Women for Peace, Peace for Whom? A Critical Analysis of 1325 and the U.S.

National Action Plan (NAP) PART II: The Forbears By Charlotte Dennett, US WILPF In Part II: The UNITAR-US Connect Debate The First UN Womens Conferences: An Echo, Not a Voice The First National Action Plan (Sponsored by Guess Who?) Feminism Seduced No to NATO WILLPF and the UN Final Thoughts on the NAP: Honoring Our Foremothers

Part I of this Critical Analysis of the US National Action Plan began by briefly summarizing Secretary of State Hillary Clintons vision of the NAP and WILPFs own interpretation of what a NAP should look like, inviting a member of the State Department to hear the testimony of American women in five cities as they talked about what womens peace and security meant to them.. Hillary Clintons formal presentation of the National Action Plan on December 19, 2011 ignored the findings of the five consultations and instead focused entirely on women, peace and security in the context of foreign national security interests. Part I ends with an analysis that suggests 1325 has been co-opted (a concern shared by a growing number of women in WILPF, both at home and abroad) and that its primary goal, as envisioned by its drafters the Secretary of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council and US AID is to use women in soft-side counter-insurgency activities in conflict areas in order to

win over hearts and minds and make U.S. occupation (both covert and overt) of these conflict areas more acceptable. The UNITAR-US Connect Debate After Part I was drafted, WILPFs 1325 subcommittee (of which the author was a part) learned from WILPFs Executive Director that the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) had approached WILPF to see if it wanted to be its civil society partner in a grant application to U.S. Connect. The application was to develop a two-day training workshop in May 2012, an educational DVD and a gender training manual for US policy-makers, envoys, defense officials, and democracy advisers on implementation of the U.S. 1325 NAP and of UN Security Council resolution 1325 to ensure women's participation and empowerment in Middle East and North African (MENA) countries undergoing democratic reform processes. WILPF would receive $15,000 to participate in the training project. The author immediately looked into US-Connect, saw that it was financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and then sent an urgent warning to the 1325 subcommittee (the deadline for applying to US Connect being imminent, in fact already passed) that any decision on this grant application should wait until there was full discussion of the ramifications of WILPF getting involved with UNITAR and US-Connect. An online discussion ensued, with some believing that no foundations are saintly and that this was
2

probably the best next step WILPF could take in ensuring proper training of policy makers, defense officials et al in gender sensitivity. One respondent suggested that the agencies implementing the NAP are high-level agencies ie DoD. State, etc. This is good because it gives hope that the NAP will have sufficient funds and political momentum behind its implementation." The author respectfully disagreed and responded that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund was tied in to the military industrial complex, produced a chart showing the connections, and declared that for these reasons, the US Connect grant would not fit WILPFs ethical funding guidelines. During this debate the author made it clear that she did not question the motives of those who advocated for the UNITAR relationship, that she simply had knowledge that others did not, having spent 18 years researching and writing a book about the powerful Rockefeller family -- a book that was ultimately suppressed (Thy Will Be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon. Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, Harper Collins, 1994). Now comes the rest of the story: how the Rockefeller Brothers Fund played a role, beginning in 1975, in creating and then trying to co-opt the UN Decade of Women for US corporate development needs. The UN Womens Conferences: At first, Echoes not Voices

In 1977, a feisty, New York-based feminist-run publication called Majority Report carried a scathing critique by its own publisher, Nancy Borman, of the 1977 National Womens Conference in Houston, which in turn was a follow up to the 1975 UN Decade for Women Conference held in Mexico City. The title of the piece was as eye-catching as it was funny: Rockefeller, in Drag, Takes Over WLM. The Womens Liberation Movement, Borman reported, after hosting 1,442 delegates, 18,000 observers, 1700 reporters and 15,000 [Phyllis] Schlaflyite protesters, has neither collapsed nor triumphed as variously predicted. It has, however, been cleaned up, de-loused, manicured, wrapped in plastic and sold for distribution overseas. The pricetag was $5 million, and the new owner is the U.S. State Department. What was supposed to be four historic days of sisterhood and feminist reform symbolized by the International Womens Year turned out to be more like Three Days of the Condor [a film starring Robert Redford about the CIA in Latin America]. The conference, she went on, got a lot of press, but none of the stories mentioned that the Commission for the Observance of International Womens Year, which was running the Conference, is a subdivision of the State Departmentthat the conference was not a womens conference at allthat the leaders of NOW viewed the conference as a shrewd co-optation of the womens movementthat 47 members of the conference staff were
4

