No doubt the coming weeks leading up to the United Nations Fourth World conference on Women in Beijing in September will be filled with media hype about high hopes for a successful outcome. But such reports may prove unrealistic. The problem is that UN delegations failed to complete successfully the hard, nitty-gritty work of thrashing out agreement while easing major conceptual and linguistic sticking-points at the Preparatory Meeting or “Prep Com” held at the UN in New York in March.
Despite extension of the Prep Com by three days, more than one-third of the 124 page text was to go to Beijing bracketed, i.e. enclosed in square brackets for further debate, and signifying serious disagreement. Official concern has been so great that an emergency reconvening of the Prep Com was announced for the end of July to attempt once again to force agreement on the “less controversial” bracketed sections.
If the depth of the divisions revealed in the March Prep Com meeting is anything to go by, the chances of consensus are not looking too good. Though the Beijing Conference is scheduled from the 4th to the 15th of September, it seems highly unlikely that a genuine consensus can be achieved in the course of less than ten days of Main Committee debate.
The more likely outcome is that a superficial consensus will be racked up through less than impartial chairmanship. This will include limiting open debate and moving the more contentious issues off camera to working groups with instructions to produce texts of maximum agreement. Delegations will be reminded by the Chair of the pressure of the waiting media. Recalcitrant delegates will be harried as at Cairo with such pearls of wise chairmanship as: “The press will be there. I reminded delegates it is not the UN custom to make reservations in the Main Committee and the Plenary.”
At the New York Prep Com, serious problems were revealed with a multitude of linguistic errors causing French and Spanish speaking delegations to complain that the Beijing document translations were inadequate. The word “gender,” for example, used over 200 times with specifically New York feminist connotations, has no adequate counterpart in French or Spanish, the working languages of scores of the world‘s poorer countries. Indeed, to many Third World countries much of the Western feminist language will remain, I suspect, impenetrable and largely irrelevant. Bella Abzug of the powerful Women’s Caucus complained in Cairo of back-sliding Third World delegates: “They forget everything you tell them; you have to explain again and again. The developing countries say to me, ‘These are words and we don’t understand them’; there are lots of concepts and words they don’t understand.”
UN conference organizers have always been keen to avoid taking the final document to a formal vote, where two-thirds majority of the 185 member nations is needed for adoption. At Cairo, they were able to preserve the fiction of consensus (100% agreement) by allowing reservations to be expressed in the final Plenary session and by pointing out on a number of occasions that the whole document was to be governed by a chapeau that would allow each country to interpret it in accordance with the religious, ethical and cultural values of its people.
Whether the attachment of a similar chapeau in Beijing will do the trick in neutralizing opposition is doubtful. The US feminists seem excessively zealous, motivated to disallow all reservations and to close off what they consider to be religious, ethical and cultural loopholes for not embracing their total gender agenda. Ostensibly the Beijing conference is very much committed to focusing on women’s issues, but since the most prominent issues are those defined by Western feminism, the program doesn’t seem to have a great deal of relevance to the main concerns of the vast majority of women in poorer countries of the world. There is a fundamental mismatch between primary goals of women separated by the North/South divide.
Preoccupations with conditions of work such as child care and paid maternity leave, are hardly relevant to the millions of women who haven’t a hope of any job. It is an insult to preach transformation of gender-pre scribed roles within the production process. It is also insulting to impose gender-based attitudinal changes to the division of labor for people who have no jobs at all. Such concerns are a farcical distance removed from the primary concerns of the billion poorest women who, I’m sure, couldn’t give a damn about the gender balance of engineers as long as they bring their children clean water and sanitation. It is an insult when the Beijing document specifies that men and boys be “compelled to share the housework” to these people who have no house, only a few sheets of rusted iron and old cardboard. And it is crass to insist on special funding for expanded bureaucracies devoted to gender policing and gender disaggregation of statistics when the deaths of between one and two million children each year can be prevented by the investment of a far more modest amount in the provision of vitamin A supplements (UNICEF ‘95).
It’s a real shame that the Beijing agenda should focus on the jumbled priorities of a pampered coterie of New York-based feminists with fanatical social orientation and distinctly fascist tendencies as revealed in the Beijing Document’s push for government legislation and “enforcement.” It is ironic that the feminist movement, built primarily on the rhetoric of “choice,” has so quickly resorted to the language of “enforcement.” Sugarcoating enforcement with the rhetoric of “women’s rights” does not make it any more palatable. The Beijing Conference is about substantially increasing the legal, social, and financial pressure on all governments, all transnational corporations, all private enterprise, all communities, all families, and all individuals to “choose” the gender-perspective outlined in the Platform for Action. Essentially, it’s about the forced deconstruction of traditional societies, about gutting the family unit, removing from mothers the “burden” of caring for their own children, to “free” them for economic independence in the work-force. Above all, it’s about enforced reconstruction of a new global society using the female individual as the basic unit, and welfare governments as surrogate fathers.
