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TOOLS PRINT E-MAIL MAY 1, 2008, WOMEN CHANGING RWANDA'S FUTURE BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic, with me today is Elizabeth Powley who is the Rwanda Project Director for Inclusive Security. She's with me today to talk about a series of reports that she edited and authored on women's roles in Rwanda today. Elizabeth, thank you for joining me. ELIZABETH POWLEY: Thank you. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I wanted to start by asking you what is the work that the Initiative for Inclusive Security is doing in Rwanda? ELIZABETH POWLEY: We directed a project in Rwanda from 2005 to 2007 which was aimed at documenting the successes that Rwandan women, particularly in the parliament, Rwandan women in leadership, Rwandan women in government but particularly the parliament, documenting their successes and really examining their contributions to Rwanda's reconstruction. Many people are aware that in 2003 Rwandan women were elected to nearly 50% of seats in the lower house of parliament and we wanted to investigate what those women were doing and answer the question what difference does it make when you have a parliament that's nearly 50% female. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And let's go back just a little bit in time for our listeners who may not know the situation of women, particularly, in Rwanda. I think most of our listeners do know that in 1994 there was a genocide in Rwanda when at least 500,000 people, mostly from the Tutsi minority were murdered. And of course the country in the aftermath was devastated. What were some of the particular challenges that Rwandan women faced? ELIZABETH POWLEY: Well Rwandan women are, were and are, the majority of survivors of the genocide; as you mentioned, at least half a million people were killed, most of those were men and boys. So women lost their husbands, their brothers, their sons, their fathers and were left to pick up the pieces of the society. Estimates of the demographic immediately after the genocide indicate that women and girls were as much as 70% of the population. So the burden of the aftermath fell on their shoulders. It's also important to note that there was definitely a gendered element to the violence during the Rwandan genocide and that many of these survivors are in fact themselves also victims of rape, survivors of rape. And these women often carry the burden now of HIV/AIDS and in fact the genocide continues to kill women as those infected continue to die. So the Rwandan women carried special burdens. They were singled out for rape and torture. They in the aftermath were responsible for rebuilding the society and reconstructing with the loss of their families. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I was particularly impressed when I went to Rwanda and through reports about the work of women survivors to try to help each other in groups like Avega, which is a group of widows that work together to support each other and get training and other help. But what were some of the leadership roles that women played in the new Rwandan government after the genocide? ELIZABETH POWLEY: In recognition of the role that women were playing in terms of promoting reconciliation and helping one another recover, you mentioned Avega which is a widow's group, there are also examples of church groups all across the country where Hutu and Tutsi women came together -- some widowed by the genocide, some with husbands in prison as perpetrators or suspected perpetrators. These women began to work together out of necessity, out of need to provide for their families in new ways. But also women were involved at the national level in terms of reconciliation. It's important that the Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda is under the leadership of a woman, the Gacaca jurisdictions -- the Gacaca is a community based pseudo- justice system, it's an alternative justice -- and that system is- is also administered by a woman. These are important, these women are important as symbols I think of reconciliation, it's an acknowledgement that women were the minority of perpetrators that they were in fact are much less culpable in terms of implementation of the genocide and they are being held up as examples of reconciliation or attempts at reconciliation. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And what most did the government make to try to include women more? ELIZABETH POWLEY: Starting immediately after the genocide but throughout the ‘90s and into the early part of this decade the Rwandan government first as a transition government and then later as an elected government after the 2003 election, the government of Rwanda has put in place very specific policies to bring women into the political process and into the governance of the nation. It's been quite aggressive in fact in terms of promoting women's participation. The constitution for example adopted in 2003 has a 30% quota for women's participation in all decision making levels, at all decision making levels. They've also established interesting balloting mechanisms in order to encourage women's candidacy for local election. For example in the 2001 local elections and again in the 2006 local elections there was a triple ballot used. That is each voter received 3 ballots when they entered the voting booth, they were received a general ballot, a women's ballot and a youth ballot and they had to select one candidate from each ballot. So they had to vote on the general ballot-- didn't necessarily have to be a man but often was a man. They had to choose a woman from the woman's ballot and they had to choose a younger person from the youth ballot. This was a deliberate attempt to make voters comfortable with voting for women and to increase the number of women in local government. So with mechanisms like that, with a constitutional mandate, the Rwandan government has made it clear that bringing women into the political process is a priority. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And now I want to move more into the substance of the series of reports that Inclusive Security has just released. Today then, we're about some 14 years after the genocide, with now a generation of women survivors, many of them, but also leaders now. What are their primary issues as parliamentarians, as leaders in the new Rwandan government? ELIZABETH POWLEY: You mentioned that this week at the time of recording anyway, this week we're 14 years out from the start of the genocide in 1994. I think that it's rather dramatic that I'm here today talking about women's leadership; a model of women's leadership emerging from Rwanda, it's almost unthinkable when one thinks back 14 years, it would have been hard to predict that Rwanda as devastated as it was would generate this, you know, interesting, successful, innovative, creative indigenous model of women's leadership. It's a remarkable testimony to how far the country has come. The parliament is not a particularly strong institution, I think it's important to note that, It's a nascent fledgling parliament, it's under budgeted, it's under staffed. For example individual parliamentarians do not have their own legislative aides or their own staff. Many of them in fact don't have a lot of training on how to be legislators. So it's a young institution and it's not necessarily a robust check on executive authority and that's an important context for the work we were doing with women parliamentarians. Within that relatively weak institution then we found that it is the women who are pushing the envelope so to speak or promoting democratic governance, introducing new models of consultative leadership. The reports that we're releasing this month reflect that interesting model. We have research on both the policy priorities of these women parliamentarians and also the processes, the political processes they used. