Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian peace activist who helped lead thousands of Christian and Muslim women in a non-violent movement that helped end the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003, spoke Thursday at a Utah symposium, stating multiple times that “peace is not just the absence of war.”
“Peace is the presence of conditions that bring dignity to all,” Gbowee said.
Gbowee was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. The prize honored her role in founding the Women in Liberia Mass Action for Peace with a handful of other women in 2002. It also recognized her continuing activism to build peace and expand women’s rights across Africa.
“Most people see peacebuilding as when their guns are silent and wars have ended,” Gbowee said, speaking at Bellwether International’s third annual Bridging Religious Divides Symposium held in Utah.
The end of war does not signify complete peace, she said. Oftentimes, “the systems and structures that contributed to the war are still there.”
The reason Liberia has become “the country with the best peacebuilding story in all of Africa,” and a gunshot has not been heard in the nation for nearly 23 years, is because the nation’s “peacebuilding journey has not ended,” Gbowee said.
“(Our work) is successful not because we have any special superpower, but because we recognize that peace is not just ending wars,” she said.
“(We recognize) that the personal is political, and that the journey of building a community is not just on one person’s shoulder, it’s on all of our shoulders.”
‘Imagine’
Gbowee invited listeners during her keynote in Draper to close their eyes and imagine living a “picture-perfect” life with dreams, children, work, an education, a home, a spouse and a tight-knit community.
“Imagine you’ve lived in a small community where everyone knows you and you know everyone,” Gbowee said. A place where “you share views, you share prayers, sadness, laughter (and) joy.”
And then imagine, she said, waking up to a sound one morning and seeing the “little boys who grew up in your community, the ones you helped with their homework,” standing in front of you with guns, “asking you to strip” and “defiling not just older women, younger women, but little girls.”
“Imagine your picture-perfect world dissolving into chaos in one moment,” Gbowee said, and then seeing the world’s formulating narratives feature all but the voices of the women and girls that “suffered the most.”
“This was our situation,” Gbowee said, speaking of the Liberian civil wars that upended her life and that of many women and children from 1989 to 2003.
“(Our) world continued to be destroyed for 14 years,” Gbowee said, until she and a group of six other women decided to step in and take action for peace.
“(We) decided that we were going to change the tide, we were going to stand up for our children,” Gbowee said. “But the group of us that decided to stand up were not a group of women that had not been hurt.
“Each and every one of us carried a scar. Each and every one of us carried a level of pain.”
What fueled their drive, however, was the determination that they were “no longer going to be silent” and that they would “shift” the war’s narratives to include their stories.
“With $10 U.S. out of someone’s hand bag, we started a movement,” Gbowee said.
“We had no clue where it was going to end, but the one thing we knew was that we needed to stabilize our nation for the future of our children.”
‘The best peacebuilding story in all of Africa’
Gbowee and six other women founded the Women in Liberia Mass Action for Peace in 2002, and as they began working for peace, women began joining their work in surging numbers.
“From seven women, in a week we had 16, and then 240, and then 1,500 and then scores of women — 10,000+ women standing up for peace in our nation,” Gbowee said.
Gbowee and these women’s work in mediation and negotiation helped lead the development of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ultimately ended the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003.
Their work to promote women’s rights and involvement in politics also paved the way for Africa’s first female president to be elected in 2006.
“Day and night, we campaigned” to increase the number of women registered to vote in Liberia, Gbowee said. By the end of their 2005 campaigning, more women than men were registered to vote, she added.
“Liberia has become the country with the best peacebuilding story in all of Africa … because our peacebuilding journey has not ended,” Gbowee said.
Every election cycle Gbowee and her army of women “go into the villages that are threatening the peace,” they work with young men and women and negotiate with political leaders, she explained.
For 23 years this August, “we’ve never heard the sound of a gun in any of our communities,” Gbowee also said.
What kind of world do you want to leave your children?
People in the world today “talk at each other,” leaving no room to find common ground, Gbowee said.
“You are either far right or far left,” she said. “There is no middle ground.”
Gbowee invited listeners to “imagine,” once again, the kind of world they would like to leave their children.
“Is it a world of chaos?” she asked. “Is it a world where it is always us versus them?...
“What kind of world are we leaving our children?”
Answering her own questions, Gbowee said: “I have chosen to leave a world of peace.”
She acknowledged some might say, “But peace is evasive, peace is illusive.”
That is true, she said. “But you can find pieces of peace in your everyday life.”
Gbowee then said this is time for the world, for women and for people of faith to create spaces for peacebuilding.
This is “the work that we’ve been doing for years,” she said. “And this is a journey that is continuous….
“I invite you to come along with us” in a journey of “people-to-people peacebuilding.”