WILPF International Board Meeting Seminar:
21 November 2008, Palais des Nations Room XXIII, Geneva

Introduction and welcome by Felicity Hill

Today we are here in the United Nations to discuss a number of urgently relevant issues to us as PeaceWomen, as WILPF women. 

It is entirely appropriate that WILPF women are here in the United Nations as part of our International Board meeting, which is bringing 80 women together from over 30 countries. 

WILPF predates this institution, in fact, we called for it, and the League of Nations which preceeded it and was hosted on these grounds in Geneva.  WILPF was in the first group of NGOs to get consultative status with the UN in 1948 and we have supported the United Nations Charter, its goals and principles, very strongly.

A few years ago I was working here in the library, going through the WILPF archives which are kept here in the basement.  One of the best documents I found was from 1946, about 9 months after the UN had been established, and it was a letter reminding the First Secretary General that WILPF was closely watching the Security Council, waiting for it to begin the implementation of Article 26 of the UN Charter.

What is this Article 26 of the UN Charter?  It's my favourite part of the Charter, for me, its what the UN is all about, and anyone who knows me for very long sooner or later wants to throw rocks at me because I talk about it so much.  Article 26 gives the Security Council a job – the Security Council is asked to generate a plan for the least diversion of the world's human and economic resources to armaments. 

It is entirely appropriate that the Security Council chose the very day that WILPF started its International Board meeting in its 93rd year, to hold a debate on Article 26.  Costa Rica, the country that introduced the Nuclear Weapons Convention into the UN as a UN document, Costa Rica, the country with no military, is the country that has sparked this debate.  Viva Costa Rica.  Viva the implementation of Article 26.  We need that plan.  Our world would look very different today if the Security Council had done what the Charter called for, instead of what those countries did do, which was trade in arms and profit from weapons. 

Article 26, Resolution 1325, we are dealing with a lot of numbers in the UN it seems, but does it add up to peace and security?  Does it add up to human rights?  Does it add up to women's peace, security and human rights?  Is peace something you can keep or enforce?  Who has the responsibility to protect? This is what we are here to discuss today, and it will be a full and interesting day.

To begin our day of discussions and debate, we have an official welcome from a special friend to NGOs, Tim Caughley.  Tim is the Director of Branch, UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, here in Geneva and he was formerly the Ambassador of New Zealand to the United Nations here in Geneva. 

Cynthia Cockburn is a feminist researcher and writer working at the intersection of gender studies and peace/conflict studies. A visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at City University London, Cynthia is politically involved in the international feminist antimilitarist networks Women in Black against War and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Christine Abogtan Johnson, (UNIDIR) Dr Christiane Isabelle Agboton Johnson, a French and West African national, is currently the Deputy Director of UNIDIR. She holds a PhD in Odontological Studies. From 1982 to 1994 she was Professor at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. She was Founding President of MALAO (Movement against Small Arms in West Africa), an organization that works through advocacy, lobbying and education to encourage peace and security in Senegal and throughout all of West Africa. For three years, Dr Agboton Johnson has served on the Secretary General Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters and is currently a member of the ECOWAS Advisory board on Small Arms Control. She was an active member of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) and a founding member of IANSA Women’s Network and the West African Action Network on Small Arms. Particularly interested by the role of youth in conflict management on the ground, specifically in Senegal, she initiated many activities for promoting peace education.

Resolution 1325 & Human Security: Limiting or Expanding our Political Horizon

The name of the seminar is Over 1325 Billion Arguments for Human Security.  What a strange title! 
The 1325 relates to the 1325th resolution adopted by the Security Council in 2000. The debate on that resolution and its follow up brought into sharper focus the enormous potential contribution of women as stakeholders of peace, disarmament and conflict prevention. The result has been a greater awareness of the gender dimensions of security issues, conflict and post-conflict situations throughout the international community. Even NATO is convening workshops on the significance of this resolution 1325 to its work. You will know why this troubles me, NATO is a cold war nuclear war fighting alliance that has tried to reinvent itself, but for the very same reason, it is remarkable that this body is contemplating such a resolution about gender.  In the policy world, and in the NGO community, the gender and security nexus is enjoying attention like never before. 

1325 is a tool, it depends how we use it. Women are using as a key tool to open doors for women into negotiations and decision-making. Women have used 1325 as a mirror tool to hold up and shame those who made commitments and said words and now must do deeds what you said you were going to do. Women are using 1325 as a pair of glasses to help very short sighted people see security through a gender lens.  Women 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 this a conflict prevention tool?  Is it a tool 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? Are we insufficiently ambitious for the goals of 1325 to take that on? Yesterday I saw that you can buy a T-shirt through the WILPF website that says WILPF – Working on 1325 since 1915!! This for me is a  very real point.  WILPF has been working on these issues for a long time. And I worry that we have collapsed quite a bit of our agenda into this number 1325. 

