Patricia Daniel

A question of trust

2009-04-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama’s tour of Europe has set the scene for a more progressive US - demonstrating a real change in the tone of trans-Atlantic relations; and making a significant inclusion of the Arab world.

This is all good news. However, as regards ways of engaging with the deeply embedded problems in the Middle East, summit diplomacy will never be sufficient - because it simply excludes the different motivations and perceptions of all the other actors involved.

So - as the US pledges more troops to Afghanistan while protesters in Iraq call for immediate US withdrawal - here’s an alternative strategy for conflict prevention, which involves a more intimate type of connection and a more creative kind of communication…

This was my starting point:

“When the allies invaded Iraq in March 2003, I was in the south of Nigeria leading a small team of Muslim colleagues doing participatory research on conflict prevention. As fundamentalist imams in the north of Nigeria called for a violent response to the invasion, there was the likelihood of reprisals against Muslims in the Christian south. So we made our plans to leave the south before midday on Friday and travelled as quickly as possible to the capital Abuja, where the World Bank grounded us for our own safety.

Thus it came about that I spent several days in a hotel bedroom watching CNN and BBC24 coverage of the unfolding situation in Iraq. It was clear that the US intelligence was flawed and /or the US politicians had misread / ignored what intelligence there was; that the US military chiefs were at odds with the politicians over how to run the campaign; and that the world’s media were being treated like mushrooms (kept in the dark). I was, above all, fascinated by the role of poor Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks, the token black officer delegated to provide meaningless daily press briefings. At that time I conceived the scenario of a varied group of stakeholders in a bunker, learning how to see each others’ point of view…”

Finally, here’s the blurb for the product (and I’m not claiming to have entirely solved the problem).

“She is known only as The Facilitator. You may hate and love her at the same time: it doesn’t matter. When she calls you to take part in her virtual scenarios, you can’t refuse. She has the power to send you where you’ve never wanted to go. You have to enter other people’s minds – and learn how to survive there. We are in a time of crisis: there is only war. Those who are called need to collaborate to find the ultimate solution. After all, the future of the universe is in your own imagination.”

The Facilitator can be accessed at http://www.lulu.com/content/5849275

Also read: Global politics and confidence building measures

Roll over northern rock: we can build a new movement on twopence a week

2008-10-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

Among all the gloom and doom of the credit crisis, my friend Jen claims there is something to celebrate. Not all banks have gone to the wall: the Cooperative and other mutual or friendly societies are thriving up here in the north of England.

This weekend we went to see the last performance of Mikron’s Fair Trade. Reaping the Dividends, which tells the story of the Cooperative Movement from its beginnings in Toad Lane in Rochdale in 1844 when the first Co-op shop was opened. The show was written and produced before the current financial crisis really took hold – so it was interesting to hear that, during hard times in the 19th century, the reason for the success of the Cooperative, in comparison to other schemes, was their decision not to give credit. “Only deal with cash.” Members contributed twopence a week to get the Cooperative Wholesale Society off the ground, to provide affordable basic food and goods to poor families. And, of course, the movement was also built on that fundamental principle that, for some of us, still holds good today: that any surplus should be divided evenly between members, not hived off by managers.

After being away from Yorkshire for a long time, I’m proud to be back, and back to being a Co-op member. In fact, my mum claims that the first Co-op shop was opened in Meltham (in Yorkshire) - where I was born and bred – and not Rochdale (in Lancashire). We recall how, in the 1950s and 60s, Meltham Co-op ran its own farm, alongside a grocery store, a hardware store, a clothes store, a pharmacy and the village cinema. It built affordable housing. It offered interest-free loans and modest overdraft facilities to its members before payday. It also, importantly, acted as a savings bank, encouraging thrift and forward planning through the scheme to put away a small sum every week towards Christmas, family holidays - and funerals. Truly it provided ‘cradle to the grave’ security.

In contrast, today’s high street banks have made, and continue to make, their unique contribution to heightened insecurity. I’ve had personal experience of this over the past few months. (Mortgage, madame? Of course, but for not less than £25,000. Costing £2,000 in ‘administrative costs’. On condition that you employ a solicitor. Yes, we acknowledge that you are legally entitled to do your own conveyancing, but if you intend to do so you can’t have a NatWest mortgage. Oh and look, our statistics show that fewer people are taking out mortgages. This is clearly a client driven crisis!) And on the backs of these fleas are smaller fleas to bite us – viz the increase in modern day loan shark cold calling, with an insistence on speaking to the owner of the house: “we’d like to offer you debt advice” aka “let us get you deeper into debt.”

See Cristina’s blog on globalisation and cooperativism in Brazil

Fair Trade highlights the growth of the co-operative movement beyond Britain. There are more than 750 million co-operative members in over 100 countries today. One notable example: the 900 rural electricity co-operatives providing energy for 40 million people across the United States. Another: there is a Co-op for employees in the Emperor’s palace in Japan. Strangely enough, the day I picked up Mikron’s leaflet in Holmfirth, I was with my friend Mary, who comes from Warrington but for many years has been living in Mali. “Oh yes,” she tells me, “the French version of cooperativisme used to be very big in West Africa.” And apparently everyone in Mali knows about the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Across countries in the south, on a small scale, farmers are benefiting from Fair Trade agreements, workers’ cooperatives and credit unions - all of which initiatives are seen as providing more autonomy and better security to the poor than World Bank loans with its crippling conditions attached. Cooperativism is increasingly seen as an alternative world order . Also see an earlier post on women and 'the gift economy'.

I’ve picked up a related idea recently from south Wales: that of ‘time banking’. This is a mechanism promoting volunteerism in community development, which enables people to feel valued and to value each other for their contribution ‘outside paid work.’ The impact assessment report on this system, from the Wales Institute for Community Currencies, emphasises that “it is important to treat people as assets.” A concept western society largely seems to have forgotten.

The Mikron Theatre Company, itself a co-operative, provides a good example of operating on a human scale. Now 37 years old, supported by the Co-operative Membership and working out of the Mechanics Institute in Marsden, the company performs across the north of England in local venues – pubs, village halls, community theatres and even sometimes on their own barge – bringing culture, politics and solidarity to ordinary people.

Read more about Mikron at www.Mikron.org.uk

and the Wales Institute for Community Currencies at www.wicc.org

Note on the Tolpuddle Martyrs:
This was the group who, in the 1830s, set up the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, operating as a trade-specific benefit society. But as friendly societies had strong elements of what are now considered to be the role of trade unions, the organisers were jailed and subsequently sentenced to transportation to Australia...

The feminist agenda? Let’s do the time warp again!

2008-08-06T04:18:00.000-07:00

The good news last week was that the UK government has published plans to reform the murder laws, specifically to ensure that an effective defence be made available to women who murder their partners after prolonged and violent abuse.

Interviewed on Women’s Hour about this and, more generally, about the June 2008 white paper on equality, Minister for Women Harriet Harman was quizzed as to whether her “promotion of the feminist agenda” might add to the government’s current problems, merely serving to further weaken Gordon Brown’s position. It was even mooted that this might be part of Harman’s strategy in a potential leader contest.

I found these questions quite outrageous, given that we have had the Sex Discrimination Act since 1975, the Equal Opportunities Commission for 30 years and a new combined Commission for Equality and Human Rights since autumn 2007. One would expect that “the feminist agenda” (that is, active promotion of gender equality and the rights of women) to be automatically an integral part the agenda of each MP and every individual in our society.

In fact, the recent draft Equality Bill – supported by all major political parties, by the way (Hansard Debates for June 28 2008) – does little more than restate a number of previous government policy commitments, for example the legality of choosing a female over an equally qualified male candidate where women are under-represented in the workforce; an end to age discrimination; measures to increase the number of black MPs in Westminster; and an equality duty on the public sector. This is not new news.

However, at every turn we see resurrected the harbingers of doom decrying “the unleashing of the spectre of positive discrimination” (see The Spectator)

as if this would mean the undoing of modern society as we know it. These pundits overlook the fact that “positive discrimination” in favour of men has been operating for the past four or five thousand years, culminating now in irreversible climate change, the international credit crunch, the food security crisis and violent conflicts around the world.

And so, quite rightly, a radical change is overdue. In July I attended the 10th Women’s Worlds Congress (this year in Madrid) where these issues and many more were explored. A couple of my reports were published by openDemocracy.net on creativity and dissidence

and women in the global economy – just to give a flavour of the diversity of topics. My summary below attempts to capture some of the inherent contradictions of this regular event which, since 1981, continues to highlight women’s potential alongside our subordinate position in a man’s world – where even a Minister for Women is required to justify her engagement in equality and where feminism is still seen as a minority interest rather than a mainstream project.

Read more

Boys may under-perform but it is women who are underpaid

Solidarity, sustainability and nonviolence

Women's worlds 2008: not a utopia

2008-08-06T04:05:00.000-07:00

(See introduction above)

The Women’s Worlds Congress convenes every three years in a new country and naturally takes on a different flavour or focus according to its location. The first was held in Haifa, Israel. I attended the eighth Women’s Worlds in Kampala, 2002. That was the first time the congress had been held in Africa and it was an important event for Uganda itself, widely covered in the national media and actively supported by President Museveni. It provided a platform particularly for African women, and especially Ugandans, to highlight current issues of concern around government policies, political participation and women’s rights.

Co-ownership of land for women and recognised rights for second (unofficial) wives in a polygamous society were two aspects of the proposed Domestic Relations bill which had been under discussion then for four years by the government. Ugandan friends suggested to me that one reason for its slow progress was the fact that President Museveni had more than one wife himself.

At Makerere University, we had the official ceremonies in the open air under a large awning, were entertained by African drummers, enjoyed a fashion show featuring fabulous African prints and were able to browse the stalls of goods and services from local publishers, non-governmental organisations and women’s campaigns on the lawn of Freedom Square. And frankly, there was some dissonance between the language of western feminist academics and the articulation of hard-pressed needs of African women, whether working in national government or at the grassroots.

At the congress in Seoul 2005, aiming to address something of that paradox, the theme was north-south, east-west. For Madrid 2008 the slogan was “equality is not a utopia.”

At the congress opening in Spain, our first delight was the highly acclaimed flamenco singer Carmen Linares, whose powerful voice, interpreting raw pain and passion, transcends time, space and culture: “history is always the same for women.” And adding to the colour of this congress were the Arab women - both visitors and residents - in the hijab and shalwar-kameez.

The contradictions of the context also resonated clearly here. The (male) Secretary of State for Education and Innovation was convinced that the future of the world depends on bringing women and their talents on board, yet the (female) representative from the Ministry of Equality (with “an agenda fully supported by the government of Spain”) highlighted a list of problems still to be tackled: domestic violence, sex trafficking and the high level of abuse and discrimination against immigrant women. The (male) chancellor of the Universidad Complutense applauded the efforts of the (female) vice chancellor in pulling off the logistical feat of organising the Women’s Worlds Congress while the university’s office of gender equality talks about raising awareness among the academic community “by means of various actions including the gradual elimination of sexist language,” which scarcely sounds a hard-hitting approach.

To be fair, the opening ceremony provided a platform to air “the numerous obstacles to equality in our country” including inequity in the labour market and the “predominant white machismo of liberal democracy.” Spanish women are still in a minority in decision-making positions. Yet again, the congress is clearly a prestigious national event from which the male côterie wish to benefit.

My friend Irene Norman suggested that each country hosting the congress should be held accountable for achieving national changes in the three years leading up to the following gathering. (Irene was awarded “woman of the year for learning” by the Wales Assembly Government in 2002 and named one of Wales’ 2003 “top ten regenerators” in community education through projects such as promoting women’s enterprise.)

We were told by the convenors that the logo of this year’s congress represented “a woman, like a butterfly, emerging from her chrysalis, symbol of the change we are all going through, with her wings open to the future of possibilities.”

To what extent is this meaningful?

We can’t deny the fact that, in one sense, the Women’s Worlds phenomenon is located within what is still a man’s world, deriving permission, sponsorship and credibility from it. Can, indeed, women’s worlds exist independently outside? Yes, in terms of our collective intellect and imagination, our capacity to inspire each other, the connections we make and our conversations together. All this leaves little doubt that a woman’s world (for want of a better phrase) would be a smarter, safer, fairer, wittier, more colourful and sustainable place for both men and women to live in. Not a utopia, but a different paradigm – and an urgent necessity.

The Women’s Worlds 2008 website is at

www.mmww08.org

Read more: Wales Women’s Studies Monographs

Nearly ninety years of solitude: Magical realism and the United Nations

2008-06-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

“Last night the UN rebuked the Zimbabwean government”

(Quoted from front page article, The Guardian, 24th June 2008)

When I ask my daughter about the literature module she’s been studying on the works of Gabriel García Marquez, Mikhail Bulgakov and Salman Rushdie, she replies: “But, mum, I think the whole of life is magical realism!” And thus she gifts me the language by which I can begin to translate the fantastic narrative of the United Nations.

Just a quick recap of the main aspects of the genre: time passes and yet stands still; events repeat themselves, but nothing is resolved; cause and effect are inverted while the characters - resembling each other and even having similar names - accept rather than question the logic of the magical element. In general, the story holds a dreamlike quality with heightened sensory details, emotions and symbolism all of which work to seduce and confuse the reader.

Is the magical or the mundane rendering of the plot more truthful to the world as it is?
Here it goes…

The forefather of the United Nations was the League of Nations - conceived during the first world war and established in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles, “to promote international cooperation and achieve peace and security”. Twenty years before, its existence was heralded by the first international peace conference, hosted in Den Hag, to elaborate common instruments for settling crises peacefully, preventing wars and codifying rules of warfare. The weakling League of Nations was disowned in 1942 for having failed to prevent the second world war. So, in 1945, fifty countries came together in San Francisco to celebrate the birth of the newly proposed United Nations and to baptise the Security Council - the body with primary responsibility for preserving peace - which held its first meeting in January 1946.

“Unlike the UN General Assembly, the Security Council was given power to enforce measures (on any danger to world peace) and was organized as a compact executive organ. Also unlike the assembly, it in theory functions continuously... However, on substantive matters, the nine affirmative votes required under the charter must include the five permanent members. This requirement of ‘Big Five’ unanimity embodies the so-called veto. The veto has prevented much substantive action of the UN but it embodies the reality that resolution of major crises requires the agreement of major powers” (US, UK, France, Russia and China).”

Almost lost in translation here: the Security Council as an entity was never given the power to avert crises or to exert sanctions – but the five major powers gave themselves (and each other) a licence to wage war (although of course Russia and China were never meant to use this). How many times during the 1980s did the UN General Assembly condemn US interference in the domestic affairs of Nicaragua (for example) while the US arrogantly shrugged off the ruling of the International Court of Justice in Den Hag? In more recent times, how often has the toothless Security Council vacillated over relationships in the Middle East, before and after, in all impotence, watching as the US and UK invade Iraq?

As I float back through the nebulous history of the UN family, I can recount how Iraqi oil was an issue that arose during the first world war: the archives show that the British government rushed troops to Mosul in 1918 to gain control of the northern oil fields. Britain and France clashed over Iraq's oil during and after the Versailles Conference, but Britain eventually took the lion’s share by turning its military victories into colonial rule. The powerful Iraq Petroleum Company acted always in the cartel interests of the Anglo-American companies. To the fury of the Iraqis and the French, the IPC held down production to maximize profits elsewhere, keeping a monopoly of Iraq’s oil sector until nationalization in 1972 (see Global Policy Forum).

During the final years of the Saddam era, envied companies from France, Russia, China and elsewhere obtained major contracts. But UN sanctions were kept in place by the US and the UK, making those contracts inoperable. Since the occupation of Iraq in 2003, have things changed? The Iraqi constitution of 2005, greatly influenced by US advisors, contains language that guarantees a major role for foreign companies in the forthcoming decades. But it is not yet a done deal - the Iraqi parliament has balked at the legislation; most Iraqis favour continued control by a national company and the powerful oil workers union strongly opposes de-nationalization. This is another thread in the nylon stocking of the storyline that will run and run.

Meanwhile, the UN flounders incomprehensibly across the globe, as ‘breaking news’ (UN News Centre ) eerily echoes both past and future:

“Settlement in Cyprus ‘not a foregone conclusion’ says envoy”

“UNICEF reports rising trend of violence against children in strife-torn countries”

“Ban calls for ‘redoubled’ efforts on causes and consequences of forced displacement”

“Kosovo plan is a ‘practical and workable solution’”

“UN chief says more women need to be involved in peace negotiations and recovery.”

In Africa conflict, food insecurity, poor health and inequality prosper. Help is at hand, however, according to ‘musician and humanitarian’ Bob Geldof who raised money through the Live Aid concerts of 1985 in response to famine and drought in northeast Africa (the UN estimated 160m people were still affected after nine months) .

This gentle knight accompanied the US president on his journey round Africa recently and records the experience without irony:

“On Air Force One, the President and I discussed this Luminous Continent, drenched in light and hope, grace and spirit…” (No! How could I make it up? This is from Time magazine, March 3rd 2008) “…The great unacknowledged story of America in Africa didn’t immediately originate with this President. But it was accelerated hugely by him, increased by him and monitored by him… I look forward to seeing exactly what the next President will do to continue this great untold and secret story. The story of the African Bush.” (No! seriously!) “The quiet triumph of America’s foreign policy.”

In the same issue of Time, ‘last true movie star’ George Clooney has an alternative perspective. Founder of a Darfur support organisation Not on Our Watch, he has a UN passport bearing the legend ‘Messenger of Peace’ (“it’s very cool”) which allows him to visit. “I’ve been very depressed since I got back. I’m terrified that it isn’t in any way helping. That bringing attention can cause more damage. You dig a well or build a health centre and they’re a target for someone… A lot more people know about Darfur but nothing is different. Absolutely nothing.”

Travelling to conflict areas of Sierra Leone and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, we next find goodwill ambassador for the UN High Commission for Refugees, Hollywood actress and ‘earth mother’ Angelina Jolie (with adopted children from Ethiopia, Vietnam and Cambodia she has said she would like to create her own UN family) (Scotland on Sunday, 22nd June 2008).

Still active in the story from time to time is ‘international entertainment personality’ Geri Halliwell, who as goodwill ambassador to the United Nations Population Fund since 1998, draws on her ‘girl power’ persona to promote women’s sexual and reproductive health rights not only in countries like the Philippines and Zambia, but also in the US (speaking to Congress - and respect to her).

Stop press for 18th June 2008:

At roundtable discussions at UN headquarters in New York, US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice raises the issue of war rape and joins calls for an end to sexual violence in armed conflict. She also presses the UN to weigh in on Zimbabwe’s rising violence: “the UN must act.” A UN food survey warns of impending food crisis in Zimbabwe. Neighbouring Malawi (where pop singer Madonna adopted her son) can help out because bumper harvests last year have provided a surplus, so the government is selling maize to Zimbabwe while the poorest Malawians are unable to buy sufficient food for their own families.

Violence and discrimination have marked Mugabe’s reign since he was first elected in 1980. However, during the first ten years, a commitment to social programmes brought real changes in the areas of health and education. From 1990 there followed austerity measures (it’s the same old story) imposed by the World Bank and IMF (both members of the UN family) - which have drastically affected social development in Zimbabwe.

So, here is the UN Security Council’s first direct involvement in the Zimbabwean crisis: mundane, magic or meaningful? Compare with the (still unsuccessful) nearly fifty-year-old US trade embargo on Cuba which continues despite the fact that, in the annual UN General Assembly, all of the USA’s closest allies vote against it. But no surprises there, especially as the term ‘magical realism’ was originally coined in 1949 by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier : he called it “lo real maravilloso” in his novel The Kingdom of this World.

Note
In 1967, The New York Times hailed One Hundred Years of Solitude as "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."

Read more
The new International Journal of Cuban Studies is now online at http://www.cubastudiesjournal.org/

And all my posts under Conflict and Africa!

Will he, won’t he? Climate change and the romantic fiction of global politics

2008-04-30T03:41:00.000-07:00

It’s spring again, which in recent years seems to bring rapid extremes of temperature, from snow in Hyde Park to apple blossom in Snowdonia almost within a twenty-four hour period. And like the weather, our so-called world leaders are blowing hot and cold on fundamental issues such as human rights, freedom and the environment.

Looking forward to the summer, the Olympic Games in Beijing provide a classic opportunity for each to parade their own moral barometer. At the end of March, France’s president was reported as the first premier who “hinted that he may boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games as Britain and France increased the pressure on China over Tibet”. France, of course, made the same threat last year when China’s role in the Sudanese oil business was condemned and China disregarded calls from G8 countries to exert influence on the Sudanese government over the conflict in Darfur.

So far, Bush is going, Merkel is not. Brown is apparently able to do both (boycott the beginning but attend at the end: a Scottish jig he used for the opening of the European Parliament). And the European Parliament, through a ‘non-binding resolution’ has urged EU leaders not to attend.

