I wrote a book in 2002, Kyrgyzstan Women in Transition, as a reaction to the various interpretations foreigners made of what was going in my country at the time. I tried to show not only the negative sides of the socialist life in the last decades of the former Soviet Union, but also some of its positive aspects, including mass education so that no child was excluded from the school system; there was no homelessness; no problems with access to the available healthcare - the quality was sometimes very good, sometimes not very good - but everyone had free access to medical centres in every village. So there were positive aspects to the legacy, and there is still a social memory of these factors. I think we need to remember how it was achieved, and to insist that history cannot only be understood from one perspective. For example, people in my country still take it for granted that it is normal to aspire to a good education. They expect access both for boys and girls and that is surely a good thing. I described in my book actions undertaken by the socialist state to ensure that young girls from remote areas were trained up in special women's institutes which offered them full board and accommodation and allowances. This was a huge advance.
Today, this inheritance is not much discussed. This is because the transition period in my country was driven by the imperative to throw away everything that was there before. This is why we have been able to regress in women's health issues. We now have widespread anaemia among women: there were very low levels before. Goitre has increased by forty times. The fact is that the approach we had before insisted on everything being for the masses - education, healthcare. Now it is quite the opposite. Capitalism only cares about who owns capital - to them must come ownership of everything else. This creates elites. We have a growing gap between rich and poor which we didn't have before. We were not very rich before: but we were not very poor either and we were more equal. Now we have a few very rich people, and the vast majority in need. Moreover, women are more susceptible to poverty in this divvying up process.
How, then, do the people of Kyrgyzstan explain this development to themselves? In a different way from the approach taken by many foreigners. Foreigners detect only the enthusiasm for change. They know little about the way we lived in the past, and are inclined to assume that everyone was unhappy with everything. When it comes to inhabitants of Kyrgyzstan, as you would expect, those who have been advantaged by the transition are very happy with the whole process: those who have been disadvantaged see no good way forward - especially the elderly, who become nostalgic about what they miss, an active life working in a factory, developing agriculture, ship-building. Now, the majority of our industries are defunct, or have been sold to the private sector.
Young women also live a different sort of life. Here too, some have much improved prospects - they can go abroad to complete their education and this is a big advantage for them in terms of their personal growth. But we never hear from the very many young women whose lives have been deeply disadvantaged. Some have become the victims of trafficking, which was unknown in the state socialist period - not only because there were closed borders, but because there simply wasn't that level of poverty, and these criminal structures didn't exist. Now in the last ten years, we begin to see a strong women's movement emerging which is tapping into these experiences. But they are a long way, these women, from having good access to the media so that they can share with other people the many huge challenges they face. Do we hear from the many very intelligent girls who cannot access further education because they can't pay their college fees? They could be bright scientists, bright managers: but they can't afford the training and we simply don't hear from them at all.
We have so much diversity in Kygyzstan today - class diversity, income diversity, different aspirations and philosophies. But unfortunately, we hear very little from young, rural women where the old employment has ground to a halt and there is no alternative. She has to be very lucky to have a job. If she is not lucky, given the gender bias in people's attitudes, she can only hope to get married early. The average age for rural women getting married has dropped dramatically. Patriarchy has for sure been strengthened under capitalism in my country. At the Forum, we monitor these sorts of trends, we collect information and we lobby.
Recently, we made our shadow report to the CEDAW committee, and I'm glad to say that all our practical recommendations have been taken on board and reflected in the concluding observations of this CEDAW Committee, so that now we are working with the parliament and various state officials to amend laws accordingly, and especially, to see that they implement existing legislation on domestic violence.
This CEDAW transnational implementation network is wonderful, one of the most effective means at our disposal. Step by step, the women's movement in my country is gaining maturity, utilising the positive results and building on them. There is much to be learnt from other countries. I plan, for example, to involve members of my network in sharing experiences with their opposite numbers in Turkey. I understand from their CEDAW reports, that in the last five years they have had a tremendous number of new laws, and amendments to old ones, passed in relation to gender, and that Turkey, which is close to us in culture, is doing a great job in countering violence against women. So we are hoping to learn from them. Also, when the European programme, ‘From Local to Global', generously included us, there was much to learn.
I expected a lot from this Nobel Women's Initiative event as well, because we are planning next year to organise our own international conference on "Women and Security" in Kyrgyzstan, and so I was not just an observer, but I came to find out what can be achieved at such a gathering - who is doing what about which kind of security priorities? What is the concept of security in a wider framework of peace and democracy and how best can it be implemented? And there have been some wonderful surprises. I had some hopes, but I really didn't expect the level of effective implementation achieved by women who find themselves newly in political office, for example, in Liberia. Eva Mappy Mogan, Liberian Deputy Minister of Justice for Public Safety and Administration shared with us what she has been able to do since she took up her post in September 2008, under the presidency of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. It amazed and inspired me - this is proof positive of how much women can do in office if they have a feminist approach. It is an object lesson. Also, Barbara Lawton, Chair of the National Lieutenant Governor's Association in Wisconsin in the United States, has taught me more than I could have hoped for about how women in public office can work practically with local citizens for a global green vision. I liked very much the panel on women in governance. Rigoberta Menchu told us about her tragic personal and family experiences in the kind of detail that strengthened my resolve to hold our conference on ‘Women and Security'. She was completely convincing on the subject that women living in such violent contexts can nevertheless raise women's concerns and make them a priority. They can, despite everything, run for office, and fight for what they believe in, still have hopes for the future and not break down. This was very remarkable, and inspiring.
I also like the way participants at this conference have approached the whole issue of enriching and deepening democratisation. If we have gained public office - what kind of transformation are we after? What structural changes, cultural and behavioural changes, do we want to see - what new points on our agenda, what new values? We want to change everything! So - this ambition was very valuable indeed.
Finally, the conference we are planning to hold in mid-April, 2010 in Kyrgyzstan. We want practical proposals to come out of something that has been so thoroughly prepared beforehand, that women's security, domestic violence, violence against women is directly addressed as an integral part of the wider concept of national and global security. Srilatha Batliwala had an excellent idea about a way of doing this: namely the development of a new framework of indices on women's security which could be useful for national and international comparison. We will do this. I'm going away to work on it. I had come wanting to measure the interest in our event and to draw people's attention to it, but the lunchtime discussion that I organised gave me some really great ideas.
And in return I was able to share with that group an idea of my own that has worked well in our Forum. In our campaign to prepare 50 women to go into parliament, we have been evolving an approach to avoid loose formulations and vague objectives. The image I have found works well is to use a drawing of a house with a leaking roof, and lots of puddles on the floor of all sorts of different shape and sizes. Usually, we agree, people discuss the puddles - the size, shape, degree of danger from slipping and so forth. The last thing they discuss is what has caused the puddles and how to stop them. So in this way we learn how to choose our battleground so that we can have the maximum positive effect. In discussions of violence against women, for example, I try and help them avoid getting bogged down in the detail of how much we suffer. We know all about it in our circle. Instead, we need to get strategic, decide how to work with the police, how to work with legislation, how to implement it, how to work with women, and how to raise funds to open crisis centres. So nowadays, I only have to say, ‘Are we discussing puddles?' and they say, ‘Oh yes!'. It makes it easier to move on...
