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UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com, UN/ - 27 October 2006 -- Mr. President and
members of the Security Council, Thank
you for the honor to address the Security
Council on women’s roles in peace
consolidation.
Peace
consolidation is an uncertain enterprise. It is
one thing to agree to a ceasefire, and quite
another to move from there to a point where
societies can resolve conflicts through
inclusive governance without reverting to armed
combat. This
year we have seen many examples –from
Timor Leste to the With
the setting up of the Peace
Building
Commission, the UN has strengthened its
peacebuilding architecture, increasing coherence
in fulfilling its peacebuilding mandate.
But today we must ask what else is
urgently needed, and how Security Council
resolution 1325 could be more effectively
implemented to bring about just and sustainable
peace. From
our work in over 20 conflict-affected countries,
UNIFEM has learned what is needed to implement
resolution 1325 effectively in peace
consolidation. Let me mention three points: 1:
peace-building efforts must ensure
women’s physical and economic security In peacemaking and peacebuilding, the urgent often drives out the important. The urgent is the need to stop the fighting—which means placating former combatants and addressing the grievances of warring parties in peace talks and agreements. But parties to the conflict are not the same as parties to the peace. Peacebuilding and
consolidation require that all parties with an
interest in peace are engaged in negotiating a
new social contract, building institutions of a
new society, and re-establishing livelihoods.
Women are a crucial resource in this process. Peace agreements, early recovery and post-conflict governance do better when women are involved. Women make a difference in part because they adopt a more inclusive approach to peace and security and address key social and economic issues that provide the foundations of sustainable peace and that would otherwise be ignored. The
question is not only what women can bring to
peace consolidation but also what peacebuilding
can do to promote women’s human rights and
gender equality—transforming social structures
so they do not reproduce the exclusion and
marginalization that underlie conflict. Women
know the costs of war: what it means to be
subject to sexual violence designed to destroy
communities, what it means to be displaced, to
flee their homes and property, to be excluded
from public life and regarded as less than full
citizens. Peace consolidation must include
ending impunity for sexual violence and raising
the political and economic costs to those who
engage in it, making sure they are not rewarded
with state power and high profile jobs as a
result of negotiated peace agreements. Two of women’s most urgent needs are for physical safety and economic security. Efforts to engage women in public decision-making will not succeed if women risk continued violence for taking on public roles, and they cannot be expected to be effective public actors if they have no source of livelihood. What
UNIFEM is seeing on the ground--in And
everywhere there is evidence that sexual and
gender-based violence is taken into homes and
communities after conflicts have ended, as
ex-combatants return with small arms, and social
norms that protect women remain broken. In all of the conflict areas we have worked, we have witnessed women’s willingness to take risks—reaching across borders, organizing to support dialogue and defying threats to their security. But we cannot rely on the bravery of women; we need systems to be in place. In peace consolidation, the international community must invest in reforming the security sector to ensure women’s safety, particularly where armies or police have been a source of the violence they experience. In
Rwanda, after police said they could not protect
women as they lacked vehicles for rapid
response, UNIFEM organized an inter-agency
response to set up specialized gender desks in
police stations and provide them with training,
hotlines and motorcycles to reach women in
remote districts. 2:
Sustainable peace requires real justice
for women To consolidate peace there must be justice for women in accordance with international human rights standards. This means removing all laws that discriminate against women, formulating new gender equality laws, strengthening rule of law institutions to implement them, and empowering women to access these institutions and demand their rights. To
support these efforts, UNIFEM is working with
the International Legal Assistance Consortium
(ILAC) to support a global Partnership for
Gender Justice,
co-chaired by the Governments of Sweden
and South Africa, to marshal Member States, UN
system, and non-governmental resources
to support these efforts. Too often in conflict affected countries we see that laws on victim compensation do not include compensation for rape, which is regarded as a minor crime. I just returned from Kosovo with Goodwill Ambassador Nicole Kidman, where we met with women who had been brutally raped during the conflict. They
feel doubly violated now as they seek justice,
both locally and from international tribunals
who promise to help them but never deliver. If
we are serious about ensuring justice and
