Thank you WILPF for convening this meeting and taking me away from New York. I want to especially welcome the men who have come to this meeting and remind us that the word gender should never be used to just mean women. We have to welcome men and we have to welcome the woman in every man to all of our meetings. We are never going to have peace unless we do it together.

I want to wish each of you a happy international women’s day. I was asked to say a few words about an extraordinary woman who was too young, too smart, and too good to die of cancer. The woman is Randall Caroline Forsberg who invented the concept of the Freeze, an 80’s word, where she called for a freeze on the manufacture and development of nuclear weapons. It was a word that came to mean not just to stop the development of nuclear weapons, but as an anti-nuclear word, just as the world non-proliferation is being used to mean anything anti-nuclear including nuclear abolition, even though that’s not what it means. Randy sadly died a few months ago and she is one of the women on whose shoulders we stand.

Let us remember other women on whose shoulders we stand as we celebrate this day. We probably would not be as smart, as creative or as courageous if it weren’t for Julia Ward Howe who said in 1873, “Disarm, Disarm, the sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” In 1876 Bertha Von Suttner, a founder of the International Peace Bureau, wrote Lay Down Your Arms. I maintain she had a tryst with Alfred Nobel and persuaded him to invest the profits from his invention of dynamite into the Nobel Peace Prize, which he did. Unfortunately very few women have received that prize. There have been many women who worked for peace. Emma Goldman said, “When you are educated, when you know your power, you will need no bombs, and no militia will hold you”. Eleanor Roosevelt reminded us that the UN is a place where we use words not bullets or bombs. Swiss women invented 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize, now called 1000 Peace Women across the globe, which shows us that conflict can be prevented only if we harness the energies of women from hundreds of professions with hundreds of skills, hundreds of interests and capacities. You don’t have to be a peacenik, a peace activist to make peace. It’s going to take women with all kinds of skills and interests. And then of course Virginia Woolf said, “War is not women’s history.”

I just want to run through very quickly the contradictions that are coming fast and furiously. Perhaps you’ve read that Iran’s Parvin Ardalan was barred from leaving her country to accept the Olof Palme peace prize in Stockholm for her work on behalf of women’s rights. That news flew around the world on women’s and other list serves and it showed up in a small newspaper in Arizona, an important state in the US where a Presidential candidate comes from. Perhaps he read it, but the oppression against women in Iran is serious and requires our attention. The African network of women’s peace negotiators created on 15 February in Brazzaville, Women for Peace, is something that hasn’t happened too often in the past. Felicity reminded us of the women in Kenya who gathered to call for the end of impunity, an end to the killings and violations of human rights and called for constitutional reform. Lesley Abdela told a NATO conference in Vienna on 19 February that former women combatants are suffering from post-conflict trauma and from being marginalised when grants are handed out, when training for peace time is available to the men but not to the women. And there is an extraordinary development. The staff for the Office for Disarmament Affairs at the UN, the staff for the DPA and other UN agencies are now being trained in 1325 by non-UN women and it’s happening quickly. Two missions, those of Costa Rica and Italy, from the Ambassadors down, have been trained in 1325. I am talking with a woman Ambassador about training the women Ambassadors about 1325. There is a whole new generation of people who don’t know anything about 1325. Every year new people come on in all of these capacities, and unless 1325 becomes part of the briefing in all diplomatic training schools, people don’t know about it, and women and men need to be trained in it.

There have never been quite so many activities both for the good, and for the bad. I’ve just come from New York where the CSW has been meeting. It’s the 52nd session. I don’t usually go because it’s so boring, but the non-governmental activity that takes place with a great deal of dynamism is really the thing to do. I will tell you that I only saw the first draft of the final Commission statement. It’s on Financing for Gender Equality. Not one word in that official draft was about paying for tickets for women to get to the negotiation table, not one word was about paying for women to participate in meetings to prevent violence. Not one word on financing the prevention of violence, the protection of women from violence or including women in decision making. That’s pretty poor and should not be allowed to go forward. So leave it to some terrific women to fix it. There is a group of women called women in peace building and conflict resolution from dozens of organisations that signed onto a demand which has been presented to the delegates, which calls for an increase in resources available internationally and nationally for the prevention of conflict and women’s participation and support for a strong gender entity in the UN system to enhance our advocacy for the full implementation of SC Res.1325, and support for a dedicated and transparent Security Council mechanism to more effectively monitor women’s equal participation in peace building. They add that development and financing for gender equality and women’s empowerment will only be successful if carried out under an environment where all stakeholders are working together for social justice, sustainable peace and respect for human rights.

So it’s been eight years since a bunch of us mere mortal women sat around the table and worked out compromises about our own differences, and we had differences, and then drafted what became 1325 which has many mothers. The activity is incredible on this issue today, the need is even more incredibly enormous, and the lack of full implementation is inexcusable. How many more years do we have to wait?

