Felicity Hill- WILPF International Vice President

IWD Seminar

Today our first panel will discuss and try to answer this question :  Is resolution 1325

• the historic document the Security Council adopted in 2000 on Women, Peace and Security
• in which the Security Council discovered the existence of women in war and peace and
• which brought the 15 members of the Security Council up to the thinking of the women’s movement of the 1970s,
• which you will find in your packets

is this a conflict prevention tool?  What kind of tool is it?  Is it a tool we use to put a spanner in the works?  Is it a tool to take apart, or a tool to build? Is it a tool to build something new?  Is it a tool to build an extension onto the Security Council table? To make it bigger to fit us and our issues?

I see women are using it in a lot of ways – as a key to open doors for women into negotiation rooms, and their issues into the agenda, as a mirror to hold up and shame those who made commitments and said words and now must do deeds, and as a pair of glasses to see security through a gender lens.  I’ve seen it used as a teasing tool too – “gee, EVEN the Security Council get it, why can’t you?” So yes, it’s a tool. 

But is resolution 1325 a conflict prevention tool?  Well, it has language about women’s important role in conflict prevention, but have we the women’s movement, the women’s peace movement, peace women have we unpackaged that part, or used it enough to challenge war and militarism per se? to demand a radical rethinking of what security really is? of how and why wars start? and how the war system works? With the weapons trade that makes the tools of war?

I think very often we have been caught up using 1325 as a tool about women in peacekeeping operations, (which it is) or the number of women in UN posts (it is also about this), and the number of women in peace negotiations (again, this is part of it) – but while these are incredibly important issues, I think we can affect these issues in more powerful ways by using 1325 to prevent conflict at the source of thinking, and the source of money, and the source of weapons used to wage war. I think we could use it more as a tool to critique the organization of security, the culture of security, the money and human resources that is wasted on military security – on WEAPONS – weapons to kill and mutilate.  I don’t think 1325 has been used enough in this way YET.  I think we can use 1325 as a key, as a mirror and as a set of lenses on each of our campaigns against weapons, on each of our campaigns against wars, and I think we should.  I think its time for us to dare to be more political, to dare to enter in numbers, as women, to what is called the “hard security issues” with more confidence and determination.

We are here together today to try to discuss and answer these questions and some of you have come a very long way, wrestling with visas and crossing borders to share knowledge and experience and inspiration, to reduce our isolation and increase our collaboration

We are here today while Peace Women in New York at the Commission on the Status of Women push and push on the issue of Financing for Gender Equality. We are here after our Peace Women colleagues in Kenya surrounded the venue of the peace talks wearing white to symbolize peace until a solution was found to the worst turmoil since independence, and we are here after 60 Liberian women gathered last week at the Ministry of Gender and Development to discuss their participation in political dispensation after a hideous war.  We are here because women are trying and pushing and working and making a difference, usually on a shoestring budget, with hardly any financial resources to work with, with hardly any media coverage.  We have some good reasons to celebrate our endurance, and solidarity and our networks.

And we have some very good reasons to be very alarmed at how our world is really going.  The small, sometimes medium gains we have made as PeaceWomen we need to see in the larger context, in a tense world of increasing military expenditure, of increasing investment in war, and still using war.  One scholar once said that war is the “continuation of politics by other means”, and another man called John Horne adapted that to say that “war is masculinity by other means”.  If 1325 was bringing some gender wisdom to the world of peace and security thinking and action, we sit here while Gaza and the West Bank are occupied, burn and bleed, while the violence in Democratic Republic of Congo continues, on and on, and while the deaths in Afghanistan go on and on and the burkhaas in Afghanistan stay on and on.  Bombing the burkah off didn’t work – women’s rights and 1325 were instrumentalised very well in that war, in justifying that violence, but the women were easily forgotten too.  Same in Iraq – 1325 became a tool for war.  That is a dangerous manipulation and we were not enough or united enough to challenge and defeat our rights being misused – once again – as a tool of policy, as a symbol to justify and encourage war.

And of course the war in Iraq continues, on and on.  Thousands and thousands of deaths in Iraq, it’s hard to see how and when the violence will stop.  But for some, Iraq isn’t a mess, its going very nicely indeed – every day is pay day. Billions and billions and billions of no-bid contracts, cost-plus and often immune from audit – at least $12.3 billion to Halliburton; $5.3 billion for Parsons Corporation; $3.7 billion for Fluor Corporation; $3.1 billion for Washington Group International; $2.8 billion for Bechtel Corporation. And these are 1996 figures.   The money used to occupy Iraq for two weeks is the equivalent of what the OECD countries allocated to gender empowerment projects for the last 5 years on 1996 figures.  This is called organized crime; an organized crime against humanity in Iraq and everywhere.  This is called corporate welfare.

Well, this is what we have to get around, this is what we have to make visible if we are going to realise the full potential of this thing called 1325, and the long agenda of the women working for peace and disarmament and the end of war and militarism. We have to find a way to speak and to be heard, to conceptualise and to articulate on these “Hard” security issues, and we have to see this as a responsibility too, because while we’re reduced to talking once a year in October when 1325 has its anniversary about please can women have some democracy, about how much training so we women can enter security issues, and while we are making peacekeeping safer for women, we are not making 1325 work for us, we are being worked by it.  It’s our tool, not a tool to make us run around.  If we can’t use this tool to enter the big security debates, the macro, the foundation, the structure, then maybe we are kidding ourselves.   

So that’s what this seminar is all about – finding the facts and the figures and the fury – the righteous fury about how needless waste and death is occurring – to organize, to mobilize to stop it and to take back our future from the profit margins and pockets and mindsets of outdated military security thinking.  It seems impossible, but 7 years ago it sure seemed impossible to get the Security Council to catch up to 1970.  It’s time that security concepts evolved from the ideas of the year 1325 to the ideals of resolution 1325.  That involves having the courage to not only talk about our role but really stride in and assume it, act like we own this place called Earth, because if we don’t our home will be destroyed.  The people who are running and determining policy and the general direction we are headed are watching TV while the kitchen is on fire.  They continue to define security in a very narrow way and fail to see that bombs, guns and landmines will not destroy a Tsunami, a hurricane, a flood, a virus, or a water shortage.  These are our real security threats.  We can face and address them, but only if we have the human and economic resources currently going into weapons and war.