Stephen Lewis says that the modern world’s economy was built on Africa’s human and natural resources and still depends on them; therefore Western donors have an obligation to stop needless AIDS deaths in Africa by contributing the required money.

Reflecting on his time as United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa (2001–2006), Stephen Lewis highlights the sustained failure to facilitate female leadership and offer effective protection for women perpetrated by UN agencies and African countries’ political leaders. Drawing on examples such as the complete absence of a single woman’s voice at January’s DRC peace negotiations, Lewis emphasises the widespread lack of opportunity for female leadership and representation. Just as he underlines the extent to which violations of the DRC’s resources have been inextricably linked to violations of the country’s women, the author argues that rape has become an essential strategy of war as a means of subduing entire communities. As a challenge to this cauldron of sexual violence, Lewis argues for the pressing need for a United Nations agency for women in order to begin to tackle issues of profound inequality, oppression, and abuse until now simply neglected.

Here is an unassailable truth: if sexual violence is not addressed during the course of a conflict, then sexual violence will haunt the post-conflict period, and make of the ostensible peace a mockery for half the population.

Three days ago, I returned from Liberia. While in the country, I met with President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, with senior officials of the Ministry of Health, with the Minister of Gender, with the leadership of the Clinton Foundation, with the consultant who drafted the legislation for the special court to try sexual offences, with the UNICEF Representative and significant numbers of the UNICEF staff. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to meet with UNMIL, but the UN Mission in Liberia and its peacekeeping forces were inevitably a part of every conversation.

She was speaking about the contagion of sexual violence that currently engulfs the country and causes such intense concern. The statistics are horrifying: a recent study by UNICEF indicated that more than fifty per cent of all reported rapes are brutal assaults on young girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. The gender advisor in UNICEF felt that the percentage was probably on the rise, and it’s feared that increases in the HIV rates among female youth will not be far behind. The Minister of Gender showed me figures for March, 2008, indicating that the majority of reported rapes in that month were committed against girls under the age of twelve, some under the age of five, and she narrated stories of gang rape so insensate and so depraved that it reminded me of exhibits in a Holocaust museum. A further survey, of all fifteen counties in the country, found that girls and boys were united in their conviction that young girls were the most endangered group in Liberia, and incredibly enough, that there was no place and no time of day or night where adolescent girls could be considered safe.

The context of my discussions is encapsulated in the words of the Deputy UN Envoy for the Rule of Law in Liberia when she said, as recently as May 20th: We cannot expect the future leaders of Liberia, the doctors, nurses, and engineers of Liberia to be brought up amongst men who are rapists and women who are angry, degraded, frightened, depressed, embarrassed and confused.

The wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS
By Elizabeth Pisani Viking Canada,
372 pages, $35

This is an utterly fascinating book. I must admit that it's been growing on me since I read it, the arguments and language reverberating in my mind. Elizabeth Pisani writes with enormous verve and acerbity, her prose alive with anecdote and metaphor. There is, to be sure, a certain adolescent touch, delighting in naughty words and vivid sexual description, but all of that is forgiven in the sweep and force of the narrative. The Wisdom of Whores is a great read.

The title is meant to convey the variety of sexual experience and the savvy that attaches to it. The text is replete with references to "prostitutes, rent boys, pimps and clients ... addicts, cops and rehab workers." The chapter on Indonesia alone is an astonishing foray into the world of female, male and transgendered sex workers, all of them imparting wisdom on AIDS. Even in the preface, Pisani talks of a trip through several Asian countries where "I encountered a world of women with penises who sell anal sex to men who are completely heterosexual. I found men who buy sex from women and sell it to men. I found heroin addicts who fly airplanes and Muslim fundamentalists who run protection rackets for brothels."

