INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
A celebration of those at the forefront of their fields
In the dozen conflicts and war zones where Lise Grande has worked, she said she found women’s rights were always marginalised, neglected or forgotten. Before she become president and chief executive of the Congress-founded US Institute of Peace in December, Ms Grande served as UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Yemen – which was ranked the worst place in the world for women.
“Since the war started, 80 per cent of the population have been hurt, but those hurt the most are women. Women are a million times worse off because of the war. They have lost access to food, access to the political sphere, access to education and access to healthcare,” Ms Grande told The National on the eve of International Women’s Day.
“At the same time, women are also the ones expected to cope with every disaster, to feed the family, get medicines when children are sick, find fuel, look after relatives, run the household, even as their own lives are disintegrating.”
Women are not offered the resources to carry out the disproportionately large responsibility expected of them by society, Ms Grande said.
“The burden of supporting and caring for their families falls on them. Women are the least empowered but expected to do the most despite this.”
The oppression of Yemen’s women does not occur within one sect, group or affiliate but across the board, Ms Grande said.
“The systems of patriarchy, power and oppression are deeply embedded and extremely difficult to transform,” she said. “That also means that the process of change is not something that will happen quickly or overnight. It’s a long road and struggle.”
For 13 years in a row, Yemen ranked last in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, making it the worst place for a woman to live. It moved up four places in the index’s 2020 survey but remained the least progressive country for women in the Middle East.
Only a third of women in Yemen can read and write, making up less than 2 per cent of the political process and 6 per cent of the labour force, the lowest in the world, according to the 2020 Global Gender Gap Index.
Ms Grande said she saw some of this for herself.
“I was the only woman in 98 per cent of all official meetings in Yemen,” she said.
In 2019, human rights group Amnesty International released a report that included interviews with women from Sanaa, Taez and Marib.
“By God, I am broken from the inside. It’s not normal, I don’t feel like a human being. I can’t breathe properly like other human beings,” one of the women said.
“We suffer from the forced niqab, child marriage, divorce shame, domestic violence and honour killings. I don’t know … as if we are aliens. They [male family members] have to oppress us and we have to stay oppressed – like a puppet controlled by strings.”
Ms Grande said the situation for women in Yemen was incomparably dire – even against other conflicts zones where she has worked such as Sudan, the Congo and Armenia.
“I have seen nothing like it,” Ms Grande said.
Against all odds, local and UN-supported women’s rights groups exist across Yemen, hoping to make strides for women in education, policy, and human rights.
Organisations such as women-led NGO Food 4 Humanity and the Abs Development Organisation for Woman and Child have collaborated with similar groups on equality in Yemen.
“It is our collective responsibility to support these groups, politically and financially, and to stand in solidarity with them,” Ms Grande said.
About 230,000 Yemenis have been killed since the war began with the Iran-backed Houthis’ takeover of Sanaa in 2015, and the Saudi-led Arab Coalition’s intervention to restore Yemen’s legitimate government into power, according to UN estimates.
For years, the UN and the US have been attempting to bring warring parties to a negotiating table for peace talks.
While progress has been made on several occasions, resulting in the mutual release of prisoners and precarious ceasefires, lasting and concrete steps have yet to be taken in the political process.
“People make the argument that the peace process is hard enough and that it would be harder to achieve and take longer if the process has to include women. ‘We’ll get to the women later,’ people would say. That’s what has to stop and that has to stop now,” Ms Grande said.
“It’s high time that the mediators who help to build peace are women. Women mediators won’t say that women’s equality can wait – that men have created the problem and need to solve it. As victims of patriarchy women mediators understand, in ways that most male mediators do not, that patriarchal systems do not produce lasting peace or equality.”
On this year’s International Women’s Day, Ms Grande said one of the most important things the world can do is to honour, support and stand in solidarity with women in every country who are struggling for peace and changing the patriarchal status quo.
“Our job is to help build networks of women across the world that may one day be the foundation for tangible progress in the realm of women’s rights in Yemen.”
Our job is to help build networks of women that may one day be the foundation for tangible progress
LISE GRANDE
President, US Institute of Peace