working in either the State Department or the Agency for International Developmentthat the idea for a national womens conference paid for by the taxpayers originated at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a major CIA conduitor that the resolutions which were supposedly coming from a series of State Womens Meetings were actually drafted word for word by Carter appointees at the State Department. That was some 24 years ago and you have to admit, it bears some similarity to todays National Action Plan. Is WILPF going to allow the NAP to be sold for distribution overseas without a peep of criticism? The First Plan of Action: Compliments of Guess Who? Here are more comments from Bormans 1977 piece that have resonance to today: Why, for example, was a domestic policy conference being run by an agency ordinarily concerned with foreign policy? Adds Borman: The Plan of Action presented by the Commission for a vote to the delegates included a proposal for a Womens Department at cabinet level something like the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Why did no media person ask where the hell such a crackpot idea come from or whose was supposed to benefit from it.? [Authors Note: The BIA is not known for its enlightened policies toward Native Americans] When ERA opponent Phyllis Schlafly bitched about the plan
5

being drafted by Carter appointees, conference Executive Director Kathryn Clarenbach countered that the resolutions had originated at the State MeetingsOnly one resolution, the one concerning lesbian rights, got into the final plan without being proposed by the Commission in the first place. Hmm, at least the women participants got one resolution in that National Action Plan of 1977. Thats one better than WILPF managed with our 64 resolutions submitted in December, 2011, which was fundamentally ignored by the drafters of the 2011 National Action Plan And who can doubt that the 2011 NAP has also been written, wrapped in plastic and presented for overseas distribution not only by the Department of State, but the Department of Defense and USAID, long known as a CIA front and active in the soft side of counter-insurgency (medical and educational aid, etc first advanced under the Kennedy Administration through the Alliance for Progress). Borman continues. The Commission wanted no change in the Plan, and frequently shut the mike off as soon as a delegate uttered the word amendmentMany women wearing Pro-Plan buttons (printed before the Plan officially existed) said they disagreed with a lot in the Plan, that it was too wishywashy, too compromising, or that it called for too much government control. They said there were opposing any revisions, however, because people in Washington had warned them that any break in the ranks

would be viewed as catfighting in the media, and might be a soft spot whereby the right wing could disrupt the event. Borman, being a real journalist, tracked down the idea of the conference. She discovered that it was conceived by Marilyn Levy, a staff associate of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for a National Womens Agenda that would water down all womens issues so that almost nobody could disagree with them. Levy admitted having planted the agenda-conference idea on the Womens Action Alliance (WAA), a project which at the time (January 1975) was funded almost entirely through Rockefeller foundations and corporations. The 1975 Conference in Mexico, which launched the UN Decade for Women, was co- chaired by a head of US AID with an emphasis on population control. It is this authors belief that the underlying aim of the womens conference in Mexico was to introduce population control (including birth control) to Third World women who were about to be recruited as cheap labor from the country into major factory centers to work in maquilladoras. This phenomenon mirrored the recruitment of farm girls from New England a century earlier to work in the Lowell textile mills. What, we should reflect, were the underlying goals for future conferences in Copenhagen (1980) Nairobi (1985) and Beijing? (1995) WILPF members presumably
7

participated in all of them, especially the ones in Nairobi and Beijing. Did the same foundations fund these conferences and work out a Plan of Action ahead of time? This author has not had time to research this issue. But she has never forgotten this piece in Majority Report)* Feminism Seduced Fast forward to 2009, and a book entitled Feminism Seduced by Hester Eisenstein, professor of sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. (This book was put into my hands by a WILPFER who is deeply concerned about the direction WILPF is going in.) I just started reading it now. I did not want it to color my thoughts about 1325 and the US NAP until the NAP had been released in its unfinished form in mid December, 2011. Eisenstein starts her book by stating her dread in publishing it, because it was a critique of international feminism that she felt no one wanted to hear. I want to challenge optimistic accounts and to raise some troubling issues about how feminist energies, ideologies and activism have been manipulated in the service of the dangerous
*.

