Dear All:
After returning to Costa Rica from the AWID Conference “Reinventing Globalization” held in Gudalajara, México between the 3 – 6 of October, 2002, I have decided to put in writing the proposal I made orally in the workshop: “ The Big Debate: Have the UN Conferences Benefitted Women?”

The panel held on the 5^th of October had as a background a personal statement made by Joanna Kerr in the opening session of the Conference, stating that she personally thought that there should not be a 5th World Conference on Women in the year 2005. Her argument: the way in which in every recent UN Conference since 1995, women have had to place so much effort and resources just to defend the gains in previous UN Conferences, in a context of the rise of right wing governments that go to these conferences precisely to try to backtrack those gains by women...”

The statement sent a combination of applause and shockwaves throughout the room where the 1,200 participants in AWID were listening to her. My assessment of the reactions? Perhaps excitement about the fact that we were hearing a daring, challenging, critical and autonomous thought being launched openly from a young woman in a leadership role in a significant global women’s organization. At least that was my reaction, mainly because it was – at last – provoking DEBATE. But the statement was only the beginning of a debate that hopefully takes us away from the all or nothing approach of past years in the preparations for the UN conferences.

But other reactions were less positive. Perhaps fear of losing even more ground in the UN if we become “confrontational” about UN proposals in the Beijing Platform itself, or even fear of losing the place we have won in the UN process and as NGOs that have developed around and within the UN lobby. They have already placed efforts in the “+ 10” process.  That “place” needs to be evaluated but maybe the players felt there was an assessment without the debate or evaluation.

Concern might also have been based on another reaction. Some women felt that the proposal was questioning the value of the UN itself for women’s advancement, and even beyond, challenging that there ever be a UN Conference on women again in history. FIRE interviewed Joanna Kerr just after she had made her statement. This idea had not even crossed her mind. Instead she was speaking about postponement until better global conditions for women were in place. She meant governments, so much so, that she stated that the Vatican should be out of the UN decision-making process before another Women’s Conference.

Another woman who asked to remain anonymous told me that she thought we should talk about women boycotting the UN, not so much because she really believed it, but because she felt that the stagnation of the global women’s movement has in part to do with the fact that the movement cannot even think beyond a UN and its institutions, even though they are being eroded into a terrible unilateralism (or what I have called a multilateral unilateralism!) This woman wanted a shock treatment for the movement, so as to make us move beyond the present paralysis of analysis and change in the present context. What was sad about my conversation with her is that she wanted to remain anonymous because she felt no one in the movement would talk to her or invite her to events after such a statement and no funding agency would ever fund her again. Sad, sad, sad that the approach to politics of “you are either with me or against me” has occupied a place in the subjectivity of some women leaders (and maybe in the dynamics of our movement.) We still have to revisit the way we have debated and have not debated within the movement, in order to challenge ourselves to face the new context. In that sense, the speech by Malika Dutt from India in the plenary session “Human  Rights for All…” challenged all of us to rethink the positions of privilege (and power) from which we debate and build movement. (Another round of applause followed…and even a standing ovation!)

The workshop on “Power and Negotiations… organized by Just Associates raised the issue of stating, recognizing and making explicit the powers (and the pains inflicted by lack of negotiations that includes explicating power, fear and competition) among women.  

The five women who spoke in this workshop did a good job of assessing the gains that women have made in two of the UN Conferences--ICPD in Cairo and WCW in Beijing.
(Sound files will be posted on FIRE at www.fire.or.cr as of October 12, 2002)

However, their analyses seemed to have frozen in Beijing 7 years ago. None addressed what happened either at the UN World Conference against Racism or the recent Sustainable Development Summit. Without these two conferences, precisely the ones that took place in the new context, it is impossible to assess the status of our gains today.

Furthermore, a participant from the floor stated that the analysis had been too self complacent, and gave the following example. “The paradigm  shift about reproductive rights in the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994…how can it be considered a gain now, when neoliberalism is dismantling state-provided basic health services? Where are women going to get those rights met?

First of all I must clarify that although I presented the proposal, the original idea is not mine. It was posed to FIRE in the last international broadcast during the 4^th World Conference on Women when a woman said that “now that the UN and Member States have successfully organized a World Conference about Women, the global women´s movement should consider organizing a Women´s Conference about the  State of the World.”

I remember commenting to my colleagues at FIRE that the day would come, sooner rather than later, when the conditions would be ripe for such a proposal to gain ground. That moment when it was first stated was not its time. Women were celebrating the results of the Beijing Platform for Action. Many of us felt we had to put much of our energy into keeping what we had gained rather than moving forward. But we were still ABLE TO MOVE THE AGENDA FORWARD ON SOME ISSUES, so there was much to celebrate.

But the changing “correlation of power” among UN Member States and other actors was not as clear cut then, although the tendency was there. I remember the position paper that I presented at one of the main plenaries of the NGO Forum (see book, Looking at the World Though Women´s Eyes by NGO Forum conveners).

In it I took the audience though a guided political tour of each and every UN Conference from the 1992 Earth Summit to the 1995 Social Development Summit in 1995, showing that in each of them emerged what I called the “invisible powers” that govern the world and the UN, but appear outside of the decision-making at the UN.  These "invisible powers" include transnational corporations, the “new” military, the IMF and World Bank, the drug Mafia, Fundamentalist religions, etc.

Today, seven years later, most of those powers are actually very visible in the decision–making, have gained tremendous ground so as not to have to do things invisibly, and yet, we women, who finally have gained visibility in the global agenda of the UN, have, in those same seven years, become TRANSPARENT: we are there, in the documents and the policies, but in the actions, the mandates of the “no longer invisible powers” are able get most actors to go through women as if we are not even there.