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So what were some of the policy priorities for these women? ELIZABETH POWLEY: We found that women parliamentarians are committed to the protection of vulnerable groups, particularly to child survival and protection of children's rights. One of the reports that we're releasing this month documents women's efforts around 3 pieces of legislation: a 1999 land law that extended inheritance rights to girls as well as boys; 2001 child protection law which among other things defines child rape as a crime in Rwanda for the first time; and most recently a bill introduced in 2006, a bill to combat gender based violence, which has very specific components that address violence against children. We tracked women's efforts to introduce, promote and pass these pieces of legislation -- the 2006 bill is not yet passed -- but what we saw is that throughout the transitional period and the post 2003 election period, as women's voices became stronger, as their numbers grew, their impact and their import grew, their ability to influence the legislative agenda grew. They were advancing these kinds of causes, the protection of children, we have another report on the development of the gender based violence legislation. That was a particularly pivotal piece of legislation, not only because it addresses an important human rights issue that is the protection of women and men from gender based violence, but also because that piece of legislation was the first piece of legislation introduced actually by parliamentarians themselves as opposed to by the executive. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: How are women drawing in men and other constituents, which I'm sure they need in order to move this legislation forward? ELIZABETH POWLEY: The gender based violence bill introduced in August of 2006 was really remarkable in many ways, but I think one of the sort of most dramatic pieces of evidence that demonstrates women's consultative and cooperative policy processes is the fact that the bill had 4 female and 4 male cosponsors. So 8 parliamentarians introduced it, half and half, male and female. Now it was the women's caucus in parliament that developed the legislation, that led the drafting process that was responsible for putting it on the agenda. But they very deliberately worked with men throughout that process early on during public consultations and later on asking them to sign on as cosponsors of the bill. They were careful to couch the issue as a major social problem, not as a man against women problem. They approached male parliamentarians using, you know, non alienating language, talking to male parliamentarians as fathers who would understandably want to protect their daughters, as opposed to approaching men as potential perpetrators of violence. So in the language they used, in the ways that they framed the issue and in the cooperative relationships they established early on in the legislative process, Rwandan women were really able to draw men in so much so in fact that when the bill was introduced it had co-sponsorship by men and women. One of the first parliamentarians to speak on the parliament floor in defense of bill was in fact a male parliamentarian. So there were principled and strategic reasons for doing it that way but it's a successful model. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And can you tell us a little bit more about who these women are do we know are they- are they Hutu women and Tutsi women, do they come from throughout the country, do they tend to be among Rwanda's elite or at least more highly educated? Who are the women who are finding their way into power? ELIZABETH POWLEY: I worked closely with the women's caucus in parliament, it's called the Forum of Women Parliamentarians and it goes by the French acronym the FFRP. That caucus, the FFRP is made up of all women parliamentarians from both chambers, the upper and lower house, from all political parties, from all ethnicities. It is an interesting model of cross party, cross ethnic collaboration. I don't know necessarily what the ethnicity of each parliamentarian that I worked with is. It is a difficult topic in Rwanda and not something that people talk openly about. They don't introduce themselves with their ethnicity and don't welcome questions, frankly, about their ethnicity. So I can't identify for you the background of individual women but I can tell you having worked with them for years now and being aware of their family stories that the leadership of the FFRP for instance is mixed, is Hutu and Tutsi. I think interestingly when we look at the women parliamentarians, we see something you might not expect, which is that they come from all over the country. They don't just come from Kigali, the capital city. This is because of the set aside quota, the 30% of parliament that's mandated in the constitution. That 30% came out of the election of the women to those 30% of seats, came out of an interesting system called the Women's Councils. The Women's Councils are active all over the country at every administrative level. So they started the grass roots at the cell level, then the sector, then the district, then the region and then up to the nation. The Women's Councils are a sort of parallel system of women's representation and it was from that system that the women elected their 30% quota. Those women come from rural areas and they come from places outside of the capital. Many of them didn't have national level leadership before they entered parliament. That's an encouraging sign I think in a country that has many divisions, you know, regional divisions, ethnic divisions. It's an encouraging sign that these women are representative of all parts of the country. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And I will just speak frankly for a moment to our audience. I was lucky enough when I went in 2004 to Rwanda for the 10th Anniversary to go with you and I remember we had dinner one night with a group of women leaders. And I remember being really inspired by their commitment and the fervor with which they were committing their lives to improving their country, into making women's issues be a common cause for the country. I wondered if you could just comment a little bit, you went back then and lived in Rwanda for a year? ELIZABETH POWLEY: Just under two years. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What was it like to live there and work with these women on issues like this for that time? ELIZABETH POWLEY: It was an incredible privilege to live and work in Rwanda. There are some who are critical of Rwanda's government and its fledgling democracy and its efforts to rebuild and often those criticisms are valid. I got to see however, some of the most dedicated individuals, the most progressive, forward thinking leadership on gender issues but also on protections of children and other vulnerable groups. I really got to work with a group of women leaders who are so committed to the future of their country and so dedicated to improving the lives of Rwandans. They are as parliamentarians laying down a legislative framework that will improve the lives of children, of women that will fund education and health, that will rebuild the social fabric that was destroyed. But beyond just their role as parliamentarians, many of these women you know, volunteered with NGOs, volunteer in their church community. Many of them are fostering orphans from the genocide or supporting HIV/AIDS widows. They really embody a civic spirit that is an inspiration and it was a privilege to work beside and try to support them in their efforts. Then definitely a privilege to be able to document some of their successes in this series of reports that we're issuing. It was it was truly an honor to live there. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Thank you. ELIZABETH POWLEY: Thank you. NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you'll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.