They may dance the soft shoe shuffle or attempt the more flamboyant tango: after all, they’re just games. But when the G8 summit meet on the banks of Lake Toya on the island of Hikkaido in northern Japan at the beginning of July, we can be sure that China will be there, invited as one of the ‘G8 plus 5 group’ because of her emerging role in the global economy - and there’ll be plenty of other rationalisations at the last minute to justify her inclusion.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has identified the environment as a key topic of discussion in Toyako. Climate change was also highlighted by the German government for Heiligendamm in 2007 - resulting in some vague pledges to agree to consider a time to discuss the topic again. As GRIST argues, 'since the safe bet is on continued US interference with specific emissions reduction goals, there's little to lose by aiming for the same shot-down target as last year'.

Before last year’s summit, there was some fear that strained relations between the US and Russia – caused by Putin’s cheeky little rocket launch - would blight reasonable debate. However, an unexpected thaw occurred, leading Merkel to pull off a great public relations victory, claiming success on climate change negotiations when in fact nothing concrete had been agreed.

See Robert Amsterdam's blogpost: A Valentine for Putin

Since then, Merkel has pushed forward carbon emission reduction regulations at home – excluding, of course, the heavy industries because of their importance to the German economy. In contrast, Brown and Sarkozy plan together to save the world’s energy crisis by developing the use of nuclear power; the UK plans to count its clean power projects overseas towards the EU mandated renewables targets; and the West’s stampede on bio-fuels has triggered a global food crisis, as predicted last year by social movements.

And one of the downsides of China’s economic boom is the astounding environmental devastation that has come with it at home, not to mention the environment damage also associated with China’s march across Africa.

Downloadable from http://www.g-8.de/

Back in Hokkaido, Governor Harumi Takahashi has said she hopes the G8 will help resolve the longstanding territorial dispute with Russia over sovereignty of the Northern Territories: in fact president Putin and prime minister Yasua Fukuda have been meeting to discuss this.

Group composition moves on: last year Sarkozy was the new kid on the block, this year will be the first G8 summit for Gordon Brown and the recently elected Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

But I don’t imagine that this continual flux of cosying-up and the subsequent cold shoulder among our world leaders will ever be subject to real climate change. How can we ever believe what they say? Why do we even care any more? When we turn to the press, it so often seems as if there is in fact no real news, rather we’re caught up in a fictionalised narrative, which plays out in the present tense with no sense of historicity, nor cause and effect, although events continue to repeat and repeat themselves.

As with romantic fiction, this approach has become almost entirely formulaic : but instead of dismissing it, we as readers also play an important role in perpetuating the genre.

One little known fact is that in 1983 I won third prize in the Women’s Hour / Woman’s Weekly Quest for a Romantic Novelist. So here’s another take on the news. It’s a little flight of fancy I jotted down last year in Berlin when I was covering the 2007 G8 summit from a women's perspective:

"Georgie came in with her natural flounce, bold, bumptious and brazen. She knew she was irresistible, but still there were those who resisted her. Vladimir stood at the window looking out into the night. There was something virile and aggressive in his slender frame and his arrogant stance.

‘Why don’t we settle this matter here and now?’ asked Georgie, taking his arm.

For an instant, Vladimir’s dark slavic face softened. He was, in fact, incredibly attractive when he smiled. Georgie’s heart flipped over. Even as she succumbed, she knew that tomorrow things would look different. Another crisis, another man: she was incorrigible.

‘I’ll see you later,’ she drawled...”

Malcolm turned the page, dreamily reaching out for one of the tea-time sandwiches that nurse had left him. It was such stirring stuff. And now a new twist in the plot…

"...Nicole smiled across at Abe, their gaze entangling. ‘I think we may be quite similar in lots of ways,’ she murmured in her attractive French accent.

Abe watched her slink away. He was definitely interested. But he couldn't help wondering if Nicole was only making up to him to make someone else jealous…"

Suddenly the door opened and Sister Theresa came into the room, creating a through-draft, which made the candles flicker. It was too late for Malcolm to hide what he was doing. He shrank back into his chair, clutching the book to his chest.

“Malcolm,” she said incensed, “Why are you doing this?” She swept an authoritative arm around to indicate the well-stacked feminist bookshelves. “After all the effort
I put in to provide improving literature for you, I still find you involved with this kind of …”

Malcolm tried to defend his position, but nurse was too strong for him. Wrenching the offending volume from his grasp, she threw it out of the open window.

“I’ve told you before,” said Theresa. “Too much of that can make you go blind!”

Don’t read more, Take action
Anti-G8 action in Japan

http://gipfelsoli.org/

Read a little more: The temperature in Berlin blog

Here below is another piece about the environment from this time last year, which I omitted to post. Plus cela change…

The temperature in Berlin

2008-04-30T03:19:00.000-07:00

7th May 2007

(Please read in conjunction with the post above)

The hottest news in Berlin is still the weather: the highest recorded springtime temperatures in the last hundred years. The environmental lobby is warning that this is yet more evidence of global warming. McPlanet a three-day conference held at the Technical University over the weekend, attracted over 1500 participants calling for ‘a climate of justice.’ Meanwhile many Berliners decamped to the beach at Wannsee – a large lake south-west of the city, where apparently middle-aged nude bathing remains popular. (see photo below).

Also top news last week in the Berliner Zeitung is Sahira the 27-year old Palestinian born German hip hop artist who raps about the racism which bubbles just beneath the surface here – and who has now reclaimed the hoodie as a feminist neo-muslim alternative to the hijab.

(NB a free translation of ‘Frei Schnauze’ is ‘speak your mind!’)

I’m not generally in favour of women covering up their natural assets. However, it’s good to see youth coming up with creative solutions to the world’s problems, while the older generation just let it all hang out. I don’t mind hip hop, but more importantly, I think Sahira rocks (and let’s hope the planet keeps on rolling).

(Today it’s cold).

(Photo by Daniel Rosenthal courtesy of Greenpeace Germany)

Greenpeace activists urged G8 climate action at the G8 environmental ministers meeting in March in Potsdam (also on the Wannsee)

International Women’s Day: Sharing our Histories

2008-03-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I enjoyed International Women’s Day at the Department of Lifelong Learning, University of Bangor thanks to the great organisational efforts of Shan Ashton and courtesy of a grant from the Welsh Assembly Government to celebrate women’s heritage in Wales. A range of women were there, different ages and stages in life, community development workers, micro-entrepreneurs, students, educationalists and organisations such as the Wales Women’s Archive.

Keynote speakers included Angharad Tomos, Wales’ foremost female Welsh language writer, novelist, journalist and political activist for language rights and Charlotte Williams, now professor of social justice at Keele university who read from her autobiographical work Sugar and Slate about being mixed race (Afro-Caribbean Welsh).

Although I’m only Welsh by adoption (having spent 20 years here) I was honoured to be invited to speak about another minority interest – women and revolution. My theme was: how can we women be true to our own revolutionary nature rather than merely revolving on someone else’s old record?

Interestingly enough, although each of the three of us had gone on quite a different journey through life and took quite a different approach in presenting our theme, we had crossed paths along the way and somehow seemed to have reached the same destination. You can read my talk here with an accompanying powerpoint here .

One Love or Roots of violence in Jamaica

2008-02-10T04:10:00.000-08:00

Post-election violence continues in Kenya
while fear of further violence mars the run up to Pakistan’s postponed elections. I’ve just returned from six weeks in Jamaica - another former British colony - so here’s a Jamaican perspective on Kenya and other events.

At the beginning of January 2008, countries in the north were taken aback at what was for them the unexpected eruption of tribal violence among the youth of Nairobi’s slums during the abusive election process in Kenya. No surprise to participants at the World Social Forum in Nairobi this time last year, when the People’s Parliament took over the daily press conference to declaim the corporatisation of Kenya and the WSF event itself.

In the Sunday Gleaner, 6th January 2008, Jamaican commentator Don Robotham highlights the fact that the 1960s Mau Mau rebellion led by Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya was a “major source of inspiration for our own anti-colonial struggles.”

Today there are other connections: “Like Jamaica, Kenya is a land of great and growing inequality, which is particularly hard on its large and semi-educated youth population.” Despite the difference in size, Robotham argues that “the two countries face similar problems… grappling with the pressures posed by globalisation on underdeveloped economies.”

Jamaica Observer

In the Sunday Gleaner, 16 December, just arrived in Jamaica, I’m able to read the latest crime figures: 1500 people murdered in 2007, an average of 41 per week. Recently appointed police commissioner, ex Scotland Yard Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, characterises crime here as a national crisis linked to poverty. In other words, “depressed communities are factories that produce criminals.”

Despite these statistics I never feel afraid in Jamaica and colleagues here tend to agree that the violence is very much localised in particular communities. St Mary parish, where we’re staying, is recognised by the island’s police force to be the safest. If you’re taking a country walk, for example, you’ll be greeted with ‘peace’ ‘love’ or ‘respect’ and villagers will check that you know where you’re going and are ‘on the right track’.

A month later, on 14th January 2008, the front page of the Jamaica Observer carries the headline “Deadly raid on Tivoli”. Five men were shot dead in a joint police/military action against this so-called “garrison community” in west Kingston. 27th January, Kevin O’Brien Chang (Sunday Gleaner) estimates that the homicide rate in garrison communities (1,200 deaths per 500,000 population) is a level seen only in war zones.

The Cuban connection

At the museum at 56 Hope Road in uptown Kingston, we are reminded that reggae, like Fidel Castro, has long been big in Africa. In 1980 Robert Nesta Marley O.D. was invited by newly elected Robert Mugabe to play at an official ceremony in Harare, the newly named capital, to celebrate Zimbabwe’s independence. Unfortunately the ordinary citizens, excited and angry at being excluded from seeing these inspirational musician perform, rioted outside the fence. And the irony doesn’t stop there, given Zimbabwe’s great hopes for the future then and the situation there now.

Two years before Harare (1978) Marley played the One Love concert in Kingston with the aim of promoting social harmony on the island of Jamaica, physically uniting the two political leaders on stage. He was later to be the target of an assassination attempt.

Jamaica’s then Prime Minister, Michael Manley, after six years in office, had developed close links with Cuba and wanted to adopt the Cuban model of socialism as a means of addressing Jamaica’s failing economy and related problems.

On election, Manley had signalled his intention to pursue a 'third path' of 'non-aligned' states, which could steer between the Russian and US superpowers. He hoped that Jamaica could promote some kind of minor trading block, entice foreign investment and grant improvements to the working class through levies on industry. For a couple of years this strategy seemed successful with Manley able to grant the working class rising living standards. But US capitalism proved to have the whip hand. When Manley supported Cuba's involvement in the Angolan civil war the US administration withdrew economic aid and funded a destabilisation campaign.

Manley called for elections in the fall of 1980. The opposition won a landslide victory, and Edward Seaga became prime minister and minister of finance. He announced a conservative economic program that brought an immediate harvest of aid from the United States and the IMF. In October 1981, Jamaica broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, and two years later it participated in the US-led invasion of Grenada.

Neighbourly connections

Price hikes - especially for fuel and basic foods - over the last few months under Golding’s new government, have hit Jamaica hard. Survival problems have been exacerbated by the fact that harvests were destroyed by unseasonal hurricanes in November / December. A lot of new construction for the tourist industry can be seen but this kind of development investment rarely benefits local people in need.

A Caribbean colleague is one of the lucky ones. He has a pretty little villa with a tiny private beach on the north coast, not far from where Noel Coward and Ian Fleming built their winter hideaways. This is somewhat ironically down to Manley’s rejected vision. Carlos recalls that “thirty years ago, the middle classes were leaving Jamaica in droves, crying ‘communism is coming’. They were literally selling off their houses for a song at the airport.”

Now he looks around and asks me: “If you moved here, how would you cope with the politics?”

In a neighbourly offer, Venezuela’s president Chavez has opened up the idea of bartering cheaper oil for a share of Jamaica’s bananas and sugar cane - an idea of great interest to the Jamaican Agricultural Society who would like to include the famous Blue Mountain coffee in the deal.

In addition to this offer to help on the economic front, other support is at hand: Cuba wants to increase their scholarship quota to Jamaicans, according to Ambassador Gisela Garcia Rivera at the Cuban Embassy in Kingston. Currently more than 400 young Jamaicans are studying in Cuba and she hopes to increase the number of places for others, especially those interested in medicine.

Inversely, Cuban teachers and doctors are keen to work in Jamaica and a number are already here in the northern parishes. Matthias Brown, member of the Westmoreland Cuba Friendship Association is enthusiastic about the connection and (a little disingenuously) explains that “over the past three years we have been celebrating the Bay of Pigs (when Cuba successfully repelled US invasion) in Westmoreland.”

The Wales connection

In contrast, earlier this year, Milton Brown, mayor of Clarendon, called on Wales to compensate his country for the legacy of poverty he says has been left here (reported in the Bangor Chronicle). Clarendon is the parish where, at the height of the sugar trade, the Pennant family owned 8,365 acres and 594 slaves totalling £40,667 in 1736. According to Welsh historian Jean Lindsay, “men and women were valued at prices ranging from £10 to £45 with ‘children priced at £5… Mules were priced at £20 each.” The family also had property in Spanish Town, where at that time the wealthy plantation owners had their town houses and which is now one of the deepest pockets of violence in Jamaica.

The huge fortune amassed from their plantations (where the agent wrote ‘nothing can be done without negroes’) enabled the Pennants to establish the world-famous Penrhyn quarry, the largest exporter of slate and still in operation - when I’m at home I can see it from my kitchen window in Bethesda. (And although this is argued to have ‘provided a major stimulus to economic and commercial development locally’, wages and conditions for workers amounted to local slave labour and resulted in the longest running strike in the area at the turn of the 20th century).

The lovely plantation home where we are staying in St Mary parish still serves as a reminder of 18th century injustices. I pick up a racy novel on slavery based in St Kitt’s by novelist Unity Hall (which could in fact be the name of a local community). This helps to emphasise the practice of social separation – of man from woman, parent from child - that was employed by slaveholders to keep black people in their place.

This practice seems to endure, as Chang argues:

“The nine predetermined garrisons still warp our politics. This nightmare scenario of a Jamaican government not freely and fairly elected should horrify anyone who values democracy.

“For despite their evil reputations as dens of iniquity and criminal havens, it’s not clear that the majority of Jamaicans want garrisons abolished… Are garrisons a form of social control? Are dons the bakra massas of our time, keeping the ghetto dwellers / field slaves under control so the rest of society / plantation great house can go on with business as normal?”

In comparison with the downward spiral of development and democracy in Jamaica, our ex-patriot British hosts were impressed with the industry and creativity they observed during a recent vacation in Cuba. While Cuban national elections are conducted peaceably on 20th January, with over 8 million voters at the polls and over 40% female representatives elected, Richard Crawford, UWI lecturer eloquently bemoans the situation in Jamaica:

“We need to clean up the police force, the political parties and those private interests who operate outside of the law, running drugs, laundering money, hiring hit-men, smuggling people or goods and not paying any taxes.”

Divide and rule

But why should we aspire to social harmony when we’re lucky enough to live in a liberal capitalist democracy?

As we check into the Terra Nova hotel on 28th December I’m shocked to read the newspaper headline that Benazir Bhutto has come to a violent end in Rawalpindi. That’s going to further destabilise the country, I can’t help but feel intentionally, in what R. Iriyan Ilango of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in New Delhi describes as the “bitter and abusive election process” up to January 8th 2008. And Wasim Akram, former cricket captain, fears the incident may affect the planned Australian tour to Pakistan.

After we drop my daughter off at Norman Manley airport, Ludlow the taxi driver tells me that Cuba has been excluded from Stanford 20/20 the new Caribbean cricket initiative. This is sponsored by US billionaire entrepreneur Sir Allen Stanford but unfortunately is subject to political pressure from his own capital. Due to the United States embargo against Cuba, organisations and citizens have to make application to, and receive special permission from the US Government to conduct any type of activity with Cuba. Stanford's application was denied.

The news comes as a huge disappointment not only to the Cuba team which has been training intensely for what was to be their first official tournament outside Cuba but also to the legends, cricket fans and Sir Allen who were looking forward to seeing what the heavily baseball-influenced nation could do with a cricket bat. The sport has taken of in recent years thanks to the Commission of Rescue and Development of Cricket in Cuba which has attracted some support from the UK government.

Jamaica, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, the partition of the Indian sub-continent… the preferred game has always been to divide and rule. The strategy still prevails as far as US foreign policy is concerned, in respect to now independent states with natural geographical, ethnic and economic links in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It’s a pity: the sound of leather on willow has surely been one of the few relatively benign legacies of British colonial history. Unfortunately even this can be used as a divider. In other words (at the risk of repeating myself ) whatever the future holds, we can be sure it’s not cricket.

Alternative ending: From the sugar trade to Ceylon tea plantations: someone else is reaping what we have sown.

NB. The Jamaican motto is “out of many one people”

Read more

The Jamaica Observer

The Gleaner

Intriguing triads: The story of the three boys

2007-12-28T21:57:00.000-08:00

I was once working on conflict prevention with a small research team – four African, two British members - somewhere in West Africa. I’ll just share two in-jokes among people working in international development:

1.Before you start the research you know that the conflict has been caused by a World Bank project
2.Those who style themselves experts in conflict prevention seem to be expert at creating conflict themselves – self-generating work, I suppose.

Both these applied in the case I am telling you about. Our team leader was not an easy person to work with and there were already tensions in the team because of this. We had travelled through the heat of the day on a dirt-track road to arrive at a small provincial centre - where we were welcomed by local officials and then shown to a modest hostelry. Very basic rooms where nothing really worked, not even the television - and no catering facilities. Our host had said something about offering us an evening meal, but nothing materialised. By this time our leader had become extremely tetchy because, for health reasons, he really did need regular meals. So in the end we walked down the road to find a local restaurant.

The team occupied two contiguous tables. As you will find in establishments all over West Africa, there were a number of young men sitting around - presumably, but not necessarily, actually employed there. There was very little on the menu but we gave our choices to the first waiter. Another young man came to lay the covers. A third came out to bring drinks. Someone changed their order at this stage. When the food finally arrived, the kitchen had got it wrong. Our leader completely lost his temper and shouted at the whole restaurant. For the Africans this was incredibly embarrassing: you just don’t do that in Africa. For me being British, well, I felt the same. And everyone was afraid that I too was going to explode.

Just sometimes in a tight situation, inspiration can strike. “There are too many boys,” I explained. And then told them the story of the three boys, which was coined by a good friend’s grandfather, Will Franks, during his time as a transport manager:

“One boy’s a boy. Two boys are half a boy. And three boys is no boy at all.”

This went down extremely well with the three African men and their female colleague. They laughed and retold the story and laughed some more. And somehow the whole situation was lightened, we all managed to eat something and went back to the guest house to sleep.

At the time I was just happy that I had somehow come up with the right thing to say. Our team leader had to leave soon after this incident, I took over and it goes without saying the rest of the research trip became a much more positive experience. But the story of the three boys had really captured the imagination of my African male colleagues. From time to time they would recycle the story. And at the end of the trip, when we had become a small family and found it hard to say goodbye, they brought it up again. I was expressing the feeling that we had done a really tough job really well and one of them said:

“Yes, we’ve been worriedly discussing how it could be so successful when we are three boys. But then we decided to count in Patrick the driver, which makes four, so maybe that takes us back round to the one boy.”

Female triads

It’s heart-warming to think that the story, which originates from the east end of London, has probably circulated all over that particular west African country. Clearly humour, like the truth, knows no borders. And what makes something funny is the recognition of a kernel of truth.

As it’s the festive season, I’m not going to turn the story into some sophisticated allegory of patriarchal global politics: readers are welcome to do that themselves. But I don’t want you to think I’m in any way biased, so I have racked my brains to find an equivalent story about three women.

King Lear’s three daughters chose not to work together, so I’m claiming that doesn’t count. But what about Macbeth’s three witches: good on futures. The three furies: on target. Does this mean female triads are always negative? Hardly. What about the three graces? According to Seneca they represent the cycle of giving, accepting and returning: the chief bond of humanity. They were also good at organising parties.

Then there are the three muses: inspiring. Faith hope and charity: always in demand. The three little maids from school: in harmony. Not to mention the Supremes: still famous after all these years.

I’d like to invite readers to ponder on this conundrum – and to respond with a similar light-hearted touch.

o If you can’t think of any female triads that don’t work effectively, what does that tell us?

o If you can you think of any male triads that are effective, what are the circumstances?

Please note, I’m not accepting the three wise men. I’ll admit they did manage to get to Bethlehem but as the old feminist joke goes: three wise women would have arrived on time, helped to deliver the baby, cooked a hot meal and brought more useful gifts.

