Out of the house, into legislature (Christian Science Monitor,OCTOBER 23, 2000)

[Paola Lucchesi <paola.lucchesi@mail.inet.it>]

http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/10/23/p6s1.htm

MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2000

Out of the house, into legislature

Saturday's elections in Kosovo will give women an unprecedented chance
to enter the political arena.

By Richard Mertens
Special to The Christian Science Monitor

UROSEVAC, YUGOSLAVIA

The walls are shedding paint and stains splotch the ceiling. But in this
drab, chilly hotel meeting room in southern Kosovo, more than a dozen
local candidates have gathered in pursuit of an idea as fresh here as
democracy itself: women in government.
     "I want to do something for my people to live a better life," says
Mexhide Behluli, a schoolteacher running for office for the first time.
     Ms. Behluli's name will be on the ballot Oct. 28, when people
across Kosovo choose members of their local municipal assemblies. The
elections will be the first since NATO-led forces occupied Kosovo more
than a year ago - and the first free elections ever in the province, an
ethnic Albanian part of Serbia that is emerging from four-and-a-half
decades of communism and a decade of Serb repression.
     Yet for Behluli and other women across Kosovo, the elections
represent something more: an unprecedented opportunity to gain public
office.
     A mainly rural and deeply traditional society, Kosovo has allowed
women few chances to participate in public life. This month's elections
have been crafted to change that. In a far-reaching decree, Kosovo's
United Nations administration has required that a third of the top
candidates from each party be women.
     "It's of great importance," says Edi Shukriu, one of a handful of
women elected in 1992 to an unofficial parliament formed by Kosovo's
ethnic Albanians in defiance of the province's Serbian authorities. "We
have the capability to have a gender balance. There can be interest in
women in politics and in decisionmaking positions."
     Setting quotas for women candidates as a way of redressing
imbalances in power is a common practice in European politics. In
Kosovo, it is part of a wider effort to raise the status of women
through education, job training and support for nongovernmental women's
organizations. Early on, election officials discussed quotas as high as
50 percent, which was rejected as too high, before settling on a third
of the top 15 candidates in each municipality. Even that proportion
alarmed leaders of the 19 parties involved in the elections.
     "They hit the roof," says an official who asked not to be named.
"They thought it was quite preposterous. They couldn't find enough
qualified women - the whole standard list of objections." In the end,
however, some parties not only found women candidates, but found more
than they were required to. Of 5,543 candidates running across Kosovo,
more than a thousand - 1,363 - will be women.
     "I think it says that the parties have taken the whole idea of
women in politics seriously," says David de Beer, an official of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is in charge
of the elections. "I think this election has jump-started the idea of
women in politics. Some parties have resisted it, but some have embraced
it."
     Because this will be the first stab at democracy in Kosovo, both
politicians and the public are trying to figure out what it means and
how it works. In the same way, the women in Urosevac are still feeling
their way as candidates.
     Schoolteacher Hajrije Rexha, who decided to run at the urging of
some politically connected friends, admits she isn't entirely
comfortable in the role.
     "I don't feel very confident about going in front of the public,"
Ms. Rexha says. She also worries about what might happen if she is
elected. "If I make a little mistake, it will be very bad for my
people." And yet she has no doubt that women deserve a greater share of
power in Kosovo. "We can show that we are as strong as men are," she
says firmly.
     In a strategy session in Urosevac, a bustling market town, Behluli
and other women candidates, bundled in sweaters and jackets, sit in a
semicircle and listen with equal measures of curiosity and skepticism as
a pair of Canadian political activists from Whitehorse, Yukon, expound
on the art of getting elected.
     Jennifer Mauro, an energetic, enthusiastic woman with curly black
hair, holds up a campaign leaflet and says: "That's how I got started in
politics, at the age of 12, delivering these."
     The women take this in with the sympathetic detachment of
anthropologists studying strange tribal customs. They doubt that what
works in Canada will work in Kosovo. "The people know me and the other
candidates," Behluli explains later. "I don't have to put up posters or
anything like that."
     Indeed, the very idea of campaigning strikes the women as
inappropriate. "If I do that, it would seem to people that I'm fighting
for a position," says Rexha. "That would be a bad thing. It looks like
you are looking out only for your own interests."
     A tall, thin woman with short gray hair, Behluli is a determined
candidate. Although the local assembly in Urosevac will oversee such
everyday business as patching roads and running schools, she thinks in
loftier terms about the need to build a pluralistic and democratic
society. Women have an important role in that effort, she says.
     "A woman, if she has borne children and educated them, can do
something for the people," she says. "Men are born only for politics. I
think that women have more feelings than men. I can understand life's
difficulties, and I can respect them."
     So far, women's influence on political life has been only weakly
felt.
     Men lead Kosovo's important parties, including Behluli's party, the
Democratic Party of Kosovo, started by former guerrilla fighters. The
UN's own efforts in Kosovo have fallen short of what many Kosovo women
expected. Of 21 local officials that the UN appointed to head provincial
departments, for example, only three are women. "I think we have lost a
little bit of the opportunity," says Ms. Shukriu.
     In any case, the test for women candidates will come later this
week, when they find out how much sway they really have with voters.
     Behluli has her doubts. "Our people don't yet trust in women's
power," she says. "It's the first time for them. It's difficult to see
women in positions of power."
     Still, she has calculated her own chances, and sees a constituency.
"I've worked 30 years as a teacher, so I have a lot of students by now.
They can give me their votes - the children's parents, too." After only
a brief hesitation, she adds, "I've done a lot of good things for my
people."