 Okay, well go ahead and get started for today's forum. Hi everyone, my name is Maria Antonia Montez and welcome to the US Institute of Peace. I am a program assistant for the Latin America Program and assistant to Virginia Bouvier who unfortunately couldn't make it to today's event. Our work is focused on supporting the resolution of the internal armed conflict in Columbia and we have done so by creating and hosting the Columbia Peace Forum for the past two and a half years as a space to educate the public on the peace process which began in 2012 in Havana, Cuba. We are honored to host this event on women working towards reconciliation with our guests from Hempas an ecumenical women's organization from Columbia. We welcome Norma Ines Bernal, Monica Guerrero and Monica Velazquez who arrived last night from Bogota to share and discuss the work they're doing in reconciliation, transitional justice and psychosocial support for victims affected by the armed conflict. Some small agenda items to share. Be sure to fill out your evaluation cards and hand them to me at the end of the afternoon. This event is webcast and live and it's on the record and if you'd like to join us via social media our hashtag is hashtag Columbia Peace Forum. At your seats there are headsets for simultaneous translation. Our interpreters are in the back booth. Please adjust your headsets to English or Spanish changing the channels on the box in front of you. If you have a question during the discussion please press speak at the box. Thank you all for attending today's event. I'll now pass it over to Susan Hayward director of religion and peace building at USIP who will introduce our guests and their work. Thank you. Thank you, Tonus. It is such a treat to be here for you today standing in imperfectly for Ginny Bouvier. Everybody take a pause to send up a little prayer for her. She's under the weather. My name is Susan Hayward as Tonus said and I am the director of the religion program at USIP. I've been working at USIP for coming up on eight years and what's a special treat about being here today is that working with the ecumenical group of women peace builders in Columbia was one of the first projects in which I became involved when I started here in 2007. So little story, I arrive here and my predecessor in the religion program had done some work in Columbia previously bringing together Protestants, Pentecostal, Mennonite as well as Catholic peace builders in Columbia. As many of you know if you're Columbia watchers you know that the church and the churches in Columbia are very influential and have played a role in numerous ways in supporting both track one official peace processes and negotiations but just as importantly doing a lot of work at the local level on addressing violence and supporting victims of the many forms of conflict that have ravaged Columbia for decades. And so I was sent down in order to see how we could continue to support the work the really good work that was being done by faith communities in Columbia. And what I found when I went down there were a lot of women who were doing incredible work through their churches, doing it as individuals within their religious communities both Protestant and Catholic but had also been doing some work ecumenically. But it wasn't getting as much support as some of the other initiatives. And so together we talked about how we could better support and strengthen and bring together some of the work around the country that women were doing through their faith communities. And thus was born the Ecumenical Women's Peacebuilding Network which it has been such a blessing for me to be able to watch and learn from the women in Columbia as they've continued to build this network over the past seven years and to see the incredible work that they've done. And it has so inspired me that it actually led me on a multi-year initiative looking at the role of religious women leaders in peace-building efforts around the world across different religious traditions. And on the way in you might have seen a notice for a publication for a book that's coming out in September that is looking at some of the findings of how religious women work through religious institutions and the challenges and the opportunities they face in doing so. And this book, I don't know if I told you this, my friend, the Amy Guss. But this book was very much inspired by these women here and the work that I had done with them. So again, it's so wonderful to welcome them here to the institutes and to be able to listen to them and continue to learn from them and to invite all of you in to hear from them as well. So with us today, we have Norma Ines-Bernal who had previously served as the leader of the Conference of Religious Orders on the women's side within the Catholic Church and now serves on the steering committee of the Ecumenical Group of Women Peace Builders. We have Monica Valesquez who serves as the project coordinator for the Ecumenical Group. Then we have Monica Guerrero who has been serving as part of the steering committee for several years with the Ecumenical Group as well. So I believe you're speaking in that order. Is that right? So Norma Ines? Take it away, in Spanish. Well, good afternoon, all of you. We appreciate your presence and your love for Colombia and the love that you have for us. I'm going to talk about from a role from the transitional justice in this framework of the peace process in Colombia. Having in consideration the pre- and post-conflict, and I'm gonna tell you why pre-conflict and why pre-agreement and post-conflict. I'm going to start with a biblical phrase leaving the spirit, seeing the oppression that they're being subject to, listening to their complaints and listening to their suffering. It compromise or commits to the liberation process. Exodus third. And from that we see how can doing an analysis, continuous analysis about religion, about reality, we see new faces, but from the passing of time. So what the needs are going to get diversified, the kids, the little children, the youth, they are victims of the dissolution of the family ties for all this world that we're going under. They're also suffering from addiction, from corruption, from the drugs, from the armed forces, from the social media. Women, we are the ones that are doing the struggle and we are also suffering all sort of violence in because we are trying to be the defense of to continue with the patriarchal society. The violence that results of this or to try to look for a way to live and what it does is that it creates a lot of victims and what is happening is that creates a lot of, increments the violence around the city. Women are suffering, every day they're suffering new violence, new attacks against them, new aggressions. The work for work, for inclusion, for peace and their reconciliation, it's very important, it's very urgent. Which way we can really open in order to perceive these questions that we are getting with the changing reality? Which ways we use in order to sharpen our senses, to hear, to see, to feel. So our insights can be able to move against these oppressions. So in this frame of potential things that we can, in order to build peace and reconciliation in Columbia, we find the work of women that are united, a lot of women that are in different fields. But in this particular case, the ones that belong to different churches and that we weave together and we work together with different parts of this civil society in order to research and create and build because right now building is a key word in Columbia. And then to work from the faith, from the point of view of the faith. And many of them are seeing our victim are being, our victims and they have developed a way of resisting violence and they have able to achieve very important goals in the equity of the gender. As a woman of faith, we support socially and psychosocial support when we build the peace and reconciliation. And we are able to provide space, secure a safe space to gather together, to recognize and to build non-violence ways to exit the conflict. This safe space and safe environment is very important for Columbia. Recognizing this and building this non-violence, non-violent exit to this conflict is going to let us unite efforts to, in order to, from different faith, it be able to reconciliate, able to create deep transformations in this very historical moment that we are living as a country. What are we doing? No, it's not a lot, but we wanted to do it well. We are, we go with the hope of achieve this peace process and for that we are trying to look for social resources, political resources, spiritual resources, religious resources in order to break with the inequality that has facilitated the oppression of many social groups. What the peace process works in different actions that allows us to be able to have more equity and allow us to have a very successful, fruitful life. So from there, we are applying the resolution 1325 for United Nations from 2005, respect regarding that is a reference in order to warranty the participation of women participation in the negotiation process of the peace negotiation process and opens the door to, in order to consolidate participation in this peace agreements that we are confident are gonna be signed. We work also for the heat to heal and the people that have been women or men that have been affected by the violence, victims that are direct and indirect victims and that implies the reparation, the complete reparation. And also we can do this through a spiritual help and we can only help, we can only do this with a very inner freedom, a complete inner freedom. We also, we allow the participation of different, of different churches or the victims and other, they can participate from different point of views and we are helping them in the process to forgive and also to heal. As women, non-violent women, we want to invite and participation and I've been at James and I were not long ago in Colombia, the leaders from churches, we have contributed to the violence in Colombia. We feel now that it's urgent to recuperate the culture of forgiveness and we need to, because we want to let that behind the vengeance sentiment, the constant feeling of needing to bend vengeance and that's why we need to move forward and we were helping to restore the social framework in our society in Colombia. We are trying to build social, be able to live with different communities, so it allowed us to create new conscious so it will remind us that violence is not just the only way and together men and women can transform the pain and the uncertainty in an engine that is able to build a better reality. As we were saying by a theologist, Delayda Jimenez, she lives in Barranquilla, Colombia. Other of the challenges, another challenge that the women have in the reconciliation process in the context of the post-agreement is to see the role that the women have in rebuilding and becoming mediators. So why are we talking about a pre-agreement? Because we talk about the peace agreement in the Havana as an agreement that is going to be signed between the government and the FARC. It's not exactly the process of the post-conflict. The process of post-conflict is the one that we dream to build as a society after the agreement has been signed in the Havana. So that's why I do talk about two different spaces. Other thing that we do is to encourage the restoration of between different government agencies with social organizations in order to give some input from what is happening with the armed conflict. And it's because there is a lot of... There is a lot of