Kathleen
B. Jones is professor emerita of Women’s Studies at San
Diego State University and Visiting Research Fellow at University
of California, Davis, where she directs an NEH seminar for schoolteachers
on the political theory of Hannah Arendt. She has been active
in the field of women and politics and feminist theory since
1975, publishing widely on feminism and political theory in
both scholarly and popular journals, including Compassionate
Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women (Routlledge,
1993), Living Between Danger and Love: The Limits of Choice,
(Rutgers University Press, 2000); and The Political Interests
of Gender Revisited, with Anna Jonasdottir, (Manchester
University Press, 2009). Her latest book, Diving
for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt
(Thinking Women Books, 2013) explores Hannah Arendt’s
influence in Jones’ life. Her most recent essay in Los
Angeles Review of Books is
His
Emily Dickinson: The Visual Poetics of Terence Davies's A
Quiet Passion.
Her
website describes her as “a chronic activist, philanthropist,
scholar, artist, and internationalist.” In her memoir,
she calls herself a 
“zealot.”
Swanee Hunt, daughter of the oil magnate H. L. Hunt, founder
of a non-profit foundation committed to social justice, former
US Ambassador to Austria, creator of the Women and Public Policy
Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School and of the Institute
for Inclusive Security, is talking about her new book, Rwandan
Women Rising, before a large crowd at the Cambridge Forum
in Harvard Square.
“I saw what happened [in Bosnia] when zero women were
involved [in the peace process]. The settlement was not a success;
the country of Bosnia is still frozen, politically and economically.”
That’s why, Hunt explains, having women centrally involved
in post-conflict societies is critical to the success of rebuilding
efforts. Looking at Rwanda “from the perspective of having
worked with women leaders in sixty countries for more than two
decades,” she writes in Rwandan Women Rising,
“I’ve become convinced that the best way to reduce
suffering and to prevent, end, and stabilize conflicts is to
elevate women.”
Sharing
the stage with Hunt at the Cambridge Forum is Chantal Kayitesi,
a Rwandan genocide survivor featured in Hunt’s book. “Before
I talk about my experience,” Kayitesi says, “I want
to thank Ambassador Swanee Hunt for writing this book. It is
a very important book, not only for Rwandans, but for women
all over the world.”
“And
Chantal,” Hunt responds, “I want to say, in a way,
it’s embarrassing for me to be talking about Rwanda when
I have one of the great women of Rwanda here. So, please forgive
me when I say things that are stupid.”
“No,
no you didn’t,” Kayitesi reassures her.
To
those who know her best, the exchange is typical of Swanee Hunt.
Readers of Rwandan Women Rising will find it echoed
in her description of the collaborative process behind the book
— which, she hopes, “lets Rwandan women speak for
themselves.” And they do indeed speak eloquently throughout
this nearly 400-page “guidebook for a journey toward justice,”
as Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf calls it on the
back cover.
“This
isn’t my story,” Hunt writes in the introduction.
“Those who’ve lived it have had final say in how
their experiences are represented for the world to appreciate.”
Swanee Hunt is “a chronicler, a witness,” but a
witness with attitude, and the means to effect positive social
change. After reading Rwandan Women Rising, along with parts
of her memoir and other biographical sources, I’ve learned
a lot about her path; raised in a politically conservative family,
she eventually became a fierce promoter of women’s leadership
capacities and other progressive causes. I was eager to talk
with this “chronic activist” about what stoked her
passionate engagement with Rwanda.
“I
started working in the inner city in Denver . . . with gangs,
employment issues, homelessness, et cetera,” she tells
me when we connect by phone a few days before she’s leaving
for the book’s launch in Rwanda. “It was through
the grant-making efforts of the Hunt Alternatives Fund,”
a non-profit foundation she co-founded with her sister, Helen,
in 1981.
“We
were looking for solutions and I realized we needed an inclusive
approach. I developed a real mantra in my work: whatever work
we’re doing, the people affected by it need to be part
of the work. They know what’s going on. And what we found,
in terms of the people wisest on the ground about how to design
solutions, was they tended to be disproportionately women. Now,
I’ve worked on this so long and in 60 countries, it makes
sense to me; what we hear all over the world is how practical
women are.”
In
her memoir Half-Life of a Zealot, Hunt writes that,
when asked how she “wound up so different from her parents’
conservative ways,” she doesn’t “fully accept
the premise” of the question. Despite how starkly her
political perspective diverged from her parents’ views,
she remains “more surprised by how many of their bedrock
attitudes and inclinations are fundamental to my thinking —
particularly their insistence that every person is responsible
for changing the world.” Discussing the trajectory of
her life’s work, the theme of responsibility runs like
a red thread through it.
