of national resistance under war conditions, was to
continue to enjoy the massive support of the
Bosnian Muslim men and women until the signing
of the Dayton Accord in 1995. In the post-Dayton
elections, the SDA had to compete with several
other political parties.
In Kosovo, where the ethnic tension was also
high, Muslim Albanian women, like the Bosnian
women, subordinated women’s interests to the
national cause and supported the Albanian national
leadership in its resistance to Serbian pressure
(Mertus 1999). Ibrahim Rugova and his Demo-
cratic League of Kosovo continued to enjoy the
support of the majority of the Kosovar Albanians
after the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999. In
Bulgaria, the overwhelming majority of the ethnic
Turks voted for the Movement for Rights and
Freedoms party (MRF). In the elections of 1990
and 1991 the MRF, which became an important
political factor in Bulgaria, won the support of over
90 percent of the Turkish minority, 50 percent of
the Pomaks (Bulgarian speaking Muslims), and
about a third of the Muslim Roma (Eminov 2000).
The Muslim and Christian Roma women, who are
socially discriminated against, remain largely out-
side political life in most of the Balkan countries.
Furthermore, the Roma political parties rarely
cooperate with each other.
In the post-communist period, the nationalist
parties in many Balkan countries tried not only to
bring about an increase in the birth rates of their
respective populations but also to redefine women
as primarily biological reproducers of the nation.
In Serbia and Croatia, despite the policies of the
nationalist regimes, which seem to be in conflict
with women’s rights and interests, there is only
mixed evidence of a gender gap in men’s and
women’s political attitudes and almost none in
their voting behavior. Many women supported
nationalist parties, even though they remained
unwilling to sacrifice their autonomy in reproduc-
tive decisions to the nationalist cause (Lilly and
Irvine 2002).Bibliography
A. Babuna, Die nationale Entwicklung der bosnischen
Muslime. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der öster-
reichisch-ungarischen Periode, Frankfurt 1996.
W. Bracewell, Woman in the transition to democracy in
South-Eastern Europe, in M. J. Faber (ed.), The Bal-
kans. A religious backyard of Europe, Ravenna 1996,
213–20.
A. Eminov, Turks and Tatars in Bulgaria and the Balkans,
in Nationalities Papers28 (2000), 129–46.
Inter-Parliamentary Union (Switzerland), <http://www.
ipu.org/parline-e/parlinesearch.asp>.
C. S. Lilly and J. A. Irvine, Negotiating interests. Women
and nationalism in Serbia and Croatia, 1990–1997, in554 political parties and participation
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of national identity in shaping and challenging gender
identity, in S. P. Ramet (ed.), Gender politics in the
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ground paper 3, Warsaw 1998.
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munist and post-communist Central and Eastern
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1998, 285–303.Aydın BabunaCanadaThe story of Muslim women and political par-
ties and participation in Canada is one of begin-
nings: Muslim women are only just starting to
become involved in formal politics in Canada. (This
is true also of Muslim men.) As in most other poli-
ties, women in general are underrepresented in
Canadian legislatures, ranking 35th out of 181
countries according to the Geneva-based Inter-
Parliamentary Union (data from IPU December
2002).
In the last ten years, although there has been a
remarkable increase in the number of minority
women elected to the federal parliament, minority
women remain underrepresented in elected bodies
(Black 2003, 59). Muslims represent 2 percent of
the Canadian population (2001 Census data) but
there are no Muslim women elected to the federal
parliament and only one (of whom I am aware)
elected in a provincial legislature (Fatima Houda-
Pepin in Quebec). One Ismà≠ìlìwoman (Mobin
Jaffer) has been appointed to the federal senate, a
non-elected body in Canada. Thus, in proportion to
the population, Muslim women are clearly under-
represented in elected bodies in Canada at all levels
of government – local, provincial, and federal. This
is in keeping with Abu-Laban’s description of the
structure of formal political power in Canada being
a “gendered vertical mosaic”: majority groups hold
more power than minority groups, and within
those groups, men hold more power than women
(Abu-Laban 2002, 269).
This absence of women from the scene of formal
politics raises a host of questions. Is Muslim
women’s absence due to external factors, such as