November 8, 2011 | Violence Against Women
Woman of the Week: Zainab Salbi
Zainab Salbi started Women for Women International to link women in post-conflict communities with women who want to support them and learn their stories.
By Anna Louie Sussman
NEW YORK CITY -- As a teenaged girl in Iraq, Women for Women International founder Zainab Salbi was unusual. She refused to dress up, gossip, or talk about fashion, and she resented going to parties. That was because the party’s host was usually Saddam Hussein.
Salbi’s father was the dictator’s pilot, a role that brought the family into Hussein’s inner circle. The privilege that intimacy brought – a life of private education, country weekends and endless gifts -- was soured by Salbi’s clear-eyed observations of his and his sons’ unbridled lunacy, most clearly manifest in their shocking abuse of women.
The lucidity and integrity that prevented her from succumbing to an easy life of sycophancy in Iraq have served to distinguish her in the crowded field of women’s rights advocacy. Abigail Disney, who asked Salbi to advise her on her multi-part documentary series Women, War and Peace, calls her “one of the most innovative thinkers in the world.”
“Zainab thinks with absolute clarity and independence,” Disney said. “That's why her voice cuts through the noise.”
During the first Gulf War, Salbi was a young woman living and studying in America. She watched as the country she now called home laid waste to the country where her parents and siblings still lived. But it was reading a Time magazine story about rape camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia that set her on her path. Distraught and pained by what she had read, she resolved to do something. None of the women’s rights organizations she called operated in Bosnia or Croatia.
One number stuck in her head, forbidding her to give up: twenty thousand, the number of women raped so far.
“How could we let this happen?” she asked herself, as recorded in her memoir Between Two Worlds. “What excuse did we have this time for the lack of action?”
To Salbi, there were no excuses, only action. She began by soliciting American women to support an individual rape survivor with monthly donations and letters, so the survivor “would know she wasn’t alone.” For two months, she and her husband Amjad fundraised out of a local church, and together founded Women for Women Bosnia. Using money they had saved for their honeymoon, they set off on a trip to Croatia. There, they met survivor after survivor. They listened to story after story of violence. Some women spoke of vengeance, of soldiers who spoke of historical injustices as they perpetrated their vile crimes.
“As if,” Salbi wrote, “women were a field of battle where men met to set scores straight.”
As more and more women signed up to sponsor “sisters” in Bosnia and Croatia, Salbi crystallized a core principle for what was to become Women for Women International: that each woman has a unique story. Unlike many other development-oriented non-profit organizations, Salbi prioritized individual dignity over discipline.
“I felt very strongly that this cash should go directly to the women, because it represented freedom to make a choice again in their lives, even if it was a small one,” she wrote. “They could buy medicine for their children or fruit or cosmetics if they chose. It was their choice, not ours.”
“She has really created an incredible way of getting money directly into the hands of people who need it, not by way of an NGO or government entity,” said Disney. “That is what will stimulate economies.”
Disney also noted that Women for Women International’s model created a relationship between donor and recipient based on friendship, sisterhood and peer support, rather than charity for the needy.
“She's always described Women for Women as ‘stealth social change’ because of the way it changes the hearts of American women just as much as the destinies of the recipients,” Disney said.
“Many of the voices in women's issues speak with too much conformity--there are too many sacred cows, too many no-go areas,” she continued. “But Zainab is not interested in wasting her time on those things, and that frees her up to ask hard questions and shake up the old ways of thinking.”
Since 1993, Women for Women International has worked with approximately 300,000 women in eight post-conflict countries: Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Kosovo, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Sudan. Women enroll in a one-year economic empowerment program that includes basic literacy and numeracy, job skills training and business training. The model builds on the strengths of the individual (each participant gets a personalized plan), while leveraging the capacity of women to positively influence their wider communities. This innovative approach as won plaudits from some of the biggest names in global development, including Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen and former President Bill Clinton.
Throughout it all, said Disney, Salbi has kept her sense of humor. “Everyone assumes that people who do the hard work of advocating for traumatized people are no fun, but Zainab is full of laughter and light.”
And like the survivors she works with, she has confronted the ghosts of her past. Having overcome her early aversion to parties, said Disney, “She is the life of the party!”
Anna Louie Sussman is a writer and editor for the Women in the World Foundation website, and a frequent contributor to major U.S. magazines and newspapers.