The author did interview several WILPF leaders about them, back in 2001. The late Marilyn Clement, former US WILPF executive director, felt that more progress came out of Nairobi. There was a huge number of women of color there. Many are now in leadership positions. As for Beijing, which was by all reports exhilarating, Clemens comments, There was no plan by WILPF. We didnt do what we should have done. We allegedly had the largest delegation 242 people but little coordinated efforts, at least according to Clemens. Felicity Hill, former head of the New York Office who had a major role in advocating for 1325, agrees. Nairobi had the strongest language on militarism. Beijing was a fall back from that.

forces of globalized corporate capitalism. Hence, feminism seduced. She notes that in the 1970s, a counterrevolution against the gains of the 1960s in both the developed and Third World was successfully undertaken, and it is still going on. The War on Terror has given it a new impetus. She notes that in 2006, the World Bank had launched a major initiative: Gender Equality as Smart Economics. Shouldnt we rejoice, she asks, that the powers- thatbe were finally recognizing the social and economic contributions of women? Not so fast! she continues. What I will argue is that this apparent acceptance of feminist principles is in fact an attempt to co-opt the energies of feminism into the project of corporate globalization, an enterprise that has been having disastrous effects on the lives of most women. On US AID and other entities, she notes the myriad channels of influence wielded by the United States, which include local subsidiaries of multinational corporations; foreign military bases; the CIA , USAID ( which provides economic and military air and technical assistance) embassies and consulates; local armed forces trained and equipped by the United States; subordinate governments that do its bidding; NATO; and the agencies of the United Nations, including the World Bank, the IMF and World Trade OrganizationMost recently, the National
9

Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and other US Government agencies have engaged in democracy building, openly intervening in national government elections in central and eastern Europe and elsewhere, to assure that these indigenous electoral events turn out in a way that favors US interests. [p. 171] American leaders, she writes, lean heavily on a concept of democracy linked to the free market and opposed to various axes of evil that collectively either 1) reject free-market capitalism, as in Cuba and North Korea or 2) represent centers of Islamic political aspirations, such as Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or Hamas in Palestine. According to this reasoning, both of these categories of nations and subnational actors need to be swept into the orbit of market democracy. And this was written before the Arab spring. Now US WILPF is being seduced to apply for a grant from US-Connect, itself funded in part by the militaryindustrial-foundational complex headed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to do what? To help national security advisors on the implementation of the U.S. 1325. This grant is aimed at women in the Middle East and North Africa, allegedly ensuring womens participation and empowerment in a part of the world where the United States and NATO are making dramatic military interventions. Does WLPF truly believe that it would help
10

train policy-makers, envoys, defense officials and democracy advisors to somehow make US foreign policy advisors and officials (read State Department, CIA, DOD, and through them, the US marines, their counterinsurgency teams, special forces etc) more humane, more gender sensitive in a part of the world where the stakes for imperial domination are very high? The only substantive negative consideration advanced during an email presentation by Executive Director Tanya Henderson of the pros and cons of this grant was whether, By training U.S. policy makers and possibly defense officials are we putting ourselves in a position where we could later be responsible for harm caused by our government as part of its foreign policy agenda? Thats a serious question, and not one to be quickly dismissed because a grant deadline is hovering. NO TO NATO Now consider the concerns express in April 2011 from the group No to NATO in their paper, Snagged on the Contradiction: NATO, UNSC Resolution 1325, and Feminist Responses by Cynthia Cockburn, herself a WILPF member. It starts: The more energetically we push for [1325s] implementation, the more we see its limitations. Worse, we realize how it can be used for ends quite contrary to those we intended. NATOIt is an enraging
11