The Three Graces from Primavera by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Read and hear more

Faith Hope and Charity
Note: to stop the music on this link, press Escape on your keyboard when the music starts – or before you leave the link webpage.

Three Little Maids from School

Logic dictates…

2007-12-28T21:37:00.000-08:00

Participation in decision-making is key to equality for women, as frequently pointed out by various United Nations agencies. It also has an important correlation with conflict prevention and the reduction of violence in society, according to UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (see an earlier blog )

I was recently invited to take part in the women in leadership roles online forum hosted by Women Watch on the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs website. At the moment it is still a closed debate but the results will be available shortly.

Over four weeks, there was widespread participation in this well-structured discussion, covering issues such as: the impact of women leaders; the present situation of women in the public and private sectors and in civil society (academia, media etc); the constraints against greater involvement of women in leadership positions; and the strategies that can most effectively be used to counteract those constraints.

In the final week, the moderator asked for more analysis on institutional barriers. And you know, I thought I ought to contribute, since I’ve worked (and become frustrated) in a number of different sectors myself - as well as being employed as an external consultant to carry out organisational audits, workforce training and develop strategy on gender equity.

Unfortunately I found myself unable to join the debate. Nobody was actually stopping me. It just seems that my lifetime experience, both personal and professional, has taught me nothing but this: within the prevailing paradigm, there will always be discrimination (and hence violence) against women.

Former head of the Equal Opportunities Commission in Wales, Prof Theresa Rees, once analysed remedial measures for gender equality as follows: tinkering, tailoring or transformation and concluded that only the third option will do. But how can we imagine it? Although Doris Lessing (The Guardian 08/12/07) has not yet had the time to discover the joys of blogging, she has often resorted to science fiction, futurism, dystopia and myth in her ground-breaking attempts to illuminate gender within the human condition.

Star Trek fans will recognise the language of Vulcans and androids alike: “logic dictates” that the only solution – scary to women and men alike – is to find a new paradigm: this one isn’t working.

Read more

16 days against violence blog

Doris Lessing

For peace in the Middle East… lose yourself in the dance

2007-11-22T15:03:00.000-08:00

It’s a Thursday evening in dark damp British autumn. I roll up at the drafty church hall in Llanfairfechan - a village on the wild north Wales coast – to meet a group of women I may not associate with in the daytime. I ask myself: what am I doing here? I should be blogging about world peace, the Israeli roadblocks and electricity cuts in Palestine or the crisis in Pakistan, the poppy harvest in Afghanistan, nuclear power in Iran, Iraqi factions and back again to Annapolis.

But as soon as Julia our teacher puts on the music, we are transported there, to what is known as the cradle of civilisation - the valley of the Euphrates or the banks of the upper Nile. For this is our weekly belly dancing class and for one short hour we bask in an oasis of female power.

They say that the art of raqs sharqi comes from the worship of Isis - the magical goddess of ancient Egypt whose healing ensures everlasting life. As one famous modern day practitioner Jasmin explains: “Isis is the universal mother who guides women in childbirth and comforts them in bereavement, a reminder to women of their connection to the all-goddess and to each other.”

Another story is that learning the technique of undulating the belly was a preparation for natural childbirth. And then there is the hafla or gathering of different dance groups, to perform for each other - not as a competition but in enjoyment of female beauty and self-expression. Along with massage, foot-baths, sweetmeats… It may be a throwback to the harem or have since degenerated into exotic dancing. But it originates in the time when women as priestesses were free to hold their own celebrations and had control over their own mysteries.

That was before goddess worship was desecrated by the priests of patriarchal religion and the practitioners of manmade medicine, one by one seeking to possess the powers of woman which will always be denied to men: conception in the womb, gestation, parturition and lactation. At the same time they try their best to emphasise the redemptive power of the Madonna, the virgin mother (as Marina Warner tells the story) in some warped logic that somehow, by denying woman’s sexuality, men can redeem their own sins.

In the name of god

Last month it seemed that absolutely everyone was an expert on abortion and human rights. Many missed the point that Polly Toynbee raised but did not unpack: the debate is still about the control of women and their fertility. Because men don’t have that life force, they resort to the opposite: oppression, violence, rape and war. And this is always played out across the female body. Danish artist Jens Galschiot launched his sculpture of a pregnant crucified teenager last December as “an outcry against the crusade against contraception and sexual education orchestrated by Christian fundamentalists with President Bush and the Pope in the lead”.

Fortunately not all men are moralists of the abstract, hypocrites, control freaks or fundamentalists looking “to compete with you / Beat or cheat or mistreat you / Simplify you, classify you / Deny, defy or crucify you” (Bob Dylan).

David Grieg recently wrote about the need for men to get in touch with their feminine side with reference to his updated production of Euripides’ play The Bacchae:

“For me, these concerns remain as relevant as they were 2000 years ago. There are still men who would control women in order to boost their shaky sense of self. There are still men who are lost because they refuse to lose themselves in the dance. And so we still live with the psychotic and uncontrolled violence that will appear whenever a repressed Dionysian force reasserts itself – as it always will.”

World peace and thin thighs

Sometimes I have to wait and wait until the right metaphor comes along. Y’alaouni! As we practice our moves, it all makes sense. After all, I never thought I’d get thin thighs again: world peace cannot be far behind. It may sound frivolous but I’m seriously trying to find a radical alternative to the same old tired performances.

In fact, another definition of hafla is a peace festival, which the eponymous London-based group is planning for 2008: I don’t mind that somebody got the idea before me, as it reinforces my position.

“The word 'HAFLA' is common to both Arabic and Hebrew meaning 'celebration' or 'party', and it has a particular connotation as being the third stage of the peace process that comes after the stages of truce and reconciliation. We bring together Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs and Jews and all people who are committed to creating peace in this part of the world. As a group HAFLA asks you to imagine such a celebration.”

So back to Annapolis: boys, please clear the stage, your second-rate snake-charming act is over. And let’s axe the conjuror’s patter. Bring on the dancing girls!

Afterword

HAFLA is also a make of grenade launcher. Go figure.

Gender and Trade or Call your bluff

2007-11-08T12:01:00.000-08:00

“Critics of the EU’s trade agreements are gambling with livelihoods in the developing world.”

This claim was made last week by Peter Mandelson (EU trade commissioner) and Louis Michel (EU development commissioner) in The Guardian with reference to the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) now under discussion in Brussels. Furthermore, the critics “undermine those in Africa and other ACP countries who are seeking to work constructively for economic reform and a new trade and development relationship with Europe.”

But who are these critics? Clearly not willing to be taken in by a little masculine rhetoric, many of them are representatives of regional and international women’s advocacy groups. They have brought out their own analyses on the likely impact of EPAs, which they believe could blight the future of yet another generation, pushing the dispossessed further to the periphery (Lebohang Pheko’s voice)

Research carried out for the Central American Women’s Network

on the recently launched EU-CA negotiations predicts that women’s working conditions in the ‘free-trade zones’ will get worse, women farmer small-holders will be harder hit by competition and in general “women are likely to be further marginalized, uninformed about their rights and less able to organize to defend them”. Women in Costa Rica are already struggling against the US imposed Central America Trade Agreements (CAFTA).

The International Gender and Trade Network have also published a paper discussing the policy linkage between aid and trade under the Doha Development Agenda. This puts trade at the center of growth promotion and poverty reduction strategies at the national, regional and multilateral level. “This political shift affects the way development policies and technical cooperation (including gender-related activities) are to be designed and implemented in the future and will not go without implications for funding provided for other sectors.”

The paper argues that Aid for Trade should go beyond the general policy declarations related to ‘gender-sensitivity’ and ‘sustainable development’. “It should be part of a specific global plan aimed at improving female employment, ensuring higher employment standards and more stable and sustainable income.”

At the World Social Forum in Nairobi at the beginning of the year, EPAs were top of the agenda, seen as a mechanism for compromising national and regional autonomy (and more: an end to sovereignty in Africa) The organisers of the discussion theme on ‘women farmers cultivating local markets and defending food sovereignty’ talked to me about the importance of the united south-south struggle for fair trade. “Asian women are looking to the African social movements to win over EPAs this year - because we know that Europe will soon be coming after South Asia.”

Sure enough, bilateral EU-India free-trade negotiations are now underway. And the Brussels-based organisation Women in Development Europe have a new report out looking at the implications of EU-India trade for social development and gender equality . The paper questions the main interests behind these free trade agreements on both sides - looking at who is actually going to benefit. It points out that, while Indian economic growth rates now rank second in the world behind China, UNDP ranked India's human development at 126 (out of 177) and gender-related development at 96. One quarter of the population of India lives below the poverty line and female foeticide is systematic.

Since bilateral trade negotiations are held in great secrecy, the paper aims “to provide civil society actors in the EU and India with background information and to build their capacity to engage critically in policy-making on trade and development and in trans-regional networking.” Sounds reasonable in a global democracy?

Speaking out

While I’m on the subject, here’s a plug for another international publication: Unpacking globalisation: markets, gender, work. Edited by Linda E. Lucas this reprints papers from the Women’s Worlds Congress (Kampala, 2002) providing a range of case studies on and by women workers from Mexico through Tanzania to India to exemplify what Saskia Sassen calls the feminisation of survival.

If anyone has real authority to speak about the impact of the current trade system on livelihoods in the south, it has to be the women who live there. And there is plenty of research from women north and south to back them up. In fact, you could say that women have a vested interest in becoming experts on globalisation since they bear the brunt of its effects. And yet it’s still so difficult to be taken seriously.

In December last year Lebohang Pheko took part in a round table on EPAs organised by the European Commission in Brussels where she was due to present a paper giving the gender perspective. What was the response of the EU? She told me:

‘Oh, they said, “let’s stay with the real discussion and look at the gender aspect at the end.” It’s the usual response. But we need to be at the centre of discussions. It’s a question of social inclusion - otherwise, women, men, children, all those who are marginalized, are just taken out of the game. There’s got to be a humanity to these trade agreements.’

As I’ve written before,

it’s easy for western politicians to gamble when someone else is paying for their habit. But if this is a game of poker, the cards are stacked in Europe’s favour. Not a gamble at all then, just a con trick.

Read more

Justice, not globalisation: Lebohang Pheko’s voice

A-Genda. Gender and Trade in Central America. October 2007

The Doha Development Agenda and Aid for Trade: Finding The Policy Link

Economic growth without social justice: EU–India trade negotiations andtheir implications for social development and gender justice

Christian Aid’s campaign for trade justice

Unpacking globalisation: markets, gender, work

Spotlight on the Cuban experience

2007-10-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I have good news to report. On 20th October – which is Cuba’s national day - I attended a prestigious event at Clwyd Theatre in Flintshire celebrating 25 years of solidarity between Cuba and Wales (Cymru Cuba).

“We’re proud that the Welsh Assembly has official government links with Cuba,” emphasised MP Elfyn Llwyd, highlighting the memorandum of understanding for cooperation in higher education, which has been developed by Welsh Minister for Education Jane Davidson in collaboration with Silvia Nogales, First Secretary of the Cuban embassy.

In contrast, explained Rob Miller, Director of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, our UK central government still does not have normalised relations with Cuba. Trade amounts to less than £4 million a year, despite assurances of “supporting open communications with Cuba rather than using an isolationist approach to influencing change” (Angela Smith). The impact on the Cuban people of the 40-year old US economic blockade continues to be officially ignored. In addition, international banks and other companies operating in Britain have been forced by the US to stop trading with Cuba – an act which both contravenes UK law and compromises our own sovereignty.

In spite of negative images of Cuba in the media, over 100,000 British tourists visit the island annually - not counting exchange visits, study tours and delegations of parliamentarians, trade unionists, academics and others. What do they find there? “People like us,” says Tyrone O’Sullivan, ex-miner chair of the worker-owned Tower Colliery in south Wales, “hard-working, good-natured, good at fixing things. Cuba still remains the example of what can be achieved by putting people first, of how ordinary people can change their own destiny.”

In summer of 2006 I got a little frustrated with the press coverage about Castro and wrote an article, archived on the Cynefin Y Werin (Wales Common Ground) website, called Cuba Sí: Let’s dream the impossible which began:

‘Cuba seems to be easy target practice for journalists these days: Fidel is dying, the revolutionary ideal is dead, communism is rotten and the vultures are circling. Soon the US will overrun the island, capitalism will be reinstated and the paradox which is Cuba will finally be resolved.’

Well, according to the speakers at Theatr Clwyd - and as I predicted - none of that has happened yet.

But what do the rest of us have to learn from the Cuban experience?

On October 10th London Metropolitan University saw the successful launch of the new International Institute for the Study of Cuba (IISC). At a time when Cuba is certainly facing a period of change, the IISC aims to provide an in-depth objective appraisal of the ‘social experience’ and to examine its holistic approach to development, particularly in the fields of education and health. IISC executive director, Professor Patrick Pietroni, former Dean of General Practice, who started mobilising resources for the institute just over a year ago, describes to me how ‘academics, managers and scientists in Cuba all seem to have an understanding of the social dimension of their work; an ability to link the macro to the micro and vice versa.’

The online, open-access International Journal of Cuban Studies - first issue due out in spring 2008 - will publish scholarly work on Cuba (and related topics) in all disciplines including science and medicine. So here’s the opportunity to develop some interesting ideas, for example: If the Cuban approach to development had been used in Africa rather than the World Bank model, would the continent be in much better shape? How is a caring holistic approach to housekeeping feasible when prevailing wisdom tells us that only market-oriented policies can bring prosperity? And how to explain the apparent contradiction that women are highly educated, economically independent and equally involved in community decision-making in Cuba, but not in so-called democracies like Mali?

His Excellency René Mujica Cantelar, Cuban ambassador to Britain, concluded his speech at Theatr Clwyd:

'We all need to address the issues of war, poverty, ecological disaster facing the world today, but it is not through weapons or market forces that we will overcome these challenges: it is through cooperation and solidarity.'

Read Cuba Sí. Let’s dream the impossible

Also read about the Caring Economy in Venezuela

human rights

Military recruitment or What's education for anyway?

2007-10-13T03:07:00.001-07:00

I’d like to put the record straight for those readers who have the impression I’m not concerned about boys’ poor communication skills and under-performance at school. I am, because we all know what happens to some of those boys: they join the army.

And as the UK armed forces are currently operating below full strength according to statistics from the Defence Analytical Service Agency, there’s a new vigorous recruitment campaign encouraging 17s year olds to fly apache helicopters instead of going to university.

The case is especially relevant to the wild Welsh highlands of Gwynedd where the city of Bangor’s recruiting office has the second highest recruitment rate in the whole of the UK. I don’t think it’s anything to with the persuasion skills of the recruiting officers – it’s because there’s not much else on offer in the way of youth employment opportunities, as I’ve blogged elsewhere. So, despite parental opposition (particularly since the invasion of Iraq) the youth of the area depart, telling themselves as they’ve been told, that they have the chance to learn a trade and ignoring the fact that it may involve killing or getting killed. The news still makes it clear that it’s a man’s job and, in fact, this is one area of life where sex discrimination does work in women’s favour: it is still boys who are wanted as cannon fodder. On the other hand, it is the wives and mothers of soldiers who have been campaigning to bring troops home.

As I’m recounting this to my daughter who’s studying in England, she informs me of something I should have known about a long time ago: the university officer training corps (UOTC). Operational since the beginning of the 20th century, this programme currently comprises 19 units across the UK and aims:

To develop the leadership potential of selected university students through enjoyable training in order to communicate the values, ethos and career opportunities of the British Army.

It recruits students into weekend boot camp activities and offers the perk of free holidays abroad (or as it is stated: ‘we learn to plan and carry out expeditions overseas’). The purpose is not to persuade them to join the armed forces per se but to foster pro-army attitudes among the middle-class, according to one student’s analysis, “so that the future captains of industry will encourage their less well-educated workers to join up if there’s a war.”

The Khaki Dragon

This kind if inequality is particularly striking in Wales, which, as one of the poorest areas of the UK, seems to have become central government’s backyard for military developments, increasingly dependent on the British war machine for economic survival.

It was Plaid Cymru who late last year blew one whistle, providing figures to show that the army recruitment division visited schools in deprived areas of Wales twice as often as those in wealthy areas and thus highlighting the trend across Britain - which led to the MoD curtailing its practice of school visits (although the Welsh Assembly itself refused to take action).

However, cadet training, which takes place outside schools, is still booming in Wales: there are an estimated 7000 young people between 12 and 18 in over 100 cadet units and up to 4000 17- 32 year olds trained as Territorial Army soldiers in 23 TA units. Such enlightening statistics can be found in comprehensive research commissioned by Wales CND into the militarisation of the region. Their report entitled The Khaki Dragon - which is available to download here - also provides a full listing of sites in Wales that are used by arms related industries (at least 35 involved in military contracts) and military-sponsored education and research (Defence Technology Centres at Cardiff and Swansea universities).

And as Ray Davies, chair of Cardiff UNA, blogs:

Between 2001 and 2004 the Ministry of Defence provided military training for over 12,000 personnel from 137 countries, many with poor human rights records. All of this raises the prospect of Wales being used as a training ground for any corrupt dictator who happens to have a million pounds to spare.

What’s education for anyway?

I wrote an earlier post on the St Athans military academy and the involvement of the Open University there. But I’m pleased to see that there are some instances in Britain where higher education questions its own role in contemporary society. Prior to the No Border camp, London academics ran a 2-day free open access event at Goldsmiths University entitled The migrating university: No detention, no deportation, no borders in education where one of the panels discussed the following:

Does a university education offer a passport to a world of opportunity? Are the old exclusions of race, class, gender and ability fully redeemed by our policies and ‘inclusive’ programs? Or is the new hierarchy a filtering mechanism which promises precarious labour for some, security and success for others? While some may never question their right to access, do some have to fight to move at all and others struggle daily simply to pass or fail? Is education really a social good, a pass to freedom; or is it rather a ticket to a new set of subjugations?

There’s not much sense of autonomy here in north Wales. Along with RAF Valley (which trains fighter pilots from all over the world) the picturesque Isle of Anglesey also houses Britain’s largest magnox type nuclear power station at Wylfa. This is likely to be replaced soon by Wylfa ‘B’ if the latest 'consultation’ gives the government the go-ahead to build a new generation of power stations across the UK.

Though I’ve returned home from my travels, I still seem to be living in a developing country which has been forced to sell out under external pressures, is subject to cynical class-based control and where political leaders like to take the name of the Lord in vain as they make empty promises of peace and security for everyone. Our elitist society where intellectuals criticise exceptions like President Chavez - for closing down private schools in Venezuela and daring to say that capitalist ideology destroys the values of cooperation and egalitarianism.

Read The Khaki Dragon: download the Wales CND report here

human rights

The People v The World Bank

2007-10-05T08:44:00.000-07:00

Star Trek fans will remember that episode back in 1993 where Q puts Captain Jean-Luc Picard on trial for crimes committed by the human race. Unless the captain can convince the court of humankind’s basic goodness, the entire race – past, present and future - will be wiped out. With his Shakespearean eloquence, of course, the actor Patrick Stewart pleads his defence successfully.

It’s only a story, but the dramatic conceit of this scenario is tremendously powerful. That is, if one honest citizen is prepared to stand up and speak from the heart, he or she can save humanity.

Multiply that by thousands and perhaps the concept is not too far-fetched. What we’ve seen increasingly since the 1960s, especially in the last decade, is the incidence of the people’s tribunal, which, conversely, puts the state or international institutions on trial for crimes against humanity - and where honest citizens are invited to bear witness for the prosecution, again emphasizing the power of personal testimony.

Not surprisingly, argues the Center for Women’s Global Leadership feminist organizers were among the first to see the potential of popular tribunals as a way to claim the “public” space of a tribunal to expose previously “private” violations. The first international tribunal on Crimes against Women was held in Brussels in March 1976. A more recent landmark in 2000 was the international women’s War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s military sexual slavery.

The 2004 Brussels Tribunal against the war on Iraq

One of the people’s favourite criminals in the dock is the World Bank - along with the neo-liberal capitalist ‘democracy’ it represents. In January 2006 during the polycentric World Social Forum, a session of the World Court of Women sat to hear women bear witness on ‘wars of globalisation, wars against women’.

In early 2007 the film Bamako was shown widely in the US and Europe and promoted by Christian Aid as part of its trade justice campaign. In the film, a trial takes place in a typical African courtyard, where the World Bank and IMF are found guilty of crimes against humanity. Some Western film critics suggested the film lacked concrete proposals for change, but it had enormous impact in Africa, being the first time that this testimony had been raised in public by ordinary Africans for a worldwide audience.

In September 2007 a four-day tribunal was held in India,
where a large number of civil society organisations gathered , yes, as in Africa, accusing the World Bank of influencing national policies to the detriment of the poor. The Bank promised to make a deposition but no-one showed up.

