From DEBRA@OLN.comlink.apc.orgFri Sep 15 10:27:47 1995 Date: Thu, 14 Sep 1995 01:01:00 +0100 From: Debra Guzman Reply to: beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org To: beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org Subject: WCW: Third World Network Papers: Key Issues [The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] ## Original in: /HRNET/WOMEN ## author : ngonet@chasque.apc.org ## date : 11.09.95 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ KEY ISSUES IN THE BEIJING CONFERENCE: A SOUTHERN PERSPECTIVE by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz The world today has 1.3 billion people in absolute poverty and 70% of these are women. Within the last 20 years the number of rural women in poverty has doubled. This data is consistently reflected in various UN agency reports. Three UN conferences on women have come to pass and the fourth one is just around the corner all bearing the theme "Equality, Development and Peace". However, if we look around us, we cannot in all honesty say that there have been substantial improvements in many women's lives. This can be borne by research results done by the UN, in the academe, and by NGOs. Even the draft Platform for Action admits that "most of the goals of the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women have not been achieved." The 1995 UNDP Human Development Report (HDR) which was released very recently, says that "..despite two decades of material progress, no country in the world treat its women as well as its men.." Mahbub Ul Haq, the main author, said in an interview that "over the past 20 years, doors to education and health have opened rapidly to women, but the doors to economic and political power are barely adjar." 20 years have passed since the l975 Mexico conference and women are still crying for equality, development, and peace. However, these goals are becoming more elusive each day to the majority of the world's women. Where lies the problem? It is about time that we, in the women's movements, seriously examine and assess our analysis, our strategies and tactics, which includes our participation in the UN conferences, and our goals. The central question to ask ourselves then is, have we been addressing the main roots of the totality of our oppressions as women? The draft Platform for Action which came out of the second and last PrepCom had 60% of it bracketed. The issues which had biggest number of brackets are those on Human Rights and on Health. During this Prepcom word has spread that the women are out to carry further the ideology underpinning the Cairo conference. The Conference intends to impose on all governments of the world a secular humanistic philosophy which promotes contraception, abortion, and sterilization, diversity of sexual orientation, plurality of family forms, which seeks to approve lesbian and homosexual relations. The delegate from Guatemala proposed that the word 'gender' should be bracketed. There were materials spread around saying that the feminists are proposing that 5 genders should be recognized - male, female, bisexual, homosexual, and transexual. Obviously, these propaganda materials were produced by the Right to scare the government delegates. These issues were used to exacerbate the north-south divide. Some G-77 representatives were convinced that the NGO women, especially those from the north were being made use of by the powerful nations to push their own agenda. Their tendency, therefore, was to bracket the concepts and phrases which to them were the agenda of the north, such as reproductive and sexual rights, universal human rights, abortion, contraception, etc. WHAT HAPPENED IN CAIRO? It is important to go back to Cairo for us to be able to interpret better what has been happening during the whole process of the Beijing conference. The Vatican and the Islamic fundamentalists unleashed their lobbying prowess in Cairo. The feminists got themselves trapped between the Christian and Islamic Right and the demographic fundamentalists or the neo- Malthusians. Many women's groups allied with the population establishment and the United States government to fight against the Religious Right. The United States which was the bad boy in Rio during the UN Conference on Environment and Development became the good boy in Cairo. It became the champion of women's rights and women's empowerment. I clearly recall how the northern women's groups gave a standing ovation to Timothy Wirth of the US State Department, when he gave his speech during the First PrepCom of the ICPD (International Conference on Population and Development) in New York. There is a broad range of views by feminists of what happened in Cairo. Some say that Cairo was a victory for the women's movement because it succeeded in transforming the neomalthusian population policy into a women's empowerment /reproductive health approach. Other feminists think otherwise. Drs. Vandana and Mira Shiva concluded that the development amnesia and biological reductionism which characterized Cairo spelt defeat for Third World women as they are once again blamed for resource scarcity and ethnic conflicts. They argue that because of