Space for Peace in the South Caucasus
Senator Dominique Tilmans, Member of the Belgian Senate

(Brussels, May 22nd - 24th, 2014)

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Biography

Dominique Tilmans was born in Wellin, in the Province of Luxembourg, Belgium. She graduated from the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1975 in Political Science and Diplomacy. She served as the Provincial Counselor of the Province of Luxembourg from 1987 – 2003 and was elected the first female Permanent Deputy to the Province of Luxembourg in 1993.

In 2007, she was elected to the Belgian Senate and served until May 2014. She created the Forum des Luxembourgeoises (Méridienne) and presided over it from 2001 to 2008. Méridienne seeks to help and encourage women in Luxembourg to be more active in their professional lives and realize their economic potential. In 2011, she was awarded the 'Femme de Paix' by the Conseil des Femmes Francophones de Belgique and is an Officer of the Order of Leopold.

"Space for Peace in the South Caucasus”

Dominique Tilmans, Member of the Belgian Senate

 

Good morning to all of you. Thank you to Mr. Donfried for inviting me to this meeting. Today I will speak about the South Caucasus.

English is not my first language and I hope you will excuse my poor English. I am a woman of peace and of course there is a reason for that. The reason is because I run peace actions in the South Caucuses. I will speak about two colloquiums that I organized in the Belgian Senate in 2010 and 2012 and I will speak about a new project, which is about space.

The goal of those actions… there are three goals. The first one is to allow women to become actors of peace and peace processes in the South Caucuses. And also a force of reconciliation. The second point is to make Europe the equal of the conflict in the South Caucuses in order to try to inflect the radical positions in both countries. And three, as my humble level, is to publish to the population to the peace as the Group of Minsk wishes it. I don’t know if you know anything about the situation of the South Caucasus. Not a lot people know about it. The South Caucuses are a group of neighboring countries across east and west. It is in the grip of conflicts such as Abkhazia, Ossetia and Nagorno-Kararbakh. And the conflict of Nagorno-Kararbakh is really unknown in Europe. It is now 20 years since the the major powers of the world— the US, Russia, and France— tried to find a solution for this conflict. We say it is a frozen conflict, but it is not really a frozen conflict because people are dying in both countries. Until now, no solution has been found. It’s really a pity because it is really a region with the same cultural identification. But as usual, the problem is politics. It comes from Russia, let’s say.

I organized two colloquiums in the Belgian Senate in May 2010, called Armenian and Azerbaijani Women to Dialogue. This first meeting gathered two women in order to give them the opportunity to speak—only to speak together, and to seize the opportunity for each of them to become a peace messenger in their own country. This first meeting was really difficult, because you have two women who speak more about hate than friendship. But they agreed that we should go further and to try to do something together. And so we organized different meetings in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belgium and Tbilisi. We also organized a meeting in Switzerland and there we met the International Red Cross and it was a very important meeting because in it they asked all the questions to the IRC about missing persons, about prisoners, and dead people. And there they understood that the governments of both countries were saying things only to spread hate between all the people. Because all the questions of missing people are resolved today. So this meeting we had in Switzerland was really important because it gave trust to them. And then those two women, and women associations from Armenia and Azerbaijan, understood the processes of their governments and the war, and they understood that they had something to do together.

And then I organized a second colloquium, it was in the Belgian Senate again in 2012. It’s called ‘Challenges and perspectives in South Caucuses— roles for women’. This conference brought together a panel of experts like Bernard Fassier; the former vice president of the Group of Minsk, Pierre Aparaxine; deputy head of the delegation of IRC in Europe; Pierre R. who was the ambassador of the European Commission in Baku; Pierre-Philippe Lefort, the EU special representative for South Caucuses; UN Women and a lot of Women associations from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. This colloquium had two goals. The first was to use Brussels as a sounding board to better apprehend the situation in the South Caucuses and especially the Nagorno-Kararbakh conflict. The other goal was to sensitize authorities from the three regions of the necessity to integrate women in peace processes. After this meeting, we decided to set up a platform of co-ordination of peace by women of the three regions.

The last project is Space for Peace in the South Caucuses. It is a very interesting project. I’m chair of the space working group of the Senate and I was in 2013 chair of the European Inter-parliamentary space conference. I said, well, it can be very interesting to mix those presidencies with the South Caucuses. And so we set up this big project, but you have to know that now it’s been 20 years since Armenia and Azerbaijan refused all projects together. It is really difficult, which is why I try to make it happen. The goal of this project is to bring closer two communities in conflict to prepare the populations for peace. To encourage women, through a scientific approach, to overcome the hostility widespread in both countries and space is our lever— you have to know that space is our future, the future of humanity. Space is in our daily lives— weather forecasting, internet, television, GPS, climate change, mobile phones—we use space all the time. But to develop those services and to go further in the space sector, we need young scientists, because the people who are working in the space sector are usually quite old, and we in Europe and the US don’t have enough young people who are interested in scientific careers and space related careers. We need chemists, physics, lawyers, commercial people, web designers—we need a lot of different young students interested in these skills.

The project I would like to launch in the South Caucuses is dedicated to two women—one Armenian and one Azerbaijani—with scientific and space-related knowledge. It would be better if they had links to Nagorno-Kararbakh. They will work together with two young scientific Belgian women, one from the north, one from the south, because we are also a difficult country. And we have an astronaut who agreed to be our scientific reference, and will fix the theme of the project. The project has different phases. The first one is to have a meeting in Brussels, to define the project and its theme. Second, we will have a meeting in Tibilisi. Third, after one year, they will present their work in the Belgian Parliament. And then we will send them to Vienna to attend a launch of a satellite. It’s a wonderful project, we have the support of the Belgian foreign ministry, the Ministry for science and the European space agency. The project has two origins— first is to help, in a conflict zone, young women scientists to accept dialogue and to work together. And second, to demonstrate that the space sector is a sector of the future. It will be, if we succeed, the first time that space can be used for something else other than technology, to be used for peace. I can tell you that a lot of people from the space sector are very interested by this project because they like that space can be used for something else other than technology. That said, nothing is simple in the South Caucuses. When I went back two or three months ago, Armenia had accepted the project, the Armenian young scientist is very talented; in Azerbaijan it is a little bit more difficult— they don’t accept a project like this, because now there are high tensions between the two countries. So diplomacy needs time to be soft. You must be flexible with your plans. So I decided to change our project a little bit, because I see that it was not possible to succeed right now. I decided to invite Armenian and Azerbaijani scientists to Belgium, to meet our astronaut and our Nobel Physics Prize Laureate, and also to meet a young scientist from the University of Liege. It’s a new way, and I think this project needs time. We shouldn’t push it too strongly. I think this new option will increase trust between us, and I hope that in the end we can arrive at our goal. In the South Caucuses relations are always going up and down. In the beginning relations were good, and both sides agreed on the project. But now with heightened tensions, we don’t have such an agreement anymore. I think all of us should have to projects for peace in such countries, because it takes us slowly towards our goals. With trust, I believe we can move mountains.

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