Next up in the middle of October is the polycentric International Women’s Tribunal on Poverty, which will be held in Peru, India, Egypt and at the UN in New York. Given that 70% of the world’s poor are women, these tribunals aim to influence governments by collecting testimony to present to officials on the worsening conditions of women.

Can honest citizens really save humanity? Well, as Captain Picard would say, let’s make it so!

Stop Press: WORLD vs BANK

Also check out this Public Hearing on the World Bank to be held on 15th October in The Hague, organised by The World Bank Campaign Europe in cooperation with the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal. It will be streamed live on http://www.worldbankcampaigneurope.org/ just five days before the World Bank's 2007 annual meetings in Washington DC.

Witnesses from Peru, Nigeria, Malawi, Mali, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan will bring forward cases relating to the effects of the World Bank's push for privatisation and liberalisation of basic services as well as its involvement in fossil fuel projects in developing countries.

human rights

Global politics and confidence building measures

2007-09-26T10:32:00.001-07:00

At the All Wales Peace Festival on 22nd September there was an inspiring talk by Professor Nick Wheeler from Aberystwyth, on the concept of trust-building in world politics - the topic of his latest book . I remain firmly sceptical about the trustworthiness of many world leaders. However, I’m able to relate the concept to a concrete example from my experience of the UK Government’s confidence-building strategy for Guatemala and Belize

This programme was funded under the Global Conflict Prevention Pool, itself a three-way cooperation between the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development - the so-called 3-D model (diplomacy, defence and development) now popular for working with other countries. I’ve criticised this model elsewhere, in Mali , arguing that its use by western governments tends to be motivated by the thought of their own economic and political gain rather than being of any real benefit to the developing countries in question. However, due perhaps to particular personalities involved in the Guatemala-Belize strategy, there was observable confidence-building over the two years that I acted as independent evaluator against identified objectives

The strategy aimed to help resolve the longstanding border dispute. Since 1939 when Belize was declared a separate state, Guatemala has refused to recognize its status, claiming the territory is still part of Guatemala. Thus the Organisation of American States , acting as mediator, coined the terms ‘territorial differendum’ (for the dispute itself) and ‘adjacency zone’ (AZ) to designate the disputed border region. The term ‘confidence-building measures’ (CBMs) was substituted for ‘conflict prevention’ because the Guatemalans maintained there was no conflict to prevent. It may sound simply like playing with words. In fact people found the use of the term highly significant - not only in maintaining non-violent relationships at state level but also in influencing the attitudes of other actors from each side of the border.

One of the notable aspects of the programme was that, as it evolved, it included an increasing number of different sectors and levels of Guatemalan and Belizean society: government officials, non-governmental organisations, the media, academia, environmental and human rights groups, communities on either side of the border and the private sector. Similarly it involved a range of cross-border activities: training workshops, exchange visits, study tours, trade fairs, cultural celebrations, civic action and community mobilisation (clearing the river, HIV awareness), mapping, educational materials – and positive media coverage.

Bi-national committees were also set up to develop and move forward joint plans, especially for the economic and social development of the adjacency zone, far from the capital, marginalized, impoverished and neglected. Through working together, representatives from both sides recognised the importance of this as the root cause of conflict. Illegal incursions into Belize’s nature reserves by Guatemalans were driven by the need to forage for food, firewood and also what they might sell to middlemen for export (for example, ornamental ferns) despite the threat of arrest and imprisonment by the Belizean security forces. So, community-based enterprises, facilitating legal cross-border commerce, boosting basic health and education services were all initiatives identified for addressing these problems.

Workshops were held for the various partners, from top to bottom, to share experiences and review progress: here, perhaps for the first time, diplomats heard what civil society had to say about the issue of conflict. In particular, it was clear the strategy had helped to change negative stereotypes and perceptions of ‘the other’. Overall there was an increase in bi-national cooperation and a capacity for joint initiatives. This created a more conducive atmosphere - resulting in reduced tensions at the border and more positive attitudes towards a final settlement. Local ownership of the OAS confidence building process also developed. As one steering committee member put it:

‘

The key lesson to pass on to others in similar situations is the promotion of dialogue at all levels, enabling different people to see the problem differently – not in terms of conflict or illegal incursions but, for example, in terms of shared economic and health needs – and to do things differently. It takes time, it’s an ongoing process (and other problems can be created along the way) but bringing people together to dialogue is a first step. This process, this approach to solving problems, wasn’t there at the outset. For example, the Health Commission for the AZ, this happened because both governments have commitment to working together in this area. We have tried various ways to reach a final settlement through OAS mediation, now maybe it’s time for us to work things out directly government to government.’

The OAS representative was based at the main border crossing (Melchor-Benque) in a small prefabricated office - a humble place where diplomats and high level foreign office personnel, among others, could meet informally to try and resolve border incidents peacefully. In 2005 a new agreement was signed here, a positive step which the then OAS representative attributed to the work of the UK’s confidence-building strategy. The office is still used for meetings.

One innovative initiative, which is ongoing, was the inoffensively named Language Exchange (LX) Project - developed (perhaps surprisingly) by the then Military Attaché to Guatemala when bi-national relationships proved too sensitive to go ahead with original plans for joint military training. Working with other ministries on exchange visits and training, developing goodwill and a high profile, the project was eventually joined by both the police and the military – and joint activities by security forces in the adjacency zone were recognised by all as a key factor in reducing tensions.

The LX project was thus an excellent example of the elements contributing to success in confidence-building: flexibility, creativity, persistence, commitment, allowing enough time for things to develop… as well as language skills, of course.

As regards trade collaboration between the two chambers of commerce under the strategy, I had some reservations, mainly because of the US-imposed Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)and its potential effects on poor farmers in the AZ. Doubtless the UK had its own economic agenda too. However, the stakeholders I spoke to emphasised that there were already long-standing, though informal, relationships in trade– as indeed there were close social, ethnic, cultural and linguistic links between families in border communities. As happens in many other parts of the world, the real conflicts - which were played out in the everyday lives of the people - were created by their own leaders.

If Guatemala did decide to use force to take back the disputed territory, the UK government would feel obliged to provide military assistance to its former colony Belize – and that’s not a desirable scenario. However, the potential conflict between Guatemala and Belize is low priority in comparison with the ever-escalating crisis in the Middle East. I understand the Oxford Research Group have attempted to apply a confidence-building approach there but have not been able to find ‘high enough people on either side who are willing to dialogue.’

Nevertheless, the event planned for October 18th - when hopefully One Million Voices will be heard in parallel gatherings in Jericho, Tel Aviv, London, Washington and Ottowa - suggests that there are many people who do want to work together: OneVoice counts over 25,000 Israelis and more than 25,000 Palestinians calling for ‘concrete confidence-building measures to improve the lives of the Israeli and Palestinian people.’ As Nick Wheeler pointed out in his talk, the impact of grassroots movements on leaders (and vice versa) shouldn’t be overlooked. In other words, we shouldn’t just focus on summit diplomacy but on all stakeholders. As was observed in Guatemala-Belize, the more people at different levels became involved in confidence-building, the less easy it was for each leader to maintain an overtly aggressive public stance.

Read more

One Million Voices

DDMI blog (The David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies / Department of International Politics, University of Wales Aberystwyth)

Archived material on Guatemala-Belize Confidence-Building

Language Exchange Project

Boys may under-perform but it is women who are under-paid

2007-09-12T01:36:00.000-07:00

“Girls outperformed boys by 11% in Key Stage 1 (seven year-olds) writing this year.”

It’s that time of year - results from school examinations and other national assessments have been published and newspapers herald the poor communication skills of boys as a national crisis. The Guardian is even hosting a major event this month for secondary headteachers ‘to identify barriers that impede boys’ learning, to work on practical solutions and set future goals to raise attainment.’ My intention is not to dismiss this as a valid topic for discussion. I’m simply saying it isn’t news.

Let’s go back to the dark ages of the 11 plus examination (established by the Butler Act in 1944). That national assessment test was used in the last year of primary education, allegedly to separate out children with academic potential, placing them in grammar schools, while the future hewers of wood and drawers of water were sent to ‘secondary modern’ schools. Because it was well-known even in those days that boys under-performed in the 11-plus, a special quota system for them was established, to ensure that grammar schools were not predominantly populated by girls. In other words, a percentage of the boys who went to grammar school did not merit their place. And a certain percentage of girls who went to secondary modern school were too bright to be there.

The practice was discontinued at a national level by the Labour government in 1974 (although it is still used in a few education authorities today) partly on the grounds that age 11 was too early to determine an individual’s future and that the exam favoured middle class children. The introduction of the comprehensive system also eliminated this 30 year-old practice of discrimination against girls at age 11 – a fact that has largely been overlooked in discussions about education in today’s ‘meritocracy’.

Of course, there is still a tendency for girls to have to teach themselves, especially at secondary school, while their teachers’ attention is taken up by boys’ bad behaviour. And unfortunately in many co-educational classrooms boys tend to undermine the confidence of teenage girls and inhibit them from showing how bright they really are. So girls sit and listen, take note, do their homework, help each other out and apply themselves consistently to coursework tasks throughout the year - rather than taking a mad dash to revise one week before the exams - behaviour which often earns them the epithet of being intellectually unadventurous and ‘not as naturally bright as boys’.

But in all this, the obvious answer to the conundrum of boys’ under-achievement seems to have been ignored. If, for the 60+ post-war years of co-educational statistics, boys continue to under-perform in comparison with girls, could the reason perhaps simply be that boys are not as bright?

‘News’ reports last week on another well-known fact suggest that we don’t need to worry about this because it doesn’t affect their achievement in later life. 30 years on from the Equal Pay Act, women may climb the career ladder faster than men – but are paid nationally 17% less for doing the same job, according to the latest National Management Salary Survey. Frances Gibb and Marcus Leroux in The Times, 5th September disingenuously reveal that 75% of women in the survey viewed qualifications as benefiting their career prospects compared with 66% of men. Of course: women know they have to work harder to get on and even when they are successful, are still under-paid.

So why should we bother about boys’ under-attainment at school when our ‘meritocratic’ society is still stacked in favour of men’s achievement at work?

The Equal Opportunities Commission, in its final report before being merged with other watchdogs into the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights on 1st October, has laid out its gender agenda: all those aspects of continuing sex discrimination in Britain which still require action by the new body.
The integrated human rights commission has potentially the advantage of being able to address the kind of connections between gender, race, class and ability that are not always made by the news reporting of the day.

But the newspaper advertisement I read for three key directors for the commission doesn’t bode well. Even as a linguist and an institutional development consultant, I couldn’t quite decipher the job description for ‘stakeholder relationships’ although I’m perfectly familiar with the concept. Perhaps it was written by one of those men whose communication skills are 11% poorer than mine but whose salary is 17% more.

Read more about the EOC gender agenda.

human rights

Out of Basra

2007-09-05T08:05:00.000-07:00

Preparing them for a future they cannot yet imagine…

No, really, how could I make it up? I found this slogan accompanying the photograph above on the home page of Metrix - the private consortium which - I have just learned - won the British government contract earlier this year to develop and run a mega military academy in St Athan, south Wales, as part of streamlining UK’s armed services. The consortium includes a subsidiary of the US company Raytheon(‘customer success is our mission’) which makes cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions, supplies electronic guidance equipment for the British nuclear weapons system Trident and is a favoured US government supplier of arms to Israel.

No surprises there, perhaps, but another long-term partner in the consortium is the Open University (‘study with us and fulfil your potential’) as Brenda Gourley Vice-chancellor proudly announced when opening the new Cardiff office in March as part of the Wales’ assembly government mission for a ‘learning nation'. Gourley also spoke at the OUSA conference 14 April on ‘learning from the past – embracing the future’: ‘Lastly let us not forget our social justice agenda – if we join hands together, we can change the world.’

As the report from a meeting of activists at the Temple of Peace with Cardiff university researcher Stuart Tannock points out: ‘Young people will be trained to in a craft which murders people, destroys environments, has no respect for communities and can lay waste huge areas forever. You have to blink hard to make certain this is actually Wales and not Wonderland.’

While Gordon Brown brings the British soldiers home from Basra it’s clear that no lessons have been learned about how best to prevent conflict, as I predicted when he first took office. Peter Beaumont highlights in The Guardian that youth training opportunities in Iraq, especially in Basra, are now largely provided (for men) courtesy of the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr and restrictions (which didn’t existed before 2003) are placed on women university students regarding dress and behaviour.

Meanwhile, despite Tony Blair’s appointment as special Middle East envoy, his support and influence have been conspicuously lacking in the case of the under 19s Palestine National Youth Football Team. Due to tour the UK for 3 weeks over the British summer and play 3 matches in the north-west of the country as part of a youth project – a visionary educational and bridge-building initiative of benefit to all involved – the team were banned from entry at the last minute by UK government visa restrictions.

Several reasons have been given. The official one from UKvisas (‘making travel and migration work for Britain’) with reference to the British Consulate in Jerusalem ‘which continues to provide a service in Gaza’ explains that some of the team from the Gaza strip did not meet the visa criteria. In fact the authorities were afraid that some of the players would seek asylum in Britain: in other words, ‘they were too poor to come’. Journalist Mark Steel ironically suggests the government were afraid the young people were part of a terrorist plot . Check them out.

As is reflected in the film Goal Dreams, to be screened at the All Wales Peace Festival this month, it’s actually quite difficult to put a national football team together ‘without a recognized homeland, no permanent domestic league, no place to train, Israel air strikes on the Palestine stadium…’

But, never mind, the Israeli football team will be playing at Wembley this weekend 8th September although a vigil against the government’s hypocrisy is being organised and the self-styled ‘world’s greatest football blog’ (edited by an Israeli football fan) doesn’t mention the Palestine team at all.

The United Nations resolution 58/5 entitled ‘Sport as a means to promote education, health, development and peace’ recognizes the power of sport to contribute to human development, touching the individual, community, national and global levels. In particular sports programmes are regarded as a key strategy for addressing the social alienation of disadvantaged youth and helping to fulfil their potential.

As we all know from Hollywood films, sporting activities, like the Open University partnership, can mean working together to change the world. But whatever else young people may learn at St Athan, we can be sure it’s not cricket.

Read the full report on St Athan’s military academy from UK Indymedia here

Women, socialism and language

2007-08-24T04:30:00.000-07:00

“ Taking part is not enough, you have to express your opinion.”

I found this quote on a card from Puntos de Encuentros
the leading women’s advocacy organisation in Nicaragua. What they say is true, but I know it’s not easy because it took me a long time to find my own voice as a writer. And like many other women I have found blogging a creative and empowering means of expressing my opinions and at the same time helping to raise other women’s voices.

I blogged live from the World Social Forum in Nairobi in January, and from the G8 alternative summit in Rostock in June. Now I’m grounded for a while in north Wales experiencing withdrawal symptoms. But fortunately the world keeps on spinning and the social movement keeps on moving. So in August musicians and political activists from the Americas and Europe descended on the tiny Welsh town of Machynlleth, home to the Centre for Alternative Technology for a Latino-Welsh extravaganza. They came to celebrate the living inspiration of the Chilean musician Victor Jara and discuss common environmental concerns – thus proving yet again that the sweet old-fashioned dream of socialism succeeds in eluding eradication and can be found bringing people together happily in what may seem the most unlikely of locations.

In fact, for me, the event is not surprising because there is a tradition of connection between Wales and Latin America which goes back to the first Welsh settlers to Patagonia in Argentina in 1865. More recently, solidarity groups in Wales have regularly exchanged visitors with Nicaragua and organised bilateral conferences on Cuba . This is the second Victor Jara festival in Machynlleth, and now links are being developed with Venezuela, since Cesar Aponte from the ministry for the environment was at the festival to talk about oil, equity and biosphere.

The reason for today’s connections, of course, is the common experience of oppression: Wales by the English kings, landlords, law, church and language; Latin American countries by dictators at home supported by successive greedy US regimes equally violating human rights including the right of free expression. The connection means that both Welsh civil society and politicians are active in LA solidarity: Jane Davidson, minister for education in the Wales Assembly, has visited Cuba on official business and Eluned Morgan (now Labour MEP) worked on the Nicaraguan coffee harvest. LA links are particularly strong among members of the Welsh Language Society : poets, musicians, writers like Angharad Tomos or educationalists like Branwen Niclas who have in their time been held in English prisons over Welsh language rights.

Mother tongue

Language was one of several themes of commonality in a cross-cultural initiative between women in Wales and women in Nicaragua last century (1995-6). This was a particular link with the multilingual Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, where, as in Wales, it is women who have been instrumental in maintaining indigenous language in the face of oppression by conquistadores, government, society or husbands. They have kept the mother tongue alive at home, in community life (especially Sunday school) in bringing up their own children, through stories, oral history, shared childcare and the development of a bilingual education programme.

At the conference in Bangor we discussed the paradox that while women are keepers of the language we are not always encouraged to use it ourselves in public. For this reason some researchers suggest that women’s speech is associated with powerlessness and can be characterised by over-politeness, hedging and hyper-correct grammar. Jennifer Coates has argued that these features do not actually correlate with the sex of the speaker but with social status, linked to previous experience and confidence in the context. “Powerless language has been confused with women’s language because in societies like ours women are usually less powerful than men.”

In mixed communication men are observed to interrupt three times as often as women, thus violating the rules of turn-taking. Conversely, women tend to act as facilitators, doing more of the interactive work and respecting others’ turns. Coates points out that “both men and women are disadvantaged by the existence of these two different models of conversation: women because their style leads to their being dominated (by men) in mixed groups and men because they lack competence in co-operative interaction.”

Angelica Brown, then councillor for the southern Atlantic coast region of Nicaragua highlighted: “Problems arise when it is a question of women taking on a public role because we underestimate our abilities of management and communication. For women in bilingual communities there is the additional worry of having to speak in public in your second or even third language.”

I have to keep on fighting

“Pay attention to the way you construct the present. It should look like the future that you dream of” (Alice Walker) is the message on another card from Puntos de Encuentro. Although the socialist experiment hasn’t always been so good for women, it has only been made possible by their active participation. While the reality may not live up to the dream, socialism in different Latin American contexts has opened up a space where women can raise their voice, take part in decision-making and are able to move, influence or inspire others. And, as Amanda Hopkinson says, ‘If you want to make a protest in Central America, you write a poem.’ The following two poems are not new but their writers’ dreams live on.

Firstly, the Creole painter Joan Beer, who died in 1984 not long after writing Love Poem, talks about the reality of personal relationships at a time when the Sandinistas (named after the anti-US-imperialism fighter, Sandino) were working for a greater love - for the sunrise, as the liberation of Nicaragua was called. The poignancy of ‘trying to keep back the night from falling’ is even greater in retrospect, given the World Bank’s dismantling of developments in health, education and equality during the 1990s.

Oscar, yuh surprise me
assin for a love poem

Ah sing a song a love fa meh contry
small contry, big lite
Hope for de po’, big headache fa de rich
Mo’ po’ dan rich in de worl
mo’ people love fah meh contry

Fa meh contry name Nicaragua
Fa meh people ah love dem all
Black, Miskito, Sumo, Rama, Mestizo
So yuh see fa me, love poem complete
‘cause ah love you too.

Dat no mek me erase de moon
an de star fran de firmament.

Only somehow wen ah rememba
how you bussin yo ass
To defend dis sunrise, an keep back
de night fran falling
Ah know dat tomara we will have time
fa walk under de moon an stars
Dignify an free, sovereign
children a Sandino.

In the conclusion of the second poem, the recently deceased Claribel Alegria expresses her choice more starkly:

Because I want peace and not war
I want to keep on fighting.
Because there are liberated territories
Where people learn to read
And the sick are cured
And the fruits of the earth belong to all,
I have to keep on fighting.

Note:
Creole is one of the languages used in Bluefields on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. As a community they were socialised to believe that Creole is just ‘bad’ English, not a real language, especially by the powerful Moravian church and its schools. Comments from afro-caribbean activists:

“The church teaches us women to be humble – that is, stupid!” Marjorie McKenzie.

‘When my husband is at home, we all speak Spanish. When he’s away, we speak bad Creole.’ Shorlaine Howard.

Further links

OpenDreams live on blog

El sueno existe

History is a weapon, Joan Jara (downloadable)

Lovers and Comrades, Women’s resistance poetry, edited by Amanda Hopkinson, The Women’s Press, 1989
Welsh Writing 1960-1985, Ned Thomas, 1996

We share the same struggle, edited by Patricia Daniel, 1996 (downloadable)

Climate change: sustainability, socialism and music

2007-08-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

My latest blog for openDemocracy.net covers El Sueno existe the Victor Jara festival in Machynlleth, mid-Wales, which brought together environmentalists, musicians, academics and political activists from Latin America (Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba..) and Europe (Wales, England, Italy, Finland...)to discuss practical solutions to climate change actually working today, as well as socio-economic scenarios for the future. I interviewed both women and men on a range of issues and came away inspired by seeds of hope, including the example of political and economic empowerment of women in Venezuela.

