The National Action Plan On Women, Peace and Security offers a powerful opportunity to move towards a gender responsive and informed framework of peace and security, but it will require vigilance to insure that it is truly implemented in a way that assures women’s human rights.

Click here to read the entire WMC piece.

(a)  The United States recognizes that promoting women’s participation in conflict prevention, management, and resolution, as well as in post conflict relief and recovery, advances peace, national security, economic and social development, and international cooperation.

(b)  The United States recognizes the responsibility of all nations to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, including when implemented by means of sexual violence.  The United States further recognizes that sexual violence, when used or commissioned as a tactic of war or as a part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians, can exacerbate and prolong armed conflict and impede the restoration of peace and security.

(c)  It shall be the policy and practice of the executive branch of the United States to have a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security (National Action Plan).

Sec. 2.  National Action Plan.  A National Action Plan shall be created pursuant to the process outlined in Presidential Policy Directive 1 and shall identify and develop activities and initiatives in the following areas:

(a)  National integration and institutionalization.  Through interagency coordination, policy development, enhanced professional training and education, and evaluation, the United States Government will institutionalize a gender responsive approach to its diplomatic, development, and defense-related work in conflict-affected environments.

(b)  Participation in peace processes and decisionmaking.  The United States Government will improve the prospects for inclusive, just, and sustainable peace by promoting and strengthening women’s rights and effective leadership and substantive participation in peace processes, conflict prevention, peacebuilding, transitional processes, and decisionmaking institutions in conflict-affected environments.

(c)  Protection from violence.  The United States Government will strengthen its efforts to prevent    and protect women and children from    harm, exploitation, discrimination, and abuse, including sexual and gender-based violence and trafficking in persons, and to hold perpetrators accountable in conflict-affected environments.

(d)  Conflict prevention.  The United States Government will promote women’s roles in conflict prevention, improve conflict early warning and response systems through the integration of gender perspectives, and invest in women and girls’ health, education, and economic opportunity to create conditions for stable societies and lasting peace.

(e)  Access to relief and recovery.  The United States Government will respond to the distinct needs of women and children in conflict affected disasters and crises, including by providing safe, equitable access to humanitarian assistance.

The National Action Plan is a significant addition to U.S. policy and long overdue.  The potential impact of this order is huge.  In an address at Georgetown University, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said,

This is not just a woman’s issue. It cannot be relegated to the margins of international affairs. It truly does cut to the heart of our national security and the security of people everywhere, because the sad fact is that the way the international community tries to build peace and security today just isn’t getting the job done. Dozens of active conflicts are raging around the world, undermining regional and global stability, and ravaging entire populations. And more than half of all peace agreements fail within five years. At the same time, women are too often excluded from both the negotiations that make peace and the institutions that maintain it. Now of course, some women wield weapons of war — that’s true — and many more are victims of it. But too few are empowered to be instruments of peace and security.

Clinton went on to cite examples of why the NAP is so crucial, pointing in particular to recent attacks on women in Egypt by security forces in the aftermath of the Egyptian overthrow of the mubarek government,

“This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonours the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform and is not worthy of a great people,” she told an audience at Georgetown University.

She called the events of the past few days “shocking”.

Unfortunately, there is nothing shocking about what happened in Egypt.  Women’s human rights improved somewhat during the decade preceding the overthrow of Mubarek, but this State Department report from 2010 points to the still systemic misogyny in Egypt before the uprising.  Specifics about violence against women include,

The law prohibits rape, prescribing penalties of 15 to 25 years’ imprisonment or life imprisonment for cases involving armed abduction. The number of cases investigated was small because women were reluctant to report rape. Spousal rape is not illegal. According to a 2007 study by the National Center for Criminal and Social Research, there were approximately 20,000 cases of rape annually.

Although the law does not prohibit domestic violence or spousal abuse, provisions of law relating to assault may be applied with accompanying penalties. However, the law requires that an assault victim produce multiple eyewitnesses, which is a difficult condition for a domestic abuse victim…

…The law does not specifically address honor crimes, in which a man violently assaults or kills a woman, usually a family member, because of a perceived lack of chastity. There were no reliable statistics regarding the extent of honor killings, but observers believed such killings took place during the year, particularly in rural areas.