In this context, we women urgently need a space to call home -  ours, LA NUESTRA -  were we can (1) assess the huge changes that have taken place in the past years, (2) evaluate and take stock of what we have accomplished and have not accomplished in that context, (3) assess how we have done what we have done (strategies of action, negotiation, agenda setting and power building (personally, organizationally and socio-politically)), (5) look at the gains and the costs (personal and organizationally) of having done thing the way we did them, (6) develop proposals about the CHANGES that we have to make as a movement in order to be more effective in the new context.

Back to the AWID workshop were I first made this proposal, I had one minute to present what I had written in 5 pages, so here it is:

First I wanted to outline what my IDEA is NOT ABOUT, so as to clear the air from the “all or nothing” or the “with me or against me” approach. (Therefore this is an open proposal for debate and enrichment.)

1.      It will not be a Conference against the UN or its conferences. It will assess the current status of the UN today, to look for ways to contribute more effectively to affirm the principles, objectives and programs for which it stands and how to defend, promote, protect and implement what women have gained in it and the place in equal footing that women have to gain in its decision-making process and places. But it will address other issues and spaces beyond the United Nations.

2.      It will not be an NGO Forum for  Beijing + 10 exclusively. It will assess the gains of the IV World Conference on Women and the Platform for Action, but there are other issues, and the Platform itself will be assessed in the context of today, not of the past alone.

If it happens before, parallel or after a 10-year UN assessment about the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action is a discussion that is independent of the proposal of a Women´s Summit about the State of the World. It seems to me that a debate about the 5 year assessment by member states is still pending. Finland is the only government that has said yes to it and we have not hear from other or form each other.

3.      A Women´s Summit about the State of the World will not even be a conference by women in NGOs or other types of civil society organizations. Convened and organized by the women´s movement, it will invite women in governments, specialized agencies and States that want to take part in a women´s space that will set the agenda and proceedings in women´s own terms, regardless of the place they occupy professionally.

4.      The women´s conference will not be an event, but a whole process leading up to it, which includes preparation at the personal, local, national, regional and international levels in order to assess, but mainly to contribute, to re-build the empowerment and movement that is so dis-articulated at those levels also, and also name the paradigm shifts we need in the world.

5.      I hope it will debate and construct new paradigms, be they based on the “commons” or the “gift economy” or whatever women call the paradigm of the planetary world we need to build as a reference point for the transformation we want and that humanity desperately needs.

I have learned during the past years that the big achievement of Neoliberal Globalization has been that it has convinced almost everyone today that the world as it dominantly moves today is the only world possible. Therefore when we all speak about the changes we want, but do not raise alternative paradigms, most people think we want them in the context of this model!!!!  The World Social Forum has used the slogan: ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE, BUT IF AS WOMEN WE DO NOT CONTRIBUTE TO THE DEFINITION OF WHAT THAT NEW WORLD IS FOR US, OTHER ACTORS WILL DO IT “FOR” US AND I DOUBT IT WILL INCLUDE WOMEN AS MAIN PLAYERS WITH EQUAL FOOTING… WE NEED TO DEFINE THAT WORLD, NOT ONLY “ENJOY” IT or we will SUFFER the consequences.

6.      It will not be a consultation process organized by the same global networks that we have had in the past or currently have. Their place in the organizing of the Summit should be redefined  and other women´s social organizations should also be at the table.

·        One of the first steps is to recover our dynamics and negotiations as a movement: how we want them to be and the collective that should convene it.

·        A collectively drafted and agreed code of ethics about power sharing, accountability to others, and resource allocation in the process might be second step.

·        A third step will be a recollection of ideas about the rest of the process at all levels.

·        And a fourth step is how to fund it. Perhaps we have to re-think our strategies in this sense also. A combined effort such as the World Social Forum that combines three proportional parts: local contribution by the citizens and municipality or central government of the country in which it is to be held; individual contributions by all in terms of voluntary work in the preparations and process and also expressed in that those of us who make good NGO salaries or professional salaries will commit to save money to pay our air fares and will even help another woman without a salary to get to the Conference; and funding from the cooperation agencies and philanthropists who are committed to global movement building.

·        The rest of the steps should be drafted in the process….

These are just a few ideas that hopefully will be debated and improved, and stimulate us to think globally and autonomously in new ways and to recover our faith in ourselves collectively as political actors for our human rights and the human rights of all in the new grim context that threatens even the very existence of the human race in this planet and our humanity as such.

I want to end with a personal note: strange as it many seem, I am making a proposal for a process in which I might not be able to participate in this coming year.

Many of you know that I am taking a leave of absence of one year from Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE) from my activism, due in part to a health problem I need to tackle (by stopping the traveling and learning a new way of being in this world as a young elder woman), but also the need to let FIRE develop a younger leadership.

The personal  process towards this leave, plus the process of negotiations with FIRE,  together with my participation in the organizing team of the IX Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentro and my personal conversations with friends and foes have provided the main inputs towards my understanding about the need to recover safe spaces for ourselves collectively…paradoxically, this awareness comes as I become ready to leave both FIRE and the end of the Encuentro with its realization in December, the two most autonomous spaces I have ever formed part of.

As my leave starts next February, I´d like to propose that we all think of a way to open an e-mail  listserv where this debate and proposal can be built upon and start taking shape.

Upon closing the last plenary of the AWID Conference, Joanna said that the proposals made during AWID about this issue required more discussion. Lets do it!

Regards, María Suárez Toro at femintra@hotmail.com