Please check out the blog here openDreams live on

Democracy in Mali: the president and the prostitute

2007-07-26T12:13:00.000-07:00

The second round of parliamentary elections in Mali was completed at the weekend (22nd July 2007). The ADP coalition supporting Amadou Toumani Touré (ATT) was always the favourite to win and in the end they took 128 seats out of 147 in the national assembly. Since ATT was re-elected president for a second five-year term in May, the casual observer may be forgiven for assuming that the Malian population are happy with his style of leadership and that, clearly, he has their support to go forward with the neo-liberal programme of economic reform imposed by western donors.

Let’s look beneath the surface, because this also occurs in other countries. While Mali is perceived to be one of the most stable democracies in the African continent, it is also right at the bottom of the UN’s human development index. Despite a raft of donor-driven institutional reforms, life has not improved for the majority of her citizens. This is one good reason why the turnout for the national elections was low - as in bye-elections over the last year or so - indicating disillusionment with politics in general. Overall the turnout was estimated at 33% but this figure hides the disastrous lack of engagement of citizens in the capital (12%) and the relatively high engagement in some rural areas (up to 50% or more in a country where the literacy rate is around 25%).

Gender equality has made no progress whatsoever in the past 5 years. In fact, it looks as if it might be reversed. In the outgoing assembly, women deputies counted for a bare 10% or 14 out of 147 seats with 5 women ministers (18%). This year for the first time there was a woman presidential candidate Aminata Sidibé who entered the race late and was only able to draw on the support of a network of Malian women working in the non-governmental sector. In the parliamentary elections there were 227 women candidates out of 1,408 and none of them were elected in the first round, leaving only 26 to save Mali’s honour in the second round. Predictions that the number of female deputies would be halved in the new assembly were found to be too pessimistic: 14 women were finally elected.

This is not because women don’t want to be involved in politics. They have campaigned vigorously, in a cross-party coalition for the introduction of 30% quotas on the candidate lists (which are put forward by the different political parties) and even managed to get a bill discussed in the national assembly last August, in preparation for this year’s elections. After a stormy debate, the bill was thrown out by a majority of the legislature – but as they are almost all men, this is hardly surprising.

And while male commentators continue to claim that women are not politically competent or confident enough to run a successful campaign, women themselves complain that the main factor is economic inequality. Those candidates that have money to bribe the electorate will win. The vast majority of women in Mali are economically dependent and anyway women don’t play that game. Possibly one reason why men are against more women in government is that “their presence would bring scruples back into public life and rehabilitate politics in the eyes of citizens for whom ‘democracy’ has become devalued.” (Bintou Sanankoua secretary general of the network of African women ministers and parliamentarians and former deputy in Mali). Indeed, the ombudsman’s report for 2006 revealed that 103 billion West African francs (more than £103 billion) had been ‘lost’ that year through government corruption in Mali.

Coalition politics

The problem is that Mali exemplifies open democracy gone wild, but only for men of course. There was a total of 154 political parties contesting the 2007 elections, the same scenario as in 2002, when ATT formed a coalition government. For the 2007 elections, the ADP (the alliance for development and progress) comprised over thirty political parties and numerous other civil society organisations. In different constituencies different coalitions joined together to form other coalitions as seemed expedient in order to present the most attractive lists. This form of coalition politics is entirely cynical and has nothing to with political principle, according to Nina Walet Intalou, councillor in the northern-most constituency of Kidal and deputy chair of the independent state watchdog for local government.

In other words there is no viable opposition. As another friend there commented, the strongest candidate standing against ATT was Ibrahim Boubacar Keita - who had just been working with ATT as a minister for 5 years in government (sound familiar to British readers?): how can he be seen as a serious political opponent? Although I’m not generally in favour of the combative male two-party oppositional political paradigm, I have to agree with Nina Walet that it at least means representatives attempt to have some kind of position. The situation is also a disadvantage for ATT, because as leader he has to please everyone in the coalition. Realistically, he has to go along with corruption. And as for social justice, well, for example, he allegedly supported the women’s quota bill himself but was not able to push it through. Yet it seems he certainly had all the civil servants in his pocket come election time.

So, the long and the short of it is that the citizens of Mali don’t bother voting because – despite the plethora of apparent options - there isn’t really any choice. And, in the same vein, journalists are free to say what they like about ATT and the government because that’s not going to make any difference either.

Freedom of the press

However, there was a little fuss in June when a secondary school teacher was arrested for disrespect to the president, along with five journalists - which led Reporters without Borders to query Mali’s status as one of the few African countries to field a free press. Believe it or not I actually met this young man who used to drive up on a moped to visit his cousin Mboye, the housekeeper in the Bamako courtyard where I lived for 3 months. In his first year of teaching, Bassirou Minta had taken advice from an older colleague on essay themes that had been used before. He then gave his students an assignment to write on moral corruption in relation to an imaginary president and his mistress. The press got hold of this, thanks to a helpful parent. Minta was fined, jailed and barred from teaching; the journalists were also fined and had suspended sentences for publishing articles on the matter. The public were barred from the trial on the grounds it was a ‘sex case’.

On 21 June, a crowd of around 200 journalists marched in the capital in front of the office of the Justice Minister to demand the release of their colleagues (as reported by the International Federation of Journalists) Security forces violently broke up the protest and fired tear gas at the journalists, badly injuring Ibrahim Famakan Coulibaly, the president of the Malian Journalists' Association and the West African Journalists' Association.

But the story was nothing to do with politics - or was it? Firstly, the woman in the story was ‘a student and economic prostitute’. It is so much taken for granted in Mali that young women will sell their favours to older wealthy and more powerful men. It is only when the girl falls pregnant, as here, that there is an issue to debate - one of the dilemmas being should the president marry his mistress and recognise his child - which in fact he is forced to do when the girl comes into a cabinet meeting to plead her case.

Apparently ATT is well known for his extra-marital liaisons and his long line of natural-born children. A lot of people think ‘a big man’ like him should have disregarded the story in the press instead of over-reacting. As the journalist who first published the story puts it: “the link is clear between moral corruption at the grassroots and the role model at the very top which has created it.” Seydina Oumar Diarra continues: “We allow young girls from our own families and villages to be pimped - in a society where money has become the only sign of success.”

Meanwhile Mali’s new poverty reduction strategy depends on money from the US-based Millennium Challenge Corporation. The MCC currently uses 16 objective indicators of social, political, and economic performance to determine a country’s eligibility for support – including combating corruption. The aid invested is expected to deliver a return, namely, improvements in the lives of the poor. Mali’s plans are to upgrade the airport at Bamako which will advantage private and foreign companies. In addition, rural development will include parcelling out land to what another journalist (Ousmane Sow, writing in Les Echos 22 November 2006) calls ‘Sunday farmers from Bamako.’ Instead of the people benefiting from the great green river Niger, their water and electricity supplies are controlled by outside entreprise - and GM crops are being introduced by the US under a new agricultural project.

So, that’s democracy in Mali. Who’s the prostitute in the story? And where’s the moral outrage? A government committee is complaining that not enough people went online to cast their vote for Timbouctou to become classed as one of the seven wonders of the world. Never mind, two young Maliennes have been voted in to the final round of the regonal Miss Sahel competition. Let’s get things in proportion.

Afterthought: The women’s platform

The women’s cross-party coalition in Mali held a round-table in January 2007 to develop a women’s platform for future increase in political participation . I hope they get the support they need to move this forward for the 2009 local elections. At that level, another women’s platform already exists : the labour-saving multi-purpose machine run on battery power which performs a range of tasks normally allotted to women, lightening their physical load and freeing up time – to become involved in politics. If every community in Mali had one of these, we might begin to see real progress in democracy and development.

Read more

See an earlier post on the same theme: The Boys Club Rules OK

Pamela Mhlanga discusses the 50.50 gender protocol in southern Africa

My original essay on Mali: everyone's favourite destination, 2006

The language of Goethe

2007-06-26T06:27:00.000-07:00

“Folklore is the expression of the soul of the German people. Goethe led the way in writing poetry in folkloric style, a style which was emulated by poets who followed him, a style which still endears his poetry to the masses today.”

It’s been thirty years since I was in the BDR as a young English teacher. When I left, I never thought I’d come back and so threw away the dictionary. Now I‘ve had to go back into the museum of my mind, find the lost room, unlock the door, throw open the windows, take off the dust covers – and there, somehow, my German treasure house is still intact, apart from a little oil needed to grease the wheels. In fact, it’s been so long that I can’t actually remember ever speaking German! It’s a little bit scary.

Of course, things have moved on since then. There’s the new technology to catch up with. So I’ve had to learn the German for mobile phone: das Handy and the mobile phone emporium is das Handy Shop. Then in so many bars you get live music: Live Musik or sometimes there’s just a DJ: Live DJ (happily).

Every so often I get stuck for the right expression. I never like to stop in full flow so just throw in a word from another language (usually French). I find you can use die Nostalgie; die Philosophie; die Melodie usw. This seems to do the job and people tell me how good my German vocabulary is!

The easiest conversations are professional because here again German has adopted a lot of the English international development language. Some attempt has been made to integrate a German ending. For example you have ‘evaluation’ become
die Evalueirung. Der Monitoring sort of sounds a bit German, but then - oh why bother making it even look German: let’s just use der Gender Mainstreaming!

As always in a foreign country it is the everyday that is problematic, rather than debates on philosophy and politics. Because it is in the everyday where you expect things to be most familiar and yet you constantly feel as if you’re in a parallel universe – things are just that little bit different.

At the local orthopedic practice, which clearly caters for, and employs, a lot of people from eastern Europe, the doctor barks at me: “What, don’t you speak Russian?”

At the Postamt, I shamefully have to ask where the post-box is (no, they’re yellow and on the other side of the pavement!) but also am forcibly impressed by the notice that says:

Achtung!
Sie werden heute ueber unser Girokonto angesprochen!

(Attention! Today you will be spoken to about our Girobank!)

At the hairdressers – well, I’ve learned that hair stylists all over the world have their own understanding of what I want to look like, whatever language we’re speaking – I just sit back, smile and pay the tip.

So it’s always comforting to get back on the internet; that’s my medium and in Berlin every other café has wifi for free. You can sit in the sun, drink white wine and surf: what better working environment? I can do everything online! I was told for train journeys you go to www.bahn.de (our equivalent would be www.train.uk). I follow the German order here thinking: why not try the same for flights www.flugzeug.de (www.aeroplane.uk )? Yes!

However when I come to put new entries on my blog, I see that the instructions on blogspot are in German! (All the adverts come up in German too: how do they know, I ask myself?) Later I check my blog stats to see who is reading and find a lot of hits in northern Germany. Oh no, I think, the police are tracking me as a suspected terrorist planning violent action against the G8 summit! But then I realise it was probably just me uploading my entries in the local bar. Which also feels bizarre…

Bridging the gap

We don’t have wifi (I should say wireless lan) in the flat. I tell my landlord he has to move into the 21st century but he’s proudly fixed in the 19th, has no knowledge of the internet and doesn’t speak any other language than German. Still we manage to get on well, because we’re both very direct, have a good sense of humour and after all, we have to negotiate the important intricacies of shared living – whose turn is to buy the toilet paper and, oops, who left the lights on all night?

I just love playing with language. Like little children, that’s how you learn how to do it. My landlord comes in with his friend from their traditional Saturday afternoon pub-crawl (Kneipenbummel)

Wie geht’s? Besoffen? How’s it going? I say (Are you) drunk?
Verneunftig! he says. (We’ve been) sensible
Verneunftigerweise besoffen? I ask. Sensibly drunk? (Lots of laughter)
Ich auch! I say, me too…

Because there’s no easier way to get your tongue round those polysyllabic German words – and some are longer than that. Try the word for gender equality: Geschlectergerechigkeit (nice!) and another favourite at the moment is Entwicklungsnichtregierungsorgansiationen = development non-governmental organisations. The thing always to remember is that when we actually say those things in English, we don’t mind the gap either.

Noam Chomsky - before he became known as a political analyst and activist - first won worldwide fame as a socio-linguist, with the groundbreaking concept of the difference between the surface and deep structure of language. You have to track back from the words that are used (the surface structure – or code) to the speaker or writer’s actual intention (the deep structure - the real meaning).

The intelligent reader here will begin to see how this might relate to analysis of political rhetoric. Unfortunately in our so-called sophisticated society, so much use of language has become a self-serving commerce along with everything else.

I would say that genuine communication is more to do with paralinguistics : that is, the ability to pick up clues in a new context from your own knowledge of the world and to read one another – because you want, simply, to have real human contact and share fundamental life experiences for non-profit-making purposes.

Svenja Cussler, a German film maker who collaborated on a documentary of female genital mutilation in Mali, put into words for me what impressed her most there: “In Africa, people really see who you are. When they reach out to greet you, it’s not to check if your suit’s from Armani, they’re feeling the quality of your soul.”

(So, all in all, I seem to get by pretty well in the language of Goethe.)

Rainbow in Berlin

2007-06-26T05:04:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I woke up in the very middle-class Schoeneberg district of Berlin to find I was in the middle of Europe’s largest gay and lesbian street-party.

Schoeneberg has in fact been the gay centre of Berlin since the 1920s and outside the local metro station there’s a plaque commemorating the thousands of homosexuals who were persecuted under the third Reich: one reason why the gay scene in Berlin is pretty politicised. The rainbow monument has just been re-erected - this is also a reminder of the pink triangle used to stigmatise homosexuals in the concentration camps.

Now in its 15th year, the festival was founded by Schoeneberg’s former mayor - Dr Elizabeth Ziemer, who’s gay, and this year, Berlin’s gay mayor Klaus Wowereit received the Rainbow Award. However, walking through the one mile of back streets where the festival takes place, I was handed a number of leaflets by support groups and services – from counselling for young lesbians to gay parenting - which indicate that even in Berlin being gay is still not easy. And the local Green Party newsletter highlights the fact that the Berlin Senate will be closing the AIDS and STD advice centre in north Schoeneberg which is recognised as a model of integrated practice and success in prevention, particularly with young migrant women working as prostitutes.

The party finished with a concert by Berlin’s favourite women’s group Die Kusinen. A nice touch here was the little old couple (man and woman) sitting out on the balcony of their second floor apartment with a great view of the main stage while the fabulous blonde foursome played heavy metal to a backcloth of ‘Sexual Democracy’.

The rainbow theme continued for the whole of last week. I passed on the Gay Night at the Zoo “singing and swinging among elephants, tigers and penguins with Danny van Blond” and the boat trip on the river Spree, which culminated in the finals of the Durex gay top-model model contest - part of its better and safer sex campaign. But I caught up with the annual CSD parade on Saturday 23rd June - which involved thousands of people in a 5 kilometer-long loud colourful movement across the city, from the memorial church at Kurfuerstendamm to the Victory statue.

The motto this year was “diversity seeks work” with the parade constituting a massive demonstration of Berlin’s gay and lesbian community against discrimination in employment.

In fact, one of Berlin’s larger employers, the combined public transport service BVG has had an equal opportunities policy since before European law was implemented in Germany and they are one of the main sponsors of rainbow events.
These actually started on the 9th June with the Berlin Respect Gaymes – an initiative championed by prominent gay sportsmen and women, aimed at promoting tolerance and sexual democracy among school-children through friendly competitions open to all. Because unfortunately, according to the BVG magazine, the word “gay” is still the worst taunt in the playground. *

Things don’t seem to change. But at least there was a very low-key police presence, unlike at the anti-G8 demonstrations in May – and during the actual G8 summit. I’m afraid to say the Berlin police force are tied up in trying to prevent self-styled “autonomists” from senselessly setting fire to cars in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain districts. Meanwhile I read that the Telecom workers, after five weeks of strike action, have had to concede defeat, returning to work with longer hours for lower pay.

We had a heat-wave in April and giant hailstones in June. It even rained on the CSD parade. The environmental lobby have yet to see any concrete steps taken by Angela Merkel’s government to address the problem of carbon emissions - despite G8 statements.

I love Berlin, but Germany’s political climate is such that you only get to see a rainbow once a year.

* My landlord tells me that, unbelievably, the other common taunt is ‘Opfer’. This means ‘victim’ and is the word used in the many memorials in Berlin to the millions who died in the holocaust.

Africa and democracy: Club rules still apply

2007-05-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

The Club of Madrid is comprised of 68 former heads of state and effectively amounts to an old boys network. When I first heard it was launching the African Women Leaders Project - in support of high-level women politicians in West Africa – I was a little sceptical. However, Mary Robinson, one of the few women members of the club, is leading the project, and it’s a salutary reminder that we need more women leaders not only in Africa - but across the world.

With funding from the European Union, the project will provide opportunities for sharing experiences, networking and looking at feasible policy options for the increase of women’s political participation.

It’s a worthy cause. Because feminists, women lawyers and human rights activists in Africa have already been systematically addressing these issues and wherever I go the message is the same: we’ve heard the rhetoric, let’s see some action.

The key instrument for gender equality is the African Protocol for the Rights of Women (based on CEDAW) - which, after much lobbying, was ratified by the African Union in 2004. Women are still actively campaigning for individual governments to ratify and implement the protocol at national level.

In November 2006, The Gambia hosted an ECOWAS conference for women’s rights representatives to develop a common approach. The difficulty they all have is explaining to male-dominated governments that, under the protocol, affirmative action to achieve equal representation of women is not an option but a regionally (and internationally) endorsed principle.

Once this right is recognised and enforced, there are examples of electoral systems which facilitate equitable election of women candidates. The most impressive example – not only for Africa but for the world – is the quota system in Rwanda, underpinned by civil society involvement, which has resulted in fifty-fifty government. Rwanda also led the way by holding the first international women parliamentarians conference (February 2007). According to organiser Judith Kanakuze, this aimed to develop participating countries’ “insights and commitment to gender equality as a tool for nation building”.

Where this principle remains in question, women’s efforts continue to be frustrated. The Women’s Manifesto for Ghana was developed collaboratively by Abantu for the 2004 elections to provide a common platform for both voters and candidates. Their hope was: “women would be empowered to use their vote as a bargaining tool; candidates have an agenda once elected; and political parties held accountable as to where they stand in relation to women’s issues.” Ghana, widely recognised as a stable progressive democracy, recently celebrated her 50th year of independence. But, with only 9% of elected officials at national or local level, women still feel left out of the celebrations.

Meanwhile, the Fifty-Fifty Group in Sierra Leone - a country still recovering from civil war - is campaigning hard to get at least 30% representation for women in the July 2007 national elections.

It all comes down to money

Even where (male) political support is not forthcoming, women clearly have the capacity to move forward their own agenda. While cultural and educational restraints are often quoted, my discussions with women activists in Mali reveal a consensus on what is really holding them back from success. “Basically, it all comes down to money,” says Nina Walet, former Vice-President, Haut Conseil des Collectivités, the independent state watch-dog for local government.

Women’s lack of economic empowerment hinders their political participation from the very first step. In order to register as a voter, to join a political party or to stand as a candidate, you need to have a birth certificate and that costs money. So does running an election campaign. In countries with limited infrastructure, travelling round the constituency can be difficult and expensive. The same applies for getting to the voting station, as Nina Walet, who stood for mayor in the desert region of Kidal, describes: “Voters have to travel long distances of up to 60 kms, so you need to give them food and lodging overnight, provide water for their animals. I sent my people out one week beforehand to find two or three tents each and persuade the touaregs to come in and vote.”

And even then… Nina, whose electorate consists of 70% women, was elected mayor in 1999 but her appointment was never endorsed by the state because of pressure from the men of the (wealthy) ruling family of Kidal.

Women’s organisations all emphasise the need for finance to support their lobbying and campaigning work - to mobilise members from different parts of the country, run meetings, produce leaflets, discuss and publish manifestos or get media coverage. “Awareness raising is an essential activity - for both men and women, not only at the grassroots but also among intellectuals and professionals”.

Article 26 of the women’s protocol obliges member states to provide a budget for effective implementation of gender equality. Oumou Traoré, director of the coalition of women’s associations (CAFO) in Mali, is indignant about the lack of state support. “Women are just treated as election fodder. We need leadership training and citizenship education. Women should understand their rights, put up resistance to party politics, learn to vote for the policies not the person, check the party lists to see if women candidates are included. But the government’s afraid of this kind of thinking, maybe that’s why we don’t get any funding from them.”

The right conditions

National women’s organisations often look in vain to the international community to support their cause. In fact the situation has got worse with the introduction of the poverty reduction strategy (PRSP) model. “In 1997-8 we had a lot of encouragement from donors for women candidates and direct support. But now all donor money goes through the government, the donors shrug and say sorry, they can no longer help out,” says Nina Walet.