mistrust. There is a lot in between the society and the government. So we want to create a bridge between two shores. We want to look at the history and be able to see what is the reality that we have. We are looking to rebuild and we want to not repeat our actions or we want to be able to look at the good images of a good life and the way to solve conflicts in the future. Mainly we want to rebuild the ethical frames and the reasoning that allow us to live together and the legal framework and from the justice point of view. Also that we have that in the evangelical point of view. It's important from, it's very important in the pre-agreement and in the post-agreement. And this is very important because the justice can be in essence a loyalty act and a solidarity act that supports community, an organized community. We are trying to develop the... We're trying to develop the power, the local power in order to build stronger relations. And that implies to be able to help victims and also the aggressors. So we can help, so we are able to overcome and we can reach reconciliation. We want to help, we want to tell people that they don't have to supply or satisfy all the needs, but we want people to be able to exercise all their rights and enjoy all their rights. As the International Women's Table says, this implies that we have to change our mentality. And this means that we have to open ourselves to new concepts and analysis. We do hope, we have to able to discover how women were able to organize themselves to achieve what they were looking for their goals. And we know that were exegesis is the study of the Bible. How do we interpret the biblical words and terms? So we have to see women from generating life and also they can support in the social, be able to give support in social and in political order. We are developing safe spaces in order to be able to work with the victims of violence, especially women. It's very important to demilitarize our social life. So we can be able to control and have control over our lives. The way to peace goes through the elimination of the force as a way of solving the conflict. That women can participate in social life, in a community life, in a political life without any fear. The insecurity that happens on a daily basis it has a great impact on women. How can we disarm people? How can we improve our community relations and the relations between one and another? How can we just not just frame people, situations or conflicts? We are looking for a society in general to commit with ethical agreements that will help us as a new frame to live in a society. And that's why we encourage the participation of women as in the women summit. And it's very important that the truth commission that is gonna be created has a participation, a plural participation and equity participation between women and men. So from a perspective of the human rights, women human rights encourage the participation of women that have been victims and that allow us to clarify the responsibility of different perpetrators. So in this is being complimented by the ecumenical table saying, one peace with ethic and ethic for peace. In order to achieve this, we have in strengthening women that have been leaders in order to have reconciliation and the local level. We started with Susan and we want to continue with that. How are we going to do this? Giving tools to analyze the structural analysis from the church point of view so we can analyze what is happening from the social, political, theological and from different focuses and different spiritual point of views. We are giving tools that will allow us to rebuild the trust from victims and attackers. So we are trying to foment, to encourage participation spaces from the community with actions that will allow to repair victims and that would allow to rebuild our social environment. So that's why we join other people, we join other men and women. And at the end, I'll try to explain a little bit what we're trying to explain a little bit what is the ethical pact of women so we can understand a little bit better. But we do promote ethical agreements so we can overcome violence, inequity and inclusion and to eliminate violence against women and girls to the local and national level. Human dignity implies and demands respect to life as the more sacred value. We do go to try to heal rage and hatred that will perpetrate violence and in conclusion, from this first part as the Pope Francis says, we'll have to go to the outskirts. We have to go, that means in Colombia that right now we have to go to the process of the victims and with the pre-agreement and post-agreement because if we don't do that then our mission is gonna be obsolete. It's gonna be a way of life but without being close to reality. So what we have to see, we have to look for real commitments in attach to what is the legal and social framework and it has to be next to we have to forgive and we have to include everybody. So in order to do that, we have to continue and be hearing and we have to have a dialogue, an active dialogue, listening actively and then we have to study the public policies that are going to come out of that process in order to work hand by hand with different faiths in order to open to the civil society, to open our horizons to a new cooperation, a communicable cooperation and interfaith and in general with society, we are convinced that women are key in this process and this recalculation process and this forgiveness process and then we ask the people in Havana as it says the declaration of the life Congress that we have in Bogota, that Havana, they have to set the basic lines that will allow us to stop the world in order to continue permitting the greatness of the human being and then allow the restoration of the country and then they should trust in the Colombian people that want to do deep changes and then we can overcome injustice and exclusion. Today we come with real hopes. We started new anew and there was already a declaration from the seas, unilateral seas of fire from starting July 20th and we are working in the bilateral seas of fire. They're working on that and then be able to more dynamic with the negotiations. So this is giving us a lot of hope and allow us to keep on working and then we cannot let behind or not forget that in the gospel says you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world and I think that's very important that we should believe on that, thank you. Thank you again for the invitation, Susan. It's a pleasure to be here in Washington with friends, people that we always see in Colombia, that we share workshops and spaces. James, thank you so much for your support and your facilitation process in other spaces in Colombia. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the psychosocial support in regional women's circles. We work with women in different regions in Colombia. And that has been a very important process and it's the psychosocial process. So we begin from a point that without the psychosocial support and emotional support, it would be very difficult to be able to reconcile without that process of facing yourself. It's very difficult to restore that peace with other people that at a moment were aggressors. The psychosocial support also takes a process of restoration and this is also responsibility of the state unfortunately in different investigations that have been reviewed and that I have participated on the victims do not feel fully satisfied with the psychosocial support that they have received. Many of them have been called to give testimony for a very, for a legal process but they never take into consideration their pain, their suffering, the people that died, their husbands, the children that died and the process and the conflict process or everything that means to be a victim of displacement. So this process is new from the law 1448 and now there's support to victims but in investigations and research that we've done there's not a lot of satisfaction from the victims in the psychosocial side. We understand the psychosocial process as an integral and very important part of this as a collective peace and we think that we need to restore that social weaving from the community, the neighborhood in which these people come from sometimes they have to leave their spaces and how this is not an easy process. It's a very painful process and it has to be a collective process so that they can have better results. In 2013, we have a report that was presented by a group of women in the Pacific Route a couple of months ago and we see different stories of a lot of suffering, very difficult stories where women have lost people and they're confused, there's a lot of suffering, a lot of women that are not very close to conflict and they say, well, this is not part of my life but I had to go through this. There are also stories about a lot of male control in these different territories but also of their bodies and how sexual violence has been another way in which conflict has taken place and it's another tool of war against women. Also, in different processes, we understand that this psychosocial support is very important to recover a project of life that has been lost and that has to be restored at an individual level but also at a community level. So, in our association, we've started to provide different tools, not so much as a therapy but in a way, yes, but it's more a collective piece, group support and we give and provide space to women so that they can heal and develop again that resiliency and give abilities so that they can overcome a very difficult conflict. And we also help other women so that they can help other people and other women that have gone through this. That's why the circles in these regional circles as our sister Norma was saying in Susan, this was very important at the beginning when we were starting this group, we practiced something that is called facilitated dialogue and this is a tool in which we can talk and listen and understand the other person and in which victims and ex-combat and different participants can start healing and restore things that were taken away from them. Not all of us have been direct victims in this conflict in Colombia but we also have roots and maybe family, parents in this conflict that took place 40 years ago. So, these people are also hurt and they have consequences because of this, if you take into consideration that we've been in conflict for 50 years and this has consequences, so these spaces are spaces so that we can talk about suffering and pain in which sometimes in our lives we don't have time to talk about suffering and conflict can be a very political topic or subject and basically to talk about pain and suffering is not important but in this space we can talk about this we can talk about truth and I think this is a very important subject. Commissions of truth, we call them like that, we do memory exercises in which the victims and people that were direct victims can do this memory exercises in which they can talk about what happened and the truth that takes place is not judged. So this process of reconciliation can be achieved because when we clear out everything with the truth it's difficult sometimes to forgive and reconcile. We have talked about the fact that we work as an association that strength spiritual values and we try to recover hope and forgive and forget because when you do not forgive you still have feelings of hate and bitterness because of your loss, also bitterness, anger and other things we also believe in dignifying all the parties, inclusive ex-combats and other participants