[Nasional-e] Pay attention to the women

[Ambon]

Pay attention to the women
Barbara Crossette IHT  Friday, October 25, 2002

Moderate Islam

NEW YORK The frenzied mob that stormed Iraqi cell blocks after Saddam
Hussein declared an amnesty may or may not prove to be the first act of a
popular revolution against the Middle East's most dangerous dictator. What
is certain is that a large number - a majority, by some reports - of those
seething, angry people were women.
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For at least a decade, women in Arab countries and the wider Islamic world
have been trying without much success to get the attention of foreign policy
planners in powerful nations, especially the United States, to make the
point that women must be factored into strategic thinking if moderation is
ever to prevail in societies that have become breeding grounds for terror
and repression.
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These Muslim women say history has already proved them right. They point to
the power of women in Iran whose votes were instrumental in two election
victories for President Mohammed Khatami, a moderate by current Iranian
standards. He has made it his cause to temper clerical absolutism at home
while fostering a "dialogue of civilizations" with the non-Islamic world.
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Moreover, says Rounaq Jahan, a Bangladeshi political scientist on the
adjunct faculty at Columbia University's School of International and Public
Affairs, women have led democracy movements in Pakistan, Bangladesh and
Burma, among other places.
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Not that women are necessarily more tolerant, democratic or peace-loving
across the board. Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher spring to
mind as the counterpoint to that shaky feminist theory. But millions of
women, given basic rights, including the right to vote, have often chosen
cautious, even conservative political paths, preferring problem-solving to
confrontation and militancy.
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The message has been delivered eloquently by writers and scholars like
Fatima Mernissi in Morocco and Azar Nafisi, an Iranian now at Johns Hopkins.
It has also been expressed lately with more desperation by beleaguered
female lawyers and judges in Afghanistan, who, having survived the Taliban
years, are now meeting similar obstacles under the regime in Kabul that was
stitched together by the United States and other international players.
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Any number of women's organizations watching Afghanistan would be willing to
bet that a huge, direct investment in the country's women - in education,
health, housing and civil rights - would bring almost immediate rewards in
calming and settling down a ravaged population still living on the edges of
subsistence.
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The United Nations and a host of private international agencies have
produced statistics to show that improving the status of women and educating
their daughters lead to substantial reductions in poverty over time. A world
awash in poor young men with no hope is widely accepted as the backdrop for
militancy in general and its most nihilistic expression, the suicide bomber.
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Why do policy planners fail to take the potential power of women seriously?
There are the obvious answers. Women are not organized into something
recognizable like Kurds or the Northern Alliance. More important, power in
foreign affairs remains largely in the hands of men everywhere, and at no
time more decisively than in a time of war. Strategic thinkers are no longer
averse to considering epidemic diseases or trafficking in people as threats
to international security. Yet the low status of women - despite warnings by
no less a development expert than Amartya Sen that nations allow this at
their peril - rarely if ever figure prominently in blue-ribbon analyses by
the Western foreign policy establishment of why states fail, or societies
implode.
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Good intentions often are not enough. UN efforts to inject peacekeeping
operations with programs designed by and for women are relegated to tokenism
very quickly, by UN officials' own admission. Campaigns to put women at
peace tables or into high-ranking jobs in the rebuilding of countries get
little if any coverage in the international media, and therefore no serious
hearing. Publishers are not interested in topics that they think won't sell
books. To women outside it, the circle of exclusion is strong as steel.
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In a report to the Security Council this week, Secretary-General Kofi Annan
said women are excluded because they are not military leaders or
decision-makers in most societies and are not thought to have the expertise
for negotiation. "We can no longer afford to minimize or ignore the
contributions of women and girls to all stages of conflict resolution,
peacemaking, peace-building, peacekeeping and the reconstruction process,"
he correctly said. The writer, a former New York Times correspondent in Asia
and at the United Nations, contributed this comment to the International
Herald Tribune.


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