By: Staff Writer
April 14, 2023
A Dominican born international human rights journalist leads fight at the United Nations for women struggling in the Ukraine due to the war.
Rebecca Theodore is turning her attention deeper into women’s affairs and away from her traditional beat of human rights and international security in general to now focus on the plight of Ukrainian women suffering as a result of the ongoing conflict with Russia. “People never look at the casualties of war. But when war breaks out people focus on the hesitancy of the act, but never the long term impact of what it does to families and communities.”
Theodore, who has spent half of her adult life working on the “red carpet” of the UN where all of the world leaders congregate when there is a General Assembly meeting, hosted a forum honouring Ukrainian women caught in the middle of the conflict between Russia. She said that people always ask her why did she jump into the Ukrainian/Russian conflict as opposed to women’s issues affecting the Caribbean, she told Caribbean Magazine Plus that women around the world can all “empathize” with the ravages of a changing environment that Ukrainian women are faced with.
Ms Theodore added: “The same way my parents empathized with people affected by World War 2, is the same way we can empathize with the victims in the Ukraine. Pain and suffering knows no bounds.
“Although you are not affected physically, you are still affected in some form of unconscious way that you know that something has happened.”
Something is happening indeed in the Ukraine as hundreds and thousands of civilians are being displaced by the ongoing conflict with Russia. “Inclusion has always been my watchword, I fight for inclusion in everything. Everywhere I go, I look at the crowd. Sometimes the crowd is mostly women, sometimes you look at, but also I look at the race, I look at the socio economic factors, and all else,” she also noted.