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Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 5
(6 of 22 pages)
The support from the political party were lip sayings more than real support.
So coming out of the experience I did not win. I was an independent in a very difficult situation and I came out
of that with learning and with experience and with knowledge. I wanted to use that knowledge for the election of
1997, so with two other colleagues, we worked to initiate a program to support democracy and we created an institute.
Then we worked for 11 months on a project that is called raising women's participation in the election, learning
from the experience of '93. I could say that we have achieved something very important, that in the election of
1993, 400,000 women were voters; in the election of 1997, 1,200,000 were voters and I could say that I have a lot
to do with that.
But we did is we created voters, we did not create educated voters. We just created beginning of tradition to accept
women as voters. We were able to save our experience from not having the same fate of Jordan, not to have women
in the election and the parliament, we had women in the parliament, two women in the parliament and in the ex-parliament
was also two women. That is not a big achievement, but we stayed in the parliament, in a democracy that I call
it decoration of democracy. It's nice, I mean, we do have women, but they're there. They were in a parliament that
initiated a law against women that is [inaudible] status law. 1,200,000 women voted for a parliament who made a
law that handicapped them, that make their husbands marry over them without them saying no, that does a lot of
harm to their life and their marriage life and that's the parliament that they elected. They didn't know if are
going to elect it, they are supposed to choose the kind of people who are going to be in the parliament in order
to do laws that benefit them, that change their life. Well, it did change their life, but not too good, it is too
the bad.
And actually, this recent one that they participate in have also issued a law even for diplomat woman, if they
are married with diplomats, they cannot have benefit from being -- the only benefit they can have when they get
the same rank or to be sent outside is to be divorced. It's much better -- I mean, this law encouraged divorce
among who are working in the Foreign Ministry, than encourage husband and wife to continue work in the diplomacy.
And that law also were issued in the parliament.
A citizenship is granted for men and their kids when they are born. It's not granted for the kids of woman when
they are born and the parliament itself that were elected by 1,200,000. So it's an experience. That's one of the
things that I wanted to share.
And I wanted to share something else, which is the experience that we did in trying to communicate with each other
as women to work in NGOs. We created an NGO network for women to prepare for Beijing. The NGO was first said in
this country with that group and so we were fought because the word NGO itself were understood to be opposition,
group of people who do not want to obey the government, so we were not the nice people and then the minute we wanted
to be institutionalized after Beijing, with the recommendation by Beijing conference that institutionalization
should take place for all groups that have worked to prepare for Beijing, we were prevented to do that, because
they didn't issue any law -- that parliament itself did not issue any law that could NGOs to be organized. And
they have only one law that exist in one of the two systems before unification, that is from 1963, that is interpreted
according to the mood of the person who give license. So that NGO for women who have prepared to Beijing were not
allowed to continue after Beijing, and so it was not announced after that.
Then I came to do another experience, which is establishing a women's study center which I direct right now and
the first word that was fought or so -- I mean, we have fought with languages, you will find that funny, is the
word "gender" because that center is supposed to do gender studies. The word gender was translated first
to be kind and sometimes to be social kind and some other times it's the social kind or the kind of sex. And of
course, as you see, if it is that, it allows them to write their papers, again, it's our center saying that the
word gender means marrying man to man and women to women, which is something we don't teach, something we don't
mean. It's not true, but that's how they fought this kind of activities that they are doing.
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