like victims, direct victims, indirect victims and other people that participate in these circles. We think that in this way we can also achieve reconciliation which is a process in which we are working in our country even though there's no that conflict like it was before we're trying to reconcile after some time, this process of forgiveness and psychosocial work, it's also a complete work that we have to build all the time but it's also holistic and we try to recover the initial situation in which it's gonna take time but we're trying to rebuild and start all over again. All the parties that participated in this conflict have different responsibilities. The state and the other, the antagonist and all the parties on the other side and this is key when we talk about the reconciliation process to accept responsibility so that this is not repeated again and how this psychosocial process which is individual and as a group generates conditions so that you can believe in yourself again and in other people. We also talked about the way that we also work in different values, spiritual values and we think that when we celebrate all together is something that has been missed which is trust and hope. We can have a new beginning and this would be a point, a very strong point so we can start all over again and heal everything that has happened to us as faith, as women of faith in the circles we also facilitate as I said before dignity and equity, faith as principles, Christian principles or spiritual principles but also your own faith, faith in yourself because faith in the word of each other has been lacking at this time. We also have a process of thinking of ourselves and taking care of ourselves, body, soul and spirit and how to link everything together in this complete process to heal and how you can relate to other people and this reconciliation with yourself which is gonna help to make peace with other people and as we said this is a process in which we train, we support but we also think that this process, support of psychosocial process is gonna help to reconcile and we think is needed. We have forgotten about this important peace and it's a very important topic and not all of the victims have received the support and that's why we think of the safe spaces in which we can talk and listen to each other, pray and celebrate in different ways even though there are different religious differences or differences in beliefs but we also think that women are empowered to participate in different regional spaces and some of the women that we work with come from regions that are far away from Bogota, we live in Bogota but some of these women live in small villages and the rural areas and small cities. To end or close, I wanna say that women in my country still have dreams and projects and we have a hope to live in a peaceful country we have a lot of faith in the peace process from Havana and this inspires us to be stronger at a rural level or local level and this inspire all of us to continue with this project, to continue working with this personal suffering and to face violence in a better way. This would be a little bit of what I wanted to share with you and maybe later on, I can clear something out for you or answer questions. Well, once again, thank you so much for inviting us. Thank you for the people that are committed to the work that we're doing in Colombia and to all the people that were interested in listening to us and knowing a little bit more of what we're doing. Within what we're doing in Hempas, we're also going through a training process and that's when we start with the restorative justice challenge because in Colombia, we've been, we have a lot of violence in our history and even though we're talking about new times in which we want peace and we want to achieve peace, we just talk about this as a concept. When we go to the daily life, we know that we have a big challenge to transform this concept and transform our lives and the way that we want to do it and achieve a long lasting peace and we don't want it to be just a document. We want to have a complete transition. So we have different experiences in different places or different cultures like South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Belgium, but we are focused on this justice process and the restoration of justice. We stopped thinking about me as a person or he or what I want, but we try to put ourselves in the other person's shoes and that's when we need to start understanding and find different pieces in this process, the victims that are aggressors, but the community as a whole, sometimes we only focus on two people, but really the community as a whole has been affected and this process, we see that in Colombia, in the daily life, there are a lot of feelings of hatred and vengeance and this is a more reactive process. So when we think about peace, this has to go further down than just talking and having a dialogue. This has to be a state dialogue and a dialogue, a complete dialogue and that doesn't affect me daily, not only focus on what bothers me. In campus, we started this process after we started getting training and we as a group, we have some alliances with other associations and we have different partnerships that share trainings with us. So we're always thinking about the women and spirituality. Those are the key subjects, word, God, Jesus Christ and his life to be able to achieve the construction of peace in Colombia. We also learn from the restorative justice through different programs and experiences. This mainly talks about some moral principles and ethical principles and that's basically what give us support as a group to recognize each other and this subject about changing our thoughts. In Colombia, we're always thinking about how to punish the other but when we think about restorative justice, you have to change this and Colombia is in the process of learning this. Sometimes we hear from the news to reduce some penalties for crimes and we think this is not fair but when we talk about restorative justice, we need to know that we have to work in a complete way. When we go back into history, we can understand history and understand what is going on with other people to complete this cycle and when we look in our personal history, we can think that when we're talking about blaming or punish other people, we have to go further away and to see where this cycle of violence started why this person reacted or behaved that way and we're gonna be able to understand better. Nelson Mandela says our mission in the future is to advocate to heal the wounds of the country and building trust between each other and not to start the battle against each other. Unfortunately, that's what we see in our country sometimes in our daily life. We always try to see who's a bad guy, who's a good guy and that has been affecting all of us. As women of him past, we also learned that we have three pillars to understand that there's a damage and to recognize the damage and we're not gonna talk only about the victim as a person, but also the victim in the community and that's why we consider that at many times the origin has not to be an individual one. We have to go further down to the community as a whole and that's why restorative justice cannot focus only on one person, but in general. The second pillar is the responsibility of the aggressor or the victim, not only on the aggressor, but also to understand the third parties and to understand how these people have been affected by listening. It's a listening process and it's very important that the aggressors acknowledge this offense. This implies accepting responsibility to try to heal the wound in a symbolic way. Sometimes we know that not always we have the chance to face the aggressor, but there are other symbolic ways to heal and restore this. Also direct participation in which people can accept their mistakes and this goes more into the legal frame and this is a process in which we can have an honest dialogue, open dialogue in which we can express ourselves, but we also need to have mediators because there are a lot of emotions that can come out. So there are different aspects that can happen in this process. Donna Hick, expert of Harvard, has been in Columbia many times and she says that when you punish someone, you see that person as an enemy and that's our problem. At many instances when we're in this process we see the other person as an enemy. What justifies the dehumanization of the other person and that's why to overcome conflict, Colombians have to replace the mentality of the good guy and the bad guy and to put ourselves in their shoes and this is very important and we need you to see ourselves not only as a whole, but as a person. It's not only about the good guy and the bad guy. Hempas has a lot of potential to be able to help in healing with restorative justice and as women of faith, we need to know these principles and to love other people where we give life and not only in a maternal way but also has to do with identity and to recognize ourselves as women and identify ourselves and to start something new. To be brave and to support victims, women are very important because they've been there supporting other people, other victims and to help them overcome trauma and women have been in that process so to help other people to trust themselves and we can achieve that in our spaces and basically to listen to these voices and Hempas, we are gonna continue to provide these tools to restore justice and to train women in different regions in regards to different subjects, legal subjects, healing and also the process of repairing the lives of the victims. We have started to work in this and spirituality has helped all of us to provide this assistance to other women and we are trying to get better prepared and to have a better relationship with the two parties to be able to start a process in which we are gonna be able to include victims but also to ex-combat and the community as a whole. So we are in the process of training as my colleagues mentioned so we are trying to have gender equality and restorative justice, 1325 Act from United Nations and this is a huge process to reconcile with different communities. The restoration is focused in a spiritual way, emotional way and also to heal other people and to reconcile and we have tried to base ourselves in which is the gift of God, what he gave us and this is a very important principle and where we come from because this is gonna basically overcome all challenges. If it's only us, we would have just basic processes of dialogue but we're able to experience that through the gifts of God we can overcome anything and of course we're gonna want to that there's not gonna be a repetition and that there's gonna be healing and this new process that we're working with OSEAP we are creating different processes for restoration in Colombia we're identifying many women that have been working with us for some time and we're gonna continue working with them to restore and to overcome those wounds that have been left through violence in our country and that sometimes we just leave it to the legal framework but we cannot forget what is the legal justice and the state from our perspective and past we started working three years ago with ecumenical groups and this are open spaces in which women can come to us and look to restore their lives and through the tools that we provide so we have different study groups we have different points in which we start with a biblical context and then we start studying the story of each women individually we also work in different