WUNRN
Women Must Be Part of the Peace Equation
Rousbeh Legatis interviews
MAVIC CABRERA-BALLEZA, Global Network of Women Peacebuilders
UNITED
NATIONS, Mar 21, 2011 (IPS) - Eleven years ago, 192 countries – all the United
Nations member states – agreed to step up the integration of women in
international peacebuilding and security processes, a promise that has remained
largely unmet.
Mavic
Cabrera-Balleza notes that by having specific provisions compelling their
members to implement and report progress, regional organisations like the
European Union and the African Union "are a step ahead" of the United
Nations, which lacks a regular accountability mechanism.
As
international coordinator of the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders (GNWP),
consisting of 50 women's and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) from
Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Latin America, Cabrera-Balleza spoke
to IPS about developments and challenges in supporting women around the world.
Excerpts
from the interview follow.
Q: Recently you
conducted a stock-taking study to look at the progress made in 11 countries in
terms of women's involvement in national efforts to prevent war and build
peace. What did you find?
A: One of
the biggest problems is what we refer to as the 'accountability gap'. There is
nothing that compels U.N. member states to report on what they are doing to put
Resolution 1325 [on women, peace and security] into practice, apart from the
beautiful statements that they all say during the open debate in the U. N.
Security Council every October. But that is not an accurate reporting.
A second
finding of our report is the enduring lack of women 's participation in
decision-making, which is also related to an absence of women in official peace
negotiations. When negotiations are informal then women are there and
recognised, when they become official and national they disappear. The reason
is that in these peace negations a bigger premium is put into parties who had
guns or who were engaged in actual combat. So it is not because women do not
have anything to contribute, but there are structural barriers to their
participation and that has to be changed.
We have also
found that women's participation in the justice and security sector is still
very low, in general, across the 11 countries. There has been a change in the
judiciary, but not in critical mass, meaning at least 30 percent. The security
sector – police and military – is still very male in all the analysed
countries. Women's participation in the military, for example, was less than
nine percent in eight of the nine countries for which data were provided.
Q: Did you find ways to
confront these problems?
A: To begin
to fill the 'accountability gap' we have been advocating for the adoption of a
general recommendation on armed conflict for the U.N. Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The general
recommendation is the CEDAW Committee's interpretation of state obligations
under international laws.
So what will
happen if a general recommendation on women and armed conflicts gets adopted is
that member states who have ratified the CEDAW – there are around 186 of them –
will be obliged to include in their regular compliance report to the Committee
how they are actually implementing resolution 1325.
And NGOs
which are providing or presenting on their own shadow reports to CEDAW will
also more consciously integrate 1325 implementation, even when they are already
do it. It will raise their awareness.
Q: Some critics say that
NGOs and U.N. agencies are competing for visibility and resources instead of
working together.
A: This
happens a lot, I cannot believe how much it happens. We [women's groups, civil
society organisations and U.N. agencies] go to the same donors. What we are
encouraging the U.N. is that they should not duplicate what NGOs or other
agencies are already doing, but provide the models or catalytic examples,
meaning examples that one can replicate in other areas.
The world is
big, there are many problems. We should not try all of us working in the
Democratic Republic of Congo or Afghanistan. There are many places which need
attention.
The existing
lack of appreciation and the competition is in some ways driven by the need for
visibility and the need to attract donors' attention to our individual work and
not to our collective work. And here I would really challenge the donor
community to encourage collective work, partnership and not just to put their
stake on the bigger and more visible agencies or organisations.
They are
accountable to their constituencies, to their parliaments and to their
congresses, but they should also educate their constituencies and not just work
on one priority country when there is already presence there.
Q: GNWP was part of the
NGO executive committee at the 55th session of the Commission on the Status of
Women (CSW), which just held two weeks of meetings in New York. What do you see
as the greatest challenges yet to overcome?
A: The CSW
remains the only regular global policy discussion space dedicated to women,
there is nothing else. It brings in a very good number of participants together,
no matter what the theme is. I want for the CSW and U.N. Women, which serves as
a secretariat to the Commission, to realise the convening and mobilising power
of this event.
Unfortunately,
there is a persistent procedural or you may say structural problem with the
CSW. It is not clear where do the agreed conclusions – which is the main
outcome document at the end of the two-week meeting – actually go to, how are
they influencing other U.N. policy discussions.
Another
persistent problem is the refusal by some U.N. member states to recognise that
gender equality is upfront and central in any policy discussion. There is no
escaping it, women are totally part of the equation. When you are talking about
peace, human rights and development – which are the major areas of U.N. work –
gender is an integral component. There is no meaningful, substantive discussion
that could happen in this policies if do not integrate that.