South Sudan: Women Needed to Kickstart Peace Process, Conference Told

With South Sudan's peace process floundering, members of the diaspora and their American supporters have come up with a possible solution: give women leadership roles and let them restore peace.

"Women bring order to things much faster than men with AK-47s," U.S. businessman and political advisor, Ken Feltman, told a conference in Washington that was focussed on bringing sustainable peace and economic development to South Sudan.

"The more women we can get involved everywhere, the better off we seem to be," Feltman said.

"Women tend to be what we need to hold things together and to keep us out of the tragic consequences of men just moving off in every direction," he said.

The conference looked to the state of Western Bahr el Ghazal as an example of how to build and keep peace.The state in the northwest of South Sudan has remained peaceful, for the most part, in the past five-and-a-half months, even as violence has engulfed other states and plunged the country into crisis.

State Finance Minister Lilian Riziq attributed that sustainable peace to the fact that different ethnic groups live in harmony in Western Bahr el Ghazal -- and because women play lead roles there.

Women bring order to things much faster than men with AK-47s.

Ken Feltman

"We have women ministers -- I happen to be one of them," she said.

"We have two women advisors to the governor out of nine, and we have 15 women in the state assembly. Basically, women are everywhere. You find them as nurses, as doctors. There's so much women leadership emerging at different levels of governance, " she said.

Years of war changed women's role

South Sudan's women are no strangers to leadership roles: the long struggle for independence forced them to move away from the traditional women's place as a mother and homemaker to the roles of breadwinner and peacemaker as men went off to war and never came back, Riziq said.

Women were active in the negotiations that led to the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, which ended the decades-long war of independence, but, in the first round of peace talks during the current conflict, the government side included no women.