Rwanda, with her critical mass of women in government, has moved towards institutionalising gender through all areas of planning, legislation and development. This requires a process of gender budgeting– not an increase in funds but an equitable redistribution.

For women in Mali the answer is clear. “Donors should impose conditions on the government for quotas - and proper resources to support women’s political participation.” I’m not generally a proponent of conditionality for aid, but this is one case where G8 countries could, in one simple move, change the face of development, reduce corruption, increase efficiency, promote peace – by themselves endorsing international law on women’s rights rather than enforcing privatisation of basic services which result in the economic disempowerment of women.

At the France-Afrique summit in Bamako in December 2005, the participants celebrated the presence of Ellen Johnson- Sirleaf, first democratically elected woman head of state in Africa – an inspiration for Liberians, Africans and women everywhere. She also addressed the US Congress in March 2006, an honour bestowed sparingly on international dignitaries. She faces the daunting task of bringing peace and prosperity to a society afflicted by years of conflict. However, as soon as she took up position, the European Union laid down conditions for continued funding. She has been back to the US a second time to lobby for debt cancellation - which, along with control of trans-national companies and additional aid for health and education, may have been a more effective way of strengthening female leadership and public confidence in women political leaders, as the Club of Madrid project aims to do.

Why doesn’t the international community turn rhetoric into action? After all, fifty-fifty is a simple concept and it’s been shown to work. “The real problem is that men won’t give up power,” says Nina. “ In fact, they just get greedier.”

A surprising end to the story is that there has been a female candidate for the first time in Mali’s presidential elections: Mme Aminata Sidibé, lecturer at the University of Bamako and well-known environmental activist. She was inspired by the International Women’s Day celebrations in Bamako - which focussed on women’s political emergence as a force for change. She entered the race late and her only support was a group of Malian women employed by various international development agencies who were able to help with networking. While Aminata didn’t really have a chance in the primaries against the incumbent, President Amadou Toumani Touré, her name and face were in the polls and in the newspapers – underlining the fact that there are competent African women willing to come forward, dedicated to building social capital and changing the face of development.

They are held back by north-north, south-south and north-south male economic networking. After all, it’s nice to have the ladies providing a little colour. But, apart from in Rwanda and other notable exceptions, the boys club still rules OK.

Nice quotes

“Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is not an anomaly. The African political landscape is being reshaped by women, generating hope for the future of the continent and raising the bar for democracy worldwide.” Pambazuka News

“Female illiteracy is a social mechanism designed to ensure female acquiescence and mute the voice of women.” Roselynn Musa

Further links

Women’s Manifesto for Ghana

Gender Budgeting

International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance

iKNOWPolitics

My New Berlin Blog

2007-05-07T02:44:00.000-07:00

When I got back from covering the World Social Forum from a women’s perspective in Nairobi, I was asked to write a monthly column for www.openDemocracy.net and you can check out some of my recent pieces here

Now we are working on a new project to provide a women’s perspective on the G8 summit - which is happening in Germany 6th to 8th June 2007. So I’m here in Berlin partly because of that and partly because, well, everyone’s got to be somewhere.

Wherever I go, there’s a different kind of stimulation – although the issues may still be the same. The first two pieces below are the beginning of my personal Berlin blog. The other two are earlier pieces, related to women in Africa. I try to put a different spin on everything I write. But none of these topics are going to be resolved so easily.

Berlin Checkpoints

2007-05-01T14:39:00.000-07:00

Best European youth campaign (but worst postcard)

Everyone different, everyone equal

When I first arrived here, I stayed in a hostel in Friedrichshain, a borough once part of what was East Berlin - thinking it would be interesting to see the area. For a short time it was. The buildings have now been enlivened with pastel colours and the new youth scene is much in evidence. As Sabine Reichel describes in the Berliner Zeitung (14/15 April 2007) 96% of the population is under thirty and down every street you can meet twenty-five young mothers with pierced eyebrows.

My friend came from the borough of Kreuzberg by car to find me, not having been able to identify which metro line I should take to get to her house. “I just don’t know the area,’ she explained, ‘I never come here. Eighteen years since the wall came down and in my head the border’s still there.” See the map here

On my first weekend I visited AlexanderPlatz, the centre of former East Berlin. Alongside the town hall is a leafy park where you can wander, sit and admire the statue of the female worker or the monument to Marx and Engels. But searching for postcards to send home, I browsed the kiosks (not only in AlexanderPlatz but all over Berlin) to find that, indeed, eighteen years later, it’s difficult to find any images of quality which do not in some way commemorate the wall.

In fact a blown-up Checkpoint Charlie notice is on the outside wall of the youth hostel in Friedrichshain: “You are leaving the American sector”(threat or promise?). Postcards show the Brandenburg Gate in all her guises between 1961 and 1989: from the east, from the west; with Russian tanks or US armoured cars; people leaning over the fence, climbing on top of the wall or slipping through a hole. Even the modern shot of the Brandenburg Gate by night, illuminated in her restored glory, only serves to invoke the shadows of the past. And they’re still selling cards with a tiny piece of the graffiti-ed wall enclosed in a plastic bubble (or am I just naive?)

It’s all over now

Another reason my friend doesn’t visit former East Berlin is that she has two adopted children from Mali and racism is still alive in the east – as I’ve seen it myself - across all the former soviet states.

But not just there… In the current affairs journal Der Spiegel (No. 16, 16 April 2007) I read an item on the upcoming Islam Conference at the beginning of May, which is being co-organised with the German Minister of Internal Affairs. Leader of the newly formed Islamic Coordination (KRM) an umbrella for Muslim organisations, Aiman Mazyek is demanding a “clear roadmap for achieving equality between Islam and other religions in Germany,” including the same rights and status as church groups - and Islamic teaching as part of the school curriculum.

I worked in former West Germany thirty years ago as an English teacher, so I know that the 3.3 million Turkish population of “guest-workers” - as they are so quaintly called - are now into their third generation and questions of citizenship are still problematic (see a very comprehensive post on this by Aaron Erlich). They have no rights to develop their mother tongue within the state school system - although you can find Germans (because that’s who they are) of Turkish origin (excellent English students all) as successful entrepreneurs, academics, artists across the country.

In the meantime, Recep Tayyip Erdogan the Turkish Prime Minister is running out of patience waiting for Germany, currently holding the EU Presidency, to make a firm commitment to support Turkey’s application for European membership.

Best poster

Inside each one of us lurks a pacifist. I’d like to live in a society where no one, whether Muslim or Christian, needs to be afraid.

Then there was the story of the CDU leader in Bad-Wuertenburg, Günther Oettingen, who caused Angela Merkel a headache with his eulogy at the funeral of Hans Filbinger. In this he claimed that, although Filbinger was a high-profile member of the German military during the second world war, “he wasn’t really a nazi at all,” which understandable incensed the families of victims, academic researchers and other politicians. At Merkel’s insistence Oettingen publicly distanced himself from his remarks – although CDU federal parliamentarians from the south-west say “every word was correct.”

Indeed Merkel, while juggling “the grand coalition” with much more skill than anyone would give her credit for being able to do when she was first elected, is more often held back from achievement by the ultra-conservative members of her own party than any ideological differences with the SDP. The Family Affairs Minister Ursula von der Leyen has been attempting to bring in legislation to increase the provision of quality affordable pre-school care (kindergartens) to enable women to pursue their careers. In opposition to this, CDU representatives in the Laender (different regions) are basically invoking the nazi “Kinder Kirche Kueche” role for women – despite the fact they have elected a divorced childless woman scientist as federal leader.

Still in that very same issue of Spiegel is the poignant tale of two sisters who were separated in 1945 after five years in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. One came back to Hamburg to live and the other was brought up by a foster family in Czechoslovakia - too young to remember where she was from. Through the Red Cross tracing service they were recently reunited. Sixty years too late the Czech woman travelled to Hamburg with her background papers, all the while thinking, “Oh my god, my sister’s a gypsy!” (Zigeunerin, German for Roma, still the subject of acute discrimination in the transitional states). They don’t have much to say to each other and watch a lot of television.

And by the way, the Jewish synagogue in the centre of Berlin - along with the Jewish café in front of it - is cordoned off from pedestrians and protected by a police patrol (although Esther Slevogt says that’s not the only thing that keeps people out).

Road blocks of the mind

Before travelling out to Berlin I met up with my Palestinian friend who had just come back from visiting family. After many years living and working around the globe she’s decided to return to Palestine in a professional capacity as a humanitarian aid / development project manager.

It’s not much of a leap from Berlin to Jerusalem, which is still divided into quarters - Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian - where Israeli Arabs have a hard time moving around because of the curfew and where Palestinians need to go through checkpoints to enter the city from the West Bank. Not forgetting the controversial security wall that Israel has erected…

I carried out an education mission in Palestine late 1999 at the time when both sides were preparing to sign a territorial agreement – just before Ariel Sharon provoked the current intifada in his visit to Nazareth. So I know a little about how it feels, even armed with a British Council letter of invitation, to be held up at a road block or searched twice in the middle of the night when crossing Israel from Bethlehem to Tel Aviv airport. “It’s not just the frustration or the time-wasting, it’s diminishing as a person - to be constantly reminded you have no rights, no status, no statehood,” says Yara. She noticed that people’s expectations have also diminished: “they’re just glad with the new regulations, that it only takes four not eight hours to cross.”

On 5th June, the fortieth year of the Israel-Palestine conflict will be commemorated (an opportunity Avaaz.org sees for civil society to stop the clash which is politically rather than culturally based). Germany has played a role in The Quartet and Condoleeza Rice has been diplomatically active in the region. The discourse has changed from ‘roadmap’ to ‘destination’. The Arab League’s offer to renew the 2002 peace initiative makes the future look slightly more hopeful for a Middle East settlement.

But clearly that’s not the end of the story.

However many years of division, whoever we are and whatever kind of map we draw up, we’re not going to get anywhere - unless we can somehow find a way to dismantle the roadblocks of the mind.

Best quote so far

Esther Pfeiffer, a young black woman from South Africa, was one of the panellists at a meeting in Hamburg on the topic “Women bringing about change: gender and development” organised by VENRO’s Africa Project.

When asked if women from different (racial) backgrounds in South Africa now work collaboratively to promote their rights, she answered (in perfect German):

“Unfortunately apartheid lives on inside us. But then, in Germany, you know all about that.”

Patricia Daniel
April 2007

A matter of national importance

2007-05-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

What I appreciate most about newspapers in Germany and France is that they cover Europe-wide and international issues much more thoroughly than we tend to find in mainstream British media.

But front-page news in Germany at the moment is a matter of national importance: there’s going to be a record asparagus harvest. From end of April is asparagus season in restaurants. Usually served up with hollandaise sauce, maybe roast potatoes and ham on the side, asparagus (in German: Spargeln) are delicious.

But taking a look at this bizarre photograph in the Berliner Morgenpost of Agricultural Minister Woidke and Asparagus Queen Nadine opening the season, I’m not sure I’ll ever eat Spargeln again!

20/04/07

Sudan: The chips are down

2007-05-01T05:52:00.000-07:00

Carmen Moreno, director of the United Nation’s international institute for training and research for the advancement of women (Instraw) describes the appalling levels of insecurity and violence which shape women’s lives as a ‘Russian roulette’.

Reports of sexual violence on all sides of the Darfur conflict continue. Women may be victims in this game but not always passive. “Women go out of the camps to get firewood. They say that if their men went, they’d be killed and that’s why the women choose to expose themselves to being raped instead.’ Subsequently, many of the victims then bear and bring up the nameless children of this aggression. (Louise Arbour on international women’s day)

Systematic use of rape was highlighted in the controversial report prepared for the current session of the Human Rights Council. The team of investigators led by Jodi Williams claim the Sudanese government has failed to protect the population of Darfur from large-scale international crimes and has itself orchestrated and participated in these. In fact, it is estimated that women comprise 90% of the of the victims of the conflict.

A hard-hitting report specifically on sexual violence in Darfur was published by AllianceDarc in December 2006. To coincide with publication on the global day for Darfur a letter signed by an international group of stateswomen was circulated calling for a robust and effective peacekeeping force.

Instraw, a tiny member of the UN family, has carried out research on integrating a gender dimension into the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) framework. Endorsed by the UN Reform Summit in 2005, the R2P doctrine requires the international community to prevent conflict, react to humanitarian crises and help rebuild societies - in situations where national government fails to do so.

The fourth session of the Human Rights Council met 12th to 30th March 2007

Responsibility to protect?

While Angela Merkel, guest of honour at the 24th France-Afrique summit in Cannes spoke on the theme of ‘joint responsibility for peace and security’ with specific reference to Sudan, we haven’t seen too much R2P from G8 countries.

Current and recent political activity revolves around the call for economic sanctions against the Sudanese government. To be fair, the US government took a lead last decade on banning US business involvement, although according to Drumbeat for Darfur US financial institutions are still investing in third country foreign companies operating in Sudan. And as always, there are questions over the effectiveness of the sanctions approach.

There has been condemnation of China’s role in Sudan from both western governments and African civil society : the displacement of people in order to develop the oil-fields has contributed to, if not created, the current crisis, while government revenues from the partnership with China are said to finance the janjawid militias. China has been called on to exert influence on the Sudanese government and France’s latest ploy is to suggest boycotting the next Olympic games in Beijing if China doesn’t help out. However, it is important to note that not only the US but Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, have all had petroleum interests in Sudan; African commentators see western business interests as the root cause of the conflict - and Khartoum is a new boom town.

The Darfur Consortium an African / international civil society action group has consistently lobbied African governments for continued commitment to AMIS (the African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan). They have also petitioned the Arab governments of north Africa in particular to take a more pro-active role vis-à-vis the Sudanese government.

I spoke last year in Mali to Commandante Nema Sagará– one of the few trained African women peace-keepers –about the development of the AU peace-keeping force. She told me then that it doesn’t have sufficient capacity (including funding) to mount, execute and maintain missions effectively – although a range of military training for African peacekeepers and observer missions has been provided by western governments (US, Canada, France, Germany) clearly with the intention that Africa will be left to sort out her own problems.

While the potential of AMIS (and more generally, the AU as a continental peacekeeper) is recognised and promoted, there is no budget support from the international community. And, since the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, G8 and other bilateral donors continue to lay down conditions for debt repayments, cuts in public expenditure, financial sector reform, privatisation of basic services and unfavourable trade agreements, African governments are a little strapped for cash.

Despite this, tiny landlocked Rwanda has sent 2,000 soldiers to AMIS. However President Paul Kagamé has expressed frustration that “our presence there hasn’t brought about any change on the ground” and Foreign Affairs Minister Charles Murgandé goes further: “We ask ourselves if we should maintain our soldiers for a mission which is not supported by the international community.”

In response to Jacques Chirac’s recent call for sanctions, the leader of one of Darfur’s rebel movements Abdul Wahid Al-Nour challenges France and the EU to make a choice: “Either you send an international force or you give us weapons to defend ourselves.”

One financial solution reported in Jeune Afrique (19-25 November 2006) comes from the US company Blackwater offering mercenaries to fight under the UN flag. This would work out cheaper than the going price of $1000 per solider per month paid to governments. Apparently Kofi Annan had even thought about using South Africa’s Executive Outcome in Rwanda during the genocide there (for similar reasons) but concluded “the world’s not yet ready to privatise peace”. Then again, everything else in Africa is being privatised.

Prevention is better

Not everyone is convinced a military solution is appropriate. Humanitarian workers on the ground in Darfur highlight the complexity of the situation, suggesting that the EU and China focus on support for reopening negotiations. Only one of the three main rebel movements signed the Darfur Peace Agreement in December. It’s not certain that a political solution can be found for Sudan either, given the fragmentation of opposing groups and the fact that just a handful of (male) leaders are involved in such discussions.

As Roselynn Musa reports on the ‘comprehensive’ peace agreement for southern Sudan signed in 2005, this excludes consideration of women’s specific contributions and concerns in peace negotiations and rehabilitation processes.

Surely, for the future, we have to do better. Above all, this requires sound investment in conflict prevention. Instraw has a new guide to policy and planning for women peace and security (UN SCR 1325). Bring together the whole range of stakeholders - including women and women’s organisations – to develop a joint strategy which represents and addresses the different needs and interests of all. However, there’s the usual caveat: ‘a dedicated budget is essential to ensuring the concrete and sustainable implementation of even the most modest action plan.’

In her speech at Cannes, Merkel claimed that Germany was “monitoring the situation in Zimbabwe with great concern.” Meanwhile Condaleeza Rice inaugurated awards for international women of courage. One of the recipients was Jennifer Williams founder of Woza (Women of Zimbabwe Arise)who accepted the award on behalf of the movement’s 45,000 members and took the opportunity to emphasise that “it’s important for the diplomatic community to play a role in helping us to achieve our struggle.”

“Women of courage are standing up for freedom and human dignity and the United States stands with them,” announced Rice .
Events in Zimbabwe have now moved on. The breath-taking gap between what western politicians say and what they do (or not) - to prevent conflict or protect civilians - remains. Are they really cynical and self-serving or do they speak in good faith? Is it a compulsive habit? Close your eyes when placing the chips and then cross your fingers. That’s how to gamble away other people’s security - when those with a real stake in peace are never called to the table.

Patricia Daniel
March 2007

Read more

Sexual violence in Darfur

Save Darfur petition

Incompatible objectives: Gender and the World Bank

2007-05-01T04:47:00.000-07:00

The film Bamako puts international finance institutions on trial for crimes against humanity. Set in a family courtyard in Mali, it provides a forum for African voices to be heard. They bear testimony against the World Bank’s simplistic understanding of the causes of poverty – and the disastrous effects of its programmes on African society.

But is the World Bank truly evil or merely incompetent?

Let’s explore this through the bank’s new action plan entitled ‘gender equality as smart economics’ which was presented at the Commission for the Status of Women (CSW) at the beginning of March.

Prior to this, as part of the same initiative, the German Ministry for Development Co-operation hosted a World Bank seminar on women’s economic empowerment in Berlin (22nd-23rd February) at the same time as Bamako was being premiered in London. The event, one of Germany’s
programme of meetings in the run-up to the G8 summit, profiled female politicians, public servants and private entrepreneurs from north and south.

On the surface this looks like a promising development. However, for over two decades, feminist economists like Diane Elson have criticised the bank’s approach to economic development, in particular the specific adverse impacts on women. ‘Capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy are interlinked. Markets are not abstract cash nexuses - they are inevitably social institutions in which buying and selling is structured assymetrically to the advantage of some participants rather than others.’ (Male bias in the development process, 1990)

'An estimated 70% of the one billion people living in extreme poverty are women’ Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development)

And women’s organisations are not impressed with the new plan. Christa Wichterich of WIDE (Network Women in Development Europe)
suggests that the WB plan is not concerned with gender equality at all but with continuing to exploit female human resources to avoid market failure and distortion of competition. ‘What impresses most about the action plan is the one-dimensional thinking which places markets at the centre and not human beings - or the economic rights and potentials of women.’ Things, she says, haven’t changed in the last thirty years.

A historical perspective

To go back to basics, the WB is the largest and most powerful agency in the UN family, disposing of a programme of $20 billion a year. G8 countries are the largest contributors and size of contribution is related to voting power on the board. The bank gives loans not assistance, and the shareholders naturally expect to get their money back.

In comparison, other UN agencies such as UNDP have an annual budget of $4 billion or less and are increasingly chasing corporations for ‘public-private partnerships’ to support their work.

The World Bank’s gender action plan has a budget of US$25 million. To the ordinary woman on the street in Bamako, or even Birmingham, it may sound initially like a generous amount. But you don’t need to be a development specialist to see that on a global scale – over four years – this barely amounts to pocket money

Budgets: World Bank $20 billion; United Nations Development Programme $4.4. billion; UNICEF $2 billion; UNESCO $600 million; UNIFEM $50 million

The bank is not in fact a development agency but - because it ties the purse strings - it has a stranglehold on development policy.

From the 1980s, in an attempt to stimulate economic growth and enable developing countries to repay outstanding debts from the 60s, the WB introduced the so-called ‘hard loans’. These loans were dependent on countries in the south adopting structural adjustment programmes (SAPs): notably cutting public expenditure in education and health and privatisation of essential services. These particularly impact on women because of their primary responsibility for the entire household.

‘The concept of structural adjustment is based on women’s capacity to cope, to continue in increasingly adverse conditions and to deny their own needs and interests for the survival of their families and communities. In other words, structural adjustment relies on women providing those service previously provided by the State.’ (NAWO, Women’s strategies to deal with SAPs, 1990)

Opening up foreign investment opportunities and establishing free trade zones to attract external companies provided employment for women in the form of low-paid, insecure jobs with poor working conditions and without labour rights. (Angela Hale, Trade myths and gender reality, 1994)

In particular the slashing of education budgets impacted on succeeding generations of women, since girls’ schooling always takes second place in times of hardship. As Benedicta Egbo points out, women’s economic activity is closely linked with literacy (and numeracy) since, as well as increasing confidence, this facilitates access to information, financial credit, training and opportunities for further support.