Yes, some of it is designed to shock. But as the pages turn, the interlocking universe of bureaucrats and sex work and NGOs and agencies yields fascinating insights into the pandemic. It would be a great mistake to discard Pisani because of the bizarre or the uncomfortable. There are many home truths to be found in the most unlikely of places.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/378/48550art.jpgWhen my co-Director of AIDS-Free World, Paula Donovan, visited in November, and observed that the war being waged against women “may well be the most savage display of misogyny ever orchestrated in a conflict zone”, she was right. Terrible, unspeakable things have been done to the women of DR Congo, writes Stephen Lewis. It isn’t enough to stop the shooting when the raping continues apace. The only worthwhile armistice restores peace for the entire population, male and female. There can be no satisfaction in claiming a truce or a peace treaty which is soaked in the carnage of the women of the land. If all the peacekeepers were women, and the men of a country were under pervasive sexual assault, do you think the women would simply observe the carnage?
====

Three days ago, I returned from Liberia. While in the country, I met with President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, with senior officials of the Ministry of Health, with the Minister of Gender, with the leadership of the Clinton Foundation, with the consultant who drafted the legislation for the special court to try sexual offences, with the UNICEF Representative and significant numbers of the UNICEF staff. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to meet with UNMIL, but the UN Mission in Liberia and its peacekeeping forces were inevitably a part of every conversation.

The context of my discussions is encapsulated in the words of the Deputy UN Envoy for the Rule of Law in Liberia when she said, as recently as May 20th: “We cannot expect the future leaders of Liberia, the doctors, nurses, and engineers of Liberia to be brought up amongst men who are rapists and women who are angry, degraded, frightened, depressed, embarrassed and confused.”

She was speaking about the contagion of sexual violence that currently engulfs the country and causes such intense concern. The statistics are horrifying: a recent study by UNICEF indicated that more than fifty per cent of all reported rapes are brutal assaults on young girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. The gender advisor in UNICEF felt that the percentage was probably on the rise, and it’s feared that increases in the HIV rates among female youth will not be far behind. The Minister of Gender showed me figures for March, 2008, indicating that the majority of reported rapes in that month were committed against girls under the age of twelve, some under the age of five, and she narrated stories of gang rape so insensate and so depraved that it reminded me of exhibits in a Holocaust museum. A further survey, of all fifteen counties in the country, found that girls and boys were united in their conviction that young girls were the most endangered group in Liberia, and incredibly enough, that there was no place and no time of day or night where adolescent girls could be considered safe.

Predictably, President Johnson-Sirleaf is thunderstruck by the force of the sexual violence. In a very real sense she is staking the integrity of her tenure on her ability to confront and subdue the war on women.

But how did it come to this? UNMIL has been in the country since 2003 … it has a large contingent of women peacekeepers: it has an Office of the Gender Advisor and of the Advisor on HIV/AIDS; it has gender mainstreaming built into the mandate; both the UN Envoy and the Deputy UN Envoy are women; and the resolution of 2003 which constituted UNMIL incorporated Security Council Resolution 1325 which --- you will agree --- was supposed to guarantee the involvement of women in the peace-keeping processes, but more important, guarantee women protection and security from gender-based violence and violations of human rights.

Clearly all that hasn’t worked in Liberia, where things for women and girls are getting worse. Where did we go wrong?

My own view, and the view of the organization to which I belong --- AIDS-Free World --- is that peacekeepers and force commanders alike have to take sexual violence much more seriously. It is simply untenable to argue that the responsibility to keep the warring parties at bay transcends every other human imperative. It doesn’t. You may succeed in manufacturing a semblance of peace, but for the women of the country, the conflict continues in the most painful and eviscerating of ways.

In the case of Liberia, it isn’t a matter of a contentious mandate: as I said, Resolution 1325 is built into the obligations of peacekeeping. Anyone would argue that when a peacekeeper in the field knows of acts of sexual violence having been committed, or has reason to believe that acts of sexual violence have been or will be committed, then he or she has the obligation to intervene or, to use the language of the day, the ‘responsibility to protect’.

But let me be even clearer about this. Peacekeepers aren’t mere passive observers of the human family. Peacekeepers move into a country; they learn its social architecture; they watch the roiling political terrain on a day-to-day basis. They come to know the foibles, to know the extremes, to know the anomalies. More often than not, they can tell when trouble is brewing. They can intuit when men might hurtle out of control. They have the pulse of the culture. When it unravels, they’re there to bear witness. I’m saying that when patterns of sexual violence emerge, peacekeepers are rarely surprised. In some cases, they alone have anticipated the atrocities in the offing. And with that knowledge comes obligation. With that insight comes responsibility. It isn’t enough to stop the shooting when the raping continues apace. The only worthwhile armistice restores peace for the entire population, male and female. There can be no satisfaction in claiming a truce or a peace treaty which is soaked in the carnage of the women of the land.

