Erstellt am: 10. 10. 2015 - 08:30 Uhr

Meeting Alaa Murabit

Saturday's Reality Check: a young woman demanding that women are seen as equal partners in Libya. A brave voice in a challenging region.

Alaa Murabit, as heard on Reality Check,
Saturday 10th October at 12 midday.

Alaa Murabit is an interesting person to listen to. By the age of 25, she had already travelled across her country of Libya essentially listening to and talking to women about gender rights. Her desire was to get more women engaged in shaping the future of her country.

Her work has been honoured internationally and her movement has become globally recognised for trying to affect change.

“My father brought us up on the belief that your gender was irrelevant, your marks (at school) were all that mattered”.

But outside of family life, she noticed that attitudes were different. The dismissive attitude of a professor to her studies ("you’re not going to ever use this knowledge in any meaningful way") bothered Alaa. And it galvanised her into founding a platform that sought dialogue in order to promote gender equality.

A few months after the Libyan Revolution in 2011 which saw the overthrow of the dictator Qaddafi, aged 21, she founded the Voice of Libyan Women(VLW). It is basically a youth-led organization with a strong base in her hometown of Zawia (about 40 kilometres from the capital Tripoli).

The Voice of Libyan Women according to Alaa calls for an increased investment into one of Libya’s greatest resources, which unfortunately has yet to receive the attention it deserves: women. The goal is to create a platform in which women can participate in a new, free Libya and in which they can be architects of their own future.

Women‘s Rights by talking to men and boys

There is the old phrase of preaching to the converted, essentially telling an audience what they want to hear. But that can affect very little change if real achievements can only come about outside that very audience. Alaa became very aware of this while she was touring Libya:-

One woman told me, I know you are telling this to me and I agree with you. But I go home and I have a brother and a father and they don’t agree with you, maybe you should start talking with them. So we completely shifted our campaign to talk a lot more with men and boys. Fifty percent of respondents to our surveys ended up being men and boys.

The clock is ticking in Libya

The United Nations has been pushing warring factions to agree to a UN brokered peace deal with a promise of international help to rebuild the country.

The problem is this: Libya has currently two governments - the internationally recognized Libyan government, that fled to the eastern city of Tobruk and the rival Islamist-dominated General National Congress in Tripoli. In the last 24 hours, the United Nations has proposed a unity government although MPs in both goverments have called this announcement premature. The hope is that the factions will sign the deal by October 20th, when the mandate of the elected parliament ends. But 3 previous peace deadlines have already been missed.

The collapse of Qaddafi’s highly centralized rule, meant that rival regions have grown and have become sources of potential conflict. Amongst this political vacuum is of course ISIS. So securing any kind of peace is important for the future of stability for Libya.

In fact, one of the most frequent things that Alaa hears in her travels across Libya is: we want security first, women’s rights can follow later. But she says:

The fact of the matter is, it’s not possible because the two go hand-in-hand. Once you learn to respect the rights of other people, there’s a lot less likelihood of conflict. A lot of people say, well women’s rights will come naturally, like society will just accept it one day. But I feel that unless society demand we are seen as equal partners, I don’t see that happening, I just don’t!

Jon Stewart is listening

„We are 70% of NGO’s (in Libya) but we are not the decision makers. We are being excluded from the conversation" as she told Jon Stewart in a talk on Women in the Arab World.