circles with different legislations and we work in restoring dignity and symbolic topics with celebrations and political incidents and we try to deeply hear and understand these people to be able to support them and the circles we also work so that we can talk about forgiveness and we can talk to restore trust so that we can understand that the endpoint is not jail we know that that's not gonna change anyone and in this way we can restore and heal that damage that was caused and to feel that there has been justice in the same way in different regions we've been working with different circles of women so we can work with the community as a whole not only as a group, as a small group but we wanna go and prepare women so that they can apply the same tools and provide these tools in different communities in different regions we acknowledge that the political situation in Colombia right now is not the best we have different challenges as Norma was saying with different negotiations of the government than as far but we have that hope sometimes we can say that it comes from us because we're women and we have more faith we have that faith in life and we always live with that and we think that Colombia is gonna change it might not happen in this generation but we're basically cultivating this change so that we can change social justice as women we are trying to transform our country into have public and social action sometimes we can have public action with our spirituality and that's gonna be key in the spaces that we have and to continue our impact and have a real impact to us Colombian women with faith we're trying to rebuild peace from our inside we if we start with our inner peace we're gonna transform not only our self beings but society women have to keep fighting to open spaces and to overcome the battle we have to stop having fear to rebuild peace and have a better position with strong roots and start initiatives with strong content it's necessary to avoid that the word of peace can be captured to the silence of weapons so in Jambas we have to understand that peace is not only one piece it has to start with our inner peace and we can build more and provide more to society thank you so much thank you to do I see Angelica Rincón there Angelica is I see Angelica Rincón that she's back there and she is the one the leader that the lead the ecumenical circle in Bogotá I just wanted to give her a shout out mission to the commentary from USIP and ICRD so just give us two minutes to transition into our next panel and we'll begin with introductions and I'll just say that the second panel it's just gonna be brief comments from everybody and then we're gonna have plenty of time for questions so if you have questions we'll get to them I promise just write it down so you don't forget hello again everybody so now for round two just gonna be some brief reflections and feedback from a number of people who have a lot of expertise and experiences from around the world working with women in the midst of violent conflict working on issues of reconciliation in the midst of and in the aftermath of violent conflict and with the role of faith communities and working especially with the women of faith network in Colombia so Kathleen Keynast is the director of the gender work of the senior advisor of the gender work of the US Institute of Peace Lily Cole is with our Academy for Applied Research where she has done a lot of work looking at the role of reconciliation of truth commissions of transitional justice in the aftermath of violence and James Patton is the executive vice president of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy and he has been working on issues of the role of faith communities in the midst of violent conflict with the sensitivity and understanding of how gender dynamics intersect with that with ICRD and has worked quite a bit with the Ecumenical Group in Colombia over the recent two years so I'm just gonna start very briefly by saying part of what you hear in the stories of how the Ecumenical Group is working in Colombia as women faith leaders and what you can see from that from lessons that we are able to draw generally from the work of women religious leaders in the violent conflict and peace building and there's four themes that I want to point to one is the phenomenon of working especially on cross group or inter-faith, inter-ethnic basis for doing peace work what we found is that women generally women of faith in particular tend to gravitate to this kind of work that brings people together across lines of conflict and sometimes lines of violence in the midst of conflict and when we pushed a little bit at that to understand why women gravitated toward this kind of work in particular we found a couple things one was the emphasis on relationships and especially the fact that women are particularly vulnerable to violence in the midst of violent conflict forms of violence related directly to the conflict itself but also some of the secondary forms of violence that result from violent warfare including sexual violence including institutional violence lack of access to education and to health resources and so on and so there's an experience of shared suffering shared victimization across lines of difference in the source of violent conflict that seems to bring women together as a form of solidarity but also in a very practical way a way to have more political, social, economic influence so women have to build these coalitions in the midst of violent conflict because they can't do it alone within one community or another if they don't have the kind of access to political decisions within their state institutions which they often don't or to armed groups which tend to be more male dominated of course Columbia there's a lot of women within the FARC and so on I think that in other circumstances as well but it's for these kinds of reasons we found that a lot of women of faith tended to gravitate towards that kind of intergroup interfaith work number two is the ways in which women religious involved in peace building draw on theologies that legitimate and support their work in two ways that are influential for their own work but also for the wider society one is what you see in religious peace building generally which is that religious peace builders tend to draw on and pull out those theologies those religious ideas, those religious stories that support peace support the values that are important to peace compassion, loving kindness and so on but that women of faith do something else they're not only drawing on those theologies and stories but they're also drawing on the theologies that empower and support their role as women doing this work and that speak to the dignity of women who have, who experience violence and who experience oppression and you see this a lot in the work of the Ecumenical Group of Women Peace Builders in Columbia let me give you one example of a workshop I was in where they were re-enacting dramatically stories from the Bible of women within the Bible including stories of women who have been the victims of male violence and sexual violence in the Bible. There's plenty of stories that you can draw from within our holy scriptures that bring attention to draw attention to those experiences that women face as victims and survivors of male violence and so they draw from those stories in order to make sense of and kind of draw a sacred holy lens to those experiences that women face in Columbia but they're also drawing from the experiences of women who have been leaders within the Christian faith within the Bible to legitimate their own role as community leaders in peace building to those who would otherwise try to restrict them within the religious sphere and within the secular sphere. So there's this virtuous cycle of drawing from religion in order to transform various forms of oppression and violence. Three is that the women of faith peace builders tend to operate very close to communities and they understand in working with the various communities and people affected by violence they understand in ways that are not exclusive to women of faith peace builders but are very particular to them the multiple and intersecting forms of violence within violent conflict situations and how it impacts different people in different ways but is all related and I think you heard that a little bit in their presentation about seeing how many different groups are caught up in a system of violence and oppression and about how the minor injustices and the major injustices that affect different people, different ethnic groups different racial groups, different gender groups different political groups within the society are all interwoven so the issues of gender justice and issues of violent conflict, political conflict and the justice that's driving the conflict large are very intermixed and you can't deal with one without the other and then they also brought in which a lot of faith communities do that the issue of personal transformation to and personal violence and the ways in which especially for those who have been victims of violence and sexual violence need to sort of heal and reconcile within themselves before they can seek to reconcile the larger society or bring peace to the larger society so seeing those multiple forms and then a fourth is that often in the in the ways in which religious peace builders generally I think but especially women of faith peace builders operate in designing and implementing their peace programs, the process often reflects the goals that they're seeking to achieve and so having watched the Ecumenical Group form over the past several years I can tell you that there's been inclusivity in all decision making all of the women from the different backgrounds those living in Bogota, those outside of Bogota in the rural communities from whom they're speaking of those Catholic, those Evangelical or Protestant they're all participating in the decision making about where the group goes about what kinds of issues it focuses on and it's that kind of inclusive process that's sensitive to the power dynamics within different groups between different groups majority and minority and so on that reflects the goal that they're trying to achieve within the society at large all in there. Thank you, Susan and I wanted to just take a moment and recognize Jenny Bouvier who is listening, I wrote her and to say hello and to thank her for her leadership here at USIP for at least the last eight years while I've been here and her dedication and also to acknowledge the panel that preceded us on your work it made me look up a Martin Luther King Junior quote he's somebody I think a lot about and I read a lot about when it comes to really looking at restorative justice and I thought of you all when I re-read this quote he says human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals and I have to believe that nearly everyone if not everyone in this room really comes under that term dedicated individuals and certainly how we bring that dedication into community is what you have all been addressing here today and over the years of this kind of dedicated work I also came to recall as you were speaking my very first experience with peace building it was in 1980 before most of you were born and I was I didn't really know it was a peace builder I spent a summer in Northern Ireland at a reconciliation camp called Corimila and my job was every day to hang out with Catholic and Protestant youth and at night I slept intense between them and that's really when the stories came the narratives and once I understood the