example of how good feminist work can be manipulated by a patriarchal and militarist institution. Cockburn points out that implementing 1325 could mean relatively unproblematic and even creative encounters with civil-military functionaries of relatively benign state armies like those of the Netherlands. But many seemingly benign armies are being commanded by NATO. It may speak the dainty language of security, But its actions show it to be an ambitious, expansionist and belligerent war-machine. NATO, Cockburn points out, has adopted 1325 with an energy that could easily pass for enthusiasm. It has even mounted a multi-media exhibition, showing pleasing photos of young women in army fatigues carrying babies, waving to children. Next thing you know, well be seeing WILPF trainers teaching NATO officers how to be humane toward women. That should do wonders for NATO propaganda, and for our international reputation. Secretary General Kofi Anan, on his 10th anniversary speech, noted the presence of high-level gender advisers in Afghanistan and that the US Martine Corps had, according to Coburn, begun fielding all-women military units in the most troubled provinces, with highly positive results. In other words, NATO, under the mantra of WPS (Women, Peace and Security) is providing gender awareness training to the civilian and military teams before these
12

deploy on operations. Fact is, the US occupation of Afghanistan continues to be a disaster, as noted most recently in a February 2012 issue in Rolling Stone, and whatever gains were made in helping a comparatively small number of some women have been far overshadowed by ongoing widespread misery and anger all concealed from the American people. As this author wrote in a recent issue of Peace and Freedom (Afghan Women: How Should WILPF and All Feminists Respond to Their Plight?): Malalai Joya, an outspoken (and suspended) member of the Afghan Parliament, has no illusions about the use and misuse of women in her country. Shes been traveling the world urging support for all the people of Afghanistan, claiming their battle is in their towns and villages. The aim of the war, she said in an interview with Truthout, was never to create democracy and justice nor to uproot the terrorist groups. The war's only purpose has been to perpetuate the occupation, install military bases and safeguard the takeover of a region that has substantial natural resources. All of the troops must leave and the militia of the warlords must be dismantled. Democracy can't be established by an occupying force that does nothing more than spread out and strengthen the Talibanization of my country.

13

Her message to us is simple: Withdraw your troops now! And her message to Westerners, in her book A Woman Among Warriors, is equally clear: The Afghan people have been betrayed once again by those who are claiming to help themThe U.S. has tried to justify its occupation about liberating Afghan women, but we remain caged in our country, without access to justice and still ruled by womanhating criminals. CONCLUSION The last thing WILPF should be doing is training U.S. or NATO military advisors on gender sensitivity! For what purpose? To ease, and therefore prolong, their occupation? As Cockburn points out, If Afghan women are to be searched at checkpoints, it is certainly more desirable that they should be handled by women than men. Yet how can we, who oppose NATO, who deplore its very existence and its war in Afghanistan how can we welcome its espousal of our Resolution 1325? Especially when the war was legitimated, by those who launched it, in part by its potential for liberating women from fundamentalist oppression.? One month ago, WILPFs Internationals Executive Committee met in London and among the issues it discussed was this: Is 1325 co-opting the womens security agenda and is it being used and interpreted in ways we did not envision or support?
14

Among the groups interim conclusions: Peace enforcement inevitably involves the use of force and the inevitable consequences for the civilian population. Militarisation then continues in the attempts to consolidate the peace which has long term consequences for the reconstruction of social relations, particularly along gender lines, and with enormous impact as to the understanding of security. We need to scrutinise the performance of gender roles and not believe that by having women in the military they either can, or will want to transform that institution. We need to bring OUR approach to real security into the 1325 agenda. Women are needed in Peacekeeping but our issue is broader, it is to interrogate the nature of the peacekeeping and how it should be conducted and to what purpose. At WILPFs International Congress in Costa Rica last summer, the French delegation, led by Marlene Tuininga, put out a challenge regarding the direction of WILPF. More reasoned analysis was needed, she argued - -a point with which this writer wholeheartedly agrees. In the French vision of WILPF which the International Board had authorized Marlene to present and which was subsequently developed by a working group, printed in the WILPF

