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WRI Women
No. 25, February 2000

The newsletter of the Women's Working Group of War Resisters' International

ISSN 0959-3098
Editor: Shelley Anderson
Layout of paper edition: Francoise Pottier
Layout of online edition: Ken Simons

Thanks to all contributors. Opinions expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect the views of WRI.

Subscription: £5.00, add £2 in currencies other than British sterling.

Deadline for next issue: 15 May 2000. Send all articles, letters, news items, graphics, etc. to Women's newsletter, WRI, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX, UK. Tel. + 44 171 278 4040; fax +44 20 7278 0444; email: infoatwri-irg.org.

Introduction

You can't keep a good woman down....nor the WRI Women's Working Group newsletter. After a long absence, we're back. You can make sure we stay back by completing the enclosed questionnaire.

Please help us by sharing your ideas of how to make the newsletter-and communication between pacifist women from around the world-more useful.

This issue has good news about progress on a written history to celebrate the WRI Women's Working Group (WWG) 25 year history, and news from last year's WWG meeting in Germany.

The WRI women's newsletter now has a website, thanks to Ken Simons and Maggie Helwig. Current and past issues can now be seen at http://wri-irg.org/pubs/wriwomen.htm.

Another important email address is that of Casha Davis, convenor of the WRI Women's Working Group: ACD113726_2764@compuserve.com

What is the WRI Women's Working Group?

The WRI Women's Working Group is an international network of 50 active women and a wider circle of 100 who work within the pacifist organization, War Resisters' International, to address the interconnected issues of violence against women and the violence of war.

Members come from 20 countries. The group publishes this periodic newsletter and meets annually during WRI Council meetings. WWG has organized various women's conferences. In recent years WWG has focussed on decentralized projects such as Crossing the Line, which encouraged women in conflict areas to take actions bridging the gaps between them. We are currently working to ensure a gender perspective in a WRI seminar on Nonviolence and Social Empowerment, which will take place in India in December 2000.

Shelley Anderson

Women's Meeting at the WRI Council in Steinkimmen, Germany

The WRI Women's Working Group met on 7 August and again on 12 August last year during the WRI Council in Germany. The women came from Croatia, Ireland, France, Germany), India, the UK and US. The meeting began with older members pairing with newer members for introductions, and sharing some of the WWG's history. An update of developments since WRI's last triennial (in 1998 in Porec, Croatia) was given.

Two important issues on the agenda included the WWG history project and the collection of information on women in the military, as part of WRI's on-going investigation into the changing face of the military. The history project (see related article elsewhere in this newsletter) is proceeding, and participants from Denmark, the UK and Germany agreed to look into possible researchers and funding sources for the project in their countries, including possible funding from the European Union's Women's Committee.

Communication

WWG convener Casha Davis reported that there had been lots of communication through email. While many said the information was interesting, it was also overwhelming. What is the criteria for choosing information that is sent to the whole WWG network? Should only WWG material be circulated, or should other relevant material, such as the Women in Black statement from Belgrade at the start of the war in Kosovo, which some participants passed on to other anti-war groups? Encouraging or funny messages, while not strictly WWG material, were helpful.

While the email communication helps women "feel you are part of something", not all women are on email, and email can be very expensive for women in the global South. It was agreed that the WWG will find out who needs postal mailings, and how such mailings can be funded and organized. One possibility to lighten the load on email is a listserv: you send a message to a special address, and then it goes out to everyone who is on that particular list. A coordinator is needed to monitor the listserv. The pros and cons of a WWG website were also discussed, as was better use of the WRI website. More articles on feminism and nonviolence could be sent to the WRI website; "Peace News" and the "Broken Rifle" should also be better utilized by women. Participants agreed to investigate all these possibilities.

WWG Newsletter

The WRI women's newsletter, which began at the 1987 WWG's gathering in Glencree, Ireland, was next on the agenda. No newsletter has been produced in over a year. Does the WWG really want a newsletter? The arguments immediately made in its favor included the fact that a newsletter lasts a long time, is good for outreach (including to women who aren't on email), and is also good on a website. WWG members were encouraged to send articles to the newsletter editor, and discussed other solutions to help with the work, such as an assistant editor or guest editor on different topics. Scheduling themes in advance, especially using Nonviolence and Social Empowerment material, was also mentioned, as was using the newsletter to document other WWG work.

