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A Twenty-five Years Attempt - From Mexico to New York
Zubeda Dangor
The Beijing + 5 conference, better known as Women 2000 was preceded by four world conferences on women between 1975 and 1995, convened by the United Nations. The first historic conference was convened in Mexico City in 1975, twenty-five years ago to negotiate a global policy document, which focused on developing a plan of action and saw the proclamation of 1975 as International Women's Year.Five years later, the Mexico City conference was followed up by the second world conference on women, the Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1980. Women's concerns were raised against the backdrop of political issues of the day, such as the Cold War in Europe and Apartheid in South Africa. The Copenhagen Conference negotiated a program of action and introduced the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to government delegates and NGO's.
The world conference on women in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985, reviewed and appraised the achievements of the UN Decade for Women and adopted the policy of the Forward - Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women. After the Nairobi Conference, there was a ten-year gap before the 4th World Conference which took place in Beijing, China, in 1995. Massive participatory planning took place for this conference. The United Nations convened five regional meetings world-wide during which the Draft Platform for Action was developed. NGOs presented this document to grassroots women and to regional meetings to lobby their governments in order to place their issues on the agenda. It was evident that the Platform for Action was not imposed on women by governments, which explained the continued interest, energy and enthusiasm of women in Beijing. Delegates adopted the Platform for Action on 12 "critical areas of concern" on the main obstacles to women's advancement and expanded the agenda for women's empowerment. Governments further agreed to adopt and implement legislation to end violence against women.
The journey from Mexico to Beijing + 5 highlights the increasing participation of women's NGOs as observers and participants within the halls of the UN conferences. From the 5th - 9th June 2000 government representatives and NGOs met for a special session of the United Nations General Assembly to assess the progress made in implementing the Platform for Action approved at the Beijing Conference. Further initiatives were also to be considered for achieving a greater degree of gender equality in the future.
The opening day of the five day special session entitled "Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace in the 21st Century " focused largely on the progress made or the lack thereof since the Beijing Conference in 1995. The United Nations Secretary General, Koffie Annan told the Special Session of the General Assembly that " the future of the planet depends on women" and that "undoubtedly there has been progress" but moments later he added "but at the same time much remains to be done". While Koffie Annan stressed that violence against women is now illegal almost everywhere, Equality Now reported that an overwhelming number of countries have laws in place which perpetuate discrimination with regard to personal status, economic status and marital status of women and violence against women. In fact, Grace Jones convincingly captured this discrimination, in a one-woman play staged during the Beijing + 5 session.
On reflecting on the Women's Conference journey from Mexico to Beijing + 5 at the NGO working session of Women 2000, Devaki Jaine, the Indian feminist economist reminded us that it has been a long struggle for women since Mexico and the questions women ask now are not that different from the ones asked then. Will women be less poor, less violated, or will this conference result in a greater gap between rhetoric and action?
Devaki Jaine claims that between the conferences of Nairobi and Beijing "a different ethos emerged. To some extent it would be called the bureaucratization of the women's movement". Devaki Jaine acknowledges that while NGO participation from within the UN is a gain not to be discounted, the role of NGOs have shifted in many cases from activist to archivist. She believes that the challenge is to have more than 'paper gains' and that women should grapple vigorously with turning rights in to reality. Jaine advocates that "a committee of 10 wise women gather information on women's mass struggles" after the Beijing + 5 conference. This committee could draft proposals for action, which could become powerful tools for social justice. NGOs need to move away from the 'report card approach' and form social justice movements, which share action strategies and experiences. Jaine believes that the 25-year conference journey has shown us how to use the international platform - the old boy's club - to generate more focused political resistance, which claims a re-valuation of women.
NGOs have played a major role over the past ten years in representing the concerns of civil society. The post-Beijing period has seen many more NGOs being co-opted into government delegations. Concerns were raised about the effectiveness of NGOs as watchdogs of government accountability. "Being part of government delegations means that NGOs get diluted," contends Salena Mbengewe, director of the Zimbabwe Women's Action Group. This dilution reflects a "recessionary trend that has seen gender issues pushed to the background of government agendas". According to Filomina Steady of the Women's World Summit Foundation in Geneva, "there has been a watering down of commitment to women and women should go back to advocacy and re-energize the women's movement".
Although NGO participation at UNGASS was severely limited by the difficulties of accreditation as well as the number of NGOs' allowed into the UN, women came in large numbers to monitor negotiations, and to support a strong Outcome document.
At the start of the UNGASS (United Nation's General Assembly) sessions, 59 out of 261 articles of the Outcome document had been agreed on. During the UNGASS week, negotiations moved at a snails pace and the Beijing + 5 process was continually threatened with failure to produce a document or to produce a weak document. Part of the serious threats were the attempts by conservative forces to backtrack on the Beijing Platform for Action. Conservative Governments and the Religious Sector were blocking the strengthening of women's sexual and reproductive rights. Disagreements on the Outcome document also included the issues of poverty, development and the negative effects of economic globalization and women's rights as human rights. At the close of the conference on Friday, 9 June 2000, negotiations were still continuing and the Outcome document was not available.
In the final evaluation, women used the Beijing + 5 conference as an opportunity for intensive networking and for lobbying their governments. The presence and participation of younger women was incredibly encouraging and most important for the future feminist generation. In general, some progress was made since Beijing such as the adoption of honor killings and female genital mutilation as part of the Platform for Action. In the final analysis, despite the 25 year journey of UN conferencing, women face an elusive journey to their destination of gender equality, development and peace in the twenty-first century. The question that many women grappled with is whether the UN is still the appropriate body for women's empowerment after a twenty-five year attempt.
Zubeda Dangor is editor of LOLApress Africa and director of NISAA Institute
for Women's Development, Johannesburg, South Africa.