Conventional wisdom says that it is the Security Council’s job to set policy, and the peacekeepers’ job to follow it. But that’s too easy. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations, and its military contingents in-country, should be hollering from the rooftops whenever they feel that their role is somehow constrained. If you need more troops, ask for them. If you need more training, ask for it. If you require a larger contingent of police officers, insist on it. If, in the field, you see sexual mayhem in place, then after intervening, take the names of individual soldiers and witnesses and seek investigation and indictments from the International Criminal Court. If the UN’s Member States won’t comply, then call a press conference and tell the world that women are being sacrificed on the altar of myopic parsimony, or perhaps more accurately, on the altar of Pavlovian sexism.

There is nothing facetious in this; I’m absolutely serious. The United Nations cannot allow the terrible assault on women to continue, while crouching behind the ambiguity of mandate. That, I remind you, is what the Department of Peacekeeping Operations did between January and April of 1994, in the perverse struggle with UN Force Commander General Romeo Dallaire over “rules of engagement”. And there followed the deaths of eight hundred thousand Rwandans and the start of the war in the Congo.

In the DR Congo, it is now estimated that 5.4 million people have died since the end of the Rwandan genocide. That conflict was finally supposed to have been resolved by a peace engagement of January last. To some extent, the battles stopped. But as always, just as in Liberia, the war never ends for women.

In the case of DR Congo, the role of peacekeepers could not be clearer. The words of the Security Council resolution of December 21st, 2007, extending the mandate of the UN Mission in the Congo, MONUC, were absolutely unequivocal: Paragraph 18 “Requests MONUC, in view of the scale and severity of sexual violence committed especially by armed elements in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to undertake a thorough review of its efforts to prevent and respond to sexual violence, and to pursue a mission-wide strategy, in close cooperation with the United Nations Country Team and other partners, to strengthen prevention, protection, and response to sexual violence, including through training of Congolese security forces in accordance with its mandate, and to regularly report, including in a separate annex if necessary, on actions taken in this regard, including factual data and trend analyses of the problem …”.

That sounds very much to me as though the Security Council knew full well that things were off the rails where sexual violence was concerned, and this was an explicit instruction to MONUC to get its act together. In that regard, it’s significant that the Security Council went even further: the final clause of the resolution requires the Secretary-General himself to report on the issues covered in Paragraph 18.

To be sure, I can’t pretend to know exactly what lay in the minds of the Security Council members, but these things I do know: Dr. Denis Mukwege, who heads the Panzi Hospital for survivors of rape and sexual violence in the Eastern city of Bukavu, told me when we met in New Orleans three weeks ago, that although the steady flow of raped women has slowed somewhat since the January accord, it continues in shocking numbers; the UNICEF staff in the field agree that things are still in the realm of nightmare for women, who live lives haunted by the fear of being violated, tortured, mutilated, infected with HIV. And who expected anything different, when the countless women who have suffered such demonic sexual violence were not sitting at the peace table last January, and were not signatories to the agreement … a direct violation of Resolution 1325? Who can claim to be surprised by reports from Congolese NGOs on the ground, who say that in the country’s so-called peacekeeping period, women are still too frightened to leave their homes?

When Under Secretary-General John Holmes said the Congo was the worst place in the world for women, he was right. When Eve Ensler, the noted author of the Vagina Monologues wrote of the Congo that she had just ‘returned from hell’, she was right. When my co-Director of AIDS-Free World, Paula Donovan, visited in November, and observed that the war being waged against women “may well be the most savage display of misogyny ever orchestrated in a conflict zone”, she was right.

Terrible, unspeakable things have been done to the women of DR Congo. I want simply to argue that MONUC has it within its mandate to end the reign of terror. If it so chooses, MONUC can also have it within its power to end the reign of terror. Whatever MONUC feels it lacks to protect the women of the Congo --- numbers, police, equipment, training, time, leadership, resources --- let them demand it. And if those demands aren’t met, let them tell the world that madness is at work and it knows no end.

Normally, one would turn to the Secretary-General of the United Nations for help in this difficult situation. But how can we have trust?

