Paper read at a forum on “Women’s Role in Syria’s Transition and Reconciliation”
hosted by the UPF Office of Peace and Security Affairs, Washington, DC., January 15, 2014

Why is it that in our crisis management, especially in the Middle East, we take into consideration the rights of minorities – but not the rights of women?

If our support of the oppositions against their dictators during the Arab Spring had been more vigorously conditioned on a firm respect for the rights of women, they would not today be forced once again to fight to defend what had already been achieved after so much historic struggle. We would also be helping women who are struggling to win them for the first time.

In Egypt , if the Muslim Brotherhood had early on, during the presidential election, been obliged to reveal more openly its retrograde conception of the role of women, perhaps those modernists who voted for Morsi as a way of voting against the remnants of the Mubarak regime would have envisaged their votes otherwise. This might have denied the overthrown Brotherhood president from winning a thin majority in the first place. Wrapping oneself in the vestments of democracy becomes hypocritical if it exposes a disdain for the rights of over half the population.

In Tunisia women had to take to the streets and mount political ramparts in the constitutional assembly in defense of the rights given to them with the founding of the republic, in particular by the liberal constitution and family code put in place by the first president Habib Bourguiba. Every attempt by the dominant Muslim Brotherhood party Ennahda to set back the rights of women was met with successful resistance. Tunisia demonstrates that once women have tasted equality they will not give it up and will pass it on to their daughters and grand-daughters. Nevertheless, they had to fight for what should have simply been taken for granted as an historic and inviolable given.

In Libya, if the international community, led by France, had leaned more heavily on the provisional government to clearly adopt a formal respect for women’s rights there may not have been the unseemly announcement of the return of Sharia law and polygamy.

Now the case of Syria.

Violence, thousand of deaths, the destruction of all infrastructures have destroyed the family cells, as it was the case during the Iraq War. The consequences of the impact of the war on women could bring many changes.

Will the revolution stop the patriarchal order?

Will this revolution help women to be empowered?

Let us hope that the Geneva 2 Conference will provide an opportunity to bring into the diplomatic discussions the rights of women. These rights are an integral part of political realism and cannot be viewed as a superfluous feminine fashion. It is women and their families that suffer the most disastrous consequences of bloody dictatorial repression and civil war. Why not make a serious discussion of women’s rights a precondition to sit at the table of an eventual Geneva 2? If the fundamentalists on all sides want a piece of power we should not repeat the errors of the past, we must make them uncover their most unsavory cards beforehand. Out of respect for more than half of humanity, this must be part of the deal. If as the skeptics believe nothing of consequence can be achieved at Geneva, putting women’s rights on the table will at the very least have made the gathering worthwhile.

Women should be part of both delegations, the regime and the opposition ones. The Kurds should also be part of the peace process; the Kurdish women are an example of what the Syrian women should be in the new Syria. Kurdish women are actually participating in the social, economic and political affairs in the Kurdish areas which represent 10% of the country and 15% of the Syrian people. They are even participating in the military fight some with the opposition forces, but the majority are fighting the most extremist jihadist groups such as Al-Nostra. Many of these women have been abducted recently in the Northern part of Syria by the jihadists. It is not possible that these courageous Kurdish women will not be part of the delegations.

All of this is not to say that the West should impose its conception of feminism. Women can find their way to basic rights whatever their religion, culture, or the obstacles of patriarchy and masculine scorn. In light of the ways of the world today women need our unfailing encouragement and support to make their own way in their own societies.

To help them we can condition our aid intelligently, be it military or economic, on respect for women’s rights – just as we do in support of pluralism, the freedom of expression and the rule of law. This can be done in view of the particularities of context.

Let us not make the mistaken interpretation that women’s rights serve only women. It has been undisputedly demonstrated that when girls have access to education, when they can freely choose their husbands at an appropriate age of maturity, when they fully participate in political and economic life, all of society benefits. Women have also shown themselves at times to be more effective than men at resolving conflicts.

Women and men of all generations today can only be more committed to the education of girls after the moving testimony of Malala Yousafzai who, from the tribune of the United Nations, has shown us how powerful the determination is to get an education. After being stopped by a Taliban bullet to her head on her long walk to school in Pakistan, we helped this extraordinary girl continue on her way to an education by means of the miracles of modern medical science. We must help as many others as we can to take the same road with the means of modern laws.

In short, and without belaboring the point with a myriad of other possible examples, our international diplomacy is deficient to the extent that it does not utilize women’s rights as a political lever. And in the laudable pursuit of democracy these rights are an essential condition. As is often noted, elections alone do not get you there.

Patricia Lalonde is a research fellow at the European Institute for Prospective and Security (IPSE); general secretary of the Mobilization for Elected Women in Afghanistan (MEWA); and author of Paris Kaboul, journal d’une femme révoltée (Editions de Passy) (“Paris-Kabul, Diary of a Rebellious Woman”) and co-author with A.M. Lizin of Abdullah Abdullah, l’Afghan qui dit non aux Taliban (Editions de l’arbre) (“The Afghan Who Said No to the Taliban”).