I have a few concerns on my mind. Felicity referred to the war in Iraq. I don’t think any meeting of any sensitive sensible people can happen without doing something about bringing this unconscionable, illegal, unnecessary, horrific war to a close. There is a brand new book published this week by the Nobel Economist Joe Stiglitz, and a remarkable woman, Linda J. Bilmes. They say that this war is going to cost three trillion dollars. I don’t know if you know how much a trillion is, its endless numbers of zeros. Three trillion dollars is borrowed money, borrowed, it’s not money we have in the bank. And it’s being used to kill people. It’s being used to create refugees. It’s being used to destroy a country. I’ll just give you one example because this can be done with every one of your countries’ military budgets, where you can think of better ways to spend money. For a fraction of the cost of this war, says Joe Stiglitz, we could have put social security, that’s our welfare system in the US, we could put it on a sound footing for the next half century or more. A vice president of Goldman Sachs, one of the biggest banking firms in NY, says that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enrol an additional 58,000 children in pre-school, it’s called Head Start, for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low income students. And the list goes on. The point is that it’s an obscene misuse of money and it is true in every country where your military budget is bigger than your health and education budgets combined. So we are the guiltiest, but not the only guilty country.

There is no shortage of courageous visionary women to lead a campaign to put an end to war. I think that putting an end to war is the greatest form of prevention of violence. We have just been feasted with wonderful presentations by lots of people here. We must all be quite full from this feast, but I would like to broaden the discussion a little bit. There is no shortage of fantastic women, including each woman in this room, and the woman in every man, who could take office, who could take leadership and sit at the table where the fate of humanity is at stake. We are always told that we need qualified women. I have never ever heard that we need qualified men for the same positions. Next weekend all over Afghanistan women will gather for peace, because they are tired of seeing family and friends killed in senseless acts of violence. What started as a socialist holiday, International Women’s Day, soon became a heavenly day for shopkeepers who sell perfume, chocolates, flowers and greeting cards. And I think those gifts should be wrapped in paper printed with SC Res. 1325. We need to get clever and creative about educating ourselves on what our rights are and what is the law. This is an international law, because it was unanimously adopted by they Security Council and under article 25 of the UN Charter, everything that is passed by the UN Security Council must be implemented by all member states.

I’m going to throw out some ideas about where I think we have to go. While International Women’s Day became a peace movement opportunity to protest the First World War and proclaim solidarity with women around the world, I would like to suggest that future International Women’s Days should call for a broader agenda. We need to call for respect for the environment, for all human rights for all people, including women people, and for drastically reduced military budgets and disarmament. IWD should be a time when our call, our demands, reflect our understanding that peaceful people will emerge when we integrate peace education into all places where learning occurs, formal and non-formal, and schools of teacher training. We need to recognise that democracy and peace can only be achieved when we teach for and about human rights, sustainable development, gender equality, disarmament, social and economic justice, non-violence, traditional peace practices and human security. In a word, we need to see peace more holistically and embrace women and the woman in every man who share these issues and values.

I am convinced that where women have experienced violence, calling for more women to participate in decision making is necessary and wonderful. It is consistent with our traditional call for a critical mass of women without conditions.

However, there was a time when I used to say, “Women, women every where and not enough in power”, or “Women count but only if you count the women”, or “No women, no peace”, or “Look at any photograph of UN ambassadors and ask, what’s wrong with this picture?” But my thinking has evolved. Fundamentalist movements have evolved. We now have women suicide bombers. There are plenty of women who have political ambitions with conservative agendas. We have women heads of state or government who have climbed the testosterone ladder to success and do not espouse feminist views or disarmament or peace views. There is a woman running for president in some country who won’t take nuclear weapons off the table, as an option for use. She won’t reduce military budgets.

Therefore I have begun calling for women who share our progressive feminist values. We need women who would never allow their governments to have military budgets larger than their health and education budgets combined. We need women who will promote gender equality, who would brief all their co-workers and staff in 1325 and hang a copy of 1325 in everybody’s office. We need environmentally sensitive women, gender and justice sensitive women, women who will promote all human rights for all people and who will support the abolition of nuclear weapons as called for under international law. We need women who will recognise that just as the world abolished slavery, colonialism and apartheid, why not war? In other words it’s going to take more than ovaries to qualify women to come to the table.

I have a second concern. It’s true that 8 years after the unanimous adoption of 1325, the resolution seems to finally be getting attention, training is happening. I believe we should have training and a 1325 test for all troop contributing countries before they are allowed to deploy troops to peace keeping operations. Perhaps the image of the UN will improve when the behaviour of the peace keepers improves. The training is called for under operational paragraph 6 of 1325, but I wonder if it is being carried out. There is no provision for a 1325 test. Peacekeepers who abuse women are accountable to the commander of their countries, not to the UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations After leaving his job, a very gender sensitive Special Representative of the Secretary General issued a press statement calling for the creation of an enforcer, someone who enforces the resolution, “to ensure the implementation of the resolution for peacekeepers, to see women not only as victims of conflict but also as actors for peace”. The training he said was “not to criticise people but illuminate everybody so we are on the same level on UN core values. The gap between doctrine, resolution and implementation in the field is enormous and it’s detrimental to the peace process”. And he added, “the enforcer should be a man. Because everyone else dealing with gender is a woman”. That was 2 years ago, and nothing has happened, and it should.

