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By Libya Herald reporters.
Tunis, 22 April 2015:
After what was another carefully planned UNSMIL consultative exercise, women activists and group members wrapped up a two-day meeting in Tunis today.
The forty participants had been been drawn from all over Libya and represented all views in the political spectrum. Their job was to review, from a women’s perspective, the draft emerging from the latest dialogue meetings the Moroccan resort of Skhirat.
The political divisions became evident in the final wash-up discussion this evening at the Carthage Thalasso in the Tunisian suburb of Gammarth. Among points of contention was a proposal in the draft that the army be “constructed”. There were protests that army already existed and that the word ought to be “reconstructed”.
While at one point, two disputants appeared close to coming to blows, the rest of the meeting applauded when Magda Al-Sanussi, UNSMIL’S director of women’s empowerment, took a microphone and reminded everyone that they were there to focus on issues that affected women, not the finer political points.
“Do not get into politics and forget the women’s issues” she warned. Women had to argue their own case because men would not argue it for them. Debating anything else was pointless, “You are just wasting your time:” she said “This is about affirmative action”.
Among the issues on which there was general agreement was the injustice of Libyan women losing their entitlements if they married a foreigner.
The last part of the two-day meeting brought together the three break-out groups that had looked respectively at the parts of the dialogue draft detailing the government and the document’s preamble; confidence-building measures and finally, security.
UNSMIL officials had handed out the current draft of the agreement reached at the latest sessions of the dialogue in Morocco.
Sanussi said that the women who had attended had wanted women’s issues to be included on the draft, as part of a process of fine-tuning. “It was a difficult process but we have this new product and we should be happy with this achievement”.
She said the delegates should give themselves a round of applause, because what they have done was really unusual. The delegates applauded.
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