Six of the seven living female Nobel Peace laureates have been talking peace in Galway. One of them, Jody Williams, explains the issues
For the past days, I've listened to women from 30 countries who have come together in Galway for the first international conference of the Nobel Women's Initiative (NWI). The initiative was launched in January 2006, bringing together six of the seven living women who have received the Nobel Peace Prize. Our sister Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, of course, could not be with us because she continues to be imprisoned by the military dictatorship that clings to power there.
We have come together to leverage the prestige of the Nobel Prize to focus on violence against women in all forms and under all circumstances, and the many creative and powerful ways that women combat, prevent and survive it. In Galway, we have been sharing our experiences - from the household to the global level - to secure peace.
While focusing primarily on the violence in the Middle East, we are in Ireland because two of us - Mairead Corrigan Maguire and Betty Williams - are from Northern Ireland. We knew that all of us at this conference could be inspired and could learn lessons about building peace from the women of Northern Ireland who bring decades of experience in conflict resolution.
Perhaps, surprisingly to some, a common feeling of the women at our conference is that the word "peace" is somehow simplistic. It is a concern of the weak, the utopian dreamers who do not have a "realistic" understanding of our violent world. Every woman here - whether from Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Israel, the United States, Sudan, Mexico or Kosovo to name just a few of the countries represented - is a testament to the fact that building peace is hard work each and every day.
It is hard work because we recognise that peace is not the absence of armed conflict. The absence of armed violence is perhaps one element of peace. Real and sustainable peace can only be built alongside justice and equality.
The root causes of violence are inequalities - whether of power; of control of resources; of racism, intolerance and discrimination or of the denial of the rights of women around the world. Working to change these massive, global inequalities is our work in achieving "peace".
This week, we discussed what violence looks like from women's perspective. It looks like domestic violence: men beating their women and children, because they can. It is the use of rape as a weapon of war: soldiers raping women to humiliate, to destroy families and communities whether in Darfur or in Burma. It is "honour" killing: men murdering women to "protect" the "honour" of other men in their families. It is occupation. It is military invasion. If I were to continue to describe all the forms of violence against women, it would not fit on this page.
We looked at the violence against women resulting from the war in Iraq, which has its roots in the oil industry's lust for the reserves in the Middle East and the resulting interests at stake.
We discussed the role of the media in dismissing and sometimes trivialising the voices of women, as if the only thing we can talk about are "women's issues". As if women's issues are not humanity's issues - saving our environment, equal access to resources of all types, equal access to justice, stopping the madness of the proliferation of weapons around the world that fuel the wars, killing us, our children and our husbands. We looked at violence against women through the manipulation of culture in the name of religion for political gain, whether it be in the US, Ireland or the Middle East.
In concluding our conference, we recognised that we make up more than half of the population of the globe and we still are denied our rightful place with dignity and equality, in the home or in the halls of power. Women and their children suffer the most in war, and are often the creative initiators of peace. However, women are almost never given a place at the formal negotiating table to construct peace in their own communities when the wars come to an end.
The women who came together this week in Galway at the first conference of the Nobel Women's Initiative know that, regardless of our country of origin, we come from cultures of violence. Our collective goal is to build cultures of peace, one community at a time.
We recognise that violence is not just something that bubbles up in human beings. Violence is a choice. It is an individual choice and a choice of society to condemn it or accept it. We believe that we can learn to make different choices and in this increasingly small world, we must learn to make different choices.
When women are represented at all levels of power and when women's voices are taken seriously, we know that we will make different choices. Our conference marks just one step in our common work to build a world with justice and equality for us all.