In other words, it can be argued that the current lack of economic empowerment for so many women in the south is a direct result of previous World Bank programmes.

Nevertheless, SAPs had the opposite effect to that intended: countries were still not able to repay debts (by now incrementally higher). Therefore, at the World Summit on Social Development at Copenhagen in 1995, the World Bank economists pushed for a new approach – ‘soft loans’ related to multi-year national development plans – and so the current era of poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) began.

Each PRSP is developed ‘in agreement’ between government and donors, who ‘align’ themselves and ‘harmonise’ with each other behind the national plan, following the Monterrey conference in 2002 (OECD) ). In fact, PRSPs tend to be donor-driven - even though individual donor representatives on the ground in different countries around the world have privately expressed serious reservations about the one-size-fits-all solution.

In order to qualify for PRSP related loans or any other grants and financing, the IMF must approve a country’s economic programme – and may also apply ‘conditionalities’ (unsurprisingly, more cutting of public expenditure…). As a result of the current system, 40% of the national budget of African countries like Mali is still being used to repay old debts - compared with 6% for social services.

As the authors demonstrate in the recent Gender Action report on the IFIs, this ‘new’ model not only continues in the same direction as the ‘old’ one but imposes even more conditions than before.

Their report, based on analysis of PRSPs in eleven countries, identifies the following conditions as having the greatest impact on women’s livelihoods:

Privatisation
Cuts in government spending
Trade and labour reforms
Financial sector reforms

In summary:
‘Standard World Bank and IMF policy-based loans that require public health expenditure cutbacks increase women’s home care for sick family members and reduce their time available for paid work; public sector and enterprise restructuring eliminates many jobs and benefits—women are often the first to lose jobs and last to be rehired because they are assumed to be secondary breadwinners; developing country tariff reductions threaten the livelihood of manufacturing and agricultural workers, the majority of whom are women in the poorest countries; financial sector reforms decrease women’s access to financial services while increasing their risk of financial crisis.’

Some concrete examples

One of the aspects under discussion by the WB and its partners in Berlin was the need to facilitate women’s access to infrastructure (transport) water and electricity.

Clearly no-one is going to argue with access to basic services for either women or men. The provision of piped water and electric power immeasurably lightens the load of women’s daily chores, freeing up their time and energy for other activities. So why isn’t that already a reality?

Could it have something to do with the fact that the privatisation of water, electricity, transport, is a normal requirement in the poverty reduction strategies papers? Privatisation benefits the north rather than the south since it is multinational companies that pick up the contracts, the most infamous being the British-German-Tanzanian company City Water that was eventually kicked out of Tanzania. But there are many more…

In the meantime, the poorest citizens of the south, most of them women, find it difficult to pay for basic services even when they are available. This is one of the key issues around which the social movements rallied at the World Social Forum in Nairobi. They see that their own governments, in collaboration with multinationals, continue to deprive them of a basic human right.

In the film one woman witness claims: ‘ A country which does not control its own basic services can barely be said to be a sovereign state.’

Enterprise

Another aspect on the WB’s gender agenda is supporting women’s economic activity through finance and private sector development, in particular increasing women’s agricultural productivity and their contribution to rural development.

But fluctuating prices on the world market have an adverse effect on the prices women can get for their own produce and what they can afford to buy. Women and men both work in the cotton industry in Mali, which has been developed as the foremost in West Africa. Cotton farmers and their families are currently living in penury because cotton prices have been pushed right down by US subsidies to their own farmers - subsidies which amount to $4 billion a year. Meanwhile, China is flooding African countries with cheap cotton products. And, while the WB is still promoting the micro-credit model for women, banking sector reforms have decreased access to loans especially for small-scale women farmers in rural areas.

In Mali, Kané Nana Sanou, president of the coalition for women’s human rights organisations (Groupe Pivot Droit et Citoyenneté des Femmes) has expressed concern to me about the number of women victims of a vicious cycle of debt due to similar schemes, with many having recourse to loan sharks to get more money to repay original loans: an unfortunately neat microcosm of the WB scenario at macro level.

And in the field, I have spoken to women’s associations who have gone through the process of constitutionalisation - in order to become eligible for funding - only to find that there is no financial support available.

The women’s collective at Bandiagara told me they had spent several seasons growing and selling green beans together so they could afford the legal expenses involved in the drawing up of the constitution (in a language they don’t read well). Now they are ready to start up in business, I asked them why they don’t arrange a bank loan. Their answer was simply ‘we are reluctant to start off already in debt.’ For women and families who do not have a reliable regular income, this seems to be a responsible viewpoint.

Even the WB’s own research has indicated that the poorest of the poor prefer to rely on informal credit and social capital rather than formal loans. There’s no lack of enterprise among women, it’s real money that’s missing! Why not give each association $200 and let them show what they are capable of?

Market women in Ghana are grateful for World Bank loans, despite the fact they are paying an unbelievable 36% interest rate.

Such examples are an attempt to engage with the WB on its own terms. But one of the worst impacts as described by Aminata Traoré in Bamako (there are real Malians giving testimony) is the effect of the WB top-down approach on the self-image of Africans. ‘The WB holds up a mirror showing us as poverty-stricken, conflict-ridden, lacking in capacity and needing direction.’

In contrast, the reality is that, like other countries in Africa, Mali has untold wealth – her traditional social capital now being eroded; her music; her gold mines (controlled by Anglo Gold); her beautiful women of all ages who always find some work to get by, her eloquence whatever language is used, her traditional skills such as hand-dyeing of cotton cloth with the richest colours and patterns under the sun… the film reflects these better than I can.

Incompatible objectives

As regards the effectiveness of gender equality policies, independent evaluations of the very same institutions involved in the Berlin conference (Norad, OECD, DFID, SIDA, the EC and the World Bank itself) raise serious questions. A survey of these evaluations emphasises one of the main causes for lack of progress: ‘insufficient resources have been provided to implement strategies at operational (field) level’.

But the problem is clearly more fundamental than that. The World Bank drives the development agenda and the promotion of gender equality is in direct contradiction to the bank’s approach.

The bank in fact works in opposition to other UN agencies. In South Africa UNDP and UNIFEM concerns have led them to develop a checklist for carrying out detailed gender analysis of PRSPs. In addition, UNDP’s latest human development report highlights the fact that inequality in general is increasing within and between countries because of IFI conditions. And UNRISD is now developing research on the additional impact on policy and social development of the new relationships between governments and trans-national companies.

As well as now driving forward MDG3 ‘gender equality’, the WB has also been given the lead for MDG2 ‘universal primary education’ which is of utmost importance for the future generation of women’s empowerment. My research on this in 2005 highlighted similar contradictions.

For example in the case of Burkina Faso the WB economists calculated that if all children were in school, there wouldn’t be enough money to pay the teaching force required. The solution was to reduce teachers’ salaries, bring in temporary staff (who could be laid off at short notice) and recruit volunteers. This didn’t go down well with the teaching union and education plans were put on hold until this could be resolved.

This scenario was explained to me by a couple of very charming and completely straight-faced World Bank economists as an example of ‘incompatible objectives.’ I understand this to mean setting an international target for developing countries while at the same time requiring them to operate in a way which makes it impossible to actually achieve the target. I think that about sums up their approach.

When one woman testifying in Bamako claims she can read a balance sheet, the WB’s defence counsel calls her an ‘upstart’. Women across the world are experienced in managing the household budget and, whether using a computer or counting out cups of rice, we all know when things don’t add up

In summary, the WB is clearly guilty. But the witnesses in Bamako plead only for the bank to respect its original mandate, which should be to support national development ‘in a spirit of humanity’. Instead of which it has simply become the worst kind of debt collector on behalf of the G8 - whose hypocrisy and cynicism in promoting women’s economic empowerment within the current system cannot adequately be described.

The solution, according to feminist economists and activists in both south and north is for the WB and other donors to put an end to policy-based lending and provide space for governments to address gender equality and social justice in more appropriate, locally-driven ways.

So, World Bank, $25 million for gender equality is not smart economics – when no-one seems to be benefiting from the rest of the $20 billion budget except multinational companies, corrupt officials and, of course, G8 countries.

Readers who wish to raise their own voice against World Bank iniquity and incompetence can sign the online petition organised by Christian Aid, to put pressure on the UK government’s position in the upcoming WB and IMF spring meetings.

Patricia Daniel
March 2007

Women at the World Social Forum

2007-01-16T05:34:00.000-08:00

Until end of January I'm going to be in Nairobi blogging the World Social Forum from a women's perspective. Please check out the blog here

Happy New Blog

2007-01-07T05:33:00.000-08:00

For the creation of this new blog, thanks are due to: my boss Philip Dearden and the rest of the team at the Centre for International Development and Training for agreeing to a year's leave of absence; my good friend Mary Allen Ballo of Sahel Eco who provided a little rooftop kingdom in Djelibougou, Bamako for 3 months where I could sit and think (or sometimes just sit); my editor David Hayes at opendemocracy who encouraged my taste for writing political articles; and my family who are always supportive.

The 4 posts below were all written in the final quarter of 2006 and based largely on my stay in Mali / West Africa. Please keep visiting the blog, there's a lot more to come!

Malta or House of Cards

2007-01-07T04:46:00.000-08:00

One of the highlights of a visit to Malta is St John’s Cathedral in Valetta. This building is testament to the wealth, power and religious ardour of the Knights of the Order of St John, who used Malta as a military fortress for 200 years. Known as the Knights Templar, these noblemen from the most important families in Europe had a single mission – to protect Europe from attack by the Ottoman Turks and, thus, the Catholic faith from the influence of Islam.

Or rather, as Laurence Olivier narrates in the British wartime propaganda film, Malta, GC, ‘to protect Christendom against the infidel.’

The cathedral is simple on the outside with an opulent interior. Fantastic baroque stone carving on every wall and pillar, in the nave it’s still all covered with gilt. So in one way, the building is filled with light. But there’s a feeling of darkness here and violent death – not the serenity of a soul gone to meet their maker. One of many examples is a magnificent 3-D memorial to a fallen knight, executed in shiny black metal, decorated with shields and swords. You don’t get a sense of redemption, only a sense of anger. ‘It’s as if they’re still fighting,’ says my daughter.

Is that what the family (or the Order) requested from the artist? The entire interior, including many of the altar-pieces, was commissioned from the Calabrian Matthia Preti. Did he actually subvert the task to convey his own perception of the knights? The bucolic biblical scenes painted in pastels on the ceiling are marred at the bottom by giant figures of knights in black robes who cleverly but frighteningly emerge in 3-D from the fresco. They do not form part of the biblical story at all - they crouch ready to leap out.

The whole is designed to shock and awe the congregation.

Another highlight is the grand harbour cruise, where we learn that Valletta has numerous forts, accumulated from different periods of its turbulent history. The most beautiful is San Angelo. Originally built by the Phoenicians, with a temple to the goddess Astarte, it was taken over by the Romans - whose temple was to Juno. When the Knights Templar took over the fort, they also built a church to ‘Our Lady.’ They later turned the fort into a prison, in which the artist Caravaggio was incarcerated because he had (perhaps by subversive painting) offended one of the high knights. During world war two the British renamed the fort HMS San Angelo. Now the location is used by Hollywood filmmakers for epics like Troy, starring Brad Pitt.

The former capital Mdina (Medina, the walled city) was established by the Arabs when they conquered the island in the ninth century. Two hundred years later, Malta was taken by the Normans. After the Knights of St John established their sea-base at Valletta in the sixteenth century, the island suffered but withstood the three-month ‘great siege’ by Suleiman the Magnificent. But in 1798 Napoleon took Malta without a fight and forced out the knights.

‘With revolutionary fervour the French tried to impose their ideas on Maltese society, abolished the nobility, defaced their escutcheons, persecuted the clergy and looted the churches. In a spontaneous uprising the Maltese massacred the French garrison at Mdina.’(Lonely Planet 2004 )

At the War Museum on Vittoriosa we learn that the defence of Malta (1940 –1943) against the axis powers of fascism enabled the allies to take Egypt and French North Africa from German / Italian occupation. The whole island was awarded the George Cross for bravery, but in fact the Maltese people, caught in the cross-fire, had little choice but to struggle on as best they could, cut off by broken supply lines and under constant bombardment from German air-raids.

First line of defence

Control of Malta has always been essential for control of the Mediterranean -strategically located 1000 miles east of Gibraltar and 1000 miles west of Alexandria. Malta gained her independence in 1964, but is still the first line of defence for mainland Europe. But now the discourse is more of the north-south divide between Europe and Africa.

Walk down by the central bus station and you will see groups of north African men sitting at pavement cafes in new, maybe borrowed, clothing. One or two women in the hijab follow them as their men walk through the crowd.

For Malta has a problem with illegal immigrants from Libya, which is next stop south across the Mediterranean. They come across in fishing boats, trying to reach Italy but, because of poor navigation or other difficulties, land instead on Malta. An estimated one thousand ‘irregular’ immigrants were picked up at sea in the first half of 2006. Seven hundred are detained in an overcrowded former school. Cases are reviewed on an individual basis and some are awarded right of stay.

Interestingly, communication between north Africans and the Maltese is not too much of a problem: though now a Catholic country, Malta’s language is basically Arabic.

On Christmas morning, the internet café is the only open place in town. It is packed with young Africans, skyping home, checking emails, surfing for work or accommodation. One is on his mobile, discussing photographs for a new passport. Another has managed to get a short-term job as an electrician.

The majority are economic asylum seekers or refugees. Not all are from Libya itself, disenchanted with Gaddafi’s islamic socialism which has failed to deliver expected opportunities for its young people. Libya has become a jumping-off point for youth from war-torn Somalia and even from Ghana (probably via Gao in northern Mali, a thriving illegal immigration centre which manages several routes out of West Africa).

Public debate has been facilitated, for example through a four-part series in The Times (Malta) by Martin Sciuna (December 13th-16th 2006). A majority of the Maltese population agree that, while appreciating charitable support for refugees from (Catholic) religious orders, they do not wish this to be used as a wedge to open up the island to illegal immigrants

Malta’s foreign minister Dr Michael Frendo has been successful in getting the EU to recognise illegal immigration from Libya as a serious problem – and not only for Malta. Several conferences have been held since July 2006 to try to come to an agreement on practical measures for the Mediterranean.

In November, after several months delay through lack of support from Libya (which for various reasons seems not to be able to patrol her own coastline) the EU border agency Frontex finally began a two-week marine security operation, which deployed Maltese and Italian military vessels along with French, Greek and German aircraft.

This is in addition to the Frontex rapid reaction team on the island of Lampedusa, the more direct staging post for mainland Italy (an estimated 23,000 illegal immigrants entered Italy through this route in 2005).

The other main route to Europe from West Africa is via the Canary Islands to the Spanish mainland. Because of thae large numbers involved, Spain has been receiving ‘emergency aid ‘ from the EU - and Frontex patrols have been active off the coast of Senegal since August, deploying Finnish aircraft and Spanish / Italian vessels.

Unholy wars

But further west along the north African coast another problem has arisen. Much consternation has been caused, particularly in France and Spain, by the recent release of 2,600 ‘terrorists’ from Algerian jails. European intelligence sources suggest that some of these may join the GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) - who formally announced their allegiance to Al Qaeda in September 2006, have escalated their acts of violence inside Algeria and constitute ‘one of the biggest threats to France.’

According to El País (21 December 2006) a third of suicide bombers in Iraq come from the Magreb (basically former French colonies). Al Qaeda has tasked GSPC with attacking Europe, developing links with similar groups in Morocco and Libya, as well as forming a federation across the Sahel (Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad).

‘Our Algerian brothers will be a thorn in the side of the yankee crusaders and their allies,’ says Ayman el Zawahiri (Al Qaeda’s number two) in a video on the internet ‘and will continue our holy war (jihad) in Algeria.’ Meanwhile Bush is talking about winning the ‘ideological war’ by sending more soldiers to Iraq.

In contrast, Gaddafi’s denunciation of Al Qaeda, his decision to renounce support for terrorism and eliminate his own WMD programmes, has earned Libya praise from the US ‘as an important model for regime behaviour change’ (Condoleeza Rice May 15 2006)

Gaddafi’s previous vision of pan-arabic unity has never met with success, perhaps unfortunately, as this may have helped to provide different solutions to current problems. His promotion of a pan-Sahel tamashek (touareg) republic still holds some currency – and may be a factor in the rejection of the salafiste influence in northern Mali by the predominantly touareg population.

Meanwhile, on October 7th 2006, Mali, along with Benin, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, took part in a trans-national day of action against migration controls - to commemorate the anniversary of the shooting of Moroccan immigrants in southern Spain the previous year.

House of cards

Amnesty International’s EU office warns against ‘the deep divide between Europe’s repressive immigration agenda and Africa’s interest in increasing development and opening up legal channels of immigration.’

In Malta, the non-governmental organisation Moviment Graffitti argues from an anti-capitalist position, against the construction of ‘fortress Europe’ and the fact that ‘free movement of capital around the world is accompanied by restrictions on the free movement of people.’

The island is orderly and hospitable. But a holiday on Malta is a neatly packaged reminder that, while separate ideologies may wax and wane, the god ideology remains, rampant.

The entire floor of St John’s Cathedral is tiled with giant tombstones for illustrious knights. The guidebook calls it a unique treasure of heraldic devices. The suit of swords predominates, the black eagle soars and death, grinning, holds up the hour-glass. These are not religious symbols. They are the language of the tarot cards, which, though not harmful in themselves, reveal for us the influences which have not yet passed away, that which has been ordained and which has not yet come to pass.

December 2006

Africa: Responsible Parenting

2007-01-07T03:50:00.000-08:00

My good friend Mary tells me the story of how she once went into a posh hotel in Bamako and saw five or six white women sitting in a line, each with a cute black baby on her knee, ‘for all the world as if they’d just been on a shopping spree and were showing off their purchases.’

Adoption of African babies by white families in the West is an ongoing practice and may be done from the best of intentions. Yet Mary, who has been in Mali for twenty years and has her own Malian family, explains how the practice of African-Western adoption highlights fundamental cross-cultural misunderstandings.

It is, in fact, common for African parents to let family or friends look after one of their children, give them a good education or a better start in life. But this is quite different from giving up their child for good: the child is always part of their natural family and will always return to take up their adult role there.

‘However carefully the process is explained to an African family, they simply don’t grasp the concept of adoption as we understand it in the West, because for them, the idea of giving up a child for good is simply inconceivable. So, when African parents enter into such an adoption agreement, they do not realise the full consequences of what they are doing.’

In addition, there is plenty of evidence from personal testimony that, however loving white adoptive parents may be, black children taken out of their natural environment – no matter how disadvantaged - will grow up to resent this and even say: ‘I wish it had never happened.’
You can take the child out of Africa, but you can’t take Africa out of the child.

Although some of this evidence is now contested there has been, in the UK, since the early 1980s, serious opposition to ‘transracial adoption’ - which makes it extremely difficult for a white British family to adopt a black child who has been born to parents in the UK. But, somehow, this restriction doesn’t apply to adoptions from overseas.

Adopt a country

We’ve had the sponsor a child concept - which means providing extra support for a child in their own environment. That’s been criticised for setting the child apart, creating inequality in the community. There followed the ‘sponsor a community’ concept, but this attracts the same criticisms. You can’t solve Africa’s problems by focussing on individual needs, without addressing the system in which these needs arise, as Malawian child rights activists have tried to point out to Madonna.

Good intentions are simply not enough. There’s inevitably a power and wealth differential in these arrangements which has to be recognised. So when I read that Angela Merkel is proposing that each of the G8 countries adopt an African country as part of her G8 presidency platform, my blood runs cold. Although this won’t mean taking children out of Africa, there are a number of possible consequences worth considering.

My first reaction is that this is a 21st century return to the original carve-up of the African continent between colonial powers, the impact of which is still being suffered by individual African countries. This seems to smack of the same kind of paternalism: ‘we can do things better, we know what you need.’ Haven’t we learned anything?

But there’s always more than one perspective. When I mention the idea to the president of one of the leading African women’s organisations, she’s surprisingly enthusiastic. ‘What a great idea! Just think, if Germany was really concentrating on Mali, all our problems would be sorted within 12 months!’

Maybe it’s something to do with who is going to do the parenting. Because, in fact, though Germany’s contribution to development aid is rather thrifty, it’s always money wisely spent, her technical assistance is widely recognised as excellent and, in Mali, very much appreciated.

