Soldiers threatened to flog them, imprison them, shoot them in the head. The women stayed put. “We used our pains, broken bodies and scarred emotions to confront the injustices and terror of our nation,” Leymah recalled later.
On behalf of the protesters, Leymah went to see Liberia’s corrupt and violent dictator, Charles Taylor. No one knew if she’d come out alive. But she managed to persuade him to start peace negotiations with rebel warlords.
Leymah and other women traveled to Ghana to support the talks. When word came that the men were deadlocked and giving up, the women linked arms and blocked the doors and windows so the negotiators couldn’t leave. Security forces moved in. Leymah stood her ground and threatened to strip naked there in the hall, shaming the men. They stopped in their tracks. The negotiations restarted, a peace agreement was signed, Taylor fled, and Liberians elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as the first woman president in Africa. The peace has held ever since, even as other conflicts and coups have swept across the region. The whole story is captured in a remarkable documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which I highly recommend.
Leymah once told me that back in 2003, while she was organizing protests in markets and soccer fields, someone gave her a copy of my memoir Living History, and she was struck by a quote from Harriet Tubman that had inspired me. As Tubman guided escaped slaves to freedom, she would say: “If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.” Leymah loved that and shared it with her friends in Liberia. If they wanted to stop a war and oust a dictator, they needed to keep going.
That’s exactly what they did. The women of Liberia refused “to be silenced in the face of AK-47 and RPGs,” as Leymah recalled when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. “We walked when we had no transportation, we fasted when water was unaffordable, we held hands in the face of danger, we spoke truth to power when everyone else was being diplomatic, we stood under the rain and the sun with our children to tell the world the stories of the other side of the conflict.”
I’ve heard that same determination from women activists and dissidents all over the world. One foot in front of the other, no matter what comes. Keep going. When I wonder if I can find the strength to overcome some obstacle in my own life, when I’m not sure how to get back up after I’ve been knocked down, I think about women like Leymah. Their stories put my problems in perspective. Their wisdom helps me see more clearly. Their courage is contagious.
I set out to be a voice for women who are silenced by repression. Yet in ways I could not have predicted, they helped me find my voice.
It started in early 1995, a time when I felt lost both personally and professionally. The heady early days of the Clinton administration, when so much seemed possible, were over. I had waged and lost a long battle to pass legislation that would provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans. In part because of my failure, Democrats had been decimated in the 1994 midterm elections, and right-wing Republicans now controlled Congress. I felt I had let down Bill, our team, and the millions of Americans who had put their faith in us. I thought about withdrawing from active political and policy work, which I hoped would remove a distraction for the administration and deprive Republicans of political ammunition.
Against that backdrop, in March 1995, I took my first extended trip overseas as First Lady without the president. With fifteen-year-old Chelsea by my side, I visited five countries across South Asia over twelve days. It was my first serious experience in the developing world, including countries where women had few rights and faced widespread persecution. I would never be the same.
A highlight of the trip came at a women’s luncheon in New Delhi, India. The principal of a secondary school shared a poem written for me by one of her students, Anasuya Sengupta. It was called “Silence.” All these years later, I still can’t get it out of my head. It begins like this:
Too many women in too many countries
speak the same language of silence.
Wow. It was like a bolt of lightning cutting through the clouds in my head. I had been feeling sorry for myself, too worried about politics and the press. This felt real. It felt like the work I was called to do. Then there was this:
When a woman fights for power,
as all women would like to,
quietly or loudly,
it is questioned.
And yet, there must be freedom—
if we are to speak.
And yes, there must be power—
if we are to be heard.
And when we have both
(freedom and power)
let us not be misunderstood.
We seek only to give words
to those who cannot speak
(too many women
in too many countries).
I rewrote the speech I was preparing to give the next day. Now I knew what I wanted to say. I quoted from the poem and, a few months later, brought it with me to China for the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where I declared that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” The Chinese authorities had banned thousands of NGO representatives from attending the main conference and forced them to gather an hour away in the Huairou district. So of course I went to see them. A raucous crowd of women activists from around the world sang, yelled, clapped, and cheered as I walked on-stage. They loved Anasuya’s poem as much as I did.
Her words and the spirit of the women I met on my travels gave me a new sense of purpose. I committed to use whatever power and platform I had to lift up women who were fighting for peace and democracy, who were doing the hard work of building power and defending human rights. That would be my mission.
