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http://www.peaceisloud.org/the-womens-court-a-feminist-approach-to-justice/
“The Bosnia Women’s Court was the first of its kind in the Europe
region.”
“What is critical about the Women’s Court in Sarajevo was the
way it was constructed for and with the full participation of women victims
themselves. Women designed the court. Women testified. Women were the experts
and judges.”
BOSNIA WOMEN’S COURT: A FEMINIST APPROACH TO JUSTICE – FEMINIST
JUSTICE IS VICTIM-CENTERED
An interview by Peace is Loud with Karima Bennoune, University of California-Davis Professor of Law, author of Your Fatwa Does Not
Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, and Peace is Loud
speaker
From 1991 through 2001, a series of conflicts, including the
Bosnian War, were fought on the territory of the Former Yugoslavia. During that
time, ethnic, sexual and economic violence against
women was rampant and rape was used as a tool for “ethnic
cleansing”. Neither international nor domestic trials adequately addressed
these multiple forms of violence against women, and neither was focused on the
interests of victims. It was evident that a court designed by and for women was
needed in order to develop a feminist approach to justice in this context.
Recognizing this need, diverse women’s organizations, including
the Mothers of the Enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa, Women’s Forum, and Foundation CURE from Bosnia and Herzegovina;
the Centre for Women’s Studies and the Centre for Women War Victims – ROSA from
Croatia; the Kosovo Women’s Network;
the National Council for Gender Equality from
Macedonia; Anima from Montenegro; Women’s Lobby Slovenia; and Women’s Studies and Women in Black from Serbia worked for the past
five years to organize a Women’s Court. The Court was a ground-breaking event.
During its hearings, which took place May 7-10, 2015 in Sarajevo, Bosnia, women
testified publicly about their experiences of ethnic and sexual violence, and
about militarism and economic harms throughout the wars that engulfed the
region during the 1990s.
The Women’s March on May 7 through the Streets of Sarajevo.
Peace is Loud: How do you see women’s courts worldwide providing
a pathway for justice, especially on issues like violence against women? How do
you see them impacting international and national legislation?
Karima Bennoune: What is critical about the Women’s Court in
Sarajevo was the way it was constructed for and with the full participation of
women victims themselves. Women designed the court. Women testified. Women were
the experts and judges. The process employed feminist pedagogy, with the
organizers consulting extensively on the ground over a period of years, and
providing support to victims before, during and after the court met. The
Women’s Court was the first of its kind in the Europe region. This symbolic
tribunal was jointly organized by women’s groups from every part of the Former
Yugoslavia. As the Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie-Lucas, Founder of Secularism Is a Women’s Issue (SIAWI), who
attended the hearings wrote,
“This, in and by itself, is a huge achievement, at a time when Europe is
plagued with the rise of nationalisms, of extreme right forces that divide
peoples along ethnic and religious lines…”
At the Women’s Court, women testified courageously of their
experiences of losing family members to massacres, of mass rape and kidnapping,
and of ethnic persecution. They demanded that such events never
be repeated. This feminist re-imagining of a court in which women victims are the
central focus was very inspiring and thought-provoking to me as an
international lawyer. Their use of the model of a Court, but one that is
entirely re-imagined in feminist terms, forced me to reconsider the contours of
justice.
“I would like to tell this story. I would like it to be heard
all the way to Australia,” one woman from Foca, Bosnia said. The immense
contribution of the Women’s Court was to give women a space in which to speak
locally, to be heard globally and to write a plural feminist history of the
human impact of the wars in the Former Yugoslavia. All of this can spur the
fight against impunity – can spark more official, legalistic responses, and can
also change the way we conceive of justice by reminding us to always put
victims at the center. As one woman from Srebrenica, site of the infamous 1995
genocidal slaughter, said, “I stayed alive to tell the story. If we do not
speak, how will they be held accountable?”
Part of the list of victims at the Srebrenica Memorial
What does a feminist approach to justice mean to you, in the
context of the Bosnian war and also in terms of ongoing conflicts around the
world?
