Women Peace Activists From Around the World Gather to Network

December 16, 1999

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By Ken Gewertz
Gazette Staff

From left, Ana Maria Arenas-Nejia, Rosa Emilia Salamanca, Nancy Rocio Tapias-Torrado, Martha Cecelia Quintero, and Monica Duran Scott, all from Colombia, demonstrate for peace on Dec. 10 while taking part in ³Women Waging Peace,² the brainchild of Swanee Hunt, director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government.

Catherine Loria Duku Jeremano has worked as a public health nurse in her native Sudan since 1986. Asked if she would be willing to talk to a reporter, she seems to shrink slightly within her brightly colored tunic, and her gentle eyes become wary.

"That depends on what questions you ask."

Sudan has been wracked by civil war for the past 44 years, and sometimes saying the wrong thing can be dangerous.

Jeremano is among 100 women from trouble spots around the world who are spending two weeks in Cambridge as part of a program called "Women Waging Peace." Chosen by local selection committees, the women represent areas such as Azerbaijan/Armenia, Colombia, Cyprus, India/Pakistan, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Sudan, the post-Yugoslavia region, and, in recognition of America’s own divides, urban Boston.

Despite the dangers at home, Jeremano is willing to talk about conditions in her country. Working for Oxfam International she has helped to distribute food and medical supplies to the thousands of refugees who stream into town from a countryside devastated by war.

She speaks of people living in refugee camps, orphaned street children, people dying from AIDS or crippled by the tropical parasite guinea worm.

"There are so many people who need assistance – severely malnourished children, pregnant mothers, the elderly. I thought the situation would improve by now, but there is no solution. The war is still going on."

Matlyn Starks of Dorchester holds hands in solidarity with Nazhat Kidvai of Pakistan at the same event. Photos by Gail Oskin.

Recently Jeremano has been feeling a little more hopeful. One reason is that she has been able to talk and compare notes with her fellow Sudanese Mary Nyaulang. Although the two women are both from southern Sudan, Jeremano is from a government-controlled area and Nyaulang is from an area controlled by what she refers to as "the movement."

"In Sudan, we have no direct access to one another," she says.

After two weeks of attending seminars and working at policymaking and coalition building, the women will return home armed with laptop computers, provided by the program, with which, it is hoped, they will be able to communicate with one another via e-mail. The program is also providing them with Internet training.

"This conference has been so interesting," says Jeremano. "It has given me hope and confidence to know that we are not forgotten."

Women Waging Peace is the brainchild of Swanee Hunt, director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government and former ambassador to Austria. Hunt sees the two-week gathering not as an end in itself but as the beginning of an ongoing process.

"This is not about a conference," she says, "but about the launch of a network."

She also believes that Women Waging Peace will have an energizing effect on its participants and that their attendance will give them greater credibility and confidence when they return home. She said that most of the women at the conference are not high-profile officials in leadership roles, but rather women whose influence within the local community allows them to serve as peacemakers.

"We’re not talking about a George Mitchell who is appointed by the president to go to Northern Ireland to help resolve the conflict. A woman at this conference is more likely to be a schoolteacher who is respected throughout the community and who has former students on both sides of the conflict, and this position allows her to pull groups together," Hunt says.

Recent examples from around the world show that women can often have a decisive influence on local conflicts. Hunt points to the example of Russian women who founded the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers in response to the unpopular war in Chechnya. These women travel to their sons’ barracks and persuade them to desert. Women in the former Yugoslavia have used similar tactics and may have influenced Serb President Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate to NATO.

Other conference participants have played an important role in bringing combatants together. María Cristina Caballero, a Colombian journalist who is currently a research fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy, discovered an unexpected compatriot whose peacemaking efforts in her own country closely paralleled Caballeros’ own.
Caballero, who has twice won her country’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on Colombia’s internal conflicts and the activities of the Cali drug cartel, made headlines in 1997 when she interviewed Carlos Castaño, leader of the so-called right-wing death squads. Unexpectedly, Castaño revealed that he was ready to talk peace, which paved the way for a nationwide peace initiative involving all factions.

When Caballero told this story to Sevgül Uludag, a journalist from Cyprus, Uludag responded with warm recognition.

"She told me, ‘I didn’t know I had a twin soul in Latin America doing the same work,’ " Caballero said.

"We found that we had many things in common. Our goals are very similar – to improve social conditions, to help promote political and economic reforms, and to communicate that the people on the other side of the conflict are not monsters. This is the job of journalists," she said.

On Dec. 16, 200 leaders from government, industry, nonprofit organizations and academe will convene at the Kennedy School to help launch the worldwide women’s network which the conference was designed to initiate. The following day, the women will begin departing for their home countries.