accent I was able to follow the stories they speak very rapidly starts at an early age there I think and what startled me was how early the narratives of hate began many of them were really quite young giving their parents a break for a week or something and so they were five six, seven they were without kind of what's right, what's wrong they just kind of speak and I remember coming away that summer that it is our stories that we repeat that get settled into the next generation literally planted in their minds as a pathway of flashlight to the future and so as I was listening to your comments here today I was thinking also of the role of parents mothers and fathers and the stories that they tell as you move through this very treacherous path another quote that comes to me of Martin Luther King is that peace is not the goal, it's the path it's a hard path it's much more difficult than the war and you know that in a very deep way another thing that came to me while you were speaking and I really wanted to be spontaneous here so it's working as you were speaking but I wanted to draw your attention to what I think is a seminal piece in the development world this year the world development report just released a month or so ago is called mind society and behavior and you'll see my ragged version of it I've been digesting it and why I think it's important for peace builders is that it's important when economists and social scientists begin to adapt to the story of framing the narrative you all know that story but their own evolution in trying to understand poverty in trying to understand violence they are looking very seriously at this crossroads of how we think and I kept hearing you all say you know it is our attitude it is purposefully acting peacefully taking, letting go forgiving, loving I mean it's work and this was actually so much a part of this new story and if you're not familiar with the world development report this happens every year they take on an issue and they get some really best minds in the world trying to dissect an issue and I think this one is important first of all they also begin to challenge our almost natural tendency to think in binaries and I heard you all talking about that as well and this is something we've been struggling with here at the Institute of Peace in how we understand what we call gender and peace building and it's something that we say and we don't say it lightly but gender is not another name for women I mean we are born male or female in terms of a biological sex but gender is really a social cultural understanding very very adaptive ideal and so I would encourage you as you are thinking through your own narratives moving forward that you take on a multi-dimensional perspective on gender dynamics we have begun to also kind of create a narrative here that is trying to understand that we're really not getting achieved gender equality achieve a world without violence against women unless we engage men and engage men as active parts of solving the problem and so we have begun just a very small little pilot project called learning violence as a way to problem solving and we think it's going to be possibly contribute to DDR programs and I will tell you the very first panel I think I sat on with Jenny was on DDR and it started me thinking about how we leave out women in DDR but we also create our own assumptions that people once are violent or forever violent and how do you unlearn violence in a society and it takes both men and women, moms and dads to re reboot the narrative on all of this so I wanted to lend you a couple of those thoughts and also just to say that this kind of work takes great organizational skills great fortitude Suzy was talking about community driven peace building and these are some of the hardest things I think faith communities have come to learn though it sounds so good living in community is I think among the hardest things human is ever to do and so I say that and again with deep respect for the efforts that you each and all are making and I'll just end again with another Martin Luther King quote and if you're here for a couple of days I strongly urge you to go to the memorial in his honor darkness cannot drive out darkness only light can do that cannot drive out hate only love can do that good luck and your know that we're standing by you and with you in your efforts okay thank you very much it's a real honor to be asked to speak here with people doing such wonderful work in Colombia I have to say I am not a specialist in religion and peace building I'm not a specialist in gender and unfortunately I'm not a specialist in Colombia or Latin American affairs although I have been to Colombia as part of a meeting on transitional justice and have great appreciation for the just fantastic creativity of the work being done there by the peace building and human rights communities so I have only a few remarks really just one that comes from my more normative I guess ethically but the first is actually question for the panelists and maybe some others in the room as a way of introducing our work here at USIP so I'm in our center for applied research on conflict and we're not we don't actually organize our work geographically it's thematic and what we're our goals for our different streams of research and mine is on reconciliation our goals are to try to understand what are the practices being used in different fields in peace building and what are the best practices and how do we even decide how to ask those questions and reconciliation has been very challenging it's not a very specific clear practice like the one my colleague works on which is to combat election violence reconciliation is really a very difficult concept to to implement and actually operationalize so we are really trying to use social science research methods to better understand reconciliation that is what people living out in conflict zones what does it mean to them are there other concepts that are clearer does it mean social integration social cohesion trust building building social capital or some combination of those and how can we find out where those good things are actually increasing and what practices can increase them so this is a relatively new area of work we are not beginning this work ourselves but to try to promote some of the work and fund some of it and try to bring the findings back to our colleagues inside usip and our partners outside usip who are actually designing practices so one big challenge is to say well how do we know that reconciliation is increasing in some way how would we actually find that out so my question is this means that we need what we call in this field this sort of monitoring evaluation indicators what are the indicators how would we know that reconciliation is actually increasing and we actually don't have a lot of evidence at the moment different people different countries are using different standards there's a very well known reconciliation barometer in South Africa I think it's one of the earliest ones and it's been copied elsewhere there are some different tools in Cyprus that are now being tried in Bosnia and Nepal there's one in Australia with quite a different focus and I understand that there is one that's been developed in Colombia but what I want to do because we have we're so lucky to have you here today is to take advantage of having it almost a mini focus group and to put to you to the question if you imagine 10 years from today I guess assuming that the peace agreement goes forward what would you imagine as success in reconciliation and something more specific obviously than just we have achieved a peaceful society I was wondering if you or any of the other Colombians or Colombian Americans in the room would be interested in sharing with us with me at least some of the some of the things that you would actually specifically imagine what parts of of social life or personal life would be the most important to look at and what are the signs you would look for those are exactly the kind of questions we're trying to develop and then to carry out through surveys and interviews and other kinds of methods in our center and then just quickly before I pass the word along to James Patton my I had I was really very interested by your talk on your work and I'm very curious about the question of asking for forgiveness and trying to encourage people to forgive and I wondered why you chose that instead of asking people who have committed extremely violent crimes to repent and show signs of non-repetition and that's actually mentioned in the Rempass literature it's a very very impressive kind of comprehensive mix of social reconciliation and transitional justice goals so I'm curious to know what's what happens if you have victims who are not what we would call resilient who have been really deeply harmed or we have victims many many of them who are actually dead and what is our responsibility to them or the victims who are really not able to easily go on with their lives and how is it possible to actually have a sign of non-repetition and security in the society if you have many perpetrators who don't want to repent and the evidence around the world I haven't seen very hard data on it we showed a film last night on Indonesia based on interviews with perpetrators of a massive genocide there in the mid 1960s and the majority of the perpetrators have expressed no remorse whatsoever they actually brag in their lives on the camera about what they've done so this is my question should the first line of communication be to those who have committed crimes to ask them to express some form of repentance and I was interested in hearing a little more about that how much well first of all it's a pleasure to have my friends here at home this is a group that I fully respect it's so deep that I cannot even express express it by chance the poem that Maritza wrote and read at the last event that we did where I can be on English this is one of the peacemakers from Himpas and just to illustrate how extraordinary some of these folks that we work with in the field are in particular the women's group there's a little fire brand of a religious leader named Maritza who is part of the group who is just fantastic she's got to be in her closing in on 70 at least right and she stood up at the end of an event a three-day event that we had where by custom of Himpas in the middle of the room were the photographs of all of their friends and colleagues who had been quote-unquote martyred during the violence in Columbia working on peace issues and a candle burning down in the middle and she read this extraordinary poem about women as basically a broken clay vase within this process within society and how to restore that and then she sort of jokingly said well now I'm going to head back home where the one of the big paramilitary groups have just come and told me they're going to kill me again if I don't knock off doing what I'm doing and she smiled and laughed and off she went back to her house to continue her work these are the kind of folks that are out in the field doing this kind of thing I had the privilege of being interviewed on dole radio last week about a letter that was written by religious leaders that was sent to the Havana process pleading with them not to give up on the process and not to return to violent means to try to end the conflict which is a irony that I still haven't unpacked but um and I was asked by the interviewer Claudia Margin okay well is this too little too late now that the columbians have given up on the peace process and I thought which columbians are you