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"Frauen und Sicherheit - Brauchen wir einen Weltfrauensicherheitsrat?" 14./15.09. 2002 in Berlin
Dr. Sima Samar (President of the Independent Human Rights Commission, Afghanistan) Prof. Svetlana Slapsak (Ljubljana Graduate School in Humanities, Slovenien) Heidi Meinzolt-Depner (Internationale Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit/IFFF) Salwa Hdeib-Qannam ( Jerusalem Center for Women, Palästina) Grußadressen von: Charlotte Bunch, "Regrets , because..." Pam Spees, "Solidarity from New York ..." Ute Kätzel, "Sicherheitspolitik ohne die Stimmen von Frauen?"
#Durda Knezevic (Infotheka Zagreb, Kroatia) "It is a sort of paradox that the world capitalism, represented by USA and Western Europe, and its overpowering hegemony is nowadays so hysterical in discovering (and creating) enemies when there is, in fact, absence of any real threat for them bigger than that thirty years ago. Is it realistic for the country that spends 380 billion USD a year on its military (let alone the others from the same club) to fear a couple of thousands of Al-Quaeda fanatics, to fear "reds" where there are almost no reds any more, to fear allegedly deeply-rooted cultural/civilisational antipathy of Moslems to modernism, to fear Iraq, devastated by the long years sanctions, etc.? And moreover, to fear so much that they are ready to enter into new wars, even wars that may include nuclear weapons? And all this as a farcical play if we only remind ourselves that Islamic fundamentalism has been for a long, long time supported and created by the "modernist" West to be the frontier against communism, the "reds", against secularist nationalism and similar. And after all, when the same "evil reds" became some time ago the largest market for westerns and when reformed Stalinist, communist etc. countries found themselves queuing before the doors of the World Bank, NATO, IMF, EU, White House and so on." #Dr. Sima Samar (President of the Independent Human Rights Commission, Afghanistan) Women and Security Policy: Possibilities, Obstacles, and Perspectives #Prof. Svetlana Slapsak (Ljubljana Graduate School in Humanities, Slovenien) Why should there be an international body for security, consisting of women, or Women's Security Council? #Heidi Meinzolt-Depner (Internationale Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit/IFFF) Thesenpapier zur Konferenz "Frauen und Sicherheit - brauchen wir einen Weltfrauensicherheitsrat" #Salwa Hdeib-Qannam ( Jerusalem Center for Women, Palästina) Women's Security Council
I wish you the best of luck with your conference this weekend and regret that I cannot be with you. As you know, I think that the idea of an International or World Women's Security Council is very powerful, and I hope to stay in touch with this initiative. However in reading over the materials, I would like to recommend that you consider this being an independent women's initiative and not affiliated with the United Nations. Given the current state of the world's governments, I do not think that a Council within the UN would have a feminist approach to the issues of peace and security, and I am sure that many governments - including my own - the USA - would use such an initiative within the UN to justify their policies. Given that there is no way within the UN to have such a body except through governments, I hope that you will consider the possibility of women setting us such a council as a shadow or alternative body to the UN Security Council that can speak freely and without the constraints of the UN or governments. I believe that this would be more powerful and effective for making women's voices heard. I look forward to hearing more about your proceedings this weekend. I am also sending you a link to an article that I wrote for the Nation Magazine for the anniversary of 9/11 to share more of my thinking about what women - especially in the US - need to be doing now.