From
1993 to 1997, Hunt was US Ambassador to Austria, a country bordering
the former Yugoslavia. She witnessed firsthand the atrocities
perpetrated when Bosnian Serb forces, with the support of the
Yugoslav army, targeted Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croatian
civilians. By 1995, some 100,000 were killed, with the overwhelming
majority of victims, around 80 percent, Bosniak. Her experiences
in Bosnia, both during and after the conflict, led to the publication
of three books on the subject and left an indelible mark on
her.
In
the introduction to Rwandan Women Rising, Hunt writes
about feeling like a failure as a leader. A policy maker with
President Clinton’s ear, along with Hillary’s, she
failed to urge intervention in Rwanda. I asked about her sense
of personal responsibility.
“I
don’t want to be maudlin or have a messianic view of myself,
as if I could have stopped this genocide. But, on the other
hand, I must not be in denial that I was not talking to the
president about Rwanda. I was talking about Bosnia. Frankly,
I saw Rwanda one night on a television screen. That’s
how much I was thinking about Rwanda. I was engulfed in a different
genocide, the one in Bosnia . . . but we have to hold ourselves
accountable.”
Returning
to the United States in 1997, Hunt was invited by Joseph Nye,
then dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, to create the Women
and Public Policy Program, which she directed for 10 years.
The main activity of the program was to bring women from different
countries and a variety of conflict zones to Harvard to join
in conversation with policy makers. The idea grew out of what
she’d observed in Bosnia, and chronicled in This Was
Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, about
women working across the divide.
“I
thought, I’m learning something here about how these women
are working across the lines. Let’s bring women from even
more different places, as different as possible . . . Let’s
bring them from 10 conflict areas — a group of 11 women
from 10 conflicts; large enough so when they go back they can
have an impact. It was very successful. We started in 1999 and
it’s been ongoing for 18 years. That program was my contribution
to the field of international relations, international security.
Let me share one small example: I vividly recall Leon Fuerth,
who was Vice President Gore’s national security advisor,
standing in a big room, talking to two very tall South Sudanese
women. He’s straining his neck to look up and they graciously
look down and are explaining why the delivery of food is causing
death and destruction. Because wherever the food is dropped
the armed forces come in to grab it and burn the village and
take the women as sex slaves. They say there’s a bill
out of Congress. It will have all these horrible consequences
and there’s another way to provide aid. I’m just
standing there listening, and I see Leon reach into his coat
pocket, take out his cell phone, and call the White House. He
says, ‘There’s a bill on the president’s desk.
Pull it!’ It makes me shiver to think of all the times
something like that has happened over the last two decades.”
Talking
about the importance of involving those on the ground in policy-making
and political transformation brings the conversation back to
Rwanda, and the question of how a country wracked by genocide
now stands at the top of the list of parliaments with the highest
representation of women. Rwandan Women Rising charts
the course of that change.
During
more than a decade and a half of work with Rwandan women leaders,
Hunt and her colleagues conducted scores of interviews to tell
the remarkable story of women’s empowerment in the political
aftermath of the 1994 genocide. At the Cambridge Forum, Chantal
Kayitesi recounted her own family’s gruesome experience
of the 100 days of horror, when house-to-house killings took
the lives of nearly one million Rwandans — one 10th of
the country’s population — and drove another two
million into exile. Hunt calls it a time of “chaos that
cracked open the culture” — an opening that found
many women like Kayitesi, unused to leadership roles, with no
option except to begin to organize to repair their lives and
their society.
Without
obscuring that event’s tragic scope, Hunt’s book
focuses on Rwanda’s extraordinary ‘rebirth,’
and the no less astonishing story of women’s rise into
key positions. In 40 short chapters divided into five sections,
it tracks the effects of “decades of violence and prejudice”
fanned by the legacy of Belgian colonial oppression, which preceded
the ’94 massacres. Weaving a series of vignettes drawn
from extensive interviews around key themes, Hunt showcases
the efforts of “dynamic, determined female leaders,”
who took on “central roles in all facets of the restoration
of their country.” Today, women hold 64 percent of parliamentary
seats and dominate the cabinet. The book’s broadest purpose
is to present Rwanda to the world as an inspiring exemplar of
transformation.
When
I ask her to speculate about the audience for her book, Hunt
tells me, “I wrote this book and am putting my shoulder
behind it, because I think it’s applicable to any country
in the world. It shows how a country transforms not because
of politicians, but because, in the transformation, you get
the participation of the entire society.”