Contentious issues abound, but the most fiery debate will probably be over abortion. The abortion issue raises a number of inherent contradictions in the Beijing Draft. Especially problematic is the call for a special focus on programs that discourage female feticide. It points up one of the defects of the document, vis-a-vis the naive expectation of building a better world through an exclusive focus on females. A document which perpetrates the fallacy of discouraging female feticide while demanding abortion rights that encompass female and male feticide lacks both logical consistency and moral integrity.
“Unsafe abortion” will again be raised in Beijing using the Cairo definition that it is “a major public health concern.” While speculative claims for 70,000 maternal deaths from abortion each year (WHO, Sept. 94) is indisputably tragic, it is hardly a “major public health issue” when placed in the perspective of other dreadfully serious mortalities which are insufficiently addressed worldwide. Not when placed in the perspective of 5,000,000 infant deaths each year from diseases related to the truly major public health concerns of 1 billion people with no safe water and of two billion people with inadequate sanitation.
Sexual and reproductive rights are being resurrected in the Beijing document under the banner of “universal human rights.” Despite the document’s confident statement that “the universal nature of these Human rights and freedoms is beyond question,” the word “universal” is bracketed and will, no doubt, be explored in Beijing by the Holy See and other delegations interested in teasing out potential applications to adolescents, for instance, or to practices such as sodomy.
And so the battle lines are set for Beijing. The world divisions have deepened. A new bout of US isolationism may mean that there will be less arm-twisting of the poorer countries to achieve consensus through threats of withdrawing donor support. At the same time, developing countries are becoming impatient with western dominance of UN agendas. At the Copenhagen Social Summit, Malaysia’s Prime Minister objected to the developing world being stereotyped as “a bottomless pit meant for wasted Western handouts and welfare programs.” He went on to insist that the developing world be given its rightful place.
It appears that there is a widening chasm between the developing world and western feminist ideology, and I can see nothing in the Beijing Platform likely to reconcile the two. The world view through a New York feminist lens holds that the most urgent global inequity the UN needs to address is gender-based, and requires concerted action on women’s issues. The view from the developing countries, however, seems to see the most pressing injustice and inequity in terms of maldistribution of people and resources, and these countries will be seeking a more equitable distribution through development and migration.
The real concerns of the poorer countries, mainly the urgent need for development and a loosening of migration barriers, are not scheduled for any major discussion in Beijing. Perhaps it will be as at Cairo: the developing countries will be frustrated to the point of an explosive rejection of this Platform of Action that promises to hedge development with a further expensive layer of gender requirements added to the already expensive stipulations of environmental standards from the Rio Earth Summit. Perhaps in Beijing the developing countries will not be so easily bought off as they were in Cairo by promises of an international conference on migration “in the very near future.” In regard to the urgency of development needed to avert massive South/North migration, Alan Doss, UN Development Programme director in Europe, warned at Copenhagen: “There is a huge time-bomb ticking out there. If economic opportunity does not come to the people, the people will come to economic opportunity.”
The growing cultural arrogance of many Asian countries, too, may mean the adoption of a much more critical posture towards the Western feminists’ social engineering plans. They may-be inclined to see the Beijing Platform as a blueprint for Western-style social disintegration, moral decline, and uncontrollable welfare budgets that vainly attempt comprehensive compensation for abrogation of traditional family responsibilities. Given the Asian countries’ concern with development, they may insist that, contrary to the claims of the Beijing Draft, development is possible without the massive social upheaval that will be required to enact the Draft’s gender perspective. After all, the prosperity of the West was not built on such a perspective.
Proposed changes to inheritance laws to guarantee equal succession and inheritance rights of children, regardless of sex, may also prove a sticking point. Such changes have implications for the continuity and sustainability of rural societies and of the deposit of rural knowledge, and could severely affect the viability of small rural landholdings throughout the world.
Consensus on this and other issues may prove especially difficult to elicit from the Islamic countries. Denigrating references in the Draft to “religious extremism” and “cultural prejudices,” intimating that religion and culture are inimical to the new gender perspective, are almost certain to meet Islamic resistance. Neither is there reason to suppose that the Islamic countries will be any more agreeable towards “legal safeguards” to prevent “discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or lifestyle” than they were to the “marriage and other unions” language at Cairo whereby Western moralists attempted to secure global legitimacy for homosexual unions.
And finally, of course, there will be some countries like China and Zaire that will commit to everything, ratify everything, and agree with everything in the Beijing Platform, in the supreme complacency that their governments haven’t the least intention of complying with any of it. The Chinese are particularly accommodating. Indeed, Chinese leaders continue to demonstrate a disconcerting facility for picking up feminist language and using it to justify their savage human rights abuses, such as the enforced abortions and sterilizations involved in their infamous one-child policy. In March this year, President Jiang Zemin, in ordering a new offensive against unauthorized babies, stressed the importance among women of smaller families, emphasizing that “family planning is important to liberate women,” and adding that this would boost their status and give them more time and energy for their own careers and lives!
In all, the Beijing conference is set to bring together an unwieldy, volatile mix of countries and issues. It should be interesting.
Rita Joseph is an Australian journalist who specializes in women’s issues and public policy. A previous article by Mrs. Joseph, “From Cairo to Copenhagen,” appeared in the PRI Review, vol. 5, no. 2, March/April 1995.
