Women, War, Peace, Security, Conflict Prevention, UN Security Council Resolution 1325
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: October 6, 2015
WUNRN
UNIFEM
– WomenWarPeace.org
Our inital aim is to track progress on the implementation of resolution
1325, and ultimately to provide information to encourage researchers, policy
makers, analysts and NGOs so they can routinely include, seek and contribute
more information and analysis on women, war and peace.
Through this portal, UNIFEM strives to provide access to the information and
analysis that is currently available on the impact of armed conflict on women
and women’s role in peace-building.
_______________________________________________________________
VIDEO – THE COST OF WAR
Double click arrow in center of link
screen, to start video.
“The combined budgets of UN bodies working on
women’s issues $65 million, is only 0.005% of
world military expenditure;” Conference Report – follows.
________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________
This 2008
event was the 25th such seminar. Since 1984, the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) has worked with other NGOs to organise a
seminar linking 8 March – International Women’s Day – with disarmament, peace
and security issues.
International Women’s Day Disarmament Seminar
Statement and Report
Women, War, Weapons and Conflict Prevention
We, women from many parts the world,
take this opportunity to raise our voices, which are often suppressed or
ignored, on disarmament, peace and security. The 2008 International Women’s Day
Disarmament Seminar highlighted the crises of human security and sustainable
development caused by military spending, war and weapon profiteering, and the
persistence of ideas and expectations of gender that shape how war, women, and
peace are considered.
This
year’s Seminar, held 5-6 March 2008, included over one hundred participants
from non-governmental organisations from more than forty countries and marked
two significant anniversaries. The first is the 30th anniversary of the First
Special Session on Disarmament of the UN General Assembly, possibly the highest
point of consensus and vision ever achieved in multilateral disarmament
diplomacy, which created the Conference on Disarmament we have today and set
out its ten-part agenda.
Our
seminar was directly linked to neglected items on the Decalogue, namely the
reduction of military spending, the linkage between disarmament and
development, nuclear disarmament, conventional weapons, and disarmament as
confidence building. We struggle to find language to express our dismay, our
anger, at the failure of governments over the last eleven years to advance
these agenda items, and their commitments made by consensus thirty years ago.
A
40 year-old treaty was also discussed; a treaty that has inhibited nuclear
proliferation somewhat, but that has not yet delivered on nuclear
disarmament. If, indeed, “life begins at 40”, then the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) must gain a new lease on life if it is to
deliver tangible results at the 2010 Review Conference. The CD’s contribution
to the success of this meeting is to start negotiating a verifiable Fissile
Material Treaty. States Parties must get serious about compliance with
the disarmament obligation and commence negotiation of a Nuclear Weapon
Convention.
Civil
society has documented how small arms and light weapons are killing and
wounding hundreds of thousands of people every year and how they threaten
sustainable development throughout the world, but still this issue has met with
a less than adequate international response. The unexploded remnants of cluster
munitions, attractive
in size, shape, and colour to children and other unwitting civilians, continue
to kill for decades after conflicts are over, as do landmines that lay hidden
in the earth. Conflict goods that fuel wars, repression and
environmental damage are traded on our markets almost completely
unhindered. There are stricter international regulations on the trade of
old postage stamps than on conventional armaments. And we are now witnessing
another escalation of the nuclear arms race and the potential weaponization of
outer space.
We
are women from countries that experience war and peace, from countries that
produce weapons and from countries that pay the high economic, social and human
price of receiving them. We, as women, unanimously call on governments to
abandon narrow concepts of military security and instead focus our human and
economic resources on addressing the real daily threats to the security of their
citizens, such as poverty, hunger, insecurity, HIV and AIDS, climate change,
and environmental degradation.
Weapons can do nothing to alleviate
these security problems. Instead, the acquisition of arms diverts
enormous financial, technical and human resources from where they are really
needed. This has been true for a long time, but the situation has never been
more urgent than it is today. What is preventing progress? Who benefits from
business as usual? We reject the idea that the military industry, the
weapons trade, brings jobs, prosperity or security. The arms trade has turned
people into mercenaries and parts of our planet into cemeteries. The
military-industrial-academic complex, that we were warned in 1961 as having the
potential for a disastrous rise of misplaced power
has truly achieved its potential when military spending exceeds $1204 billion
annually in 2006 prices. Reducing military
spending is on your agenda, you are mandated to address and curb this
disastrous and misplaced political and economic power that military
corporations exercise.