I met Rigoberta Menchú during another challenging time in my life. In November 1998, Republicans in Congress were preparing to impeach my husband. Personally, I was heartbroken. Politically, though, I was furious—and absolutely convinced that the best thing for the country was for Bill to remain as president. It was during this painful, confusing period that I set out on a trip through Central America, which had recently been devastated by Hurricane Mitch.
Guatemala is a country so beautiful that, as the indigenous poet Humberto Ak’abal put it, “if you climb up an ancient cypress tree and creep among its branches… you will see the earth is not so far from heaven.” Yet for nearly four decades, it had been torn apart by coups and a bloody civil war between the right-wing military-controlled government and leftist guerrillas. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and there were widespread atrocities and human rights abuses, especially against the indigenous population. I was proud that Bill formally apologized for the role the United States had played over the years in supporting the Guatemalan military’s abuses.
In 1996, a peace agreement ended the fighting, and the country began the hard work of rebuilding democracy and reconciling old foes. Even with the guns silent, however, justice and accountability were proving elusive. The country’s power structure was not yet ready to give up its culture of impunity and embrace accountability. No high-ranking military officers or political leaders had been held responsible for human rights abuses during the civil war. A Historical Clarification Commission was slowly compiling a report but was not going to name names.
Bishop Juan José Gerardi, a revered champion of human rights in Guatemala, led a separate investigation under the auspices of the Catholic Church that he hoped would spur prosecutions of war criminals. But in April 1998, just two days after publishing his findings, the bishop was brutally beaten to death with a concrete block. The government seemed paralyzed and unable to respond. Human rights activists feared the murder signaled a return to the bad old days of massacres and disappearances.
This was the backdrop for my visit. I came to offer aid in the wake of a deadly hurricane but also to encourage Guatemala’s leaders to deliver on the promise of peace. At the U.S. ambassador’s house in Guatemala City, I met with former dissidents now working to promote reconciliation and accountability.
One of them was Rigoberta Menchú, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 at the age of thirty-three for her work exposing genocide against indigenous Guatemalans during the war. I remembered Chelsea reading Rigoberta’s 1983 memoir when she was in fifth grade in Little Rock. Rigoberta’s story of turning tragedy into activism made a lasting impression on Chelsea. It was easy to see why. In her book, Rigoberta described growing up in extreme poverty and how both her parents, her two brothers, and other members of their family were killed by the repressive military dictatorship. Rigoberta continued to fight for the rights of indigenous communities, land reforms, and democracy even after being exiled from Guatemala in the early ’80s.
Now Rigoberta was back and determined to bring to justice human rights abusers from the old regime, despite the official stonewalling. She had recently gone to court to protest biased judges putting their fingers on the scales in the trial of twenty-five soldiers accused of massacring indigenous villagers in 1995. The prosecutor who had been brave enough to bring the unprecedented case also complained of political interference and resigned. It was a debacle.
When we met, Rigoberta told me about her efforts and the entrenched obstacles she and other human rights activists faced. She asked me to mention her work when I visited the Guatemalan Congress. My voice could give her cause momentum—and perhaps protect her from retribution. After all, it was just months since Bishop Gerardi had been killed.
Her words stunned me. The idea that a mention from me could be that meaningful—that it could potentially be the difference between life and death—was hard to process. I had been First Lady for nearly six years. I flew on Air Force One, dined with kings and queens, and was constantly surrounded by armed guards. Yet none of that drove home for me the gravity of the role I occupied in the world like that conversation in Guatemala. I could feel the responsibility pressing down on my shoulders. At the same time, I was lifted up. Here was a woman who had endured so much, had persevered through unimaginable hardship, and she was totally undaunted. Yes, I had problems. But if she could stay focused on the all-important fight for human rights, then so could I. And if I could use what power I had to help, then that’s what I would do.
The next day, I talked with lawmakers about Rigoberta and the hard work of truth and reconciliation. “You also have the opportunity to teach the world that you cannot have a lasting peace without strengthening the rule of law and ensuring justice and security for all citizens of your nation,” I told the Guatemalan Congress, adding, “There is no greater tribute to Bishop Gerardi than to see justice done, not only in his case but in every case, and impunity rejected throughout the country.”