Dear friends, Please accept my sincere regrets that I am not able to be part of the important discussions you will be having this weekend on this initiative. As I cannot be there in person, I have taken the opportunity of putting some initial thoughts in writing. Immediately after 11 September 2001, you will recall that security at the United Nations was extremely tight and several important international meetings were either postponed or delayed. The exception was the eighth session of the Preparatory Commission for the International Criminal Court. This was a significant decision on the part of the UN Secretariat - to proceed with the work toward a permanent system of international justice and accountability in the wake of criminal acts like those that took place on 11 September and the U.S.-led military response that followed. Though the UN has long been criticized for the undemocratic role of the Security Council and, more specifically, the role of permanent members of the Council, it has also been the only game in town. Meaning - that as imperfect as it is, it has been the only international institution set up to guard against destrutive unilateral action. The problem has become, however, that one of the ways the UN seeks to guard against destructive unilateral action is to make it multi-lateral. In light of the events of this week, we can see clearly that its existence, at least its meaningful existence, as an institution created to rid the world of the scourge of war is still seriously in question given the intense pressure by the U.S. to get a green light for military aggression against Iraq. In moments such as these, one wonders whether the UN is not merely rendered useless at such times but whether it in fact becomes a facilitator of wrong actions such as those demanded by the U.S. for the sake of mitigating further damage, obscuring the truth of the organization's futility or to preserve the appaearance of multi-lateral agreement. Never before has the need for UN reform been so clearly laid out for us. A World Security Council of Women that mirrors or shadows the existing official Council and which provides a forum for women's diverse voices to be heard in a fair and democratic way could help raise awareness of this need at the same time as developing and presenting viable alternatives to critical issues based on women's real and diverse experiences and perspectives. The Need for a World Security Council of Women: Shortly after 11 September, there was a brief period when the only NGO's allowed inside the UN at the time were the NGO's following the establishment of the International Criminal Court. Thus, the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice was able to have a minimal presence in the UN in those critical days. We made every effort to monitor what the Security Council was doing and try to get the word out to women's groups internationally - at the same time as we were trying to impact the ICC negotiations. We knew that the decisions the Security Council would take - or not take - would have far-reaching implications not only for the already tenuous level of peace and security in the world but also for the very existence of the UN as a buffer between the unilateral acts of a vengeful superpower and the rest of the world. As with everyone else, we knew the U.S. was gearing up the war machine and like organizations and activists all over the world we joined with colleagues to raise alternatives and try, often in vain, to be heard among the din of battle cries. When I received the notice from Gabi Mischkowski about Scheherazades's renewed thinking and efforts toward a World Security Council of Women, something clicked. I had heard that such efforts were undertaken during the Gulf War and thought the idea had merit. In the wake of 11 September, I believed the idea urgently needed to become a reality. Now, on the eve of possibly another Gulf War, you are revisiting this possibility and it is my hope that this idea can be brought fully to life. After the past decade of transnational feminist advocacy through the world conferences on human rights, population and development, and women, it is my belief that women have achieved a capacity for organizing at the international level that is unprecedented. While women have managed to come together internationally over the past one hundred and fifty years, these efforts were mostly sporadic, not regionally representative and could not be sustained given the lack of resources and access. Now, never before have we been so connected to each other and had the opportunity to develop strategies, overcome obstacles and promote the integration and implementation of women's human rights and political participation. This transnational feminist advocacy has enable women's voices and concerns to impact negotiations in other arenas such as the International Criminal Court and more recently the Security Council itself via resolution 1325, the first resolution of the Council dealing with issues of women at all levels of peace negotiations and conflict resolution. Given the organizing of the past 10 years at the international level, we are well-positioned to raise the stakes and take the challenge direcly to one of the last remaining pockets of undemocratic male power in the world - the sancitified and exclusive realm of the UN Security Council, a realm that was largely created by and for men. The following are some thoughts about goals and objectives of a World Security Council of Women: The World Security Council of Women should be a people's initiatives. It is my belief that the World Security Council of Women would be better served at its inception by remaining outside of the official UN Structure. Seeking to include a Women's Security Council into the official structure could serve to further legitimize the current structure. Also, the existence of a separate Security Council of Women could serve to marginalize women's voices and relegate its decisions to issues that are often viewed by the mainstream as of concern to women. By proceeding with the Security Council of Women as a people's initiative, it would follow in the tradition of other important people's initiatives such as the Tokyo Tribunal 2000, which served as a people's tribunal to do the job that official tribunals did not do after World War II, and the peoples tribunals formed during the Viet Nam war to raise awareness of war crimes and atrocities and the foreign policy of the U.S. A World Security Council of Women should seek to provide a forum for open and honest discussion of crisis situation and the impacts of global politics on such situations. It must be mandated to explore all possible alternatives to the use of force. This is not to suggest that all women are inherently pacifist or anti-war. Rather, the range