Africa-Press – Liberia. The Angie Brooks International Centre for Women’s empowerment, leadership development, International Peace and security says its recent engagements have unearthed early warning signs of violence ahead of the 2023 presidential and legislative elections which need continuous interventions through multi-stakeholders efforts to ensure peace before, during, and after the elections.
“Access to peaceful participation of women of diverse occupations in elections keeps dwindling. Women participate in elections as aspirants, candidates, voters, security officers, election commission officers, political party supporters, polling center agents, media personnel, and floating voters and these different levels of political participation come with different levels of violence targeted at women in elections ranging from gender and sexual based violence, verbal abuse, physical violence and to emotional psychological abuse,” Establishment Coordinator of the Angie Brooks International Centre Cllr. Yvette Chesson-Wureh said.
Chesson-Wureh said when the political atmosphere continues to give rise to unfavorable conditions for women to take part in elections, it is an affront to their Constitutional right of freedom of association in a manner that grossly undermines the core of democracy.
She said electoral violence against women is a death threat, not a scare tactic, stating “we have witnessed this from the bloody altercation with machetes, stones, and other weapons against the representative candidate, Cornelia Kruah-Togba, and putting of gas around the house of Telia Urey was in and lighting a fire to burn her alive.”
According to her, they have also observed a novel disturbing trend of violence targeted at women’s political participation which reared its ugly head during the December 2020 midterm senatorial election–the abuse of cultural and traditional norms.
She said the orientation of the Poro Society in Liberia is a much revered traditional practice, and one that has been very well situated as part of the fabric of the society.
“The early warning signs have shown solid momentum being garnered for violence ahead of 2023 elections, to the brink of no longer being early warning but the concrete signs of violence brooding in infancy and awaiting the set time to explode. We have witnessed a series of violent clashes, including on July 26, 2022,” Chesson-Wureh said.
At a media engagement with journalists in Monrovia on Thursday, August 25, Chesson-Wureh stressed the need to bring all grieving political actors to collaborate and abide by what she terms the tenets of democracy with high regard for the rule of law.
Cllr. Chesson-Wureh said Eminent Women have analyzed multiple situations and have observed the lack of dispute resolution mechanisms and conclusiveness in multiple investigations at the political party level, community level and the national level as the reason for these unfortunate creations.
She praised the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund for supporting the work they have done together in the last 18 months.
“This we cannot compromise as it is the referee putting in check the two sides of peace and violence in their respective corners,” she said.
Madam Wureh added: “It cannot be done in one day and it cannot be done by one entity. As a lead civil society organization, the Angie Brooks International Centre and the Eminent Women of the WR mechanism are calling on all partners; national and international to continue our collaborative efforts to cut out these cancerous signs of violence as the country prepares for the 2023 elections.”
Madam Wureh also calls on various media outlets in the country to conduct themselves in the best form and ethical manner to avoid chaos during and after the election process.
According to her, the Angie Brooks International Centre in partnership with the Eminent Women of the Women’s Situation Room has observed that media institutions in the country are being used to create critical defects in information dissemination, something she says perpetrates chaos in the country.
“The Eminent Women also recognize other instances were independently owned media outlets due to how journalism in the sense of not checking facts before publishing news items or even sensationalizing issues have shared information that caused harm with the promotion of a particular point of view,” she said.
Madam Wureh added: “As a profit-making venture, some journalists just simply start an innocent propaganda in an attempt to sell their newspapers or generate traffic to their online and social media platforms, but in the process, the outcome has repercussions of significant proportions.”
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