RADIOPROGRAM at WIDE!

Three opinions from the audience

Helga Neumayer asked three newcomers to WIDE Annual Conference (AC) for their impressions.


Listen to the radio program on: www.fonkel.net/AudienceVoices_final.wav
(click on the link to download the program, it will take up to 3 minutes to download)


Katrin Pelzer is a young women´s labour rights campaigner in the area of informal work from Austria. She heard about the conference because she is a member of the Austria WIDE network. After discovering the programme and speakers, she decided to attend. To her, the EU and its role means a daily struggle in her work. Especially when it comes to the terms of funding women´s labour rights. Sometimes she feels frustrated by it, but coming to WIDE and seeing all the different women working in various areas gives her power and more insights. At WIDE her confidence in her work grows. Day two of the conference was about the EU and its role. For Katrin, this day was the most inspiring, because she saw emotionally committed and experienced women in the panel. For her it is important to go home with concrete ideas that she can apply in her work.

Seconde Nyanzobe is a trainer at 'Search for Common Ground' in Burundi. Though she was in the Netherlands before, this has been her first WIDE conference. She was asked to come here as a keynote speaker on the topic of 1325 resolution by the Women´s Peacemaker Program. In the European Commission she observed that many times it does not really act according to the conditions and contexts of Africa. In a post conflict country, for example, or in a system with restorative justice, women are usually traumatized. And sometimes the same perpetrators continue to abuse women in the post-conflict transition. A real support for transitional justice has to consider the context. Also, the salary cuts that many educated women have had to take has been a big problem. This also affects many children.
Seconde learnt many things at the congress and she will share this at home within her network. She has a suggestion for WIDE: decentralize to other countries and to let other organisations know what is done, so they could be better prepared to act.

Mekka Abdelgabar is based in The Hague, where she chairs the 'Netherlands-Darfur Women Foundation'. She knew about the WIDE conference through a working group on resolution 1325. To her, the European Union means that the projects she is working on are funded here. It also implies that the Netherlands is playing a role in solving the conflict in Darfur, but at the same time, they are supporting the rebels. All this together with the Sudanese government, which makes things more complicated, also makes finding a solution more difficult. People, and especially women on the ground, are suffering and the problem should be solved as quickly as possible. Every day counts. Europeans are not doing much and Darfur is becoming forgotten.
At the conference she saw strong women, and that is what she takes home. But she feels sorry that nobody from Sudan was here, since it´s the largest country in Africa. She hopes that this will be different next year, because in Darfur are a lot of active women’s civil society movements.