of options and creative ideas and responses to crisis situations has been severely limited due to the fact that half the world's population has been mostly locked out of the political process. This is especially clear in most situations of armed conflict. It should seek to galvanize, channel and support women's efforts at local, regional and national levels to gain a foothold in arenas of decisionmaking, especially in pre- and post-conflict situations. While significant gains were achieved through the international women's human rights movement in the past decade, we can see that this movement has been slowly dispersing as the gains are taken back to the local level. Further such advocacy and achievements can only go so far as long as the real hold on power lies in the upper, and unreachable, echelons of the UN Security Council. A World Security Council of Women could serve as a mechanism for re-channeling and focusing the energy and creativity of this movement at the same time as expanding upon it. In doing so, it could serve as a major force for mobilizing women all over the world on issues of priority concern. It could help build activism around the UN Security Council which has gone untouched and unhindered by sustained, focused and direct activism for most of its history. In existing and operating in a way that is fundamentally different from that of the official Security Council, it will also help to educate women, and others in the world, about the limitations inherent in the current structure of the United Nations. In discussing these issues in the United States and elsewhere in the world, there is often very little understanding of how decisions which have enormous and profound relevance to people at the local level are made in the Security Council. In the U.S., for example, very few people fully understand how the UN Security Council operates and how the U.S. operates within the Council. Ironically, this has resulted in an isolationist backlash in some sectors in the U.S. against the UN. Indeed, there is a plank in the Republican Party platform in Texas that demands the complete withdrawal of the U.S. from the UN system. That power-hungry Republicans would disassociate from the very arena that gives them entre and the appearance of legitimacy in carrying out questionable foreign policy illustrates the ignorance of many people in the U.S. Aside from this weird anomoly, an initiative such as the World Security Council of Women could help educate immediate stakeholders about the role of the UN and other international mechanisms and how such mechanisms are relevant to our lives. These are just some initial thoughts about the efforts toward the World Security Council of Women. We are poised on the verge of a new international legal order that can be more fair and effective in dealing with the crises stemming from globalization and its effects on poverty, the environment, health and wellbeing. In my view, the ICC, as the world's first permanent international criminal court which is intended to be independent of the traditional power plays, is the first example of the 21st century of this new legal order. Hopefully, it is a hint of things to come. However, at the very moment that the potential to enter a new realm of being and decisionmaking in the world is at its greatest, the challenges to it are fierce and extreme. The U.S. has declared war against the Court precisely because of its independence and impartiality. In doing so, it has also abused its power in the Security Council to gain exceptions for U.S. nationals from the jurisdiction of the Court in addition to pursuing an array of bilateral agreements which seek to cordon off U.S. nationals from the Court's reach. This is precisely because the U.S. will not be able to control the actions and processes of the world's first permanent criminal court. Had the Court been established after World War II as originally intended, this would not be the case. At the same time that we have potential for change at the international level, there are fewer and fewer spaces for women's voices to be meaningfully heard. A World Security Council of Women would be a strong statement of this exclusion, a denunciation of the undemocratic and unrepresentative nature of the official Council and an affirmation of realms of existence that are rarely able to be brought to light in political discourse of international issues. I hope these comments are useful and wish you all the best of luck. Pam Spees Program Director
Am 15. September 2002 rief eine internationale Expertinnentagung in Berlin den Weltfrauensicherheitsrat in Gründung ins Leben. Er soll bei allen Konflikten die Stimmen der Frauen zu Gehör bringen und somit eine neue Qualität der Mitsprache eröffnen. Ob ein solcher zukünftiger Weltfrauen-sicherheitsrat in die UNO-Strukturen eingebunden werden soll oder nicht, blieb ebenso offen, wie andere wichtige organisatorische Fragen. Bei diesem Treffen gingen es vielmehr darum, grundsätzlich die Möglichkeiten und Chancen eines solchen sicherheitspolitischen Vorstosses auszuleuch-ten. Rund fünfzig Expertinnen von NGOs und Friedensgruppen konnten zwei Tage lang über „Frauen und Sicherheit“ beraten, unterstützt durch die Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung in Berlin.
- Israel, Wenn es nach den Initiatorinnen, der Frauenaktion Scheherazade, ginge, dann müsste der zukünftige Weltfrauen-sicherheitsrat ein klares Gegengewicht zum UN-Sicherheitsrat bilden, der zu sehr von Großmächten und von Männern dominiert werde, lautete der Vorwurf der Friedensaktivistin-nen. Die Sicherheitsinteressen von Frauen und Kinder spielten hingegen kaum eine Rolle, obwohl die Opfer heutiger Kriege zu 90 % Zivilisten sind und zwar vor allem Frauen und Kinder. Viele von ihnen würden obendrein Opfer sexualisier-ter Gewalt. Auch sei „undemokratisch“, dass der Sicherheits-rat seinen fünf ständigen Mitgliedern Vetorecht einräumt, so die Frauen von Sheherazade. Scheherazade wurde 1991 bekannt, als sie anlässlich des Golfkrieges zu einer „Welturabstimmung gegen den Krieg“ aufrief. 50.000 Unterschriften konnten gesammelt und dem Sekretariat der UN übergeben werden. Sie trugen erheblich dazu bei, so die Aktivistinnen, dass Frauen dort seitdem mehr Gehör finden. Der sichtbarste Ausdruck jahre- und jahrzehntelanger Arbeit auch von anderen Friedensinitiativen und NGOs ist die UN-Resolution 1325 vom Oktober 2000. Sie fordert die Staaten unter anderem dazu auf, Frauen in alle friedenssichernden Maßnahmen einzubeziehen und auch an Peacekeeping-Aktionen in Krisengebieten zu beteiligen. Dem Schutz von Frauen und Mädchen während und nach bewaffneten Konflikten, insbesondere vor Vergewaltigung, muss Rechnung getragen werden, heißt es darin, und der UN-Generalsekretär soll regelmäßige Berichte erstellen.
Aktualisiert: 13.02.2005 |