talking to because I'm talking to these columbians and that is not the case for the first time since I started working in columbia in 2006 I see optimism and I see hope in the field particularly in the areas that are most impacted by the violence not in the cities which are most impacted by political and media narratives but the folks who have lived through the violence and like as a group of about 300 women the majority of whom are victims of violence are trying to become reconcilers trying to find a way to get through their own histories of pain and the historical wounds that they have suffered and actually heal others on both sides of the the victim victimizer polarity which is another that's a punitive justice way of phrasing it and we can get into the restorative justice way of phrasing it at another point but it's pretty extraordinary the strength that requires so it's a privilege to have you here it's a privilege to be part of the process columbians lived at least 100 years of constant violence I don't count that little window of like 2.5 years between la violencia and the current thing as peace but if you ask columbians in an event raise your hand if you know what peace in columbia looks like you get very few if any most of them would have been 3 years old at the time if they did it's hard to know where to go in columbia there is extraordinary capacity within columbia but it is very hard to know what the path is what is the way from here to there and so I think it's very easy to fall into these kind of facile descriptions of well this didn't work because you know the FARC they're still kidnapping generals to wander onto their territory or killing soldiers etc ok this is all legitimate problems within a peace process and when I was challenged by columbia about well why are they still committing violence I said well they're still at war I mean we're in a peace process and so the reality is war and there is no clean process out of violence and into stability process out of violence and back into violence either so it's a deeply divided society and unfortunately I think that the spoilers are starting to really get a hold of the narrative and we go back to some of what folks were saying before about reframing the narrative I think of the photograph we saw out of Havana in the international press of FARC members lounging on a yacht as the single image that I think a lot of people have seen is the Havana process if you dig deeper into some of the periodicals or into some of the online materials you'll see for example a few weeks ago pictures of FARC and columbian military on their hands and knees pulling anti-personnel minds out of the ground together why wasn't that distributed with the same force as this image that undermined the validity of the process I mean part of the reason is there are political interests in columbia extraordinary energy into undermining this process another part of the reason I think is we like the ease of who's right and who's wrong rather than the complex difficulty of we're all a little bit right and a little bit wrong so how do we map ourselves forward I'm not keeping track of time either so I'm sorry just give me a heads up so how do we go forward the question in our minds ICRD from a practical strategic point of view is who in columbia holds the position of being recognized as a source of positive values for the future that can lead us to somos colombianos instead of tu eres el malo, tu eres el bueno right who holds that position after a hundred years of constant identity violence who's identity is significantly enough removed and not tainted by the political underpinnings as well as the actual actions of violence that really kind of cover almost all of the columbian society so who can operate as a trusted third party to start to build a narrative and implement a narrative for reconciliation because peace building is not happening in Havana as a demobilization process we pretty much all agree on that peace building will happen in the communities afterwards and the columbian communities are not prepared for that so they need help they need an idea they need a way to articulate that idea and they need the practical steps of taking them from what they've gone through to a way to recognize one another as fellows even if they're not embracing and opening stores together at least they're not trying to continue to live out their attribute of violence that we've seen over and over and over in columbian society for us there were two answers to that question one was the kind of sacred role of women in latin culture and that's reflected in columbian culture now this doesn't mean that there isn't an extraordinary amount of inter familial violence because that is actually intra familial probably inter familial as well that's actually far eclipses the violence from the armed conflict it doesn't mean that there is an extraordinary amount of abuse and prejudice but there is this kind of odd sacredness around the image of the woman in the family I remember we're working with the brothers with the gang members in kennedy and so atia and these kids are out at 13 stabbing each other in the public square but then they go home and the grandmother's like clean up your room yes ma'am you know I mean there's a certain kind of odd place that this gender holds it needs to be kind of recovered in a positive way and there needs to be some stuff dealt with that is very grotesque and negative with relationship to the gender divisions but it's a source of potential value values I should say the second would be spiritual actors this is not to say that the churches and as it said in the letter that was sent to Havana don't have a history of being tied into some of the armed groups but that history's faded a little bit with reference to where it was let's say in the 70s and 80s in Central America and other places and so they've recovered to some degree and again I'm painting with a pretty broad brush but the image of a somewhat trusted third partner the problem is that the religious organizations religious individuals are pathologically averse to working with one another you know we are actually trying to work across the entire spectrum of faith there including indigenous and Afro-Columbian cosmic visions to find a way to articulate a spiritual but non-doctrinal reconciliation process that all columbians can access and may not tell you what we're out in places like Corinto and we can't get one evangelical pastor to work with another evangelical pastor down the road much less with a shaman I mean it's pretty intense but it's actually happening we're moving forward not just us but the group Reconciliation Colombia which is a public-private partnership that's working at the national level so we're seeing advances there so these are two sources of potential positive values okay sorry I could go on all day but and I do sometimes so just turn me off that we're trying to mobilize and of course hemp is not just giving the examples of some of the individuals there but they hold a very unique position to play the role of becoming the not only symbolic which is very necessary in Colombia change the narrative by showing what's possible but the practical solution to processes of reconciliation not only because they are both religious and women bridging these two sources of values but they've done now five or six years under the guidance of Susie and Ginny and Ginny we miss you I hope you feel better Dengue and another pseudo Dengue wow better than I the but they've done five six years of conflict analysis training and also ecumenical engagement and frankly the last event that we had we had there were indigenous women who didn't indigenous right there were some conflicts around that frankly but that's okay and these are the places where these things can get hammered out and the encounters of individuals with different cosmo visions can result in a new relationship that again can demonstrate to Colombians what is possible because there is a very profound lack of optimism and a profound lack of believing that something else is possible my wife is Colombian and when I asked her about this project when I was first launching it I said what do I need to know about Colombia that I don't know and she said we don't believe anything can change right and so these are the folks who can demonstrate change there's a lot more I'd love to engage in terms of discussion but I'll leave it there and just again I'm extraordinarily and eternally grateful that you all are doing what you're doing at incredible risk to yourselves and thank you for being here and working with us I'm conscious of how patient all of you have been and so as the our friends from Colombia come back up here I would like to begin to collect some of your questions and Lily we're going to hold yours and come back to them as well because they're very good ones just want to give a chance for all of you to begin to raise your voice your questions your comments and when you speak can you please first of all make sure you turn on your microphone but then also just say briefly who you are which organization you're from English or Spanish ok ok Spanish it is Buenas tardes Good afternoon my name is Rodrigo I'm from El Salvador and I come in representation of Creative Associates International and we work especially for USAID my interest is in focusing the focus of Central America Salvador Guatemala Honduras as countries that we have a tremendous violence process at the moment and very similar to we are in this phase that we do not believe in anything we have lost faith we have lost hope that things can change and part of what I want to find a tool or a way to start to change the mentality of the Salvadorian of the regular Salvadorian that right now once vengeance they want more death they want to instead of reconcile with this group so I would like to hear more your opinion about what will be some of the tools or what's the narrative that we can share with this civil society that is basically giving up well that's the question that's the million dollar question in a forum that we had with women mediators that are mediators one of the leaders the Salvadorian leaders said that one of the mistakes that were made in the Salvadorian process and the negotiations of the peace negotiations process had was that the they didn't include any financial plan and from that perspective I think that we that's why we are having that into consideration that into the peace process especially taking that consideration your peace process so that's why we have been working with different summits the agrarian the the farmers summit the women's summit and how we can try to try to the different summits and this meetings from different NGOs and different social movements how can we keep hope alive through those groups and at the same time get together in bigger networks that will allow us to sustain ourselves I think that that's a job that's a very important job that is being done and that is being done through your thanks to your experience the second thing that I think it's very important is the regard being the exercise of active listening and the circles that they have been that have been forming in order to analyze and discuss and keep hope alive so this does not ensure you anything four days ago we were able to do a survey about the peace process the result was that 52% was believing in the peace process 52% so that means that with the struggle with the struggle of keeping hope alive is that we're dealing with and in my opinion that's our main role as a group is to listen to motivate, engage and act whatever