photo
SHARE | PRINT | TEXT SIZE: ＋ － | RSS

Across the Ethnic Divide

By Jessica Nkuuhe
The Isis-WICCE peace initiative at the regional level

Living in Uganda, where we've known armed conflict for a long time and people have been divided along ethnic lines, I was lucky that I came from a small ethnic group. It was easier for me to think of myself as a Ugandan. Then I went to a secondary school which promoted thinking of oneself more nationally, and then thinking as a woman and a citizen of the world, and that inspired me to see myself as a peacemaker, as someone who could bring people together.

When, in the early 1990s, our organization started documenting what women have gone through as a result of armed conflict, we discovered that women are very much confined to the private sphere; they inherit the prejudices that their husbands bring home about other groups. And yet really they don't have any cause or any reason to blame the other group.

Breaking the Isolation

So we thought, why don't we try to bring these women together and get them to understand the causes of conflict, to think about themselves as actors who can build peace from the grassroots, who can bring up children that think differently and promote peace. We began to bring women of different groups together and helped them break their isolation, learn to understand each other and build relationships. And the results were amazing. Suddenly women who had been suspicious of one another began to make friends across the ethnic lines and be concerned about one another. We realized what a powerful resource this could be for peacebuilding.

A group discussion

The first time they met, the women wouldn't even sit together. If anyone left her bottle or glass of water and went out of the room, when she came back she wouldn't drink that water, they were so suspicious of each other.

After the first week of training, we decided to travel together by bus to an area in northern Uganda to visit one of the groups. Some of them outright refused to come and the others, crossing the Nile to go to northern Uganda began crying, saying, "You brought us up here to kill us . . ." But when they came back they were singing together, and at the end of the first session some of them exchanged cloths as a way of remembering each other. Later, Ebola broke out in one part of Uganda. The same women who had been so suspicious of the group in the north were phoning us and saying "Are Betty and Margaret all right? We hear that Ebola has broken out in their area--is everything OK?" When we met the following year, suddenly they were greeting one another like long-lost friends.

Of course things are not yet perfect, but we've made long strides. The initial group started in 1999, and we've been bringing them together every year and this year, they will "graduate." Each one of them has formed a group in their area that is promoting exchange visits between women of different ethnic groups. Relationship building is extremely important for sustainable peace, especially at the grassroots level.

For us peace is not some mirage or good feeling of the heart, it is always about very practical activities. We started this at the national level, but then we began to think, "If your neighbor's house is on fire, you cannot sleep comfortably," and so we've extended this program of exchange visits and training to the Great Lakes region which includes the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan and Tanzania. There is now a group of 28 women who come together from these countries on an annual basis, replicating this activity and beginning to build peace in their communities.

Jessica Nkuuhe is Associate Director and Exchange Program Coordinator for Isis-WICCE in Uganda. She is also a member of the International Executive Committee of Women's Human Rights Net.

TOP