Sex tourism existed in Luxor and at beach resorts such as Sharm El-Sheikh. Most sex tourists came from Europe and the Persian Gulf region.

There is no specific law criminalizing sexual harassment, but the government prosecuted sexual harassment under existing law. Sexual harassment remained a serious problem. A 2008 ECWR survey found that 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women in the country had been sexually harassed and that approximately half of women surveyed faced harassment daily.

Also, significantly, while women were actively involved in the uprising, like so many social movements before, women’s human rights were not an integral part of the agenda.  In fact in the aftermath, as Foreign Affairs points out,  the blowback against those rights has been a serious issue,

After the revolution, conservative forces argued that women’s rights laws passed under Mubarak, like all remnants of his regime, were illegitimate and should be repudiated. For example, several thousand Salafis demonstrated outside of al-Azhar University in Cairo in May, demanding the return of educational authority solely to fathers. The general secretary of the High Council of Islamic Affairs, a government body, called for lowering maternal custody ages from the current age of 15 to age six for boys and nine for girls. Challenges came from supposedly liberal forces as well. In April, the Freedoms Committee of the Journalists’ Syndicate held a conference condemning the current women’s rights standards in Egypt. Three months later, Judge Abdallah al Baga, president of the Family Court of Appeal, submitted a draft bill to the prime minister that called for abolishing khula divorce and reinstating, under some conditions, a practice in which husbands can forcibly return “disobedient” wives to their homes – a practice that has been outlawed since the 1960s.

That Clinton finds the recent violence “shocking” is baffling given that her own State Department produced a report pointing to systemic misogynist violence and abuse less than two years ago. Regardless of the overthrow of Mubarek, at no point has there been any indication that an improvement in women’s rights was on the table and as the Foreign Affairs quote about makes clear, there has been a great deal of concern that things may become worse for women.

There are other reasons to be somewhat guarded in being optimistic about the NAP–The U.S. didn’t give a fig about women’s rights in Afghanistan until it was politically useful to the selling of our invasion.  Ditto Iraq.   It is also worth noting that the U.S. does not consider itself subject to the International Criminal Court, which has the power to prosecute rape and sexual assault as a war crime, yet, as I pointed out in November,  it was very supportive of of the ICC’s charges of rape by Libyan forces prior to the overthrow of Qaddafi, despite the fact that neither Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch could substantiate the charges.

If the U.S. is serious about implementing the NAP, one good place to start would be in our own military.  While more sexual assaults and rapes are being reported and more charges being brought, the rate of conviction is still extremely low.  The NAP could also be used to address the severe impact that the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq  have had on women in those countries.  It can also be used to address the ongoing violence against women in countries like Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo where they U.S. has been all but silent regarding these ongoing atrocities.

So while there is cause to celebrate the creation of the National Action Plan On Women, Peace and Security, we should not do so through a rose colored lens.  The NAP has the potential of being a very potent addition to such existing women’s human rights tools as United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 which addresses many of these same points.  But as the United States’ selective support of the ICC indicates, we need to be vigilant in insisting that it not be subverted as a tool of U.S. imperialism.

While the internet is an extraordinary tool for sharing information and connecting with other people, it is also a readily available means of harassing and intimidating people. Women are subjected to an astounding amount of harassment and threatening behavior on the internet and in the ten years I’ve been publishing my work electronically, I have received all manner of hate mail, from the annoying, “Go back to the kitchen” to the death threats that I turned over to law enforcement.

I am hardly alone in this.  It has gotten so bad that blogger and activist Sady Doyle recently started a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #MenCallMeThings to raise awareness about just how bad it is.  As Doyle explained on her blog,

It doesn’t matter how uniquely charming and witty and acquainted with various fine bourbons you are. Are you a woman? Then they don’t like you.And they especially don’t like you telling them what to do. By, for example, asking them to cut it out with the misogyny.

What I got, friends, were comments. Comments about myself. And blogs about myself. And message-board discussions, also about myself. And e-mails. What I got was what every woman (feminist or not) and openly anti-sexist person (woman or not) on this our Internet gets: I got targeted. With threats, with insults, with smear campaigns, with attempts to threaten my employment or credibility or just general ability to get through the day with a healthy attitude and a minimal amount of insult.