Nonviolence and Social Empowerment Conference

To prepare for the upcoming WRI conference on Nonviolence and Social Empowerment, women are asked to write down an example of when they felt empowered on a postcard and send it to WRI, for possible publication in the WRI women's newsletter. These experiences will then be fed into the conference. There was also discussion on how to contribute to the conference by collecting other case studies, for example, on domestic violence, and how to ensure that resource people would have a gender perspective. Anyone with ideas for resource women should send their suggestions to Saswati Roy at email: swadhina@vsnl.net.in.

Council and Seminar

WRI Executive member Joanne Sheehan reported on the WRI Council, and on the need to ensure a gender perspective in all of WRI's work. The group agreed to bear this in mind the evaluation-where did the Council go well from feminist perspectives, and where did it not? It is useful for WWG members to attend Council working groups: finance, structure, communications and publications, and the Africa group; and to avoid scheduling the women's group at the same time as other working groups.

Vesna Terselic reported on the International Fellowship of Reconciliation's Women Peacemakers Program meeting during the May 1999 Hague Appeal for Peace conference [editor's note: a report of this meeting is available by contacting IFOR, Spoorstraat 38, 1815 BK Alkmaar, the Netherlands]. The women's meeting was very inspiring and the best part of the conference. Vesna was worried, however, about the idea of women as ´natural' peacemakers. Women's role in peacemaking is more and more recognized. Women are being pushed into the limelight and presented with the mess to clean up, as a last resort. Why should women have the sole responsibility for a solution? The polarization and lack of debate at the Hague conference about Kosovo was also criticized. Vesna found it ironic that women peace activists had got our way: emotions are taken into account now - and now there's not enough space for rational argument.

Conclusion

Although the WWG hasn't met all its ambitious goals, many people felt very positive about what had been achieved, which was greater than in the past. Progress is being made. "We didn't want to let go of some of the projects that haven't happened yet, and emphasized the need to have particular people take responsibility for coordinating each task," said one participant. Such projects included: collecting the experiences of women volunteers working in the Balkan Peace Team; an in-depth analysis of violence against women in conflict situations; examining sexual harassment in peace movement; looking at the dynamics of mixed-gender groups; and how to challenge the perception of some recent Council behavior: long sequences of men taking the floor, more for self-aggrandizement, it seemed, than to make progress in the meeting; old arguments re-hashed with no attempt at resolution; layers of non-constructive communication (body language, polarized statements, etc).

How can women break through the barriers of silence and obedience (key words raised in conjunction with the upcoming social empowerment conference)? What does the silence of women in this context mean? Women explained their behavior as: "I knew it would only slow the meeting down further if I raised the issue of my discomfort about the group dynamics, without achieving anything". "The only thing I could have said was: I have the feeling we've heard this discussion before"; "There were too many different layers at once, how can we unravel them in one brief comment?" Many had the image of invisible presences in the Council plenaries, unspoken tensions that were not being addressed.

It was agreed that there is a need for transparency; role plays might help, encouraging the protagonists in the predictably repetitive scenarios to play out their opposite number's role. It was decided that the WWG would also make practical suggestions for future WRI meetings, such as in the preparation of facilitators, highlight the need for gender balance in the speakers' list.

Nonviolence and Social Empowerment

Link here to the homepage of WRI's Nonviolence and Social Empowerment discussion group. (This article appears in the print edition of WRI Women.)

WRI Women's Working Group 25 Year History Project

For the last 25 years women within War Resisters International (WRI) have been making women's perspectives of war and violence visible within the mixed peace movement. To celebrate this work the WRI Women's Working Group (WWG) is producing a written document of our 25 year history.

Complete with personal stories, anecdotes, chronology and reprints of selected articles, this history will cover the efforts of women to gain a stronger voice, to broaden the political understanding and analysis of war and violence, and to increase awareness of the links between sexism and war, and the ways in which war and militarism affect women.

The history will be published in booklet form, for easy international distribution. It will be published around June 2001, and will appear first in English, in an accessible style so that it can be understood by readers for whom English is not their first language.

Keep the 'sisters' in War Resisters!

The booklet will extend the impact of the WWG's work to other peace movement and women's organizations, as a positive example of an organization changing to become more gender conscious, and as a positive example of an early attempt to develop a women's project that is both grassroots and international.

It can be used by both newcomers to the WWG and by WRI as a whole, as a good example of how working groups and volunteers play an active role within WRI. We will look at the ways in which women who were spread all around the world met and communicated with each other and how support networks were developed to sustain the group through the years. We will explore both the challenges and obstacles that women faced within WRI at the creation of a woman-only space, and document the important effects of bringing a gender perspective into WRI's programme. The effectiveness of the WWG and the different approaches used will be evaluated, and key challenges for the future identified.

