VIENNA, 24 March 2007 — The Diplomatic Arab Women’s Forum, an NGO based in Vienna, Austria, held its first two-day symposium entitled “A Glimpse at Women in the Arab World: Achievements and Aspirations” that ended yesterday.
The symposium was held under the auspices of Princess Lolwah Al-Faisal. The symposium began with a statement from the president of the forum, May Al-Jaser, who also read Princess Lolwah’s speech on her behalf.
“Women around the world are facing daunting challenges in different professions,” said Princess Lolwah in her speech. “Arab women have gained tremendously from their efforts of self-examination that has intensified and found themselves in new roles of leadership in all walks of life”.
The symposium was followed by a speech by Ursula Plassnick, Austrian minister for European and international affairs.
“We must move beyond stereotypes,” she said, stressing the importance of cooperation and collaborations. “I believe in the transforming power of networking. Networking is a tool that can increase awareness among women and men and ultimately improve women’s involvement and participation in all spheres of social, economic and political life.”
Rafia Obaid Ghubash, president of the Arabian Gulf University in Manama, presented her work on epidemiological psychiatry focusing on women in the Arabian Gulf region.
“Sixty percent of Arab society is illiterate and that’s a problem, and that’s why women are behind,” she said.
The symposium also included a presentation by Lebanese artist Nidal Al-Achkar, who played a leading role in launching the theatrical movement in the Arab world. “The theater is the best mirror of life,” she said.
Al-Achkar founded the cultural establishment Masrah Al-Madina in 1994, which quickly became the center for all things cultural and artistic in Beirut.
“The theater is a platform of free speech,” she said. “It creates a space for free expression.”
Alia Arasoughly, a filmmaker and sociologist of culture and cinema and director of Shashat, a cinema NGO in Palestine, showed a film she directed in 2006 titled “After the Last Sky” about three women, two Israelis and a Palestinian, who signed a peace agreement among themselves.
“Cinema is a non-threatening tool and a very dynamic medium,” she said. “It can confront and transform assumptions and images.”
The moderator for the symposium was Mona Khalil, a Saudi national and senior legal officer at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
From Kuwait, Nada Al-Mutawa, professor of political science at the Arab Open University, shared the experience of political participation of Kuwaiti women and the significance of this experience in bringing about change in their active roles of international relations and politics.
Al-Jaser concluded that the Diplomatic Arab Women’s Forum aims to continue their efforts in bringing together groups of women from across the Arab region to “shed light into different aspect of Arab women’s lives and to move beyond stereotypes predominant in media today.”