Feminist justice is
victim-centered. Hence, one of the noticeable things about
the court was that when women spoke about their experiences of sexual violence,
they did so in the ways they felt most comfortable with. They did not
necessarily share graphic details, but explained the impact the assaults had on
them. For example, one Bosnian woman told of being raped by Serbs in front of
her in-laws before the in-laws were killed, and of wondering if her in-laws
might ever forgive her. At the Women’s Court, she was able to tell this story
exactly as she chose to.
Feminist justice is holistic. As one
woman victim from Montenegro noted, “We want this court to show the
unbroken thread of violence against women, in war as well as in peace.”
Feminist justice is also universalist. Bosnian Muslim women told of their experience of losing family
members to acts of genocide carried out by extreme Serb nationalists. One woman
who lost all her sons and her husband said, “I was left alone but I fight on. I
hope one day justice will prevail.” Serbian women from Croatia also recounted
their experience of kidnapping, rape and other punitive and discriminatory
abuses by Croat forces. Women’s voices from Kosovo, Montenegro, and Slovenia
were also heard.
Above all, feminist justice is compassionate. As a woman from Croatia said, “We are all the same. The pain is
the same. It does not matter if we are Croat, Serb or Bosnian. I empathize with
every one of you.” The outstanding challenge is to make feminist justice
effective. The Women’s Court organizers have a follow-up process mapped out to
promote its recommendations, beginning with a September meeting in Montenegro.
What are some ways that people can ensure the stories of women
in conflict are not lost, even when the media and textbooks fail to document
them?
The most obvious way is to tell those stories ourselves when
others fail to do so. That was the contribution of the Women’s Court. “Victims
should speak freely. Books should be written against forgetting,” one of the
witnesses from Bosnia testified. This was why I wrote Your Fatwa Does Not
Apply Here, which also contains many testimonies of women’s suffering at
the hands of extremists and of women’s resistance. Telling untold stories is a
moral obligation.
One of the recommendations made by the Women’s Court judges was
precisely that all the information collected during the five years of
preparation and the May 2015 hearings be distributed in the media, through
education, by libraries and at memorials all around the world. We must each
contribute to this in our own ways.
How do you see social media playing a role in mobilizing support
for survivors of violence, and calling for perpetrators’ accountability?
I can suggest one simple thing: Everyone reading these words and
moved by them could tweet an excerpt from one of the testimonies, or from one
of the stories in my book.
How can justice, reconciliation and reconstruction be manifested
in countries where leaders are not being held accountable for human rights
abuses?
There have at least been some accountability processes, however
flawed, related to the wars in the Former Yugoslavia, both through the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
and in domestic courts. This is in contrast to some of the country situations documented in my
book, such as Algeria,
where the “dark decade” of the 1990s that was roughly contemporaneous with
those wars, and that likewise saw as many as 200,000 victims, has occasioned
near-total impunity. Still, the Sarajevo Women’s Court was a vital effort to
address the many unresolved issues in the Former Yugoslavia which is critical,
as so many victims said, for ensuring that these abuses not recur. According to
one woman from Montenegro, “Those who are responsible for everything that I’ve
been through, and that I am still going through, are in positions of power even
today. As they once organized the crimes in the past, today they organize the
denial.” I hope this feminist campaign for accountability in the Former
Yugoslavia will inspire women activists elsewhere, in countries like Algeria,
to undertake similar initiatives and create a global cascade of demands for
feminist justice in places where there has been none.
How do you think lessons from peacebuilding efforts in Bosnia
could be applied to present-day Syria?
One of the key lessons from the Women’s Court is that to
understand a conflict, the international community must hear the voices of the
women whose lives it impacts. We are not seeing Syrian women on our television
screens. We are not reading what they are writing about the war and how it
should be stopped. This must change. The international community must refuse to
accept the unacceptable. One woman from Bosnia spoke at the Court about 700
people being deliberately killed in one day in her village in 1992, early in
the war. If the international community had reacted appropriately, the ghastly
violence in Bosnia could have been stopped sooner. In relation to Syria, the same
mistakes are being made again. If chemical weapons use by the government and
sexual slavery employed by fundamentalist armed groups are not enough to spur
effective global action, how many Srebrenicas
will Syria have to experience before that day comes? The valiant witnesses at
the Sarajevo Women’s Court teach us that the time to act against atrocities,
the time to speak out for justice is now.
All photos by Karima Bennoune