Introduction
Since our founding in 1997, Žene Ženama has played a key role in the development of civil society in Bosnia and Hercegovina, by working as advocates for women's human rights in all spheres of private and public life.
Selma Hadzihalilović, Jadranka Miličević, and Nuna Zvizdić, the three co-founders of Žene Ženama, had various, complimentary motives when they came together to establish the organization. To create a long-term, sustainable Women’s Center – a safe space for women, where all were welcomed and strengthened, regardless of status, identity, religion – was not simply a desire, but a need.
“We had known each other through activism for women and human rights during the war. In 1996 we began meeting regularly,” describes Jadranka Miličević, co-founder of Žene Ženama “It was important for me to meet with other women who were leaders, who wanted to work towards a women’s movement. And to begin the organization, we needed 30 signers: all of these names are important; these women believed in this mission, they wanted to be active. Look at the diversity of their names, their ages, their experiences in the war: they all had different needs and they all were ready to discuss and to act. It is this activist part of us that keeps us responsive to the community’s needs. It is this activist part that we must never lose.”
Selma Hadzihalilović co-founder of Žene Ženama says, “I was looking for a safe space to be a feminist, to prove to others that ‘feminist’ is not an alien word. Bearing in mind all that the country had been through, it was difficult to open people up to new ideas. From the beginning, it was important to send as many different women to as many different conferences as possible: to share various perspectives, to travel, to prove that there is a world outside the boundaries of our minds.”
“We must try to live and act in accordance with the feminist principles of sisterhood and solidarity. The reason Žene Ženama is such a dynamic group is because our membership comes from every part of BiH society,” Nuna Zvizdić, co-founder and current Executive Director of Žene Ženama explains. “We have always been independent and fought for our independence. There are problems, there will always be problems. Thus, we must approach them with complete transparency and openness. We must speak about everything.”
At the founding of the organization, there was a focus on the immediate needs for psychosocial support for war trauma victims. The organization was initially titled the Center for Women Returnees – providing psychological, economic, educational, health, and advocacy support to women returning to Sarajevo after the war. They had direct, urgent and acute needs, and thus we focused our energies here first.
To support women returning, we also needed to work with all the citizens and structures of the society to which they are returning. And thus, in 1998, Žene Ženama was born as a center for all women. From 1998 to 2002, one of our primary programs remained Psychosocial Counseling Services.
Since 1997, parallel to these direct assistance efforts, were initiatives to empower other women to create their own women’s organizations and to link women and organizations together. We call this initiative Women and Women’s Organizations in Bosnia and Hercegovina. Strengthening the interconnections among women and women’s rights organizations is central to Žene Ženama’s mission. The Women and Women’s Organizations in BiH initiative continues to be our central program and long-term focus. This program is the skeleton around which all other programs and projects are gathered. This initiative draws attention to women's practical needs and stimulates women's diversity in three areas: organizational and group capacity building, non-violent communication and civil advocacy processes. There are two approaches in our work: personal development (knowledge, experience and creativity) and public approach (empowering and connecting women from urban and rural areas to engage in their communities; reacting to political and social phenomenon which influence lives of women).
Between 1998 and 2007, Žene Ženama has evolved and specialized. It has become many things for many women: a creative space where women can reexamine their knowledge through the lens of feminist theory; a venue to strategize how to contribute to a positive change in the human rights and male/female relations in the new BiH; a conduit for empowering, engaging and connecting other women and women’s organizations in BiH and the region.
Through the rigorous and constant efforts of Women and Women’s Organizations in BiH, Žene Ženama has accomplished 30 seminars (educational places for the empowerment of organizational capacities of local women’s groups in BiH), 120 roundtables (public debates designed to stimulate citizens to critically re-think important issues of daily life), over 480 workshops (safe spaces where women, in private or public surroundings, can gather to identify problems, needs and priorities, sharing the knowledge and experiences of other women).
We recognized the disparity between politician’s speeches about gender equality and their rejection to accept women in non-traditional roles; the discord between beautifully articulated gender laws and inconsistent or nonexistent implementation mechanisms. Therefore, we took as our mandate the responsibility to monitor the implementation of the CEDAW, MDG, Plan of Action of the Beijing Declaration, European Convention, Security Council Resolution 1325 - Women, Peace and Security, Gender Equality Law in BiH.
The purpose of this study is to document and capture the work of Žene Ženama’s first ten years and to plan for the next decade. We interviewed over 50 individual local and regional partners, collaborators and donors (only a fraction of all of our fellow activists) and asked questions in three key areas, what has been the state of women’s human rights in BiH, what projects have we undertaken together to improve things, and where must we now focus our efforts, energy and activism.
In the pages that follow we summarize our activities and cull our findings. We have organized this report into five main areas:
- Peace - Making and the Region.
As you will see, the factors that affect women’s rights – societal, cultural, economic, regional, political – are so enmeshed that it is impossible to untwine them. The ills and virtues in each area constantly collide and complicate an already complex matrix of factors. In each section, we describe the context for our work and the projects we have undertaken over the past ten years to benefit women in this field. The success of our programming is dependent on the continued mutual support, collaboration, diversity, and activism of our partner NGOs and human rights networks.
THE STYDY OF ŽENE ŽENAMA FROM 1997 TO 2007, by Molly Kleiman