it goes we have to maintain this process whatever happens we have to maintain this process and we have to maintain it and keep at it with the with the certainty that as a civil society we have to rebuild we are the ones who have to rebuild the path so that's the thing that those are two things two important parts and that I wanted to emphasize and that I compliment with what you're asking us about the groups about the reconciliation groups I think that one way of seeing something very important that we're doing in Colombia is try to the intervention in the different process and the victim process and to let victims be part of this process of this reconciliation process for that there has been about a series of regional forums where victims have been able to talk have been able to clarify have been able to express what they feel and the national forum the national victim forum where we participated over 2,000 victims from 18 different areas it was very important to see how these victims were talking they were saying what they were feeling and in the group at least in the group that I was and something very important happened and it was that how in a group there was a girl that the ELN the village where she was from and all her family was killed and one of the leaders from that group ELN was there and I was like what am I doing here and that's what I understood my role in that forum so when she stopped talking she basically when she stopped talking she basically broke down and she came to me and I was there to hug her and the leader from the ELN he stood up he recognized his participation in that event and then he asked for forgiveness he asked that she will allow him to ask for forgiveness so it was very important that this was a way a very important way to start a reconciliation process that is not the same as a forgiveness process so I think that the forgiveness process is very it's a personal process it's a process that is not mandatory for reconciliation but it is basic in order to have the spiritual process that's why as women as women of faith we are sure that if we do not go with the forgiveness process and from the civil society in general it's not going to be with us because they don't have the tools to do it so if we work together if we work together we all of us are able to start with this forgiveness process so I think that the concept that what is that is in quote-unquote living is that past conflict that what you're living that we expect to live at one point it could be precisely that with the tools that dealing with this the negotiation and with the tools that we're going to have with the negotiation that we're going to have from the other guerrilla members that is from the national liberation army so we can have the possibility of a whole hope so for us and to sustain that hope it's basic to work together with different groups we cannot separate each other as churches and we cannot we cannot have one morality govern over the other I think we have to I think we have to eliminate those moral issues because if we continue like that then it's going to allow us to classify or point somebody out but if we talk about is what it will allow us to keep the hope alive so I don't think there is a formula but there are paths that we have to build only to it's a challenge it's a very long road and I think that it's to guarantee the participation of the victims of the civil society to continue with the public actions even among the division and the mistrust we have to continue and we have to try to unify it all together we have to be persistent we have been in Colombia we are in a process that every day we have to support and support this every day it's like when you're holding something a glass object so it's almost tumbling you hold it tightly you have to do that and also thinking about in general topics the position of the church the church position has been very important the last week precisely was spread through an Christian organization that basically the point is don't stand up from the table keep continue talking even whatever regardless of what is happening because the hope continues even though it is less now we have to keep our hope and it was just like a call to churches and different points of different aspects of the churches to continue to sign and to send a communique to do not stand up from the table so in our process as James said we had an opportunity to to have that process reconciliation process and to continue and to go from theory to practice with two women that were ex-convicts and then we were in an annual meeting that we always have and we were obviously working in this topic in this issue and we knew that to we knew that ex-convicts were going to come to join us but we didn't know there were women and then a group arrived and there were men and women and we were thinking that the two men that got there were the combat with the fighters but then they started talking about us and why was the reason why they got into the groups why they entered this group and one of them during the guerrilla during her time with the guerrilla she didn't even carry weapons but she was in that group so we were able to listen to them and to listen to them was very important to us because we were able to put ourselves in their shoes and see their pain and see her pain and why she acted that way so at the end of this meeting we were able to do a prayer circle where we were able to feel that pain that they had even though that we have felt as well as victims in this process so we wanted to understand women that have come to the process and allow us to just take a lot of barriers that we have built through the years with this process thank you first of all I want to congratulate you and to thank you for this work that you have been doing to continue with this work and also had the opportunity to live and work in Bogota with issues or topics that you have worked with so my question in order to get into the religious aspect and the importance of faith in Latin America and what it has represented to dozens of years for the women gender equity with all this work that you have done to see values forgiveness and faith hope where is and how is it that how do you understand from the circles that you've been working from the three of you work the equity equity in the sense of rights rights in the global agenda that are in the global agenda of women family raising kids and the sexual rights and reproductive rights and besides topics that you have already mentioned before everything that is related to sexual violence so how do you see how we can refresh that Marian model strong that we have touched I forgive, I accept so I do I like that proposal of a repentant instead of forgiveness so if you can give me a little bit of the comments in that area good afternoon thank you so much for your interventions for your participation there are very inspiring very interesting my name is Claudia Naves I just graduated from peace studies and I came and I have a lot of reasons to be in this event my the question was already done from the panelists but also a personal reflection I work with people in the conflicts women victim of the armed conflict and this started as a circle where women will come and tell their stories and their memory reflection at some point women started saying no we have to be able to create an impact in the government and that's how in Uganda they started participating in the government and a man group also said that they wanted to do a net to work together so my question is how can we do these processes in order to involve men as well and how has been your experience to expand this with the reconstruction the social fabric and how we can work with the with the communities about that question I think I talk a little bit about that when I was speaking how can we how we can how can we leave that model of stop giving services and receive rights and I think that we still have to move a lot we have to advance a lot in that area and regarding churches I think there is a mission and that's a true mission a very important mission because there is women have been subject to what is churches and what has been the concepts of the opinions of pastors of clerics clergy etc so I think that is that's a challenge to tell women we do have to we have to we have to receive rights in order to give rights so in order to get in this ethical path for women it's in English you can go there to the website it's in English but unfortunately I only brought it in Spanish but there is a series of topics that are keys and that are specific about the right to life and right to personal freedom and I think that even ourselves we have to keep working every day in order to free ourselves and as you said about the Marian circle that that is really I have to answer that because I'm a Catholic one I think that there is there is the model the Maria Maria model it's Maria that was that I was loyal to God's will and God's will was to look completely of permanent looking for social justice and the justice with equity that search for loyalty implies that you have to go for an option and Jesus had an option and was clear is to option and to opt for people that suffer for the option to go through for the victim for the ones that are the liberation path and the theology the current theology for Maria is exactly that one is the loyalty to that option that her son had that option that basically that takes her to follow that that path that Jesus basically wrote down and that changes completely and we are basically responsible be responsible for those without parties and we have to respect that path to search to look for life but life with responsibility with a complete life and that's what we're doing no we haven't done it we haven't been able to do that on the road that something that is going to happen very slowly but I think that we are pushing this through and that we've been working on it and we've been working on it from that be able to overcome preconceptions that send us to build path a freedom path and then I will add this with the question that you ask us not that currently from with the groups that we are working with in that network we've been working with two groups two male groups of new masculinity and is to see how for example from the from the women from the thought of this protection and security they are participating in the assembly being part of participating in this new ethical path and I think it's very important what it's very important what the director was saying the one that was sitting here Catherine that if we do not man we're not going to be able to do this and women in the circle do not do say that constantly if my husband does not get the education then what I can do if he doesn't get into this so it's a way of doing it it's a challenge it's a responsibility but it's part of the peace process and it's part as Salvadorian brother says that it's basically part of the awareness we have to work together in order to go into this path in order to work together we have to elevate women's dignity we have to elevate their self-esteem we have to tell them calm down we are able to do this we are able to do this and we can face this challenge together so that's it I also think that is to be able to work all together because we're subject to politics and right but we're also subject to be able to participate but we can do this in different churches in this social framework and it's been a long path in women movements in Colombia but to consolidate this in different churches it's a process that we need to do and that we are being able to achieve