15

Congress News and disseminated in Costa Rica, the group made the following points:

Can there be freedom for people whose basic needs are not met Can we talk about freedom when whole populations are occupied by others, like the Afghan people, like the Palestinians, the Tibetans the Uzbeks? The culture of violence seems to prevail everywhere. In the name of anti-terrorism more and more laws restraining civil liberties are voted by so-called democratic parliaments.

NATO, the French paper goes on, has tried to establish, in the name of security, a world-wide military alliance of so-called white countries, ready to intervene anywhere in the world with the explicit intention to replace the United Nations, considered obsolete. WILPF and THE UN Increasingly, women within WILPF and outside of it are beginning to question whether they have put too much reliance on the United Nations to solve the problems confronting women worldwide. Should they put so much stock in resolutions, or should they try to reform the UN and make it more democratic? This issue was presented before the Congress in Costa Rica, again by WILPFs French section. The author, who attended the Congress,
16

took the issue very seriously and wrote a paper, THE UN: Whats Wrong with It? What Can WILPF do about it? and gave it to some of the delegates. It reviews the history of U.S. domination of the UN, including the Security Council. It also goes into some detail on the history of Section 1325, discussing the positive role WILPFERS like Felicity Hill had in launching it, while showing how it has disappointed its advocates since it was first passed. One big problem is the lack of adequate funding something that is still missing from the current US Action Plan. Heres an excerpt from the paper: The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) examined post-conflict planning in 12 countries and discovered that in Post-Conflict Needs Assessments prepared for Multi-Donor Trust Funds, less than 5 percent of the activities and only 3 percent of budget lines mentioned womens needs. Low and diminishing levels of gender-responsiveness were also evident in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Overall, the budget for the area of economic recovery and infrastructure represents a significant portion of total funds, it showed the lowest degree of gender-responsiveness. This raises a big question: Economic recovery for whom? For people? Or for multi-national corporations. It turns out that during post-conflict periods donor funding largely substitutes for small or non-existent government budgets. Topping the list of donor funders is the World Bank, which then channels
17

its money through various local partners, whether the Asian Development Fund in Timor-Leste, the African Development Bank in Sierra Leone, or the Office of Transition Initiatives (through the U.S. Agency for International Development.) FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE CONSULTATIONS AND US NAP WILPF-US has just reached a historic turning point. Either it continues to engage (in the sense of challenging) the drafters of the U.S. Action Plan the State Department, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and U.S AID as it did with its consultations or it succumbs to them and allows itself to be used for purposes inimical to WILPF and its founding mothers. WILPF, in declaring that it would be a voice, not an echo, owes an explanation to all the women who were invited to participate in the the consultations, women who were inspired by the experience, who thought that their concerns, for the first time, were being taken seriously. Many came from minority and working class neighborhood to share their concerns. WILPF, by giving these and other women a voice, did right in the consultations. WILPF should continue on this path, insisting on a U.S. National Action Plan that addresses womens real security
18

needs, beginning in this country. Turn these experiences into a Voters Guide, to be used in the 2012 national elections. Criticize the NAP Drafters for ignoring the needs of American women, and for failing to put the needs of all women in a human rights context. Show the rest of the world that WILPF will not be cowed by the powers that be. Use WILPFs version of the NAP as a model for other countries to follow. And finally, let us honor the struggles of our foremothers, those brave and resolute women from around the world who a century ago traveled, at great risk in the time of war, to the Hague to declare their abhorrence of a senseless war and to demonstrate their independence from militarism. We owe it to the memory of the founders of WILPF to chart a new course. We can do it, and emerge on the 100th anniversary with heads held high, and our vision of the future clear. We will, once again, be a voice, not an echo.

19