Despite this, German representatives here privately admit to grave doubts about the longer-term sustainability of their projects, given the lack of real commitment of central government to the decentralisation process and the related lack of effective social mobilisation at the grassroots.

One of the reasons Mali may welcome greater involvement from Germany is their strongly felt need to escape from the psychological influence of ageing France – whose continuing stranglehold on the education system in francophone West Africa deliberately, according to education workers, impedes the development of locally appropriate skills and attitudes for both young men and women.

What kind of partnership?

Are African countries now going to have the choice over who will adopt them? Will there be a squabble in the nursery? ‘No, I want Germany to be our new dad!’ or ‘Yes, we want China to be our new mum!’

For each G8 country is going to do parenting differently. Does this mean we will see new paradigms of development, and, for example, competition between the latest German and Japanese models?

I’m not seriously worried about the proposal, because I don’t believe the G8 countries will buy into it. Whatever their relative levels of altruism as regards development aid, they all want to have a footprint in every African country, for reasons of future political influence and their own economic benefit.

But I want to run with the metaphor because it can be both entertaining and informative. What’s going to happen if Germany is doing a good parenting job with characteristic Zuverläßigkeit and China comes along, like a flamboyant rich auntie, saying: ‘That’s OK, bruv, take the weekend off, I’ll give her a treat.’ Then proceeds to subvert little Mali with a diet of takeaway pizza, coca cola and adult-rated movies?

China is willing to adopt any of the children. You can already see the marks of her high-heels across Africa, from Algeria to Angola, most recently in Accra (Ghana). She now rivals the US in trade relations. But Africans are beginning to ask: ‘what does our Chinese friend really want? She’s not applying any political conditions to economic engagement. Is she a new partner or just a neo-colonial?’ (Afrique Magazine No. 254 November 2006)

In contrast, the German proposal specifies that only certain countries are going to be adopted. Like those respectable white ladies in the Hotel Salaam, G8 is mainly interested in cute well-behaved babies. After all, who but China would want to invest in rebellious, abused, conflicted children like the Sudan or D R Congo, when you can’t trust them to play nicely at parties?

Rwanda has successfully managed to grow out of her bad-girl image. (Far be it from me to suggest this success is due to the fact that, after the 1994 genocide, the majority of the population were women.) The country’s also thrown off the influence of France, whose neglect in the 1990s had such unimaginable consequences. Now Rwanda has her own vision for her future, she is able to stand up to France and say: ‘We are equals.’

Her government’s had a lot of help through much-needed budget support from the UK. But people from both East and West Africa have also raised issues with me about commercially motivated UK support for Rwanda playing dirty games across the fence with neighbouring DR Congo…

Readers may argue that I’m being unfair. Merkel’s proposal is about G8 countries ‘picking a partnership’. She is suggesting a summit with (male) African leaders to discuss the proposal. In fact, as other reports highlight, this is not about giving more money in development aid, but (what a surprise) developing private sector investment. So, without checking the small print or talking to their (female) partners in country, are African governments going to sign up yet again to an agreement of which the consequences may be unexpectedly negative?

Good parenting

I am very lucky that I was brought up where I belonged, in Yorkshire, by my natural parents, both poor but proud working class socialists. This tough love upbringing consisted of the Brian Daniel Methodist-based morality (‘Well, you should have been sorry before you did it’) and Victorian work ethic (‘If anything’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right’) combined with the Mildred Baxter school of counselling (‘It’s time you pulled your socks up, love’).

This resulted in me working hard, taking responsibility for my own actions, never being a victim or wearing wrinkled stockings. I grew up with self-respect, because I was always treated as an intelligent equal.

Good parenting also works by example. Despite their humble origins, my parents were both loved and respected members of society. They didn’t lie, cheat or steal; never countenanced violence; they gave their services to the community for free after work in the evenings (because that’s what you do) and didn’t feel the need to advertise their achievements.

It’s not enough to have good intentions - you also need to live out your principles.

Adoption procedures in the UK continue to be stringent, and rightly so, because parenting is a big responsibility, not everyone can hack it. So, all you G8 countries, please line up behind Germany: I’d like to inspect your credentials. Africa is still experiencing growing pains because of colonialism - and which one among you, in the meantime, has become a fit parent?

December 2006

MDG9: A new millennium challenge

2007-01-06T10:41:00.000-08:00

There’s a cheeky little email entitled ‘bedtime reading’ which is doing the rounds in francophone West Africa, passed on by women in the non-governmental (NGO) sector, about how sexism in the real world is reflected in the French language use of grammatical gender (le and la).

Like all the best spoofs, the email contains more than a grain of truth and I’ve used it to good effect to provoke discussion in gender training here with mixed groups of NGO workers. To give you a flavour, though English doesn’t have the same grammatical system, I’ve freely translated some of the text below by highlighting the French masculine words in blue and feminine words in red.

(A man is speaking). Why is it, when there’s a problem, it’s immediately feminine?
Rain, snow, hail, storm, that’s all for you women! For us, it’s sunshine, good weather, springtime and paradise!

You don’t have a chance: washing-up, cooking, food, dust, dirt and cleaning. For us, it’s coffee in the armchair with the newspaper watching the rugby and that would be real happiness, if you didn’t come and sow discord and strife.

To get some peace, I think we should let gender decide. You can watch the TV but we choose the channel. Even if the remote belongs to you, we have the control.

But don’t go looking for any sexism there, oh no! Besides, I need to point out that the word sex has no feminine form. We don’t say sex but the sex of a woman. Of course, by definition, pleasure is for men.

For, if the preliminaries are too quick, it’s because they are only a preliminary. Any more than that and it’s a waste of time. After having achieved orgasm, the man turns his back to get some sleep, while the woman experiences frustration.

This is where I’m going to stop translating since, when I’ve shared the email with individual women in Mali (not the first country to go looking for female outspokenness) this is where they stop and tell me: ‘That is so true.’

This is nothing specific to West Africa – though maybe something about French-speaking men. Because over the summer I read a stereotype-confounding survey report in Le Monde, that 33% of married Frenchwomen had never experienced orgasm. One explanation for this was the social pressure on them to look (but obviously not to feel) good. And in the same paper, an article about how single Frenchwomen are so desperate for the possibility of a good lay that they no longer insist on their casual sex partner using a condom (in case he just leaves).

It’s good to talk

Of course I don’t really think it’s anything to do with the French language.

There are a number of reasons why women don’t enjoy sex. In Africa one of them is female circumcision. According to Ann Birch, making a documentary about Plan International’s work to combat FGM in Mali, a number of men she spoke to admitted they would prefer their wives not to have been circumcised ‘because it puts them off sex.’ It would help a great deal if they said that loudly in public.

But thanks to the miraculously misunderstood mysteries of the female anatomy, even women who have been circumcised can enjoy orgasm. This is because the clitoris is not a tiny hard-to-find switch but the entire female genital muscle, which has 6 times as many nerve endings as the male sex organ.

That’s a little-known fact I learned when I took part in a bilingual community production of the Vagina Monologues in 2003 in north Wales - like Mali, not the first place you’d go looking for open debate about sex. Most of the women in the group had never spoken the word ‘vagina’ out loud in private, let alone on a public stage.

Those women found the experience incredibly empowering. And among the audience in the community hall in the wild Welsh heartland of Porthmadog (we didn’t know if anyone would actually turn up) were old ladies who had come all the way from Angelesy to hear said what they had never been able to say.

Anyone who has seen the Vagina Monologues might remember that around the world there are one hundred and one cute words women are taught to use instead. And one of the main points of the show is that so many women – because of social conditioning, psychological or physical abuse - have a negative relationship with their own sexuality. Basically, ‘down there’ is ugly and dirty (and smelly) and doesn’t really belong to them at all.

The impact of that perception was indicated in a survey around the same time of young men in the UK who said they didn’t go down on their girlfriends because they were afraid of ‘offending’ them. (In other words, men might not think it’s ugly and dirty but they know their girlfriends certainly do.)

But what ‘s going on here? We’re in the third millennium. Towards the end of the last one, a visualisation technique called Body Mapping was developed and used to good effect with women in different parts of the world, to help give them a vocabulary with which to talk about themselves, their sexuality and their (often negative) experiences with men.

Thanks to the bilingual production I learned that the Welsh word cont was widely used by both men and women in Welsh erotic poetry of the Middle Ages. But nowadays, the more sex is talked about in public, the less men and women seem to have an understanding of eroticism, or a shared vocabulary to discuss it in private.

Safe sex

Once while working in Nigeria I innocently suggested to my team of Muslim men that the practice of polygamy (which I don’t agree with) could be seen as positive, if it stopped men visiting prostitutes and thus spreading HIV/AIDS. But I am reliably informed by both men and women across West Africa, that this is not the case. So, we have a scenario where a man is not able to share pleasure any of his four wives and then visits a prostitute for the chance of a little (fabricated) pleasure. Because the prostitute is not able to insist on condom use, the man brings back infection (which was passed on to the prostitute in the first place by another respectably married man) to all of his wives. If he then dies of HIV/AIDS, his wives are parcelled out among his brothers and so the infection continues. In fact, polygamy makes the situation worse.

The other obvious point about the prostitute is that her own pleasure in the transaction is never the issue, because this is a commercial, not an erotic, relationship. In Mali there’s been a big increase in prostitution as an income-generating activity among young women, including university students, who sell their favours to older, richer African or European men. After all (I suppose the reasoning goes) if you don’t enjoy sex, you might as well cash it in. Young men are now complaining that they can’t get a nice girlfriend because they ‘don’t have enough money.’

While not making much of an attempt to crack down on prostitution, the Malian authorities have become concerned at the increase in masturbation among young people - which is stopping them from getting married at all and thus threatening the whole ‘fabric of society’. They have finally found that, although they can’t please each other, they can please themselves.

The result of all this seems to be that everyone is at it like knives in West Africa - but nobody is actually making anyone else happy.

Of course, it’s not just an African problem. In France, adultery is an accepted practice (an attempt to get elsewhere what you’re not able to give at home). In Germany - which has the largest percentage of single people and the lowest birth-rate in Europe - prostitution is fully institutionalised. The Minister for Social Welfare publicly endorsed the mega-brothel that was established outside the Berlin stadium for this year’s World Cup. For this event, young girls were trafficked from Eastern Europe, West Africa and Brazil.

So, despite (quite nice) African men jumping up and down in excitement, shouting ‘gender balance! gender balance!’ when they see two female professionals among a group of twenty people in an NGO meeting, my perception is that all over the world things are regressing. The domestic economy of each country I visit seems to be founded on the beautiful but joyless bodies of young women. I don’t see how this can be good for development.

New targets

Why do we continue to abuse our most precious resources and cynically accept the encroaching desertification of human relationships? Whoever we are, however little we own, whatever the limitations on our future, good sex is the one chance on earth we all have – for everyone and their partner, just for a short time, which may seem like a lifetime - to dance together above the stars.

Bill and Melinda Gates, please take note. If you want to contribute to Millennium Development Goal 6 (Combat HIV/AIDS) you need to work towards the eradication of prostitution. This would require substantial resources to enable existing and potential prostitutes to become successful and independent businesswomen, international tour operators and sports science specialists (possibly with the help of Cuba) as well as to establish legal citizenship for all those girls who have been trafficked across national borders. Of course, that’s only looking at the supply side.

For the solution is even more radical than that, so I’d like to propose an additional goal - MDG 9: Achieve universal female orgasm by the year 2015.

I’m not recommending that we allow the World Bank to provide one of its top-down quick fixes. Nor do I think the Negroponte One Laptop Per Child project is going to help boys and girls transform the future here. This is actually something we could all take personal responsibility for.

It may sound provocative, but it’s certainly much less outrageous than what is happening in the world at the moment. Of course, there are still major obstacles, like the politics of culture, and of the market-place, but think of the gains: no more war, maybe even some help in the kitchen.

In the end, maybe it’s just a corny sixties suggestion. But, like the spoof email, my intention is serious. For peace, equality and sustainable development, why not concentrate on the art of making love.

November 2006

The veil over the rule of law

2007-01-06T09:32:00.000-08:00

‘It is not wrong for women to reject laws which concern them, if these laws have been made by men without their consultation.’

UNIFEM Director Noeleen Heyzer recently quoted Montaigne at a session of the UN Security Council in discussions about the newly appointed Peace-Building Commission (October 26 2006)

A concerted effort is now being made by African women lawyers and human rights activists to highlight how current law discriminates against women and what changes are necessary, at national and regional level, to ensure their participation in peacekeeping operations and democratic processes.

At the beginning of November the ECOWAS Gender and Development Centre held a regional workshop in Banjul to discuss a unified strategy. The participants came up with a plan of action to lobby their own governments ahead of the next African Heads of State Summit, to be held in Burkina Faso in December 2006.

In The Gambia, as in other parts of Africa, women live under four levels of law.

International law emphasises the equal rights of women and there are a number of instruments which do this, notably the UN Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW 1993). The Additional Protocol (on the rights of women) to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights was adopted by the African Union in Maputo 2003. This goes further than CEDAW as regards issues such as ‘harmful practices’ (female genital mutilation) and violence against women.

Many, though not all, individual African countries have ratified such conventions and protocols. But this doesn’t mean that the rights of women are assured because, in order to bring cases of discrimination to court, changes in national legislation often need to be made.

There is resistance to this among (predominantly) male legislators in African parliaments. ‘They don’t understand that international law takes precedence over national law,’ I was told by a woman lawyer, ‘they need “sensitisation” about the law.’ But when the AU Summit was held in Libya and then Sudan, the women’s lobby was even prevented from attending: their visa applications were rejected.

National law is enshrined in the Constitution of the state. The Constitution itself often includes reference to the equal rights of men and women, as in Uganda, The Gambia and Mali, but this doesn’t always translate into equality for women. Why not?

The Malian association of women lawyers has already been lobbying for a 30% quota for women in elections. This is legal under CEDAW article 4 Temporary measures to achieve equality and there is nothing in the Malian Constitution to prohibit it. But when the proposition was recently put to Parliament by President Touré (who supports the principle), it was rejected.

In The Gambia, where women make up a majority of the active electorate, this is explained as follows: ‘Traditionally, society views men as natural leaders, while women are supposed to give support to their men in the background.’

Islamic Law Mali is a secular state but, as in The Gambia, women don’t always make recourse to the high court because they are also subject to Islamic (sharia) Law - which is administered by religious leaders. In The Gambia this is applicable by the Mohammedan Law (Recognition) Act, as part of the Constitution.

Under this Act, the general provision affording protection from discrimination for women is excluded from those laws which make provision for adoption, marriage, divorce, devolution of property, death or other matters of ‘personal law’ - which particularly affect women.

Under sharia law, men are allowed to take another wife (up to four) without the consent or even the knowledge of his first wife. He can divorce any of his wives without their consent or knowledge by saying ‘I divorce thee’ three times in front of the Imam. The inverse, of course, does not apply. The rules for adultery follow the same pattern and in some countries, like Nigeria, can have fatal consequences for women.

Women do have some rights under sharia law during marriage and the divorce process, but are usually unaware of them. The proposed, and still contested, Women’s Bill has sought to codify these rights and entitlements in The Gambia. In all events, these rights revolve around ‘consent’ and there are many pressures on a Muslim woman to say ‘yes’ when she really means ’no’.

Customary law
A key factor in the abuse of Islamic law is that people’s understanding of it is influenced by what is know as customary practice. In the Gambia this is also recognised in the Constitution under The Law of England Application Act, which provides that ‘customary law is part of the laws of The Gambia in so far as it concerns members of the community to which it applies.’ In other words - over 90% of the population.

Customary practice underpins the traditionally accepted roles and relationships between men and women in African society. This is where the practice of FGM comes from, the dowry system whereby young girls are sold into marriage as a transaction between two families and the practice of living with (read belonging to) her in-laws. Even in Uganda, which has made real progress in the political participation of women, these customs still inhibit their personal freedoms.

Another example of customary law is the treatment of widows. If a man dies, his wife is not entitled to his property unless and until she agrees to be inherited by his family. ‘This means that under customary law, a woman is (again) treated as a chattel.’ The fact that this practice is upheld by the Church of Nigeria (the largest Christian community in the world) as well as by the sharia court, is evidence that it predates any religious law.

In short, as the President of FEMNET puts it: ‘the big problem in Africa is that a woman doesn’t belong to herself.’

The public domain

This has a particular bearing on women’s (non) existence in the public sphere. Under customary practice, women do not speak out in the public domain, it is ‘not their place.’ The social pressure for a woman to ‘keep her place’ (that is, indoors) comes from both men and other women. The exception applies to older women who are awarded respect and given a public voice ‘providing they have behaved themselves properly as young women’ (as I am reliably informed).

So when male African parliamentarians argue that the 30% quota (or whatever) in ‘unconstitutional’ and goes against ‘custom’ what they are really saying is that women should still be subject to age-old customary law, while men continue to enjoy the rights of modern legislation.

They simply don’t want women to share the influence and autonomy that comes with participation in the public domain.

No wonder that some men don’t want to take the Maputo Protocol on board, since it proposes that women have the right to a ‘positive cultural context’ rather than the ‘culture that has been wrongly and selfishly used by men to perpetuate serious crime against women.’

Among those enlightened and educated African men and women who do want to see the system change, customary law is widely recognised as the barrier to women’s advancement in African society, barring them from an equal role in decision-making and peace-building processes.

That veiled question

Africa’s hot and dusty, it’s still in the process of modernisation and often the internet server doesn’t work, so we might expect that there to be a few glitches in respect to the law here.

But, in fact, the same concentric system of law applies in the UK. International laws are ratified but not legislated for, European human rights law is disregarded and Muslim women are still subject to aspects of sharia and customary law even though these might not be officially recognised – because, as in The Gambia, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 prohibits discrimination against women in the public domain (employment, education) but does not touch on ‘personal law’.

When Jack Straw made his now infamous statement about the veil, he is said to have offended ‘Muslim opinion’. This is, unsurprisingly, voiced by mainstream male Muslim religious leaders, speaking, of course, with their face uncovered. The reason the British government has to be seen to be listening to their views is because of the increasing threat of terrorism.

As always in any conflict, women’s bodies are caught in the crossfire between warring male factions.

This whole mad max chain of events – the Bush Doctrine, the rise in Islamic fundamentalism and related terrorist acts, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Hamas, Israel-Lebanon – has adversely affected the status of women across the Arab world.

Yes, and down into the Muslim populations of sub-Saharan Africa, where, for example, ambassadors of fundamentalism from Pakistan have been busy since 9/11 encouraging Touareg leaders in the north of Mali to take their girls out of school and their women out of politics – and to take up the practice of FGM which was never part of their traditional culture.

The same forces have been at work on the Mandinka population of the Gambia. So it’s not unreasonable to suggest that a similar process has been happening in the UK. In addition, when any minority group feels beleaguered in society, the response is to retrench, defend, protect and this invariably impacts on the freedom of its women.

Yet, while we rightly invoke international law to condemn the actions of the US (not that it makes any difference) we are content to let British Muslim women continue to live under customary law – because that is where the veil comes from, not the Q’uran.

Only liberal intellectuals could seriously suggest that Muslim women have a free choice about wearing the veil. The choice they make, within their community, is between bowing to social pressure and suffering social ostracism, at best, psychological or physical punishment at worst, as many studies in the UK have documented.

Young women taking the veil as a political protest in the UK might seem to be the exception, but in reality they are still confusing customary practice with Muslim identity.

No woman who truly belongs to herself (who is the subject of her own world and not an object in others’) would choose to make herself invisible (commit an act of self-negation) when she goes out in public.

As my strong-minded Muslim colleague in Banjul puts it: ‘All women are beautiful. Why should we hide it?’

She has just learned that her husband of 12 years has acquired a second wife, he wasn’t happy with his first marriage because my friend is ‘too independent.’ Already the in-laws are closing in, trying to pressure her into not making a fuss, not to file for divorce in the high court and not to fight for custody of their five children. It’s tough, she’s devastated, but at the same time she says: ‘I don’t accept that anything a man says or does should make me feel bad about myself.’

This is not a philosophical debate about ‘dislocation’ and the ‘other’ – it’s a question about the fundamental rights of women to walk and talk and work freely. Do we accept that in UK society, as elsewhere in the world, Muslim women enjoy fewer rights than Muslim men or Western women? I know that, in the end, ‘only yourself can set you free’ (Bob Marley) - but a little help from the rest of society wouldn’t come amiss.

The veil over the public participation of Muslim women contravenes the internationally agreed Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, so why don’t we legislate against it?

Who knows? If Jack Straw had stuck to his guns, one of his female constituents may someday have been able to turn round to her in-laws and explain sweetly: ‘Under British law I am required to speak face to face, as an equal, to my MP.’ And if she was very lucky, she might get away with it.

November 2006