“I remember how the older women in our family, women of a generation that was caught in between tradition and liberation, used to talk when ‘the boys’ had made still another mess of the world. ‘Women should take over,’ they would say, somewhere between a hope, a fear and a threat, ‘and things would be different.’ This is what Africa’s only woman president told her hosts, mostly males, during her visit to Washington, D.C..
In January, a majority of Liberia’s three million people elected this 67-year old woman as their President, after the “men folk” had torn the country into bloody shreds in fifteen horrendous years of fighting between Liberian, Sierra Leonean, and other West African warlords. One brutal leader, Charles Taylor, whom the new President wants brought back from exile for trial, used to recruit schoolboys as soldiers in a bloody savagery that took as many as 250,000 lives in Liberia alone.
The lady who promised that things would be different if she were President, is Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, an economist who likes to wear a blue African headpiece. She inherits a capital, Monrovia, with no electricity, no running water, and virtually no schoolrooms. Her presidential "palace" is a dilapidated building with only generators for electricity.
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Thousands of miles from Liberia, a majority of the 16 million people of Chile also elected a woman President, hoping that she could heal the divisions left by a military dictatorship that had imprisoned and tortured her and her parents.
Socialist Michelle Bachelet's elevation to the presidency marked a sharp political shift in traditionally conservative, male-dominated Chile. Her first act as president was to swear in a cabinet of ten men and ten women, thus fulfilling her promise to have equal numbers of men and women in decision-making posts.
The 54-year old pediatrician called for national unity in the wake of Chile's seventeen years of human rights abuses and oppression of dissidents under dictator Pinochet. "There was a time in our history when we were divided, looking at each other with suspicion, with mistrust and rejection,” recalled Bachelet. “Now the time has come to look at each other again to the face, to the eyes. The past is the past, but we do not want to repeat the mistakes of that past,"
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Thousand of miles from Chile, the German parliament also confirmed a woman as her country’s political leader. Although she operates in a stable democracy, Angela Merkel, too, is expected to be a conciliator between the relatively well-to-do West Germans and their still disadvantaged eastern compatriots.
She spent the first 35 years of her life under rigid Communist rule in a Protestant pastor’s home and earned a doctorate in physics at age 24. All the more is it an amazing feat that, in only 15 years, she rose to lead a major democracy of 83 million people.
In1990 she joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In 1994 Chancellor Kohl called her into his cabinet as minister for environmental affairs. After his retirement, she assumed the leadership of his party. And five years later, an electoral stalemate gave her the opportunity to maneuver her party into a grand coalition with her Socialist opponents.
The key to her success seems to be a keen sense for what is doable and needs to be done, a willingness to compromise even if it hurts. When the defeated Chancellor Schröder told her in so many words that it was beyond her capabilities to fill the chancellor’s job, she just kept quiet and shook his hand.
In her first visits with Presidents Putin and Bush, Merkel calmly told them what they might do differently. Many Europeans applauded her for daring to tell Mr. Bush that, for America’s reputation sake, he ought to close the Guantanamo prison.
Maybe Russia and the United States would be less prone to political blundering if one day they were led by thoughtful and courageous women.