I have a new thought. I haven’t consulted anyone, so you are my test. At a recent briefing with the Ambassador from the UK, he suggested that they were going to be looking at the “synergy” between Resolution 1325, the convention on the rights of the child and the treaty on the protection of civilians in armed conflict. I proposed that training all peacekeepers, all people, in the three resolutions would benefit the population where peacekeepers would be deployed and would benefit humanity. It could also close the gap between the organisations that care about and monitor these three resolutions. How can anyone suggest that women have anything against protecting children from armed conflict or protecting civilians from violence? We would be three times stronger, three times bigger and three times more effective. I’d love to hear your views.

So is 1325 a tool for prevention? You bet it is. Should it be fully implemented? Absolutely. Are there creative ways to enhance its effectiveness? Yes. But the best prevention of violent conflict, as I said earlier, is the abolition of war. Some say that war is already abolished because it requires Security Council approval before it can be waged. Ask the women in Darfur, the Congo, Sri Lanka, any of the 40 countries where war is taking place today. Violence is part of their daily lives. When we proposed the abolition of war as the theme of the Hague Appeal for Peace conference in May of 1999 people thought we were crazy. War is part of history they said, but once those 10,000 people gathered, came out of that meeting, nobody has mentioned crazy to me since then. Bishop Tutu has asked, “If we could abolish apartheid, why not war?”

We need to create a culture where we refuse to allow our governments to send soldiers abroad for the purpose of fighting. We need to adopt Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan which prevents the nation going to war. We need to sharply reduce military budgets and we need to have large numbers of women, peace women, at the tables where the fate of humanity is at stake. We need to insist on talk talk talk, or as Winston Churchill said, “jaw jaw jaw, is better than war war war”. We have no choice. We need to preach, teach and work like hell as if our lives depended on it, because they do.

REPORT by WILPF Secretariat on the
International Women’s Day disarmament seminar, Geneva

From 5-6 March 2008, over 120 women from more than 40 countries gathered in Geneva to discuss 'Women, War, Weapons and Conflict Prevention. We discussed the next phase of activity in putting Security Council resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security to work so that it does more than add a few sentences to speeches, more than add a few women to UN departments and peacekeeping operations.

This 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. Each year, a report and statement from the NGO conference has been read into the record of the Conference on Disarmament (CD), the only official oral contribution from NGOs to this body. The 2008 statement is below. Conference papers are posted here : http://www.wilpf.int.ch/events/2008IWD/index.html

We looked at current global miltiary expenditure - 1.2 trillion US dollars - and concluded BASTA! ENOUGH! - we cannot afford every day to be pay day for miltiary corporations like Haliburton, like Lockheed Martin, BAE, Denel or Yakolev. We cannot afford the money used to occupy Iraq. Two weeks spending in Iraq is the equivalent of what the OECD countries allocated to gender empowerment projects for the last 5 years on 1996 figures. We can have one combat ship for the same cost of sending 6.8 million children to school in Afghanistan for 9 years. One year of global military spending could buy 600 years of the UN's regular budget. Well, BASTA! ENOUGH!

26,000 nuclear weapons, 'conventional' bombs, guns, cluster bombs and landmines will not deter or remove the threat of a Tsunami, a hurricane, a flood, a virus, climate change or a water shortage, the real security threats of our times. And until governments are prepared to face these cold hard facts, they are going to face some serious campaigning about this theft, this organised crime, this corporate welfare, from women. While outdated military security doctrines and budgets of the Cold War prevail, the vision of Security Council resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security cannot be fulfilled.

It was decided to launch a new effort -- within existing networks and organisations -- to reduce military spending and divert these funds to social, economic and gender justice, to averting climate change and envirnomental degradation. Participants will be reaching out to the women's movement, the peace movement, the envirnomental movement, the development movement and others. The issue of resources unites us, as efforts for our goals remain scarce while the military have no-bid contracts, cost plus, and often immune from audit. And we women, on International Women's Day say BASTA! ENOUGH!

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 is $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 rolesand responsibilitiesof 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.

References:

Skons, E., 'Analysing risks to human lives', SIPRI Yearbook 2007: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, (Oxford University Press: Oxford: 2007), p 265.

Resource Guide for Gender Theme Groups, Jan. 2005.

SIPRI, Recent Trends in Military Expenditure,http://www.sipri.org/contents/milap/milex/mex_trends.html

Ibid.

Congressional Research Service, Report for US Congress, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan and other Global War on Terror Operations since 9/11, (2007), RL33110

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