Interview: Arab Top Feminist Bloc Sets Strategies to Stop Violence against Women
SOURCE: XINHUA NET
BY: MAHMOUD FOULY, EMAD AL-AZRAK
CAIRO, March 8 (Xinhua) — The Arab Women Organization (AWO) has set strategies to stop violence against women and boost women’s role in achieving peace and security, the organization’s chief told Xinhua on the occasion of the International Women’s Day (IWD).
“Arab women are subjected to massive threats particularly in the regions of conflicts and political disputes in several states in the Arab world,” said Egyptian renowned ex-diplomat Mervat Tallawy, the AWO Director General.
The United Nations set March 8 to mark the IWD every year to show world respect for women and their social, cultural, economic and political roles and achievements. The theme for the IWD 2018 is “Time is Now: Rural and urban activists transforming women’s lives.”
Tallawy said that the AWO achieved several accomplishments, including the strategies it set for preventing violence against women and to promote their roles in peace and security in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolution 1325.
“The organization also provides a service called ‘A-B: Women’s Rights in the Arab Legislations,’ where it questions and answers women-related law articles and get them explained by legal experts,” the AWO chief told Xinhua.
She added that such a legal effort is meant to shed light on and simplify the legal issues related to women that might take long to research and understand. “It’s a very useful service,” she said.
Founded in March 2003, the AWO is an inter-government organization that operates under the umbrella of the Cairo-based Arab League (AL). It emerged from the Cairo Declaration issued by the first Arab Women Summit held in November 2000 and co-organized by the AL, Egypt’s National Council for Women and Lebanon’s Hariri Foundation.
Tallawy pointed out that the AWO has recently paid more attention to refugees and displaced people as a phenomenon that rose with the political developments in some Arab states like Syria, Yemen and Libya.
“The AWO visited refugee camps in Arab states, prepared a report and presented it at the 2017 summit of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in New York on the status of refugees, which in turn endorsed 10 recommendations stated in the AWO report,” Tallawy told Xinhua.
She said that the AWO drew world attention to the destiny of women and children in war-torn and conflict-stricken regions.
“After visiting refugee camps in the Arab world, we found that 80 percent of the refugees are women and children. We are working on issuing indicators and statistics to show policymakers and politicians the graveness of the tragedy,” she said.
The Syrian crisis, for instance, displaced half of the population whether domestically or abroad since it started in March 2011, including more than five million refugees who fled to neighboring states, including Lebanon and Jordan. Lebanon alone hosts about a million Syrian refugees.
Tallawy lamented that the world did not pay attention to the conditions of the Syrian refugees unless they started to go to Europe and they used to only focus on fighting the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group.
“The neighboring states hosting Syrian refugees are small with humble economies while receiving large numbers of refugees compared to their population,” she said, urging the international community to provide assistance and aid to refugee hosting states.
The AWO chief stressed the necessity to find “political solutions” for the crises in the region, particularly the Syrian one.
Tallawy also warned that at times of natural disasters, female victims are 14 times those of males “due to women’s lack of trainings required to deal with such disasters.”
She stressed that Arab governments and policymakers used not to consider the status of women in their policies but the attitude has gradually changed thanks to the AWO’s efforts.
“The AWO also exerts massive efforts to help developing states achieve the 17 sustainable development goals set by the UN, particularly those concerning women,” the AWO chief told Xinhua.