Irina Yanovskaya is an Ossetian journalist and activist who since the 1990s has been involved in peace-building and human rights work in Tskhinvali. In this article for Commonspace.eu she talks about how women in South Ossetia are trying to bridge the ethnic divide.
I took this photograph on August 16, 2008. That day my camera caught a multitude of images of the war's aftermath: wrecked houses, burnt cars, city streets strewn with glass shards and cracked tree branches. I can still remember the stench of food thrown out of shops and rotting away under the hot August sun.
The central water supply system was damaged during the war, and many people had to get drinking water from a spring on the city outskirts. It was there that I met this woman.
I was particularly struck by the look in her eyes, a look of anguish intermingled with despair, fear and uncertainty in the future. It made me wonder how many hardships women had to endure - after all, women along with children and the elderly are always hit the hardest during times of war. Some say that eyes are the window to the soul, and I for one agree with this phrase entirely. I am not just trying to brag about my photograph: those eyes really made a strong impact on me, and I couldn't stop thinking about them for a long time.
Two years later I ran into that same woman again, only this time in the city centre. I could see that her weary eyes had brightened up since I had first seen her, although there still was a hint of fear in them. I got to talk to her for a while. She told me that she was selling goods at the local market for a living and that she earned enough to make ends meet, but that is it. She said "but that is it" with such desperation in her voice that anyone who was aware of the current situation in South Ossetia would empathise with her.
That meeting once again immersed me in deep thought and I realized that it is vital to put more efforts into improving the position of women irrespective of their ethnic origin. All the women of South Ossetia have common problems, they all experienced the same loss and sorrow during the war, and they are the ones who need to continue giving birth and raising children in the future.
Bearing in mind these thoughts, I initiated a project under the title "Developing the peace-making potential of Georgian and Ossetian women in South Ossetia", which was generously funded by the Confidence Building and Early Response Mechanism (administered by UNDP). The goal of the project was to contribute to building peace and trust within South Ossetian society - through direct contacts between ethnic Georgian and Ossetian women.
We had to overcome significant barriers of fear and resentment in identifying women ready to participate in ethnically mixed discussion groups. But we soon realised that by the end of each meeting, the women tended to increasingly open up and share their feelings. In general, ethnic Georgian women seemed to encounter the most serious challenges. They told us how hard it was for them to find work, and how they could not use their native language in South Ossetia. Their stories conveyed a sense that there was little place for Georgian women in South Ossetian society.
They suffered from not being able to see their relatives across the border. Moreover, even though no one mentioned it during the meetings, we are aware that most Georgians who had stayed in South Ossetia during the first Georgian-Ossetian conflict feel that "we are not wanted in Georgia, we are regarded as traitors" and "in Ossetia we are seen as the enemy". The latter belief is further consolidated by their perception of war reports in the local media.
We also couldn't help but notice how unhappy the women's private lives seemed in general. Since most men were traumatized by the war experiences, a heavy burden is now imposed solely on women. The discussions revealed a number of fears and problems shared among the women of South Ossetia. Namely, most women were overly pessimistic and concentrated only on the future well-being of their children with no regard for themselves, let alone personal social convictions, hopes for positive changes in society, female leadership etc.
After the discussion phase we conducted a training session with a composite group of women of Georgian, Ossetian and mixed origin at a picturesque highland resort in Tsei, North Ossetia. Most of the women took an active part in the training and were enthusiastic in expressing their thoughts and opinions, although the Georgian women did seem more restrained at first. The main topics included the social roles of men and women in the multinational South Ossetian society, typical gender models and expectations, gender constructs of the society, conflict and violence, conflict analysis, needs and fears assessment, and the role of women in the peacemaking process. The behaviour of the women during the session suggested that they are confronted with these issues in their everyday life. Consequently, with the help of the coach they quite successfully assessed their needs and fears in detail, drawing from their personal experiences.
Nevertheless, when participants were asked at the end of the training to identify the problems specific to ethnic Georgian women in South Ossetia, active intervention by the project coordinator was required to stimulate an open discussion. This led to the conclusion among participants that even though everyone lived within the same society in South Ossetia, they had a very vague idea of each others' problems. However, following our initiative it is clear that women of Ossetian, Georgian, and mixed ethnic origin share some common grounds and experience a lot of common problems irrespective of their nationality and political viewpoints. We believe that an organised platform would greatly facilitate their further cooperation but we currently lack funds to extend our initiative.
I recently spoke to one of the Georgian women who took part in our project, and she told me that she ran into another participant, a woman of Ossetian origin, in the city. She said that their meeting was very warm, like a reunion of two close friends who had known each other for years. This story proved to me that mutual trust and peaceful relations are possible, no matter however painful the wounds of recent conflict still are.
Irina Yanovskaya is a journalist and director of the NGO "Journalists for Human Rights" in Tskhinval. She has been involved in civil society peace-building and human-rights work since the 1990s. She contributed this article to Commonspaceextra, the quarterly publication of commonspace.eu
photo: A woman in Tskhinval fetching water shortly after the end of hostilities in the August 2008 War
(c) commonspace.eu
Related articles on Commonspace.eu:
EUMM: Unarmed but effective (published on 9 August 2013)
Interview with Dimitri Medoev, South Ossetia's Envoy in Moscow (published on 7 August 2013)
Russia builds artificial border in the heart of the Caucasus (published on 5 August 2013)
