Syria's opposition leadership says NO to women

          
The leadership of Syria's main opposition bloc in exile, the Syrian National Council, is an all-male affair after elections failed to promote a single woman to a decision-making group of 41.
    
Female delegates at the SNC convention under way in Qatar  some rushing toward the podium in protest after the results were announced early Thursday  say the new leadership fails to reflect the key role of women in the push to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.
     
It also falls short of the SNC's attempt to showcase a new diversity at a time when the group faces intense criticism from the international community and Syrian activists for not being representative enough. After the vote in Doha, the SNC tried to redress the lack of women in its new leadership, with one spokesman saying women would be added to the 41-member general secretariat by decree.
     
"The bottom line is that there is a recognition that the women got shafted, and that it has to be fixed," said delegate Muna Jondy, 37, an immigration lawyer from Flint, Michigan. Still, she said, it's "not going to cure the underlying problem, which I think was the lack of recognition of the importance of the voice of women at the decision-making table."
    
The SNC, formed a year ago from a pool of long-term exiles and academics, has faced mounting criticism from within Syria and the international community that it is out of touch with those risking their lives in Syria. The group's Doha conference was largely intended to deflect such claims and present a more broad-based membership.
     
However, those efforts may have come too late. The United States and other foreign backers of the rebels are promoting the idea of a new leadership forum in which the SNC would only play a diminished role.
     
The women's marginal role in the exile-based opposition is in marked contrast to their active participation in Syria's nearly 20-month-old conflict.
     
In the early days of the uprising, women organized mass rallies and featured prominently in local grassroots organizations, risking arrest and torture just like their male counterparts. As the uprising became militarized, their role receded somewhat, but the civil war, fought in populated areas, is hitting them just as hard as the men.
   
The SNC, trying to boost its image, had set a 15 percent women's quota for its new, expanded general assembly of some 420 delegates gathered at the conference this week in the Qatari capital of Doha. Jondy, the Michigan lawyer, said she had been hastily recruited as a delegate in what she believes was an attempt to meet the quota.
    
Still, women seemed to have been largely relegated to the sidelines of the conference. The convention hotel lobby was full of male SNC members engulfed by clouds of cigarette smoke huddled over coffee to strike deals and talk strategy.
 
     
AP