The seminar Women and security was filled to the last seat. If anyone, Liberia’s president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was able to give a picture of female suffering due to war and lack of basic human rights. But Liberia also sets a good example of how women’s participation in a peace process creates a greater possibility for lasting stability and development.
“When talking about security we talk about human security, about having basic needs,” Johnson-Sirleaf said.
To many women around the world, life is simply about surviving.
“Pregnancy still means having one foot in the grave,” Eunice Brookman Amissah, former minister of health in Ghana and IPAS vice-president for Africa, pointed out. “It does not have to be that way.”
At the seminar Key to survival – defending human, sexual and reproductive rights, a number of speakers gave testimonies on the urgent need to improve conditions for mothers, daughters, sisters and wives.
Motherhood, as well as abortions, have to become safe for everyone. Women have to be protected, especially in wars where their bodies turn into a battlefield through systematic rapes and atrocities. Abolishing laws from “medieval times”, strengthening laws on human rights and assuring the implementation of them were seen as necessary first steps to assure human security for women.
“Otherwise, it’s like mopping the floor while the tap is still running,” Brookman Amissah argued
.
As a senior medical manager for the RAISE Initiative in Kenya, Fred Akonde has seen many women die in rural health clinics, on their way there or before being able to ask for help. He talked about “too many delays” preventing the saving of these women’s lives: because they lack power and information; because of bad roads for them to travel on and meagre resources in rural clinics.
The importance of involving both sexes in the fight for gender equality was addressed by Holo Hachonda, executive director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia (PPAZ). He specifically works with bringing men into health clinics in order to change gender attitudes.
“We live in a world where men are in control, making it hard to make reality of human rights,” he said.
Viviane Kitete, head of a group of associations fighting sexual violence, gave evidence of young girls’ vulnerability in her home country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To her, the obvious way out of their misery is:
“Access to health care and access to justice.”