Personal interviews and oral histories, of women involved in the founding and work of the WWG will be conducted. Reports from women's gatherings at WRI triennials conferences, issues of WRI Women and WRI newsletters, and archival material from the Institute for Social History (Amsterdam) will be examined. WRI has member sections and Associate organizations in over 40 countries, and we will obtain stories and printed information from WRI sections that were active in women's issues and the WWG.

Please help!

The history project is coordinated by a team of WWG members such as Ellen Elster (Norway), Shelley Anderson (US/Netherlands), Majken Sørensen (Denmark), Dorie Wilsnack (US/Germany), Casha Davis (Germany) and Jane Lewis (UK). If you would like to contribute stories, funds, photographs, historical material, please contact Jane Lewis at email: jane@gn.apc.org, or write: WRI Women's History Project, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX, UK. Tel. + 44 171 278 4040; fax +44 20 7278 0444; email: infoatwri-irg.org. If you have ideas for fundraising for the project, please contact Majken at email: majken@fred.dk.

Women in the Military

The WRI Women's Working Group has had a long standing interest in women's militarization, including the role of women in militaries. This last issue can be a problematic one for feminist pacifists. Pacifists have no interest in encouraging women to join the military; rather, they support anti-militarist work that keep both women and men out of the armed forces. Conservative forces that support a restricted and traditional view of women's place also strongly oppose women in the military. While recognizing women's leadership skills and capabilities, feminist pacifists also reject the argument that increasing women's roles and numbers in militaries is a sign of women's increasing equality with men.

Whether women's increased role in the military is opposed for conservative or radical reasons, it appears to be a lost cause. In Australia, Canada, the People's Republic of China and the USA, women comprise some 10 percent of the military. In some guerrilla movements women were one-third to 40 percent of the armed forces, as in El Salvador an Nicaragua. Women are organizing to fight laws that refuse them combat training. In July 1998 Italian women in the Association of Aspiring Women Soldiers led a protest in front of the Chamber of Deputies, protesting the slow progress of a law to allow Italian women to join the military. In January of this year a high court in Germany ruled in favor of a woman complainant who objected to the law that forbade women serving in combat units.

In the USA feminist organizations such as the Women's Research and Education Institute (1700 18th Street, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20009, USA. Tel. +1 202 328 7070) actively monitors and promotes the rights of women in the military. "Since 1973, when the male draft ended and the All Volunteer Force began, the percentage of women among US military personnel has increased dramatically, from 1.6 percent in 1973, to 8.5 percent in 1980, to 10.8 percent in 1989..." begins a recent Institute report, which notes that 41 percent of all US enlisted women are women of color. The report does note the lack of women in officer ranks, but does not mention a 1990 study that found that two out of three military women surveyed said that they had been sexually harassed ("Sexual Harassment: Research and Resources: A Report-in-Progress," by The National Council for Research on Women, November 1991). Nor did the report mention US Department of Defense statistics that show women are three times as likely as men to be discharged from the military for homosexuality.

The military is changing: United Nations armed forces are now given training in peacekeeping. How will this changing role affect women both inside and outside the military? If military service becomes increasingly portrayed as a form of community service or humanitarian aid, will more women be attracted to military service? Do such roles reinforce or challenge traditional stereotypes of women? In countries where minority women find secure employment in the military, what is the peace movement doing about discrimination in the civilian sector?

The WRI Women's Working Group encourages reflection on these and other issues, and asks readers to send in their comments, news, and statistics on women in the military.

IFOR Women Peacemakers Program

by Shelley Anderson

The discussions and moral support of the WRI Women's Working Group was the inspiration for women's programming in another sister pacifist organization. Women in the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), a spiritually-based movement for active nonviolence founded in 1919, have not yet organized themselves as a body like the WRI Women's Working Group. But their experiences, such as being under represented in decision making, are similar. IFOR's Women Peacemakers Program (WPP) was launched in 1997 to empower women peace activists inside and outside the IFOR network.

The WPP is an experiment in developing and integrating a gender perspective into peace work. There are four parts to the WPP's work: organizing regional consultations where women from different sides of conflicts can exchange experiences and learn more about nonviolent conflict resolution; nonviolence trainings for women's groups; and documentation of women's peace work. Lastly, because peace is connected to building democracy, and democracy is impossible without women's active participation, the WPP provides support for independent women's organizations.

