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WAND
and the UN |
UN
Report: March 2008
52nd
Commission on Status of Women
by Sayre Sheldon, WAND representative
on the NGO Working Group for Women, Peace and Security
I attended two days of meetings at
this event which lasts for 2 weeks and is held for
the purpose of summing up and furthering progress
in the advancement of women, culminating in a celebration
of International Women’s Day on March 6th. It
is sometimes laughingly referred to as the time when
the U.N. pays attention to women and their issues
and then goes back to their usual way of operating.
Of
course we know from WAND that women’s issues
include everything and in recent years thanks to the
efforts of millions of women, the women’s agenda
at the U.N. has greatly broadened. This year’s
main theme was financing for achieving women’s
equality and empowerment which of course are closely
linked to the other major goals women share including
education, health, security, and freedom from violence.
Two
meetings were especially powerful for me: one was
on the effect of guns on women, sponsored by IANSA
(The International Action Network on Small Arms) which
WAND is a member of. The second was “Where Are
We Now on Security Council Resolution 1325?”
sponsored by the NGO Working Group on Women Peace
and Security which I represent WAND on. In both meetings
women spoke passionately for the changes they wanted,
the obstacles they were up against, and the successes
their often ingenious ways of defusing the violence
in their countries. Today “small arms”
can be shoulder-fired missiles so we can be talking
about threats on many levels.
The
statistics on guns and women’s lives are absolutely
devastating and as U.S. citizens know full well we
have one of the highest levels of gun-related murders
in the world as well as being one of the largest exporters
of guns. News from around the world was discouraging
although a delegate from Argentina told of the success
of their national gun buy back, due to be continued
under their new woman president. I was dismayed to
hear of the high levels of gun violence and manufacture
in India and how hard it was for women there to work
on disarmament. As the chairperson pointed out, gun
control policies are usually made by the gun users—would
we rely on drug users to make drug policy, she asked?
The
panel on 1325 was outstanding: Toshlya Hoshino Japanese
member of the Permanent Mission to the U.N., Phil
Saltonstall, Peacebuilding Advisor from the United
Kingdom, and Comfort Lamptey, the gender advisor to
the Department of Peacekeeping. Mr. Hoshino praised
women’s efforts highly, saying that the “gender
gap” was necessary for filling the “peacebuilding
gap.” All three described the many roadblocks
to accomplishing their goals, especially from the
countries who do not acknowledge women’s rights,
but all provided workable strategies for getting around
the obstacles we face. No country wants to look bad
and opposition to violence against women can lead
to the beginning of understanding how much women contribute
to actually preventing violence as well as rebuilding
their societies after war. But at the end when a woman
from Sudan stood up to say “I need my gun—I’ve
had it for 22 years. How else could I keep from being
raped or killed?” we were all thrown back to
a sense of how far we have to go to build a world
where this will not be true.
Sayre
Sheldon, WAND president emerita
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A founding member of WAND and President Emerita
of the National WAND Board, Sayre has been a
long time political and social activist. She
is a college professor of literature and an
author of several plays and articles about women's
issues and peace issues.
She
edited the anthology Her War Story: 20th
Century Women Write About War, published
in 1999 by Southern Illinois University Press.
She represents WAND as an NGO at the United
Nations. |