consolidating peace, we must do more to provide
legal training for judges and lawyers, witness
protection, medical support services and
compensation. Family matters and personal status are typically left to traditional or customary legal systems—partly because they are an inexpensive system of dispute resolution, and partly to buy the cooperation of traditional or tribal leaders by giving them control over personal and family matters. The
result is the perpetuation of honor crimes,
exchange of women to resolve inter-clan
disputes, denial of women’s inheritance rights
and other human rights violations. Justice
for women cannot be done on the cheap, and
women’s rights cannot be bargained away for
other political gains. Justice for women has to
be featured as an integral and achievable part
of any UN strategic plan of assistance. 3:
Peace processes require institutional change and
stronger accountability systems Women’s engagement in peace consolidation requires consistent sustained investment in strategies to ensure that the institutions engaged in rebuilding governance, justice, security, economic, and social systems have the will and the capacity to respond to women’s needs, and that women are taking leadership roles in influencing these processes. UNIFEM’s peace and security approach is based on five integrated elements: 1)
bringing women to the peace table; 2) supporting
women’s engagement in building new
constitutional and legal frameworks; 3)
investing in women’s leadership in the
development of new institutions, including
gender-sensitive judicial and law enforcement
agencies; 4) building partnerships to generate
and support national gender justice movements
advocating to integrate women into national
peace, security, development and rights agendas;
and 5) support for women’s participation in
elections and political decision-making. What we have learned is that the earlier women are recognized as peace agents and engaged in peace processes, from mediations to peace negotiations to constitutional reform, the more they are seen as legitimate actors. This
is why in Uganda this week, UNIFEM is supporting
the launch of a Peace Caravan with women from
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and
Uganda to demand that the international
community respect Resolution
1325 and include women at the Juba peace talks. Some progress has been made in ensuring women’s inclusion in
post-conflict decision-making.
A variety of quotas and reservation
systems in A social group that has long been excluded from public decision-making
must be supported to exercise the knowledge and
skills needed to shape policy and legislation
and enforce implementation.
This is not just a problem of women’s capacities. It is about obstacles to gender equality in the institutions that shape the ways decisions are made, resources allocated, and policies implemented. Critical institutions – such as the military and ministries of finance and planning – do not automatically adopt gender equality goals even when peace agreements mandate them to do so. Three
changes are critical to enable public
institutions to bring gender equality into their
leadership, staff, and peace building work.
These include:
top-level directives that make women’s
rights a key element of the institution’s
work; Although more women have been brought into the military, the police and civilian staff of peacekeeping missions, they are still a token minority. Appointments of women to the top levels of mediation and facilitation teams, as well as peace-keeping missions, are still rare. UNIFEM and other women’s rights advocates must negotiate anew each
time to bring women to peace talks or include
women’s priorities in post-conflict needs
assessments, and even when they succeed, they
find that resources are not allocated to meeting
these priorities. In conclusion, if we want to consolidate peace we must stop rewarding those who are most socially destructive, and engage those with constructive, peaceful solutions. Writing in the Sixteenth century, French philosopher Montaigne stated: ‘Women are not wrong when they decline to accept the rules laid down for them, since the men make these rules without consulting them’. One way of understanding peace consolidation is as a massive national effort to remake the rules of governance, justice, security and economic activity to eliminate the causes of conflict, distrust, and inequalities. For women of all social groups, this opportunity to participate in
re-building the rules cannot be missed. Only
then will we have peace under the laws of
justice. ~~~~~~ MaximsNews.com, An Independent Voice from the U.N., provides commentary and analysis from leading world figures: King Abdullah II (Jordan), HRH Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein (Jordan), Sir Brian Urquhart, Hans Blix, Amb. Richard Holbrooke, Anwar Ibrahim, Bianca Jagger, Shashi Tharoor, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, Noeleen Heyzer, Kerry Kennedy, Ian Williams, Stephen Schlesinger, Sen. Timothy E. Wirth, Marc Morial, Amb. Jayantha Dhanapala (Sri Lanka), Amb. Pierre Schori (Sweden), Amb. William H. Luers, Mehri Madarshahi, J. Michael Adams, Gloria Feldt, Jeffrey Laurenti, Rodney D. Smith, Rory O'Connor, Genevieve Stamper, Max Stamper and others.
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