Nobel Women’s Initiative blog

by Jane Gabriel, openDemocracy’s program director

I’m struck by the completely relaxed way the five Laureates wander around the hotel with us all – sharing breakfast tables, smoking breaks, chatting with everyone as they go. This is direct, informal contact, anyone can and does talk to anyone. Jodi Williams has said that they want to use their Nobel Prizes to highlight the work of women and to link women. With 80 women activists here from thirty different countries and the chance to talk openly informally and honestly with the Laureates for three days, this is an extraordinary gathering. We’re all going to be in one room, seated at about ten round tables, with the Laureates amongst us. It feels like we may be seeing a new way of exercising power.

The morning was spent listening to the ways women in the Middle East are experiencing violence on a continuum, whether from religious fundamentalism, economic deprivation or in the domestic sphere. In discussing types of violence the topics range from the need to contest the construction of our collective identity as women, and to refuse to make the false dichotomous choice the fundamentalists impose of being either ‘for or against us’, to the fact that all societies have to explain three things – birth, death and the existence of at least two sexes – and therefore the construction of identity means that we have to address gender.

Farida Shareed urged the participants to remember that collective identities are negotiated and contested. When we, as women, ask for changes in how we define ourselves we’re asking for the whole society to change; that is what gender means. She called for us to recognise that “culture is an explosive term. It’s used as a barrier to talk about gender based violence. Just because slavery and apartheid were part of your culture it didn’t mean that you couldn’t talk about it. We must and we can.”

Nadera Shalkoub Kerkorian spoke of the way domestic violence is so often culturalised; she called for the recognition that domestic violence is a political and ethical issue, and not a cultural issue. She told harrowing stories with an awful clarity. She described one woman who took her seven year old son back to see their demolished home. She wound a piece of wire all the way around the boundary of where their home had stood and held it in place with small sticks. Then she made a tiny door and gave the boy a small key. She told him, “now this is your home and no one can come in”. She spoke of the women she works with and asked us to remember that when we look at victimization we are also looking at resistance and agency and resilience and pain; that in order to address domestic violence it is necessary to oppose the dominant political order and to criminalise it – not the individuals.

As she said, “Can the master’s tools be used to pull down the master’s house”?

Shirin Ebadi has an idea designed to spread the message that as women we denounce war and praise peace. Recognising that some of the problems of violence have cultural solutions and some legal solutions she asked “what do we need to do about war?” before adding “we don’t belong to the government. We are the civil society, and the civil society should denounce war. We have to tell our governments to stop fighting. The people in the Middle East are tired, tired of your political and military ambitions. Stop fighting!”.

Shirin explained her proposal thus: that in the capital of each country a statue is to be placed. They are already there for the unknown soldier and people pay their respects. In reality respect is given to the men who fought for their country and it is justified. We all know forgotten victims of war, but no one pays respect to the victims of war: the victims of war are women and children, and noone respects them. When a man dies in a war his death is the end of his life, fighting and suffering. But the woman who survives war has to face suffering. Having lost her husband, she has to support her family by herself. Her house and home are damaged or destroyed: war is the beginning of suffering from women and children. So why should we forget the victims?

The proposal is that in every capital of the world there should be a statue of a woman holding a child as our monument to the unknown victims of war, so that the same respect is paid to the unknown soldier and to the unknown victim of war.

Shirin has already consulted an artist who has voluntarily sculpted a statue of a woman holding the hand of a child. Through these statues we will send a message of peace and friendship and bring back the message to all our governments: “stop fighting”.

It’s not hard to imagine the statues – thousands of them, in every country around the world…