Although as a matter of policy, I usually don’t publish blatantly misogynist comments or respond to them,  they are still in my inbox and they throw my mind off kilter sometimes to the point where I can’t write.  While I know of course that they don’t reflect on me, these toxic missives sometimes still get under my skin, making me both angry and despairing.  Comments such as,

All of u stupid b*****. You don`t wanna cook on Thanksgiving Day, then you don`t eat!!! Go to McD and get a burger with large fries, as I am sure all of are overweight/anorexic.

and,

Just sick and tired of all you good for nothing educatedbut illitrate “feminists” (sic) taking stats out of your hats like some magician.

are not enabling to say the least. (Also sadly, correct spelling and basic grammar competence tend to be quite optional in hate mail.)

On a personal level, it is hard to understand how on earth  the men who write these comments could possibly think saying such things are acceptable,  But when I wake up at three in the morning pondering why this is, it doesn’t take much to realize  that the answer lies in large part in the relentless sexist and misogynist messaging that permeates our media, on radio and television, in movies and video games and on the internet.

One website that has recently come under fire for enabling the acceptability of misogynist hate speech is Facebook.  For a long time, they have allowed all manner of pro-rape pages, justifying them as expressions of free speech. It finally took a massive social media campaign to get them to begin to re-examine their policy.  As this article on ZDNet explains,

It only took two long months, over 186,000 signatures on a petition to Mark Zuckerberg, and finally a furious Twitter campaign to get Facebook to remove Pages that graphically celebrated and encouraged rape and sexual violence.

Now there is a group called Ethical Oil that is using Saudi women’s human rights as a justification for proceeding with the environmentally devastating Tar Sands project.

———-

———

While the human rights of Saudi women are unquestionably being seriously violated, that has been true for some time and we have done little to help them because we need Saudi oil.  And we continued to support the Saudi regime even though most of the 911 attackers were Saudi.  But now it is convenient to say that we support Saudi women, regardless of the fact that Tar Sands will do nothing to help Saudi women and is also detrimental to women who live near the project.  Maryam Adrangi explains,

The premise is that supporting “conflict oil” from Saudi Arabia would prop up a regime that is oppressive to women. The underlying motive, however, is not to talk about women’s liberation, but rather to deflect negative attention from the tar sands.

If women’s rights were of genuine concern to EthicalOil.org (and all the individuals that make it possible such as Ezra Levant, Alykhan Velshi, Kathryn Marshall, and their corporate oil buddies) then there would be conversation about the impacts that tar sands extraction has on women.

The tar sands boom has created dangerous jobs with long hours, fostering a culture of alcohol and substance abuse in the off hours. As a result, rates of sexual violence towards women have increased and women working in the industry have reported sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and unequal pay. Gender-based discrimination have also resulted in unequal access to higher paying jobs in communities in the region, and with skyrocketing housing prices and costs of living, there is also unequal access to housing.  Increases in female homelessness exacerbate the challenges faced by women in the area.

Climate Connections has more on this here and Grist covers it here.

The, Feminist Peace Network recently started another website, Occupy Patriarchy, which is focusing on bringing a feminist perspective to the Occupy movement.  One of the things that has quickly become apparent to us is that for women to participate in Occupy events, they need to feel safe.  There have been a number of incidents of sexual assault, harassment and rape and how some of those incidents have been handled has been distressing.  It is clear that is something that needs to be addressed but the right, which is fighting a losing battle to control the message in the face of the Occupy movement  has seized on this as a reason to shut down Occupy camps.

Brandon Darby offers this twisted logic on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website,

The reality is that ideological underpinnings of the Occupy movement–such as collectivism, “consensus” decision making, and antipathy towards law enforcement—often lend themselves to the disorder that predators see as opportunity. Far from “empowering” women, the Occupy movement’s anarchist and socialist principles and policies are exposing female activists to greater danger. They cannot maintain order because they are in the midst of rebelling against it.

Right and capitalism, which allows such things as human trafficking and the porn industry to flourish while funding for domestic violence programs is slashed is perfectly safe for women? And unfortunately, it would appear that there are also those in the Occupy movement that feel that damsel rescuing is the honorable metaphor to use.  Via Feminists Occupy London:

The fallacy of the Damsels in Distress argument is so transparent that it should really be a litmus test–if you have to invoke it in order to win your point, it is a losing idea, so quit acting like you think we should thank you.

