Amid the human toll and destruction of the war in Syria, now in its 31st month, women there are fighting an additional struggle: defining their role in the conflict and their future in the society that will emerge.

protests
Photo courtesy of NY Times

Women have played an “extraordinary” part in the war -- as protest leaders, providers holding their families together, civic leaders, healers, diplomats, activists and even sometimes as fighters, said Steven Heydemann, special adviser for Middle East Initiatives at the U.S. Institute of Peace, during a Sept. 27 panel discussion featuring three women backing the opposition movement, mostly as exiles because of the danger inside the country. The event was co-sponsored with the Washington-based International Republican Institute and Netherlands-based Hivos development group.

Syrian women are at once part of and victims of the politics roiling all sides in the conflict. Even as extremist religious agendas aim to limit the roles of women, secular forces, too, resist greater influence from the females among them, said Bassma Kodmani, executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative and a founding member of the Syrian Women’s Network.

In the shadow of the military conflict, “it is extremely difficult for women on the ground to influence change,” Kodmani said. “The women of Syria are part of a situation where there has been no strategy to promote democratic forces on the ground.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge in the participation of women is to get them involved in any political process that might develop to end the war, Kodmani said. “If there is a political process started, where will the women be?”

In the past 13 years, United Nations Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, has guided efforts to protect women and strengthen their leadership roles in promoting peace and security.

“Experts in the peace and security field have continually proven that inclusion of women in peacebuilding processes creates more sustainable peace,” said Kathleen Kuehnast, USIP’s director of the Center for Gender and Peacebuilding.

The first demand of many women supporting the Syrian opposition is democracy and equality between women and men, said Sabah Alhallak, a researcher and trainer on women’s rights who has participated in United Nations programs. Men and women of Syria’s civil society already are operating in precarious conditions, many of them having been arrested for their activism, and they need to “share every step” to achieve the democratic system that is their goal, she said.

“We believe we have the right to live as you,” Alhallak said. “We are human.”

Oula Ramadan, a young Syrian human rights defender and member of the coordination committee of the Syrian Women’s Network, said that, to her, the uprising in her country was never just political but also a social revolution. It gave women “the strength to say what they want,” she said.

Even more conservative women broke tradition with actions such as hiding men and boys fleeing security forces after demonstrations, even when the males of the household were absent. Ordinarily in such homes, it would be a cultural taboo for men who are strangers to be present without women’s male relatives.

Women in Syria drew inspiration in part from the strong roles of their counterparts in Libya’s revolution, Ramadan said. In Syria, women are taking on responsibilities such as raising awareness of the scourge of child soldiers being recruited by fighting forces, and they’re helping negotiate with rebel and regime forces for safe passage of civilians across battle lines.

In one opposition-controlled area, a training course in conflict resolution drew 16 participants, and 14 of them were women, Ramadan said.

Manal Omar, USIP’s director for Iran, Iraq and North Africa programs, outlined five of the lessons that have emerged from  the transitions of the past 10 years in the Middle East:

  • Women need to be at the decision-making tables.
  • The “not now” argument that women’s issues should be deferred until after a crisis most often turns into “never.”
  • Women are necessary and integral to achieving a sustainable peace.
  • Women can be polarized, too, by sectarian, ethnic and political lines, and have to be careful to avoid division.
  • Societies have to beware of the tendency to stop progress at quotas, without the other types of gender integration that are necessary.

“Women can really be a key element of transition,” Omar told the Sept. 27 discussion. And many countries’ citizens are far more ready to accept women’s involvement at high levels than many leaders understand.

Ramadan said she has often seen the tendency toward skepticism about including women on decision-making committees in Syria, as those involved question whether they’re qualified.

“My question is `are Syrian men qualified,’ ” she said. “We’ve been living in dictatorship for 40 years.”

Still, women have been included in certain committees of local councils, and efforts are underway to expand that trend, Kodmani said.

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