EUROPE - News

Nearly two decades after the Bosnian War ended, thousands of Bosnian women who were victims of sexual violence are still seeking justice.

More than 2,500 women from 140 countries traveled to İstanbul on Thursday for the start of the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) 2012 forum.

A new partnership between the EU and UN Women set up to strengthen cooperation between the two organizations on their work on empowering women and gender equality, was today signed by High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/ Vice President of the Commission Catherine Ashton and Commissioner for Development Andris Piebalgs, with Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women Michelle Bachelet.

Twenty years ago this month, war broke out in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the main act in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. In Sarajevo, the country's capital that once proudly hosted the Winter Olympics, 11,541 red chairs on the main street mark the grim anniversary. One for every citizen killed during the almost four years of the city's siege, the longest in recent history. When this bloodiest conflict on European soil since World War II ended in 1995, the toll was staggering: two million displaced, 100,000 dead, and an estimated 20,000 women systematically raped, though the real number will never be unveiled from under the heavy stigma.

She had expected a job in a hotel. But when Valentina arrived here two months ago from Romania, the man who helped her get here — a man she had considered her boyfriend — made it clear that the job was on the side of the road.

They have been beaten, spat at and cursed. Jeered, mocked and ignored. But a few dozen women dressed in black regularly stand silently on Belgrade's main streets. They hold signs demanding an end to war, advocating human rights or reminding people of the bloody ethnic clashes in the former Yugoslavia that Serbia itself had triggered in the 1990s.

Rights group Amnesty International has slammed the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina for neglecting women survivors of wartime rape.

The second Dutch National Action Plan 1325 (NAP 1325-II) kicked off on 21 February 2012. Nuffic is one of the 40 signatories of the four-year plan, which aims to improve the political position of women in conflict zones in Afghanistan, Burundi, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan, the Republic of South Sudan and the MENA region.

The signing ceremony in Belgrade this Thursday officially launched a project dubbed “Support for Gender Mainstreaming in Security Sector Reform in the Western Balkans”, Serbian Defense Minister Dragan Šutanovac said. Šutanovac said that today women have an important role in the armed forces, providing a new quality and capacity in response to security challenges and global threats.

Would the world be better off with more women at the helm? A recent book by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, quoted by Prof. Joseph S. Nye in Project Syndicate, concludes that the answer is definitely yes.