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Magazine
A culture of silence
KALPANA SHARMA
AP
Women are in the forefront of the fight for peace.
THERE is a Bombay Street in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Fortunately, the Shiv Sena has not got there yet to tell the Irish that the street should be renamed Mumbai Street! So Bombay Street will retain its name, and its character for some time to come. Its claim to fame is the wall mural, that tells one side of the story of "the troubles" of Northern Ireland, the plaque above the doorway of a house in a row of unremarkable houses that speaks of a 19-year-old executed by the British in 1942 and a memorial for all those who died in the civil war that has taken so many lives over the past 30 years.
Bombay Street borders a wall, a very high wall with a higher fence on top. This is called a "peace line" — apparently built to keep the peace between two communities divided by a long history of hate and violence. But the peace line also mocks the tentative and long-overdue efforts for a lasting peace; it symbolises the many walls — real and unreal — that need to be brought down before there can be a meaningful peace.
Northern Ireland, with a population of just 1.7 million people of whom 53 per cent are Protestant and 44 per cent Catholic, remains a troubled land. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, between the governments of Britain and Ireland and the parties involved in the dispute in Northern Ireland, gave people a respite after many years of self-destructive violence, and hope that there could be a lasting solution. But the hope was short-lived as the territory has once again been plunged into a period of political uncertainty.
I spent just under a week in Northern Ireland meeting a cross-section of community groups. The meetings were held on so-called "neutral" ground, community centres built to serve both Protestants and Catholics. Each location was more beautiful than the last. The Irish are a loquacious people, like us Indians. Yet the conversations at these meetings were dominated by what they acknowledge is a "culture of silence". One could sense that behind this silence lay the individual and collective burden of pain, blame and anger.
Although the political settlement has removed some of the fear, violence lurks just below the surface. No one is confident or sure enough to speak their minds in what they call "mixed company", that is a group consisting of Catholics and Protestants. "People are just beginning to come out of silence", said one woman, "only now are they beginning to feel safe enough to talk about their experiences." Said another, "The tones of conversation have changed." She explained that she did not have to be apologetic anymore about belonging to a particular religion because she had realised she did not have to carry the burden of being part of a religion that was perceived to be against another religion.
It was particularly heartening to meet people, many of them very ordinary, who are trying to heal the wounds, to make a difference. And to meet the women who have fought hard and long for peace. Two such women are Avila Kilmurray and Monica McWilliams. The former is Director of the Community Foundation of Northern Ireland, a nodal agency that funds hundreds of small groups involved in peace-building. The latter is an academician and a politician, one of the two women elected to the recently dissolved Northern Ireland Assembly. Both women are part of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition that moved from lobbying and advocacy to actual participation in elections.
Why go into politics as a Women's Coalition? Why not join one of the mainstream parties? Didn't the very fact that they were a gender-based party restrict their ability to attract votes from the general public, I asked Monica and Avila.
Monica McWilliams says that 40 per cent of their vote came from men. Adds Avila, "We got the ideological vote on human rights issue. A lot of men, like women, were politically unclear. If you didn't want to vote tribally, then you didn't know who to vote for". In other words, the people who did not want to support either the Catholic or Protestant parties - that go under the label of Republican or Nationalist and Unionist or Loyalist - had no alternative before the Women's Coalition came along.
Initially, the women's movement in Northern Ireland was content to lobby for peace. "We worked as a pressure group but suddenly we became a political party", says Monica. The vast majority of women supported their decision; a small minority said they should not get mixed up in constitutional matters.
But Monica and Avila hold that their special advantage as women was that they were effective negotiators as they could talk to all sides while many of the male politicians would not speak to one another. Avila says that the basic plank of their party was inclusion, equality and human rights. Their aim is "to change the face of politics, making it more open, more in touch and more representative of the whole community," states their attractive leaflet prepared for an election that is still uncertain.
Indeed, human rights are the middle ground on which they tried to bring together the warring groups. It is the women's coalition that fought for everyone to be on the negotiating table, with or without a ceasefire. They kept the lines of communication open to those who had been excluded. And in that way they could use their status as a group that cuts across sectarian lines to help in the process of peace.
But peace remains precarious in Northern Ireland. The elected Assembly has been suspended, new elections have not been announced, the largest party is split down the middle on whether it should continue to support the Good Friday agreement and thousands of registered and unregistered firearms maintain low-level violence. Yet both Avila and Monica refuse to be pessimistic. "People have tasted the peace and there's no going back now", says Monica.
Northern Ireland illustrates well the difference between political peace and real peace. A political agreement is only the first step; for it to really work, much more needs to be done on the ground to heal wounds and to bridge the chasm that violence and war creates between people. Who will do this job? Governments are incapable of doing this. It is up to people in civil society, ordinary people, to dig the foundations for peace. As one woman said at one of the discussions, "If only politics could be ordinary, about bread and butter issues."
In all our conflict ridden societies we long for a politics that is "ordinary", that deals with the issues that really matter to people. The Women's Coalition and its entry into the world of politics is an attempt to inject this element of the "ordinary". It is an effort to unravel what politicians like to complicate. It might not succeed; the positions in Northern Ireland, as in other such situations elsewhere, might be too entrenched. But the very fact that some people, ordinary women who believe firmly in peace, have made an attempt is in itself an action to applaud, and an intervention worth supporting.
E-mail the writer at ksharma@thehindu.co.in
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