—–

This Sunday, November 6th, Tar Sands activists are planning to encircle the White House to let President Obama know that proceeding with this horribly destructive project is a bad idea.  I plan to be there and my sign will say, “Saudi Women’s Lives Are Not A Call For Tar Sands”.

ActionAid and Oxfam have both issued lengthy reports addressing these issues.  In a survey of 1000 Afghan women, ActionAid found that,

72% of Afghan women believe their lives are better now than they were 10 years ago, while 37% think Afghanistan will become a worse place if international troops leave. A massive 86% are worried about a return to Taliban-style government, with one in five citing their daughter’s education as the main concern…

…However women’s rights groups in Afghanistan say they are being kept in the dark regarding the talks with the Taliban, as well as being frozen out of an important international conference on the country’s future and transition of power, which will take place in Bonn, Germany in December 2011…

…Women who have stood up for women’s rights in the past 10 years are also worried about their own personal safety if the Taliban returns to power, with some activists making plans to leave the country.

The report goes on to say that today,

• 39% of children who attend school are girls
• 27% of MPs are women (higher than the world average)
• 5% of positions in the army and police force are filled by women
• 25% of government jobs are filled by women

These achievements are real and should not be underestimated. Yet huge challenges remain and too many women are still denied rights that should be taken for granted. Even now, a woman who runs away from home to escape domestic abuse is seen as dishonouring her family and often loses the right to see her children.

Forced and child marriage are common and only 13% of women are literate (the figure for men is 43%). Eighty-seven per cent of all women in Afghanistan suffer domestic abuse, according to a UN survey and life expectancy for both men and women is around 45 – more than 20 years lower than the world average. The Save the Children index this May described Afghanistan as the worst place in the world to be a mother – one in 11 women perishes in pregnancy (one every 30 minutes) while one child in every five dies before reaching its fifth birthday. This means that every mother in Afghanistan is likely to face the loss of a child. And many women remain isolated. The ActionAid poll found that four in 10 women never leave their village or neighbourhood.

It is important to note, which this report does not, that not only do women run away from home to escape domestic abuse, but all too often they attempt suicide to escape, frequently setting themselves on fire to do so.  The abuse itself is often horrific beyond description, including brutal disfigurement and outright murder.

As for where we are now, ActionAid reports,

“After the fall of the Taliban things got better. But then gradually, after 2006, the situation got worse,” says Selay Ghaffar, executive director of ActionAid partner HAWCA. “All these efforts were undermined because of security and the presence of people who committed crimes and abuses in the past who are still in power. Girls’ schools shut down, acid was thrown in girls’ faces, schools were burnt down.”…

…And despite the early statements from international leaders, women’s rights seem to have been deprioritised as the military operation against the Taliban and other insurgents has been stepped up…

This is  delusional phrasing–women’s rights have never been the priority in Afghanistan except to the extent that they are politically expedient towards other ends.  The report continues,

…In September last year the Afghan government set up a High Peace Council – a 79-member body which is tasked with talking to the Taliban. There are just nine women on the council and many women’s rights activists say they hold merely symbolic positions and are not part of the real negotiations.

…The international community can also support Afghan women through deeper engagement with women’s civil society and community-based organisations. Direct funding to women’s organisations to build their capacity as advocates and leaders will enable funds to aid transformation to a more democratic society, not just facilitate transition without the promise of sustainable change…

…However, providing this support will require a fresh look at funding priorities, and methods to ensure aid reaches women and can address the root causes of women’s inequality. Women’s organisations working to reduce poverty and empower women and girls say they receive little or no funding, forcing them to operate hand to mouth and limit activities to practical services rather than also being able to lobby for long-term changes for women….

…In addition the international community should broaden diplomatic efforts to include consultations and information sharing with women’s organisations. Amplifying the concerns of women’s organisations and ensuring women’s voices are heard is a valuable role the international community can play.

Conspicuously absent in ActionAid’s analysis is the existence of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1889 as  framework for conflict resolution and peace negotiating which are however addressed by Oxfam (see below).

According to Oxfam,

Western leaders have a responsibility toward Afghan women, not least because protection of women’s rights was sold as a positive outcome of the international intervention in October 2001. Ten years on, however, time is running out to fulfill these promises.