and definitely we have started to reflect to think about the different people and advisors that work with those are men and their male voices groups but also we needed to have moments to be by ourselves as women and to talk just among women and as women but we think of course men and women have to build some equity and justice in our societies thank you so much for your intervention my name is Isabel I've been working with human rights in Colombia in different communities and the word to I come to go with basically I just want to ask what does this mean for all of you some of you mentioned to have safe spaces for dialogue but what does that mean safe spaces and how do you see your role within the restorative justice among the circles of women and to identify yourselves as different women not just as victims or aggressors the executive director of international association for human values first my apologies for being late I had another engagement I just wanted to briefly mention that the founder of our organization Shishir Ravi Shankar he's a humanitarian and spiritual leader he was one of those leaders in Colombia being part of the talks and he was invited on I believe June 26 to receive Colombia's highest award for his work in Colombia in particular and with Ivan Marquez and couple of days later they met again in Cuba and they held a press conference together where during which Ivan Marquez announced his adoption of Gandhi and nonviolent ways and said needed some time to really make sure that these this can be more sustainable of course is a process just wanted to make this comment and invite you to also meet with us and I don't know how long you are here but meet with our leader as well thank you for the work you do Isabel is talking about something that is very important in all the process in Colombia which is to accompany a company and you were asking a question is this mean safe spaces what does it mean and that word safety has to do with something that we were talking about in our presentation which is to demilitarize spaces to be able to create safe spaces and to demilitarize our lives so that women can talk calmly with respect that they can listen to them and overall to be able to respect their own feelings deeply without trying to to swing them to the answers that we are expecting that we believe are the real ones that's why susan taught all of us those principles on how important is to listen from that deep feeling of respect and that strength to be able to understand situations different situations and to respect them and to help women to be able to go and get the tools that are needed is not to make them feel as a victim or the poor girl that we are going to help no not at all but to help that woman that have rights and that need to know about this rights that has to start learning about this rights and to have self a strong self esteem that she can go out and defend this rights that she has this is something basic because if not then this person is going to be one more victim of conflict or people that just want to solve her life so this is that re victimization and that's what we want to achieve and personally I think that this can be done through reshaping and empowering women and their search and that's how we are going to be able to achieve avoiding the re victimization and that's the only thing that can achieve it because the rest nothing is certain so if we don't go through these different processes of taking care of ourselves monthly we have some workshops with female victims in which they recognize what they are and they start working through their pain and suffering and their potential and they start developing that path of searching within themselves their spirituality and that's when they come out and they say I'm able to do it and that's when they start to build their own path and I think personally there's no other way to achieve this this is to empower women through self esteem and to let them know don't worry we're with you to support you and we're going to fight together but from public forms and different spiritual spaces so that they can give you the support you need it's also important to say that not all of them have to tell their pain stories and their circles of suffering we respect their stories if they want to tell them or not it's acceptable but this process of justice and to tell them what their rights are and to obviously advise them legally and provide them with legal tools helps them so this is just like a complete process it's not only this psychosocial process so the legal process training that provides them with more tools to think about how they can basically repair or heal themselves or to go and get help with other mechanisms that the government provides so that they can be listened and to restore themselves so not all of them have to tell their stories but the ones that want to tell their stories it's possible and we have some confidentiality packs or agreements because of course these are spaces that are very sensitive spaces and we have built trust we know each other for years and we've been walking together for some years for six or seven years so this allows this trust amongst ourselves but we're very careful with this re-victimization and they don't have to tell their story ten times because it's not all about it's not about this and we understand that it's a safe space where there's a lot of uncertainty the church, that circle of friends that opportunity to be able to chat that safe space in which there's a lot of safety because outside there's a lot of violence and so this is like a safe space for many of them I want to add something else that I think is very important these days three women started talking and I was there and I was in a rush I needed to leave so I just stay there but I think they could tell that I was kind of desperate and when they finished one of them told me thank you Norma for thinking that that wasting time is not really wasting time and that taught me a lesson a very big lesson just to be there and to stay still to basically be with them from that side and just listening and feeling what they were feeling all together one more question good afternoon my name is Marcella Calle and I'm working with entry use as a fellowship program and I'm very interested in reconciliation programs in Colombia but what can we do to change and when you were talking about that basically idea to publicize or publish more about the violent actions that the police actions you have been developing some strategies or some projects in terms or regarding communication to show these peace strategies amongst different groups so that this can be strengthened and can be spreaded publicly well basically we recognize that in different regions is when we are working really hard and there are some regions obviously that are stronger in this process so yes we have been able to have this process not only in the circles with women but we've been able to have some political incidents and working more with the state so we Bogotá is strong but also Cali through this women's circles so we've been able to work all together in which the church is involved and the state to create this transformation and we also are also working through other means through the media we're working on a website trying to publish this and make it more visible and Norma can talk more about this we have decided to participate in some strategic spaces in different movements and from him we said we're not going to participate in all of them because obviously we cannot do it but we're going to choose the one that are very strategical because as a group we cannot have such a great impact but with some alliances we can achieve it so Norma I don't know if you want to say anything well to be able to change the way the media think it's impossible to make them not go ahead and publish bad news or negative news to make them to promote good news it's almost impossible however we have to continue I work in a very poor area there was a time where we needed the media to go there and they wouldn't go so I made a call and said there's a possible there's a person that might be dead and right away an hour later everyone was there all the media was there and when they arrived they were like where is the dead person and I never said there was a dead person I said that possibly there was a dead person but I told them well but I have a very nice story they're not going to make us leave this place so then the dynamic was changed and in this way a lot of women gather together from different sectors we are from the army business women farmers indigenous women afro-columbian women ex-combat women well we are a very diverse group in Colombia it's like a big mix a very big diverse group and we gather together and we said we have to achieve these points in which peace in Colombia has to be achieved and it's an ethical group so that women in the ecumenical group of women could go through this process but it took two years but we achieved it at the end and we achieved that all of these women signed this process I'm going to read the 15 points and I'm going to commit to send these points in English because everything is in English and it's on the website but I didn't bring them in English they're in Spanish so these points are the following to acknowledge humanity and the right to life from every single person that live in this country that's one of the points the other point to recognize respect and value diversity and political differences no one has the absolute truth to identify and question different interests that keep violence going to recover the notion of the state to acknowledge diversity to defend safety in every single human based on respect and their human rights to promote respect and efficiency of these human rights and financial justice from businesses and the community as a whole to transform cultural practices that try to exclude some people and to have more equal relationships between men and female to reject all violence ways against women and to exchange them and to change them to rebuild practices for social justice and a legal framework that respect human rights to reject corruption and manipulation and crimes and all sectors of the country to recognize and overcome the deep suffering caused by the violence for decades to promote active dialogues taking care of and understanding differences and knowing that differences are okay to be able to disseminate different visions and not to repeat the same tragedy to promote and demand ethical ways to to promote politics as a collective way to defend and consolidate our active participation in different spaces in the community and political debate and the notion of opposition as dynamic to build democracy if we can put all this together peace is going to be achieved so we have to work together and we have this as a therapy as some educational therapy and to give these points to community so they can study their own reality and we consider that this is a very important path and this is a constant work in this reality everybody thank you especially to our translators in the back who did a herculean job long session we didn't always talk sweetly for them do you have a final word no just thank you for staying in for those who tuned in to the webcast thank you for tuning in and please look forward to future columbia peace forum events that will continue to have through this year our guests from him pass will be in dc through friday so if any of you have any further questions they will be in town until then so thank you again and we hope you have a great afternoon thanks