Reversing
a real security threat, catastrophic climate change, for example, will require
a paradigm shift in resource allocation. We can meet this challenge, but
only if we are prepared to face the fact that bombs, guns and landmines will
not deter or remove the threat of a Tsunami, a hurricane, a flood, a virus, or
a water shortage. To do this we have to bring a halt to the organized
crime of weapons profiteering and the CD has a role to play. 8 million
lives could be saved with an investment of $57 billion. We could achieve
by 2015 the MDGS with $135 million in overseas development assistance.
These levels of investment are tiny in comparison with the level of military
expenditure.
Compare
military spending with efforts to finance gender equality for half the human
population:
·
The combined budgets of UN bodies working on women’s
issues $65 million, is only 0.005% of world military expenditure;
·
The World Bank estimates the cost of interventions to promote
gender
equality under MDG 3 is $7-13 per capita. The world’s military
expenditure
in 2006 amounted to $184 per capita;
Of $20
billion in bilateral aid in 2001-2005, an OECD DAC study
reports that only $5 billion was
allocated to projects promoting gender
empowerment; the cost of approximately
2 weeks of the occupation of
Iraq.
Article 26 of the UN Charter
emphasizes the need to stop wasting human and economic resources on
armaments. It is time for the Security Council to act in compliance with
Article 26 by delivering a plan for reducing armaments. If the Security
Council had fulfilled this task, the disarmament machinery would not be so
overburdened or stuck as it is today.
Conflict
prevention involves confidence- and trust-building, and begins with reducing
the role of nuclear and other weapons in security policies. Everything flows
from this first step that, when taken, will move security thinking beyond the
capacity to destroy to the capacity to share this planet’s finite resources
sustainably, to enjoy life with the full spectrum of human rights. Rather than
being utopian, these goals are entirely achievable, but trends in military
spending must be reversed before they can be realised.
Participants in the 2008 International
Women’s Day Seminar focused on the roles and responsibilities of women,
outlined in Security Council 1325, to participate in conflict prevention,
disarmament and all levels of security decision-making. Since the adoption of
this resolution these issues have been newly and more deeply understood,
governments and NGOs have undertaken some laudable work to implement it, we
have seen some more highly competent and intelligent women appointed to engage
in security and disarmament – of course we would like to see more because as
the President of Chile said recently, “A woman who enters politics
changes; a thousand women who enter politics change politics.” Without
women’s equal participation, sustainable peace, sustainable development and
true human security are unattainable. Women must be able to contribute their
perspectives, help determine the direction of policy options, and have a
greater say over budgetary allocations.
We need to examine the relationship
between masculinity and war as much as the relationship between women and
peace. Men and women experience war very differently, from war-making to
peace-building and everything in between. In any given army, 90 percent
of the soldiers are men while in any given refugee camp, 80 percent of the
adults of women. Gender roles help to explain why this is so – good human
qualities like strength and honour get allocated to men and deformed into tools
for violence and domination. Good human qualities like tenderness and care get
allocated to women and deformed into the badge of submission. Both parts of
humanity end up as less than fully human. If we want security for all, we need
both women and men, working as equals, to take responsibility for our common
security. Wisdom about gender roles will contribute to the peace that can
be achieved.
We women will continue to advocate for
the vital changes – in terms of military budgets and doctrines – that must be
made to achieve genuine human security. We as citizens hold you responsible,
and we recommit to supporting and encouraging the CD in its work, and to
educating our constituencies about its vital role. We as women have
addressed this body since 1984. We would like to be able to do this ourselves
rather than through an intermediary. Indeed, not allowing us to read our own
statement undermines the seriousness of CD in the eyes of people around the
world. In this year of the 30th anniversary of SSOD1, is it not time
to allow civil society organizations they chance to address the CD on a regular
basis? W e understand the danger inherent in armament, and we will
continue for another 24 years, and as long is necessary, to advocate for
disarmament negotiations in the CD, and for security and disarmament
decision-makers to be accountable, transparent and democratic. We value all
those of you who are helping in this endeavour and salute your efforts.
####
Resource
Guide for Gender Theme Groups, Jan. 2005.
SIPRI,
Recent Trends in Military Expenditure, https://www.sipri.org/contents/milap/milex/mex_trends.html
Congressional Research Service, Report for US Congress, The Cost of Iraq,
Afghanistan and other Global War on Terror Operations since 9/11, (2007),
RL33110
================================================================
To leave the list, send your request by email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.
Categories: Releases
