Participation of Kosovar women in public and political life

Since the war ended in 1999, Kosovar women saw a great opportunity to take the advantage of big international presence in Kosova for having a greater participation in public and political life. Their expectations were connected to international missions for democracy building and respect of human rights as well as international instruments that guarantee the participation of women in all levels of reconstruction and peace building in a war affected country.

In this regard, women’s groups developed advocacy strategies, either separately or through networks, by asking for a better representation of women on all levels of decision-making bodies. These efforts resulted into the establishment of the gender quota of 30% on the level of political and public representation, but not necessarily in the high levels of decision-making bodies. Thus, the gender quota supported the presence of women in the Parliament and the local Assemblies in all 30 municipalities in Kosova. While this 30% of women parliamentarians were appointed to lead most of the Commissions where the biggest part of the work of legislation making was done, none of them got appointed on decision-making bodies on both local and central level. Only one woman was given the mandate to run the Ministry of Public Services out of 12 other Ministries established within the Kosova Government.

The women’s groups gathered in the Kosova Women’s Network, launched many campaigns addressed directly to all political parties, where they asked for integration of gender perspectives in their political platforms. The campaign, called “Political Parties work for women”, developed little before the elections of 2004 and aimed to bring parties in concrete actions they need to take in meeting specific needs of women and girls from Kosova. Although most of the parties agreed to have these recommendations in their programs, no concrete steps were taken by the party leaders in supporting leadership positions for women members of such parties. Their “gender commitment” was simply justified by establishing separate “Women’s Forums” keeping the women leading within a closed gender hierarchy and leaving little space to compete with men as party leaders. Still, women considered this development as one step forward towards a better public and political representation of their leadership capacities and skills.

At the end of 2005, Kosova entered a process of peace building on both the local and regional level by starting negotiations with Serbia for the final status of Kosova. In spite of women’s efforts for having women integrated in the negotiation team, Kosovar leadership and UNMIK ignored this request. And this ignorance was justified with the so-called “political formula” required for such a mandate that happens to be met only by men who covered key institutional and strategic positions in government, like the President, the Prime Minister and representatives of two big opposition parties in the Parliament.

On 8 March 2007, women’s activists gathered in front of the UN and Kosova government in Prishtina to ask once more the participation of women in this ongoing status talks. With the slogan “We don’t want flowers, we want decision-making power” they brought the UNSC Resolution 1325 again to the attention, which guarantees women’s participation in peace building processes. Still, the formal process of such talks was concluded and no women were involved in this process.

This year's pre-election campaign demonstrated clearly the position of political women standing behind their male political leaders. All the video clips and big party meetings with the electorate gave space to the promotion of male leaders without the opportunity for female candidates to promote themselves. Although individual promotion was possible as a result of reforms in the election system with open lists voting, female candidates could not afford huge costs for covering such promotions.

In spite of all patriarchal and cultural obstacles mentioned above, women involved in political and public life demonstrate an optimistic attitude in their future vision for presenting the women’s role in all of the processes of democracy and peace building in Kosova. This vision is reinforced with the admission and recognition of the specific role of civil society women’s groups in advocating for participation of women in decision making bodies and their commitment for protecting women’s rights and freedom throughout these processes.

Veprore Shehu, Executive Director of Medica Kosova

Medica Kosova is part of Medica Mondiale, which runs different projects supporting women in war and crisis zones all over the world. For more information, check: http://www.medicamondiale.org/.