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Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 4
(7 of 20 pages)
Since the Unity as well, both the first Constitution which has been endorsed by
the Unity and then the second Constitution which has been agreed in 1994, are saying that again women and men are
equal before the law. The new thing about the new practices as well, when it comes to the women, is participation
- I'm going deeply into that subject - and the fact that both men and women were not really prepared for the multi
party system, because before Unity in both North and South, there was no appreciation for the multi party system.
As a matter of fact, it was looked upon, the people that were working even underground within political systems
or political parties, as people who are working for other countries, or people who are opposing their country.
So there has been a new change, a new thinking about this multi party system which started praising their system,
where everybody started talking about how important it was for the people, so it was a new shift from a totally
different totalitarian system to a newly different democratic system with so many parties which when they were
counted reached more than 18 in 1993. These parties, most of them at least, represented themselves in the first
public election, based also on multi party system. When it comes to the participation of the people, of course,
it was a number one experience for everybody, but women also were then second to the first one, as usual and of
course all the parties were so keen, so enthusiastic about encouraging women to go and register themselves as voters,
expecting them to vote for men. That's why, also, all political parties had the women issue as a number one issue
in their programs. Here you have parties from the extreme right to the extreme left and the other variations of
different small parties as well in Yemen, which none of them said clearly we are against women or something like
that. As a matter of fact, all of them were really praising, were saying that we are really with women's participation.
But then we came to the practice where we had so many parties which hadn't even nominated one single woman speaking
on behalf of them. It was only a very few parties who nominated a very few women, including the two political parties
which were ruling the country prior to 1993 and then it was the same, and the other parties which really participated
in the elections of 1997.
The result was that we had only two women elected in both 1993 and 1997 and both of them were coming from one of
the ruling parties again. So it was again the political willingness of the political governing party that wanted
those women to be representing the other half, the 50% of the population, in comparison to a house of 301 representatives
for the country. Anyway, for us women we thought as well the participation of women in going to the public vote
and also to giving their votes also to men, was also a victory by itself, because Yemeni women did not gain that
right until very recently in 1990. Our brother men had that right long before us, so it was for us a new development
too. And we took advantage of that, but unfortunately we were not able to really influence the whole election campaign.
I'm going to move now to the public places where also you have women's representation as well going the same way.
By that I mean also in the public offices, until today, we haven't been able to see a woman Minister and there
has been a big debate, and it's still going on, for so many parties that are still asking whether women are capable
of taking this responsibility as a public responsibility, in comparison to her private responsibility as just a
housewife or maybe a mother. It's not finished yet. Even the Es La (ph) party lately, in a very new development,
has elected seven women to its Shura (ph) Council, which is also one of the highest bodies of decision making inside
the party itself. That was also new progress inside the Es La party, which had denied at certain times the right
of women to be represented at such a level.
What's new as well in Yemen is that now women are feeling that they are really representing a real strong force
on the public elections, but until now unfortunately we're not really that organized, although we have so many
missionaries of women working either in the NGO or within the government, or in personal levels and all that, but
still the debate is still there and the women are trying now to do their best so that they can influence more maybe
the coming elections. For the government, as I said, there was no minister. We have only now two women deputy ministers,
one of them is working at the Ministry of Education, the other one is working for the Ministry of Social Affairs
as the Under Secretary for Social Insurance Organization. In addition to that, we have only since 1997, when we
had some women who had been nominated as chairpersons for the specialized agencies inside the Prime Minister's
Office or inside the Ministry of Education, or inside the Presidency Office and that was also always closed for
women. They were not really working there. They worked in big numbers in different levels, but whenever they get
higher, the number of women gets less.
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