One
of the most remarkably instructive strategies Rwandan women
developed was their innovative use of the 30 percent quota written
into the new constitution, insuring 24 of the 80 seats in the
lower chamber were set aside for women. Aloisea Inyumba, whom
Hunt told me is “the real hero of the story,” had
pioneered the creation of multilayered women’s councils
in the post-conflict period, a power pyramid reaching from the
village to the national level. Women elected to various levels
of the councils had already gained valuable political experience
well in advance of the first elections held after the constitutional
referendum in 2003. As a result, in 2003, “women won 48.8
percent of the seats in the lower house of Parliament, far surpassing
the newly mandated 30 percent.” And, by the next election,
many women decided they’d compete for the non-set-aside
seats, leaving the quota seats open for other women. As Alphonsine
Mukarugema, a Parliamentary member elected in 2003 and still
serving, explains in the book, “Many of us thought that
to mobilize women it was important to get others to take our
places. Many of the other representatives from 2003 did the
same.” The result? In 2008, women’s representation
rose to 56 percent — and today it’s 64 percent.
Of
course, the struggle around gender dynamics continues, both
within parliament and beyond. Debate persists about “the
value of gender balance,” which, Hunt writes, “is
ultimately not about numbers; it’s about the wisdom of
seeking out people with a wide variety of perspectives, values,
life stories, social roles, and other differences.” Hunt
notes that in Rwanda the notion of gender complementarity, “harkening
back to Rwandan tradition,” had a certain compelling role
in advancing women in politics. But Hunt acknowledges that this
traditional notion may also “have a major downside as
the Rwandan women’s movement evolves”: “Despite
the value allotted to women’s domestic roles, no major
moves to update husband-wife expectations [or to address the
sensitive issue of alternative sexualities] have accompanied
the social and political shift toward women in the workforce.”
A considerable
division of opinion remains on two issues Hunt discusses: the
effectiveness of the gacaca process of accountability,
which women helped design and implement, and the legacy of Paul
Kagame, who has ruled the country since 2000 with what some
consider “strongman” tactics.
In
November 1994, an International Criminal Tribunal was created
to prosecute those bearing great responsibility for genocidal
events. In addition, national courts prosecuted thousands of
others involved in the genocide. But because of the slowness
of the formal justice process, as well as its remove from the
scenes of the crimes, the traditional system of local courts
known as gacaca was reestablished. More than 12,000
local courts heard more than a million cases of suspects accused
of all crimes except planning the genocide; many viewed this
as a local truth-telling and reconciliation process. Some scholars,
such as Susan Thomson, have contended that gacaca processes
“reinforc[ed] the power of the post-genocide government
at the expense of individual processes of reconciliation.”
Yet Hunt writes positively about the central role women played
in the “more than 12,000 community courts […] set
up in villages and towns across the country,” contending
it was the proximity of these courts to the people and communities
that allowed them to have a transformational impact. Still,
she acknowledges the great risks involved in giving testimony
and the losses many incurred.
Because
Kagame’s rule has precluded a robust opposition, and even
a genuinely free press, scholars of African politics such as
Filip Reyntjens view his reign as “a clear case of hegemonic
authoritarianism, where regular, seemingly multiparty elections
serve only to consolidate a dictatorship.” Having successfully
altered the country’s constitution to remove presidential
term limits, and winning the endorsement of the Rwandan Patriotic
Front (RPF) Congress, he now seems poised to win another seven-year
term. Although acknowledging that Kagame “holds full sway
over his governing apparatus and society as a whole,”
Hunt disagrees with the view that the “president wants
little opposition” or only promotes “weak officials
below him.” “Certainly,” she writes in the
introduction, “there’s enough goodwill in the country
and beyond toward Paul Kagame that I feel comfortable not dealing
with the question of his political standing. But also settling
such controversies is beyond the scope of this book.”
She continues: “This book lets Rwandan women speak for
themselves, and I won’t edit out their dogmatic assertion
that President Kagame was a central figure promoting their leadership.”
Readers
will have to decide for themselves whether Hunt’s assessments
put to rest lingering concerns about the effectiveness of the
reconciliation process, or the openness of democracy in Rwanda
today. In the epilogue, Hunt writes of her conviction that we
can learn from “countries of every size, political structure,
and economic status.” There’s no doubt that the
stories in Rwandan Women Rising carry lessons about the importance
of fostering and maintaining women’s leadership to achieve
“enduring stability and meaningful reunification”
in conflict-ridden societies across the globe.
“Might
it apply even to contemporary US politics?” I ask at the
close of our conversation.
Hunt
concludes on a characteristically hopeful, proactive note: “I
have a lot of Republican friends and I want to go to them and
say, hey, why don’t we spend an evening together and talk
about how the Rwanda women organized.”
