Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 41

6 February 1961—

The Sixth Clanswoman

In accepting the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, Asha Hagi Elmi reminded her audience that “it has always been the case in all armed conflicts that women and children are the first and last victims of war, though war is neither their desire nor their decision.” She knows what she’s talking about. As a Somali, she’s endured a civil war that’s lasted over twenty years. The long conflict has ravaged the nation’s economy and infrastructure, killed nearly half a million people, and inflicted suffering on millions more.

The civil strife in Somalia is inseparably connected to the nation’s traditional clan structure. There are five male-dominated clans or tribes within the nation, and the tensions between them are long-standing. Since these tensions erupted into outright civil war in the mid-1980s, women like Asha Hagi who married outside of their clan have been rejected by both their birth and their marriage clans. In describing her own situation, she speaks for thousands of Somali women. “My clan of marriage saw me as a stranger, an outsider and at times a traitor. They didn’t want me to know or even listen to what was being said. In my clan of birth, they also saw me as an outsider. My relatives saw me as someone who did not belong to them because I had this ‘other part’ that was related to the enemy. They didn’t want me to know their conversations and plans.”

Realizing that the traditional clan system left no room for women’s voices—voices that typically cry the loudest for peace—Asha Hagi organized the Sixth Clan, a unification of women from the five traditional clans. The Sixth Clan works to encourage women’s political participation in Somalia, to advocate for the rights of women and children across all of Africa, and to ensure that women are a presence in the ongoing peace talks between the warring clans. In 1992, Asha Hagi cofounded the humanitarian organization Save Somali Women and Children in order to further the goals of the Sixth Clan.

Asha Hagi was elected to Somalia’s transitional parliament in 2004 and served for five years. During that time she participated in UN-sponsored peace talks and traveled widely throughout Africa, advocating the rights of women and children and especially speaking out against female genital mutilation. Through her work with the Sixth Clan, women in Somalia have a louder voice in the political and peacemaking process. As she says, “Through the Sixth Clan, we have transformed the women’s role from the traditional ululation to indispensable stakeholders for national peace and political process. We have also taken women from the periphery to the negotiating table as equal partners and decision-makers. Women are no longer passive observers, but instead active participants. We have challenged the social cultural paradigm and carved out women’s political space in the national political dispensation.”