the almost exclusive focus put on the reproductive roles of women, patriarchy gained an upperhand through the religious fundamentalists. Betsy Hartmann of The Committee on Women, Population and the Environment (CWPE) said that "The main victors at Cairo were the proponents of the New Population 'Consensus' (NPC). This consensus among population agencies, the environmental mainstream, governments and multilaterals largely blames poverty, environmental degradation, and political instability on overpopulation, while maintaining that women's empowerment is the key to reducing population growth...Structural adjustment, free trade, consumerism, corporate pollution and militarism were once again let off the hook in the grand call for population stabilization as the cornerstone of sustainable development.. The NPC largely views women's rights - as a means to the end of reducing population growth, rather than as ends in and of themselves.." This divergence of views is a manifestation of the tensions within the women's movement.The earlier UN conferences reflected the tensions and differences between the First World feminists and Third World feminists. "The battle lines were often drawn..over what constituted a feminist issue, and therefore what were legitimate feminist foci and locus." (Johnson-Odim, 1991). Basically, the source of conflict lies on how the gender, race, class, and national questions are articulated and dealt with. Third World women activists feel that the women from the north or the First World were "attempting to depoliticize the conferences and implicitly construct a women's movement and a feminism which confined itself to issues of gender discrimination. It was part of the mission, in fact, of the official U.S. delegation to Nairobi to keep 'politics' out of the conference, and instead concentrate on 'women's issues'." (Okeyo, l981) For many Third World women activists, however, it has always been clear to them that women's issues' are highly political issues because these are inextricably linked to all the oppressions they have as women, as Third World citizens, as people of colour, as members of the marginalized classes, as indigenous peoples, and as minorities. This tension was highlighted at Second UN Conference on Women in Copenhagen (l980) over the issue of female circumcision. Angela Gilliam in her article "Women's Equality and National Liberation" (l991) described it succintly; "One of the most tendentious and divisive points raised by Western women during that conference concerned clitoridectomy and the practice of infibulation of female genitalia which still exist in parts of Africa and the Middle East. This became a rallying point for Western women and as they promoted this issue, it seemed to establish a heirarchical relationship to their Third World sisters through intellectual neocolonialism. It revealed latent racism, because the form in which issues were articulated was in terms of those "savage customs" from "backward" Africa and Arab cultures. Underlying this formulation was the implicit evidence of rising anti-Arab and anti-Islamic fervor that was starting to emanate from Western countries." WHAT ABOUT BEIJING? The Beijing conference and the road leading to it once again show how gender has been overemphasized to a point where class, race, nationality, and ethnicity, are obscured. The draft Platform for Action does present a comprehensive list of the different problems of women and an even longer list of things-to- do. It also attempts to build upon, not only the Nairobi FLS, but also on the final documents which came out of the Earth Summit in Rio, the human rights conference in Vienna, the Cairo conference and the Social Summit. There are inconsistencies here and there but by and large it does not significantly detract from the main thrusts of the earlier documents. The latest reports which came out of the Informal Consultations done in New York at the last weeks of July, say that most of the brackets are already removed. Consistent with the earlier UN documents, however, it does not present a coherent and honest analysis of the increasing inequality between nations, races, classes, and genders. It does identify "the persistent and increasing burden of poverty" as the number one critical concern. However, it does not categorically state that what is causing this situation is the increasing hegemony of powerful northern capitalist nations and their institutions and transnational corporations. What it only says is that the "global transformations of the world economy profoundly affecting the parameters of social development.." What is even more ridiculous is its assertion that "all types of conflict, displacement of peoples, and environmental degradation, have further undermined the capacity of governments to meet the basic needs of its population." The effects of poverty suddenly are identified as the causes. Most of the recommended strategic objectives and actions focus on ensuring women's equal access and full participation in power structures and decision-making; equal access to resources, employment, markets; and integrating or mainstreaming gender perspectives and gender analysis. There