By Nastassja Hoffet
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 11 2009 (IPS)

“In order to be a good Muslim, a good Hindu, a good Pakistani, a good woman, you need to act in certain ways,” says Aisha Shaheed. “And all these parameters are defined by [male] self-proclaimed cultural leaders.”

Aisha Shaheed Credit: Nastassja Hoffet/IPS

Shaheed is part of the Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) network, which links individuals and rights groups in more than 70 countries to provide information and support to women in Islamic communities.

Given that the Qur’an could be translated in a multitude of ways, WLUML addresses misconceptions surrounding Muslim laws, reinterpreting religious texts to be implemented in a way that is more equitable to women and fighting for the preservation of secular spaces.

Shaheed was born in Pakistan, raised in Canada and now lives in Britain. She also contributes to a global campaign to end the practice of stoning, which is a legal form of capital punishment for the crime of adultery in Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.

“It is difficult to say that religions as they are practiced today are equitable for women,” she told IPS at U.N. headquarters, where hundreds of delegates are attending the ongoing U.N. Commission on the Status of Women.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: What are the next steps to strengthen advocacy and end violence against women? AS: I think that a really unexplored area is the issue of culture. The women’s movement, in Muslim contexts especially, has been looking at legal reform and family law reform. However, we can only get implementation at this ‘in between’ level which is culture in both its positive sense of reclaiming and redefining culture and also addressing the misuses to justify violence, violations and exclusion of women.

Work has been done on women as bearers of culture but they are not the gatekeepers of culture – the ones who define what the culture is – at the level of women’s bodies and sexuality. They are expected to stand for the group identity.

IPS: How would you rate the United Nations on women’s rights? AS: Emphasis always has to be given to local needs and local desires. It could be extremely dangerous if international pressure is put on without really understanding the implications for women on the ground. The United Nations is an important body in terms of standard setting, of holding governments accountable, but it is a collection of member states and so much violence is perpetrated by non-state actors, by family and community members, by armed groups, and fundamentalist groups that are not connected with the state.

I think that in the U.N. there are some gaps in how can they address violations by non-state actors. Women need to explore other areas of the U.N. – for example, the work done by the special rapporteurs is very useful to bring in this language of non-state actors, culturally justified violence.

IPS: What are the tools to fight culturally justified violence against women? AS: Sometimes local problems require local strategies. For example in South Asia, violence against women’s rights comes from local councils, which are not formally part of the state system but from the local customary system of justice. To counter that there have been women on the council, this means reformulating a local justice system to bring in women.

IPS: What are some of the achievements in terms of women’s rights under Islam? AS: Let me give you the example of Mokarrameh Ebrahimi, a woman in a remote part of Iran who spent a decade in jail with her partner and young son. They were accused of adultery – subject to stoning- because they were unable to obtain divorce. It was really the strength of the women’s movement that revealed the case and kept it in the newspapers.

In 2006, the Stop Stoning Forever in Iran Campaign was launched. A number of women lawyers in Iran went to find out how many women and men were in jail awaiting stoning sentences. They were extremely brave, they mobilised the local and national women’s movement, and when they thought the time was right they mobilised the international community and international women’s movement.

Human rights lawyers took on their case and campaigned using urgent action alerts and legal mechanisms at the international level. Eventually, she [Ebrahimi] was released. This is an achievement – but in Iran stoning has not been removed in the law.

IPS: How can men and youth get involved? AS: Certainly it is mostly men and boys who are the perpetrators of violence. One campaign, ‘Ring the Bell’, is encouraging men, boys and members of the community to ring the doorbell if they see acts of domestic violence.

At the international level, with the secretary-general’s campaign, there is a lot of attention on men and boys. I do not know if the time is right now for men and boys to be at the forefront or to have a very large role in issues which have been put on the agenda by the women’s rights movement.

At the local level, with our campaign “Stop Killing and Stoning Women!” it is important to be working with men and boys and religious leaders, but I have trepidation about the movement being taken over at the decision-making level.

