After four and a half years as the chief monitor of the Organization for Security & Cooperation in Europe Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, there have been many moments and pieces of information in the more than 1,400 OSCE daily reports we have released that have made me pause and reflect, sometimes in sadness, and at other times in hope.
As the head of the OSCE SMM, there have been occasions when reports have crossed my desk that has underlined the fragility of life, often the lives of the most vulnerable.
There are thankfully other SMM reports that fill me with hope that transcends the ongoing violence, in which I read about women and men in the most trying of circumstances, not only surviving, but maintaining dignity and normality.
I recall in particular two female teachers on either side of the contact line, whose insistence on ensuring the children under their care learn lessons of love and civic-mindedness touched me to the core.
All around them lurks risks and danger imposed by a failure to fully cease-fire. And yet these two women – reflecting a reality the OSCE SMM sees all along the contact line, and indeed throughout Ukraine – refuse to give in to those siren calls that have resulted in four years of suffering and loss. Our monitoring officers reported how both women have kept their schools open despite the odds, maintaining sanctuaries of learning at a time when normality has been fraying at the edges.
The SMM has a broad mandate: one that inevitably covers the conflict in the east, but also the wider aspects of the ongoing crisis. Our approach is defined by the Helsinki Final Act’s uniquely comprehensive definition of security, in which individual equality plays a part, mandating us to seek out inclusive prevention and resolution to conflict. We have been mandated to facilitate dialogue to allow this to happen.
Those teachers on the contact line – who engage with one another to find concrete solutions to concrete problems – are just some of the many women our monitoring officers have encountered, whose combined stories – outlined in the SMM’s latest report on gender dimensions to the conflict – are one of the reasons why I have hope for negotiated resolution.
Our monitoring officers – trained to include a gender perspective in both their monitoring and reporting – are aware of the different ways conflict affects women and men, girls and boys. They understand the often under-reported role played by women in conflict resolution and in preventing escalation.
They also understand – because they see it in eastern Ukraine – the role women play in maintaining and facilitating dialogue, and in finding ways to break down barriers. They know from experience that equal input and contribution from women and men produces more sustainable and long-lasting peace.
The approach is not new, building on an inclusiveness that is as ageless as it is rational. I learned it as a child growing up in Izmir. My grandmother was a teacher at a time of great uncertainty. She maintained and instilled in her students a sense of normalcy that was waning around them.
She insisted on respect for others and kept communication open. She was in herself, and by example, an agent of change and progress, reaching out the hand of friendship and maintaining social relations. Under difficult conditions, our grandmothers and mothers played an important role in contributing to the betterment of those around them. We see the same also in Ukraine today.
Just like them, the women in schools and other positions of community leadership throughout Ukraine – whose stories and examples we have tried to reflect in our latest thematic report – are central, and crucial not only to the story of conflict and crisis in and around Ukraine, but to its resolution and the eventual return to the path of peace and normality. Their contribution to peace and reconciliation cannot be underestimated.
These women have built bridges among the young and not so young, patiently listening to all, women and men, and bringing arguments to the table in favour of a negotiated solution instead of a violent one. While others have sought to exclude, many women have insisted on inclusivity and respect for all, knowing that, just as violence discriminates against no-one, peace is either built by all or none.
We see the shoots of peace on the ground every day, planted and nurtured by a largely “invisible force”, bringing normality to local communities all across Ukraine, and maintaining it. Although seen across the spectrum and other walks of life, this is particularly so in the realms of education, medicine and administration, without which the very basics of normal existence would have long disappeared.
In Krasnohorivka, a small town almost directly on the contact line, we note, for instance, that 50 of the 55 doctors and all of the 121 nurses are women, in just one medical facility. At times they have had to work without electricity or water, forced to provide medical care by candlelight. Elsewhere we see a similar preponderance of women, desperately trying to hold together and maintain what remains of the normal and essential, keeping not just home fires burning but the very fabric of society intact.
The daily reports the SMM provides, and our thematic report on gender dimensions, reveal above all that it is important to look at conflict through a gender lens, without which the full complexities of life and societies in conflict go unseen, and the full potential of all remains unrecognized and unused.
And yet where key decisions are being made – at tables where this conflict can be ended – women remain under-represented; their voices too often unheard. Precious human resources – that have at local level clearly proven themselves to be a positive force – have not been fully brought to bear in resolving the conflict and bringing the violence to an end.
We know from elsewhere that when men and women are included – when there is gender equality at all levels of decision-making – there is a more sustainable peace.
For peace to be lasting, for societies to prosper, it is necessary to have both equality and peace; the bleak alternative is to have neither. It is a choice my grandmother made a long time ago; it is a choice made as I write by countless women and men in Ukraine today and one that the OSCE made long ago when it embraced in 1975 the Helsinki Final Act.
I hope the same choice – for gender equality and peace – will be made by us all, for us all.