Two regional consultations have been organized: a European consultation in 1998 which brought women from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ingushetia, Northern Ireland, Croatia, Bosnia, Cyprus, Israel and Palestine together; and an Asian consultation, with participants from Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, Kashmir, Nagaland, Nepal, Sri Lanka, South Korea ad Tibet. An Africa consultation will take place in April 2000 in Zimbabwe, with participants, from Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia and Uganda. A fourth consultation will include participants from the previous meetings, in order to gather the strategies women peace activists have initiated.

The WPP organizes nonviolence trainings for women's groups by helping to locate trainers, materials and funding. Such trainings have been organized for tribal women in the Chittagong Hill Tracks; for ethnic minority women in refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border; and for a girls peace camp in Nepal, which brought 35 girls from 16 Asian countries together. Trainings have also been organized in Romania, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

The documentation of women's peace work involves publishing (in cooperation with the International Peace Bureau) an annual May 24 International Women's Day for Peace and Disarmament pack. This pack includes profiles of women's peace groups from around the world, suggestions for solidarity actions, and a directory of over 100 women's peace groups in some 60 countries. The 1999 English-language pack focused on what women are doing for peace in the Caucasus (in order to help with networking, summaries appeared after each article in Russian). This year's pack looks at women's peace efforts throughout Africa, and is published in both English and French. Likewise the WPP's newsletter "Cross the Lines" (available three times a year in English, French or Spanish) carries news of nonviolence trainings, new resources of interest to women activists, and a calendar of upcoming events from around the world.

The WPP is proud of the fact that it has helped women's groups in Ingushetia and Zimbabwe receive their first successful grant proposals, as part of its work to build sustainable women's organizations. This work also involves linking groups with other resources they may be unaware of, as when the WPP helped a Congolese women's group protesting rape by soldiers contact the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, or when the WPP helped women peace leaders, from Croatia, Hawa'ii, the Philippines, Palestine, Israel, Sudan, South Korea, West Papua and Uruguay to the 1999 Hague Appeal for Peace conference.

Raising More Questions

The WPP recognizes that women play multiple roles in conflict-as victims, occasionally as perpetrators-and most of all as leaders with innovative ideas about peacebuilding. Incorporating a gender perspective in peace work raises some very problematic issues. It involves expanding the definition of peace work to include issues of importance to women.

One question that comes up is when does capitalizing on women's strengths in peacemaking-good listening and communication skills, the flexibility to compromise, caring for people above abstract principles-become perpetuating traditional sex role stereotypes that rationalize domination and inequality?

Another problematic issue is the definition of peace itself. What is the exact difference between "peace time" and "war time" to a woman being beaten by her husband or a girl being sold into prostitution? How does the latter "private" violence against half of humanity differ from the "public" violence of armed conflict?

All of these issues involve the crucial question of increasing women's access to political power and political decision making. Women are not just victims. Groups like the Liberian Women's Initiative and Sudanese Women's Voice for Peace; the experiences of women UN election monitors in South Africa; the role of church women in ending Bougainville's brutal war-all of these cases and more show that women are leaders in peace and reconciliation efforts. Yet without access to political decision making, women's solutions go ignored. The challenge for women peacemakers is both to gain political power-and to transform political structures into more democratic and egalitarian forms.

Shelley Anderson is Program Officer for the IFOR Women Peacemakers Program, Spoorstraat 38, 1815 BK Alkmaar, the Netherlands. Tel. +31 72 5123 014; fax +31 515 1102; email: s.anderson@ifor.org; Website: http://www.gn.apc.org/ifor/

Resources

May 24 2000 International Women's Day for Peace and Disarmament action pack (in French or English), with profiles of African women's groups and directory of women's peace groups available for US $7.50 (includes postage). Back issues for 1997 and 1998 are available for US $5.

21-minute videos of the WPP's European or Asian regional consultations are available for $25 (add $5 if requesting air mail shipment). A 55-minute video on ways women in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka are confronting violence against women is also available for US $30.

"Cross the Lines", the WPP newsletter, is available in English, Spanish or French. One-year subscription is $10.

Readers Survey for WRI Women's Newsletter

Please return by May 15, 2000 to: WRI, Women's Working Group, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX, UK. Tel. + 44 171 278 4040; fax +44 20 7278 0444; email: infoatwri-irg.org.

  1. Do you prefer receiving the WRI Women's Newsletter:
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  2. What do you find most useful about the newsletter?
    • Women's Working Group updates
    • stories of other women
    • resource section
    • calendar
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  4. How often should the WRI Women's Newsletter be published?
    • Twice a year
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  5. Are you willing to guest edit an issue of the newsletter?
    • On what theme?
  6. What themes would you like to see in the newsletter?
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    • Nonviolence and feminism
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