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Rwanda has world's highest ratio of women in parliament, NYT, 26 February 2005

Women's Voices Rise as Rwanda Reinvents Itself By MARC LACEY

Published: February 26, 2005

K IGALI, Rwanda, Feb. 23 - The most remarkable thing about Rwanda's Parliament is not the war-damaged building that houses it, with its bullet holes and huge artillery gashes still visible a decade after the end of the fighting. It is inside the hilltop structure, from the spectator seats of the lower house, that one sees a most unusual sight for this part of the world: mixed in with all the dark-suited male legislators are many, many women - a greater percentage than in any other parliamentary body in the world.
A decade after a killing frenzy left this tiny Central Africa country in ruins, Rwanda is reinventing itself in some surprising ways.
Women make up 48.8 percent of seats in the lower house of Parliament, a higher percentage than in the legislative bodies in countries like Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway, known for their progressive policies.
The rise of women stems in part from government initiatives aimed at propelling them to the upper ranks of politics. But their numbers do not necessarily add up to influence.
They are more a reflection of the demographics and disillusionment spawned by the killing spree that left 800,000 or more people dead, though some lawmakers are trying to use their new place in government to enhance the lot of women in what remains a deeply patriarchal land.
"Before the genocide, women always figured their husbands would take care of them," said Aurea Kayiganwa, the coordinator of Avega, a national organization representing Rwanda's many war widows. "But the genocide changed all that. It forced women to get active, to take care of themselves. So many of the men were gone."

At the end of the ethnic warfare of the 1990's, women greatly outnumbered men - some estimate the ratio as 7 to 1 - a result of the wanton killing of so many men and the escape of so many others involved in the carnage. During the rebuilding of the country, then, women's anguished voices were difficult not to hear, and they became what was seen as a powerful and credible force for reconciliation. "I used to see politics as something bad," said Athanasie Gahondogo, a member of Parliament and executive secretary of the Forum for Rwandan Women Parliamentarians. "It's what caused our problems and made me a refugee for so long. But now I want to have a seat at the table."
Women were a tiny percentage of those jailed for taking part in the strife between the Tutsi, who make up about 15 percent of the population, and the Hutu, who represent nearly all of the rest. One study put the portion of women involved at just 2.3 percent.
A minister of family and women's affairs in the old government, Pauline Nyiramasuhukon, is on trial on genocide charges at the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, but the heinous charges attributed to her, including inciting others to rape Tutsi women, are considered by many here to be an aberration when it comes to women.
"There's a widespread perception in Rwanda that women are better at reconciliation and forgiveness," said Elizabeth Powley, who has studied Rwandan women's political rise for Women Waging Peace, an organization based in Cambridge, Mass. "Giving them such prominence is partly an effort at conflict prevention."
During the drafting of the country's new postwar Constitution, 30 percent of the seats in the two house of Parliament were designated for women. But an unexpected thing happened in October 2003 when voters went to the polls to elect a Parliament for the first time since the war. They chose even more women than many male politicians expected.
"Some men even complained that women were taking some of the 'men' seats," said Donnah Kamashazi, a representative in Rwanda for the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

Six of the 20 seats in the Senate are held by women, meeting the 30 percent set aside. But in the lower house, which has 80 seats, women won 39, 15 more than the number reserved for them. Taken together, women make up 45 percent of the two chambers, just below the 45.3 percent in Sweden's single-chamber Parliament.