is nothing new or radical in the draft platform for action which can make a difference in changing the world especially for the 1.3 billion poor. What it does is to give the illusion that by ensuring women's equal participation in decision-making then things will radically change for the better. This is a very dangerous proposition. WOMEN'S RIGHTS BEING USED TO FURTHER FAN ANTI-THIRD WORLD SENTIMENTS The experience cited earlier on how the issue of female circumcision was used to heighten anti-Arab and anti-Islamic sentiments, is being repeated in the whole Beijing process. Women's rights issues are being used in the intramurals between the First World and the Third World. China, a fast-growing economy can be a bane or boon to the northern countries depending on how wide it opens up its economy. In the meantime, it is convenient for the US to bash China since it still proclaims that it is socialist. The United States is being projected as the champion of women's rights and women's empowerment. China, on the other hand, is portrayed as the foremost violator of women's rights and human rights because of its coercive one-child policy, its not allowing women from Tibet and lesbians to come to China, its transferring the site from Beijing to Huairou, etc. For sure, at Beijing the CNN and the BBC will highlight and sensationalize how women's rights are violated in China. In fact, as the conference is nearing the amount of news, bashing China increases by the day. China as the "yellow peril" once again becomes the message. News about how human organs are being traded in China, about women-slavery still existing, pervasive female- infanticide, etc. are found in newspapers all over the world. This bashing extends to the whole of Asia, so the "barbaric" and "savage" customs and practices of Asians will be once again become the focus. The use of the UN Conferences to highlight issues in the host country and region may serve the purpose of stressing the imperative of giving priority to gender issues and there should be no problems about this. However, this is being done in a very opportunistic manner and it has strong racist undercurrents. It won't come as a surprise if one of the recommendations that will come out of Beijing will be the installation of trade- related women's rights. This will legitimize the the imposition of cross-retaliatory measures or trade sanctions to countries which are violating women's rights. By focusing mainly on the violations of women's rights in the Third World, the powerful northern countries can get off the hook and continue recolonizing, homogenizing, and imposing their development models and monocultures on the whole world. Their roles in perpetuating and increasing poverty which is the key problem for the majority of the world's women is glossed over. At the same time, their perpetuation of neo-colonies in the south in collaboration with southern elites who are in power does not come into the picture. The most blatant forms of commodification of women, and the increasing crime and violence brought about by the expansion of the global market economy is not projected and discussed extensively. Sex tourism, child prostitution, massive export of female labour, is happening in Third World countries because they are caught in the trap of foreign debt and their economies are export-oriented and import-dependent. Why are these issues not equally highlighted as the one-child policy of China or female infanticide in India and China, etc.? We are not saying that China should be absolved of its oppression of its own women. We should still raise these but not at the expense of neglecting all the other issues mentioned above. There is also the need to understand the effect of China's entry into the global market economy on the situation of women. CONCLUSION The Beijing Draft Platform for Action does not address the totality of the oppressions of women, especially Third World women. It is still captive to the economic growth and global market framework. Its clear bias for gender discrimination inevitably sidelined race, class, and national questions. All the governments will sign on to it as it does not question the basic economic framework which they are implementing. This signing on will not necessarily mean a victory for the women's movements. Even if it is targeted that this should be a conference of commitments, the contradictions between the strategic objectives and actions set and the economic growth development model will make this difficult, if not impossible. What this tells us is that feminism which has an ideology mainly based on gender cannot bring about the liberation of women from all the oppressions they are confronted with. Third World women should take the lead in identifying and defining what a women's movement is and what should be its agenda. This does not mean that there is no basis for solidarity with the women's movements in the north. Solidarity at this age of globalization and international trade is more needed than ever before. However, the northern women's groups must be willing to broaden their framework to include not just gender, but class, race, nationality and ethnicity. -ends-