PRESS CONFERENCE ON WOMEN’S SECURITY IN POST-CONFLICT SOCIETIES

 

Women must directly participate in peacemaking and post-conflict reconstruction in order to protect themselves from violence and guarantee their political, social and economic rights after soldiers and combatants return home from the battlefield, according to a comparative study released at Headquarters this afternoon, by the International Research Conflict (INCORE), a joint project of the United Nations University and the University of Ulster.

The study -- “Re-imagining Women’s Security in Post-conflict Societies”, which analyses how peace agreements in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Lebanon recognized women’s human rights and defined security for both sexes –- revealed that men in power strongly resisted women’s desires and attempts to challenge and change gender roles in societies emerging from conflict.

According to the study, patriarchal, sexist attitudes heavily influenced the development of security structures during the transition to peace, while safeguards to guarantee women equal access to jobs, services, education and reproductive rights were given limited or no importance.

“In our study, we showed that you not only had to decommission the hardware, which was the weapons, you needed to decommission the mindsets,” said Monica McWilliams, Chief Commissioner for Human Rights in Northern Ireland, and co-researcher of the study.

Changing attitudes was crucial to prevent the recurrence of violence and to ensure reparations and redress for past abuse, she said, adding that that process worked much the same way as programmes aimed at ending domestic violence.  Such protections were part of good governance and should be written into peace agreements and public policy.

Ms. McWilliams and another co-researcher of the study, Margaret Ward, Director of Belfast-based Women’s Resource and Development Agency, were among several negotiators who secured two women’s rights clauses -– the right to full and equal participation in political life and the right to decision-making in public life -– in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland peace accord, she said.  However, no enforcement mechanisms were set up to monitor compliance.

In Northern Ireland and Lebanon, there were still “too many men in the room” in post-agreement political and civil institutions, according to the study.  In Lebanon, women reported that personal status laws -– which regulated women’s child custody, marriage, divorce and human rights according to religion and ethnicity -- threatened their security and led to violence.

The case in South Africa was different, where greater attention was paid to institutional gender equality, and gender machinery was created to track progress.  The post-apartheid African National Congress had created a quota to fill

30 per cent of all political posts with women, a drastic break from the past.  As a result, South Africa now ranked eighth in the world in gender equality in government, up from 144^th place in 1994, said Brandon Hamber, an honorary fellow at INCORE.

Ms. Ward said the impact of quotas and other special measures -- recommended by United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) –- in societies emerging from conflict, like Rwanda, was positive and was giving women a greater say in political decision-making and greater control over their lives.

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For information media • not an official record