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Introduction:
Greg Brown, Program Officer for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), describes how the success and visibility of the Bosnia and Kosovo's Women's Initiatives actually jeopardized them by making participation more risky.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Visibility Causes Problems
Greg Brown
Program Officer, Balkans and Caucasus Programs, International Rescue Committee (IRC)
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A: It's interesting and it is disappointing too because I think at
the beginning we were very under the radar because people we weren't trying ???
because we didn't want to because at that point ???
Q: ???
A: We weren't making a big deal about what we were doing and as people became
aware of what we were doing it became more, not necessarily dangerous, although
it was initially because we were bringing people together. Serbs weren't coming
into Pristina at that point so when you have two carloads full of minority women
who are coming in and are freaked out to be in their enclave for the first time
since the war and also people seeing them you still had people throwing rocks at
them and nasty stuff happening. One bus that used to go back and forth was
bombed and all these people were ???. I think that minimized over time then as
people became more aware of what was going on people at a higher level that
didn't really represent what people wanted, became aware of that and tried to
politicize it. So you had in this one area called ??? which is where the divide
lies along the river where the north is Serb and the south is prominently
Albanian we were like that is going to be one women's ??? it is one region but
that was the most divided region, ??? the women separately and they were like oh
yeah we can see getting together, came back with women two days later as it
turns out that some woman from one of the parties had been whispering in their
ears we can't meet with them anymore. We were like "Why not? You were
totally with it before." They were like "No we can't," and that
was the end of the discussions.
It was very interesting because as much as
people wanted to tout the successes of it, the only way we are going to continue
to make progress is if we don't make a big deal out of it because these are
people who are not empowered within their society. If somebody comes up with a
gun and says, "Look you can't be meeting with Albanians anymore," this
isn't good for us because we are trying to create a separate state here. They
are going to listen to that. I think it is why you can view it as a way of
funding women's NGOs, it was much safer then to talk about it as a conflict
project because then automatically they are going to say, "Wait, what are
they doing here?" Whereas when you are saying we are funding women's groups
they are going to say, "Oh, women, whatever."
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