IPS: Do you think religious law and cultural issues can be reconciled with international conventions on women? AS: Absolutely, it is the core of many religions. Despite the technicalities, there are underlying principles of peace and harmony, things that are in line with human rights. However, there is a word of caution – that it is very difficult for religions as they are practiced here and now to say they are truly equitable for women.

Excerpt:

In 2003, two journalists from Radio-Télévision Libre des Milles Collines were convicted of war crimes in the Rwanda genocide – illustrating the dangerous role media can play by relaying hate speech or rumours during times of violent conflict.

RTLM, which broadcast from July 1993 to July 1994, was found to have “fanned the flames of hate and genocide in Rwanda”. It was the first such conviction since that of Julius Streicher at Nuremberg for his anti-Semitic publication Der Stürmer.

While RTLM was an unusually extreme example, U.N. experts and observers of post-conflict countries say it is critical for peace-building bodies to forge a coordinated approach toward local media with key actors in international agencies, such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank and the U.N. Peace Building Commission.

“The key element in any zone of conflict is to ensure that communication is flowing as a form of dialogue. What is happening at a political level must get communicated to the population and that the population’s needs, desires, fears, attitudes requests must get communicated up,” said Sandra Melone, executive vice president of Search for Common Ground, an NGO dealing with conflict issues.

“In most places, it is an afterthought – it is not enough funded, and not enough resourced. Their [the media’s] role in the peace-building framework and agenda needs to be developed,” she told IPS.

Susan Manuel, chief of the Peace and Security Section in the U.N. Department of Public Information, told IPS that it was urgent “to bring the attention of the donor community and the United Nations system to the fact that communications is also extremely important to prevent a relapse of conflict and for governance.”

U.N. peacekeeping operations receive about half of the world body’s budget, while strategies to create a public communications sphere in mission countries remain severely under-funded, experts say.

“The international community should support local media in a way conducive to survival as an independent voice in the political system,” Bill Orme, media development adviser at UNDP’s Democratic Governance Group, told IPS.

“Communications is obviously the key for demobilisation, for reconciliation, for elections,” he noted.

He deplored that “things are done, but in an improvised way and in emergency. The Peace Building Commission responses did not think about media, did not take media into consideration at all – the word media did not appear.”

Sheldon Himelfarb, associate vice president of the Centres of Innovation at the U.S. Institute of Peace, says the biggest challenge has been the absence of coordination among different organisations.

“There are lacks of a common vocabulary and strategic framework for sharing lessons across these different programmes because the money has been short,” he said. “Now we have 20 years of history and plenty of evidence to suggest this is a very important factor in stabilising fragile societies.”

Media play an influential role in establishing the authority of newly elected governments and acting as a conduit for feedback from the public.

For example, Himelfarb noted that following the war in Bosnia, a public information campaign on radio and on television – which reached more than 90 percent of the population – called “Respect” paved the way for the peaceful return of many internally displaced people.

In 1998, a similar campaign in Northern Ireland helped foster acceptance of the Good Friday agreement by a vast majority of the population in a referendum.

However, running such campaigns in remote areas of post-war countries is very difficult when infrastructure has been destroyed – or never even existed in the first place.

“The international community should support the existing forces and bring them together or create an infrastructure for nationwide communication,” Melone said.

The primary U.N. success in this area was the launch of “Radio UNAMSIL” in Sierra Leone, implemented by the peacekeeping mission there in 2000. The United Nations reached an agreement with the new Sierra Leonean government to keep the station functioning after the mission left in 2005, while the government develops a new independent public broadcaster.

The Peace Building fund is on the brink of making a proposal to finance this new entity, revealed Orme.

Since most post-war countries cannot afford such programmes, the United Nations has a crucial role to play to make media development a top priority in its rebuilding strategies and to encourage donors for that aim.

“Without international assistance, it is impossible,” Orme said.

Concerning Sierra Leone, the government must pass a media law ensuring that the station “is an independent and public radio broadcaster”, she added.

Above all, a focus needs to be placed on the journalistic quality and integrity, making training a key component.

“The best way to get good programming is in partnership. We can provide technical assistance and help support new journalists, broadening the circle from where the voices are coming,” explained Melone.