The Secretary-General gets commendably engaged when it comes to Burma or the price of food, but where is the same sense of throbbing agitation when it comes to sexual violence? This is a Secretary-General who should be insisting on the invocation of the “Responsibility to Protect” in the Congo, but fails to do so. The defense and protection of the rights of women do not come instinctively to him. This is, after all, a Secretary-General who granted immunity to the former High Commissioner for Refugees, when a claim of sexual harassment against him reached a New York court. I remember that when the Secretary-General was first appointed, he told a group of NGOs that his learning curve on gender was virtually vertical. A year and a half later, the upward climb appears to have stalled at the bottom of the graph.

No, if we are to turn things around, with or without the help of the Secretary-General, the peacekeepers must lie at the heart of the transformation. How excellent that would be. Resolution 1325 would finally be liberated from the dustbins of the Security Council, and women, without fear, could take hold of their collective destiny. You can be sure there would be no vacillation.

If all the peacekeepers were women, and the men of a country were under pervasive sexual assault, do you think the women would simply observe the carnage? Not a chance. And they wouldn’t need a Security Council Resolution to tell them what to do.

*Stephen Lewis,is the co-Director of AIDS-Free World. These remarks were delivered delivered at the May, 2008 Wilton Park Conference: Women targeted or affected by armed conflict: What role for military peacekeepers?

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/363/47347woman.jpgStephen Lewis argues that the level of rape and sexual violence in the Congo is an act of criminal international misogyny, sustained by the indifference of nation states and the delinquency of the United Nations.

Today is a day that has largely – and rightly – been given over to Dr Mukwege and his astonishing and heroic work in the Congo. Driving the work is the endlessly grim and despairing litany of rape and sexual violence. All of us assembled in the Superdome talk of V-Day and the Vagina Monologues. In the Congo there’s a medical term of art called ‘vaginal destruction.’ I need not elaborate; you’ve heard Dr Mukwege. But suffice to say that in the vast historical panorama of violence against women there is a level of demonic dementia plumbed in the Congo that has seldom, if ever, been reached before.

That’s the peg on which I want to hang these remarks. I want to set out an argument that essentially says that what’s happening in the Congo is an act of criminal international misogyny, sustained by the indifference of nation states and the delinquency of the United Nations.

Dr Mukwege and others have said time and time again that the current saga of the Congo has been going on for more than a decade. It’s important to remember that this is a direct result of the escape of thousands of mass murderers who eluded capture after the Rwandan genocide, thanks to the governments of France and the United States, by fleeing into what was then called Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The wars and the horror that followed have been chronicled by journalists, human rights organisations, senior representatives of the UN secretary-general, the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs, the Security Council, agencies, NGOs internationally and NGOs on the ground, and in the process accentuated and punctuated by the cries and pain and carnage of over five million deaths.

The sordid saga ebbs and flows. But it was brought back into sudden, vivid public notoriety by Eve Ensler’s trip to the Congo in July/August 2007, her visit to the Panzi hospital, her interviews with the women survivors of rape, and her visceral piece of writing in Glamour magazine which began with the words ‘I have just returned from Hell’. Eve set off an extraordinary chain reaction. Her visit was followed by a fact-finding mission by the current UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs who, upon his return, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in which he said that the Congo was the worst place in the world for women. Those views were then echoed everywhere (including by the European parliament), triggering front-page stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and a lengthy segment on 60 Minutes by Anderson Cooper of CNN.

Largely as a result of this growing clamour against the war on women in the Congo, and the fact that Eve Ensler herself testified before the Security Council, the UN resolution that renewed the mandate for the UN peacekeeping force in the Congo (MONUC, as it’s called) contained some of the strongest language condemning rape and sexual violence ever to appear in a Security Council resolution, and obliged MONUC, in no uncertain terms, to protect the women of the Congo. The resolution was passed at the end of December 2007.

In January 2008, scarcely one month later, there was an ‘act of engagement’, a so-called peace commitment signed amongst the warring parties. I use ‘so-called’ advisedly, because evidence of peace is hard to find. But that’s not the point: the point is much more revelatory and much more damning.

The peace commitment is a fairly lengthy document. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the word ‘rape’ never appears. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the phrase ‘sexual violence’ never appears. Unbelievably, ‘women’ are mentioned but once, lumped in with children, the elderly and the disabled. It’s as if the organisers of the peace conference had never heard of the Security Council resolution.