Why do I worry? It is the issues, it’s the complex and very broad agenda we want to make visible –not the resolution.  If the resolution helps us do that, fine, but if the picture we are painting is of men in suits around a table in New York as the heros and our route of transgression, and not the women in war situations who are surviving, and who have an experience and an analysis of security that is not only relevant and important, it contains solutions, then we are not helping, we are not advancing the issue.  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 have worked so hard to advance, we have to have the faces of women front and centre, not the men in suits. We have to find a way to speak and to be heard, to conceptualise and to articulate ourselves on these “Hard” security issues – and here we are not living up to our own hopes of 1325, we are not entering into the debates about weapons and militarism, I do not see women in numbers becoming part of those debates and movements and efforts.  1325 is about rights, but its also about responsibilities too.  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. 

But it’s our tool, we made it, not the Security Council.  And we must use it as a tool to enter the big security debates, the macro, the foundation, the structure.

But let me get back to the title of this seminar.  What could be over 1325 billion?  Well, 1339 billion, which is the amount wasted on global military spending. 
It is almost impossible to image the millions and billions of dollars being spent on weapons and war today.  But imagining is essential to motivate action. 

If you count, one-two-three-four… two hundred… twenty two thousand and one… all the way to one million, it would take 11.5 days without stopping to eat, drink or sleep. 

To count to one billion, one-two-three… four hundred million, twenty eight thousand, two hundred and three… it would take 32 years of non-stop counting.

From the first day of the year 2008, one billion seconds ago was the year 1961.

One billion minutes ago was the beginning of the Common Era.

One billion hours ago human ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

One billion days ago no animal walked upright, the earth was mostly populated with crawling, swimming beings.

Can you try to imagine 1339 billion dollars and what it can buy?  What it could do in the world?  Do you realise that this amount is approximately 600 years of the UN's operating budget? 

What about this to help us think  - We can meet the Millennium Development Goal target of gender parity in secondary education, it would cost about US$ 3 billion in additional resources. This equals less than the cost of occupying Iraq for 9 days (or four days depending on who you ask). 

We can buy One Litoral Combat Ship (LCS) for US$ 613 million or Send 6.8 million children to school in Afghanistan for nine years. 

We can spend 1.7 billion on US annual spending on unmanned vehicles per year or Saving the life of 7.4 million women or infants in the case of complications during pregnancy or delivery in low income countries.

The UK citizens can have military personnel and equipment for one year for US$ 34 billion or we could have the annual cost by 2015 to achieve universal access to sexual and reproductive health services.  UNIVERSAL. 

I say "we" can spend, but in fact we cannot spend, because the money is not in our hands and the power is not in our hands, and the issue is not in our hands. 

Both human security, our security, and the implementation of 1325 cannot happen until the billions and billions and billions of dollars and brain cells and buckets of blood stop being wasted on war and preparation for war.   Peace cannot be had, kept, enforced or even imagined while the frameworks of thinking and while the attitudes and assumptions that have become normalised and legitimised over centuries about war and so-called human nature are changed.     
And if we are going to do something really strong and effective to stop the waste, to reverse the flow of our human and economic resources into war, we are going to have to act, much more than we are right now.

The first pillar of WILPF's programme is Challenge Militarism and includes opposing military security structures, policies and supporting alternatives, which is why we:

Civil society has played a part in developing the Human Security model, reframing and redefining security to include

These are all parts of security that are ignored if only a military or state security concept prevails;
All the 7 aspects of human security are relevant to women, they have a gender lens, but the conceptualisation of human security, although helpful to the adoption of 1325, has not been a feminist concept.  In Fiji where I was recently working with women from Bougainville, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Fiji, unemployment is quite high, people have no money and have to walk miles because they can’t afford the bus. The rise in violence is directly related to the economic pressures.  Poverty means women are sold, exchanged for money, bride price, so when women are abused and seek their family’s support they are sent back to the abuser because he has “paid” for women, in the past the bride price was to bond families, but now it is about women as objects.  There is this flow that we understand that lack of human security affects women differently, and impacts on their lives, their pockets, their fear, their experience of survival.  But we add this lens, we add this component.
The Human Security Concept was prompted by the UN Human Development report of 1994, the concept of security current among humanitarian organizations has been reformulated as 'human security', referring to a condition where basic human needs are satisfied (United Nations 1994). In this way economic development has become a concern of peace makers. Governance too - for, as Amartya Sen has stressed, development is not only about the growth of per capita GNP, but also about the expansion of human freedom and dignity (Sen 1999). Development indices, when disaggregated by sex, revealed women's multiple disadvantage. Concern about 'the feminization of poverty' took hold.

However, there was yet another way to understand security. It was becoming inescapably clear that, as the nature of war changed, civilians were becoming an ever higher proportion of war casualties. Feminists began to advocate a new, gendered, take on the realist, state-based, concept of security as safety from physical assault, the integrity of boundaries. Women's particular physical, sexual and reproductive vulnerabilities in this respect were foregrounded. 'Women's definitions of security are multilevel and multidimensional,' wrote J.Ann Tickner. 'Women have defined security as the absence of violence whether it be military, economic, or sexual' (Tickner 1992:66). It was clear to see that, to be safe from violence, women and girls under occupation or displaced from their homes, in armies, in prisons, in refugee camps, needed special provisions. Even peacetime, it could no longer be denied, was a war zone for women and armed conflict threatened them in particular ways.

It seems impossible to challenge militarism and insist on a human security model, but 8 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. 

Thank you.