Worldandnation: In Kosovo, ballot will offer voters new choice: women

In Kosovo, ballot will offer voters new choice: women

By RICHARD MERTENS

UROSEVAC, Yugoslavia -- The walls are shedding their paint. Stains splotch the ceiling. But in this drab, chilly hotel meeting room in southern Kosovo, more than a dozen local candidates have gathered in pursuit of an idea as fresh here as democracy itself: women in government.

"I want to do something for my people to live a better life," says Mexhide Behluli, a 63-year-old schoolteacher who is running for office for the first time in her life.

Behluli's name will be on the ballot Oct. 28, when people across Kosovo choose members of their local municipal assemblies. The elections will be the first since NATO-led forces occupied Kosovo more than a year ago and the first free elections ever in the province, an ethnic Albanian part of Serbia emerging from 41/2 decades of communism and another of Serb repression.

Yet for Behluli and other women across Kosovo, the elections represent an unprecedented opportunity to gain public office. Kosovo is a mainly rural and deeply traditional society that has allowed women few chances to participate in public life. This month's elections have been crafted to change that. In a far-reaching decree, Kosovo's U.N. administration has required that a third of the top candidates from each party be women.

"It's of great importance," says Edi Shukriu, 49, one of a handful of women elected in 1992, when Kosovo's ethnic Albanians formed a Parliament in defiance of the province's Serbian authorities. "We have the capability to have a gender balance. There can be interest in women in politics and in decision-making positions."

But putting your name on a ballot is only a first step. That is why Behluli and other women candidates have met in the center of Urosevac, a bustling market town. They sit in a semicircle, bundled in sweaters and jackets, and listen with equal measures of curiosity and skepticism as two political activists from Canada expound on the art of getting elected.

Jennifer Mauro, 45, a short, energetic woman with curly black hair, holds up a campaign leaflet. "That's how I got started in politics, at the age of 12, delivering these," she says enthusiastically.

But the women doubt that what works in Canada will work in Kosovo. "The people know me and the other candidates," Behluli explains. "I don't have to put up posters or anything like that."

Indeed, the very idea of campaigning strikes the women as inappropriate. "If I do that, it would seem to people that I'm fighting for a position," says Hajrije Rexha, 39, a schoolteacher. "That would be a bad thing. It looks like you are looking out only for your own interests.

"I don't feel very confident about going in front of the public," says Rexha, who decided to run at the urging of some politically connected friends. She also is nervous about the possibility that she might actually be elected. "I'm worried a little bit because of my responsibility later on," she says. "If I make a little mistake, it will be very bad for my people." And yet she has no doubt that women deserve a greater share of power in Kosovo. "We can show that we are a strong as men are," she insists.

Setting quotas for women candidates as a way of redressing imbalances in power is a common practice in European politics. In Kosovo, it is part of a wider effort to raise the status of women through education, job training and support for women's non-governmental organizations. Early on, election officials discussed quotas as high as 50 percent (rejected as too high) before settling on a third of the top 15 candidates in each municipality. Even that proportion alarmed leaders of the 19 parties contesting the elections.

In the end, however, some parties not only found women candidates, they found more than they were required to. Of 5,543 candidates running across Kosovo, 1,363 are women.

"I think it says that the parties have taken the whole idea of women in politics seriously," says David de Beer, an official of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is in charge of the elections.

So far, women's influence on political life has been only weakly felt. Men lead Kosovo's important parties. The United Nations' own efforts in Kosovo have fallen short of what many Kosovo women expected. Of 21 local officials the United Nations appointed to head provincial departments, for example, only three are women.

In any case, the test for women candidates comes this month. Behluli has her doubts. "Our people don't yet trust in women's power," she says. "It's the first time for them. It's difficult to see women in positions of power."

Still, she thinks her chances are not bad. "I've worked 30 years as a teacher, so I have a lot of students by now," she says, adding, "I've done a lot of good things for my people."