The Afghan government and the international community must:

• Ensure women’s rights are not sacrificed, by publicly pledging that any political settlement must explicitly guarantee women’s rights;
• Make a genuine commitment to meaningful participation of women in all phases and levels of any peace processes.

The Afghan government must:

• Enhance efforts to increase representation of women in elected bodies and government institutions at all levels to 30 per cent;
• Encourage religious leaders to speak out on women’s rights in Islam;
• Intensify efforts to promote female access to education, health, justice, and other basic services.

The Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defence must:

• Improve awareness of women’s rights and human rights law in the justice and security sector, and ensure effective imple- mentation of these laws;
• Increase substantially women recruits in the security and justice sectors.

The international community must:

• Support expanded civic education programmes to raise awareness of women’s rights at community level;
• Support efforts to improve female leadership;
• Intensify support to promote access to education and other key services, and ensure this support will continue at current or in- creased levels even as international military forces prepare to withdraw.

The UN must:

• Continue to monitor all government actions including the peace processes and provide increased support to the Afghan government on all negotiation, reconciliation, and reintegra- tion processes.

The report points to the dichotomy between the current lip-service regarding Afghan women and the realities of how the issue is being approached,

Publicly, Western politicians are still backing Afghan women. In July 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated her commitment to women, saying: ‘Any potential for peace will be subverted if women and ethnic minorities are marginalised or silenced…And so when we look at what will happen in Afghanistan, the United States will not abandon our values or support a political process that undoes the progress that has been made in the past decade.’ But behind the scenes it is less clear what will happen if the Taliban make demands that require compromise on women’s rights, as the US government prepares to withdraw the majority of its troops by the end of 2014 and seeks a political settlement to bring an end to the fighting. In July 2011, a Washington Post article reported one USAID official as saying ‘gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities’.This reflects ‘growing realism’ tempering expectations of what they can achieve on the ground after ten years. As one analysis puts it, ‘On this list of priorities, ‘gender’ is generally seen as a luxury to be left aside until the supposedly gender-neutral objectives in the domains of security and governance have been achieved.’ (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s be very clear here–gender issues have always taken a back seat.  This isn’t a question of ‘growing realism’, it is a question of persistent, pandemic misogyny that has infested and damaged life on this planet since the dawn of patriarchy.  It is precisely the stupidity of seeing these issues as a luxury that undermines any realistic achievement of security since the day men first started going to war.  But as Oxfam points out,

The vital role of women in peace-building at the national level and in peace negotiations has been recognised in UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1889, applicable to all UN member states, including Afghanistan. The Afghan government reaffirmed its support for women’s role in peace-building in its national peace plan, the donor-funded Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme (APRP), which began to be rolled out nationwide in early 2011.

Yet women are currently under-represented or not represented at all in the APRP, which augurs poorly for female participation in any future formal peace talks with the Taliban. There are just nine women on the 70-member High Peace Council (HPC), which was created to lead the peace process. Many of the male members are former warlords and powerbrokers who do not take their female counterparts seriously. The APRP has also established provincial peace councils under the HPC, composed of between 20 and 35 members, with a minimum of three women, one of whom must be a representative from the Department of Women’s Affairs (DoWA). However, no council as yet has more than three female members. Women at the community level have little understanding of APRP; their formal role, at the moment, is unclear but is likely to be limited to involvement in community development programmes. According to a provincial DoWA head, ‘although women have great potential as negotiators and peacebuilders, the will and commitment from Kabul to involve them is almost nil.’

In their conclusions, Oxfam writes that, “words must be matched with action and firm guarantees,” and this is indeed true but not sufficient.  Our words in regard to Afghan women were used in 2001 as a tool to garner support for the invasion of Afghanistan, not a call on its own merits to address Afghan human rights issues.  Just bringing women to the table will not be enough–it must be insured that the women who come to the table are not puppet window dressing proxies for warlords or the Taliban and that they are allowed to safely speak freely and that their words be taken seriously.

The most crucial point to be made however is that while women’s human rights, progress and security are a huge concern, they should not be construed as a reason for continued, never ending foreign military presence in Afghanistan, which is only aggravating the continuing violence that pervades the country.  Killing and maiming people does not secure human rights, it destroys them.  There is no possibility of living in peace until the violence ends.  It is time to disarm the warring factions within Afghanistan and for the U.S. military to leave–only then will there be a realistic chance for women’s human rights in Afghanistan.