Geneva Forum International Women’s Day Event
Felicity Hill, WILPF

Geneva has been a very busy place these last days – there are Foreign Ministers, human rights advocates, disarmament specialists, feminist peace women, and about a million car fetishists in town– what a combination!   With all the commotion, I thank you very much for being here today.

It is both very rare and very good for a group of NGO women to be sitting in these chairs in this room.
When the Youth Caucus meets during the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty meetings in Conference Room 4 in New York, young people, high school students fill every chair and they share information in unusual ways, they educate each other with music, they actually dance, in that place, they cheer, loudly; they share their rap poems and visions.  They bring such a force of life to that room – where I have spent months of my life –  that I like to think that the walls are infected, painted, with the energy of their free and creative expression of hope for a better future.  Well, I do promise that I won’t sing and dance today or subject you to any of my poetry, but I do hope the unusual presence of so many women on the floor, and so many women on the podium, of this chamber has an effect on this room, which I would sure like to paint.  This room has a long history. 

I think it’s interesting that the first precedent in diplomatic history of non-governmental organizations addressing governmental delegates was at the League of Nations Disarmament Conference (1932-33). It was calculated that the entire panel of speakers and their organizations represented more than a thousand million members, a constituency in 1932 of almost half the human race, and more than half the adults. And the first speakers in this first NGO presentation to governments were women. The 15 Women’s Organizations, including my organisation WILPF, had a membership of forty-five million.  
I like to imagine how different history might have been if governments had listened to citizens then.

I also like to imagine what it will be like when democracy does actually exist in peace and security decision making – where women and men really equitably share the right and the responsibility of decision-making about budgets and policies, and when citizens are heard and heeded on what they think guarantees their security. On nuclear weapons, for instance, where every public opinion poll shows that disarmament and the complete removal of nuclear weapons from countries hosting them is overwhelmingly wanted, we can say we have democracy-free zones instead of NWFZ, so I like to imagine what democracy might be like.  I also like to imagine the Conference on Disarmament continuing the tradition of governments exchanging views with NGOs, the practice that started in the field of disarmament, and which benefits so many other disarmament forums – on landmines, cluster bombs, even the NPT.  It reflects badly on the CD that NGOs can’t read our own statement, and indeed that it is the only input of NGOs into the record says something about the CD evolutionary status, and while that’s worth noting, its really not worth making an issue out of because it’s a procedural issue, and that’s what’s wrong with the CD and disarmament diplomacy at this time, the privileging of procedure, protocol and precedent when we want and need to talk about peace, preventing conflicts and profiteering.  .

This year’s International Women’s Day Disarmament Seminar – the 25th seminar - focused on this issue of costs, and I remind you that reducing military spending is an issue on the CD’s ten part agenda.  And we are going to keep reminding the members of the CD of this, and we are going to be reminding the Security Council about Article 26 of the Charter, and we are going to start reminding governments about the UN military spending and arms trading registers, we are going to start a global campaign of awareness raising with some very unusual tactics and strategies, because we can’t afford this. We can’t afford business as usual.  We can’t afford every day being pay day for Halliburton, for Lockheed Martin, for BAE, for Denel, for Yakolev.  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, 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. 

We are simply furious that military spending has now reached 1 trillion 200 billion, which we call organised crime against humanity, which we call corporate welfare. We learned that in just one country, there has been a staggering 53% increase in military spending since the events of September 11 in real terms. We crunched some numbers and worked out that 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.  We calculated that we could buy one combat ship for the same cost of sending 6.8 million children to school in Afghanistan for 9 years. That one year of global military spending could buy 600 years of the UN’s regular budget.  Well, that’s enough.  On this issue, a lot of people are watching TV while the kitchen is on fire, and we have decided to sound a new alarm.  Duck and cover.

Before closing I would like to explain why has WILPF organised an International Women’s Day Disarmament seminar annually for the last 25 years.  It was first organised by Edith Ballantyne to bring the very vibrant women’s nuclear disarmament movement to the UN, about which they were sceptical, and also to bring the governments working at the UN into closer contact with the women’s disarmament movement.  We continue to do this because disarmament issues have gender components, and because women remain in the minority, despite the adoption of resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security in which the Security Council linked gender to security in 2000, and despite some very skilled and highly intelligent women in disarmament diplomacy today. 

Sometimes the initial response to the idea that disarmament has gender issues is “weapons are inanimate objects, what are you talking about?”  I find that the case is fairly easily made with landmines – an indiscriminate weapon but one that affects men and women differently, with women carrying a vast majority of the unpaid burden of care for victims, being stigmatized in different ways as victims, there is a demonstrable and documented difference in the speed with which women and men are given prosthesis because of the assumption that men are breadwinners, and mine clearance people are informed of entirely different priorities for mine action if they consult with women or men in a community.  

Small arms have vastly different gender issues.  Men are the vast majority of perpetrators and victims of small arms-related deaths, although women suffer disproportionately from firearms violence given that they are a very small fraction of the buyers, owners or users of such weapons. Governments and international institutions are increasingly accepting that small arms are practically associated with masculinity in many cultures. After early policy failures, it is also becoming increasingly recognised that the symbolic associations of SALW with masculinity have political effects.  Specifically, in relation to disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes, real barriers to effective SALW disarmament are created by the ways in which masculine identities and roles have become conjoined with weapons possession for many (male) combatants.  So there is now general recognition that there are significant gender dimensions to the possession of small arms and light weapons.

It would be naive to assume that this association suddenly becomes meaningless when we are taking about larger, more massively destructive weapons.  And more naïve still to think that it doesn’t matter.  Given the dubious military value and problematic usability of most WMD, a focus on their symbolic dimensions has to be central to any effort at weapons reduction or disarmament, because WMDs are not only physical objects, they are political objects.

When one country tested nuclear weapons some years ago, the leader said, “We had to prove that we are not eunuchs.”  A newspaper at the time showed a cartoon that had “made with Viagra” stamped across a weapon.  These kinds of images and jokes rely on widespread metaphoric equations of political and military power with sexual potency and masculinity.  In a paper presented to the WMD Commission chaired by Hans Blix and which our Chair today was part of, it is argued that ideas about gender shape, limit and distort the way we talk and think about WMD, what is considered by defence intellectuals and political actors as good clear thinking about weapons and security, which has political consequences. It is also argued that ideas about gender, what is masculine and macho and what is feminine and soft, very much affect the political processes through which decisions are made, because certain ideas, concerns, interests, information are marked as feminine or masculine and valued accordingly.  This kind of gender coding – when disarmament and trust building and cooperation are basically seen as weakness, irrational, unrealistic – serves as a “preemptive deterrent” to certain kinds of thinking and talking about the effects and consequences of WMD.  These issues, whether you choose to deal with them or not, will not go away. 

And until the CD addresses each of the agenda items it has been charged with, neither will we!  Same time next year mates, and hopefully next year we will not suffer the indignity of being muted, and a male Ambassador will be spared the indignity of being forced to say “We the women of the world,” about twenty times. 

I thank you for listening and look forward to some discussion.