to ECOWAS - Economic
Community of West African States --leaders, to the UN, OAU to make them
understand the issue,'' added Shaw, who said she felt that, with the
demobilisation, her country can look forward to a bright future.
In other countries such as Sierra Leone, Somalia, similar initiatives by
women are underway.
''We are endeavouring to build sustainable peace and social justice and
economic empowerment of women in war-affected areas,'' said Jalloh Jeneh of
the Women Initiative League for Peace in Sierra Leone.
Tsehaie
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