But it gets worse. The peace document actually grants amnesty – I repeat, amnesty – to those who have participated in the fighting. To be sure, it makes a deliberate legal distinction, stating that war crimes or crimes against humanity will not be excused. But who’s kidding whom? This arcane legal dancing on the head of a pin is not likely to weigh heavily on the troops in the field, who have now been given every reason to believe that since the rapes they committed up to now have been officially forgiven and forgotten, they can rape with impunity again. And indeed, as Dr Mukwege testified before Congress just last week, the raping and sexual violence continues.

The war may stutter; the raping is unabated.

But the most absurd dimension of this whole discreditable process is the fact that the peace talks were ‘facilitated’, or effectively orchestrated, by MONUC, that is to say by the United Nations. And perhaps most unconscionable of all, despite the existence for seven years of another Security Council resolution, number 1325, calling for women to be active participants in all peace deliberations, there was no-one at that peace table directly representing the women, the more than 200,000 women, whose lives and anatomies were torn to shreds by the very war that the peace talks were meant to resolve.

Thus does the United Nations violate its own principles.

Now let me make something clear. In the nearly 25 years that I’ve been involved in international work I’ve been a ready apologist for the United Nations. And I continue to be persuaded that the UN can yet offer the best hope for humankind. But when it goes off the rails, as is the case in the Congo – as is invariably the case when women are involved – my colleagues and I, in our new organisation called AIDS-Free World, are not going to bite our tongues. There’s too much at stake.

What makes this all the more galling is that in many respects, the UN is the answer. Those of you who intermittently despair of ending sexual violence should know that if the UN brought the full power of its formidable agencies to bear, tremendous progress would be made, despite the indifference of many countries. But therein lie these cascading levels of hypocrisy.

You heard today about the collective UN campaign to end rape and sexual violence in the Congo - 12 agencies united in this common purpose. But with the exception of some magnificent UNICEF staff on the ground, of whom Ann Veneman, executive director of UNICEF, has every right to be proud, the presence of the other UN agencies ranges from negligible to non-existent. This is all largely an exercise in rhetoric. Even the UN Population Fund, ostensibly the lead agency in the Congo, is pathetically weak on the ground and on its own website talks of the problems of funding.

It does induce a combination of rage and incredulity when the UN tries to pawn itself off as the serious player in combating sexual violence when the record is so appallingly bad. In fact, it could be said – indeed, it needs to be said – that the V-Day movement and Eve, relatively miniscule players by comparison, have probably done more to ease the pain of violence in the Congo than any one of 11 UN agencies. Who else, I ask you, is building a City of Joy, so that the women who have been raped can recover with some sense of security and become leaders in their communities?

Is there an answer to this collective abject failure of the international community to protect the women of the Congo? There sure is, and the answer sits right at the top. The answer is the secretary-general of the United Nations.

I don’t know who is advising the secretary-general on these matters, but he’s being led down a garden path soon to be strewn with ghosts that will haunt his entire stewardship and leave an everlasting pejorative legacy. I know how the UN works. I’ve been an ambassador to the UN for my country, the deputy at UNICEF, an advisor on Africa to a former secretary-general, and most recently a ‘special envoy’. In the incestuous hotbed of the 38th floor of the UN secretariat, where sits the secretary-general, critics are scorned, derided and mocked. And exactly the same will happen to me. But I want all of you to know here assembled that it need not be.

If the secretary-general were to exercise real leadership against sexual violence instead of falling back – as his advisers have suggested – on statements and rhetoric and fatuous public relations campaigns, he could turn things around. What in God’s name is wrong with these people whose lives consist of moving from inertia to paralysis?

The secretary-general should summon the heads of the 12 UN agencies allegedly involved in ‘UN action’ on violence against women and read the riot act. He should explain to them that press releases do not prevent rape, and he should demand a plan of action on the ground, with dollars and deadlines. He should equally summon the heads of the ten agencies that comprise UNAIDS and demand a plan of implementation for testing, treatment, prevention and care for women who have been sexually assaulted, with deadlines. I’m prepared to bet that UNAIDS has never convened such a meeting, despite the fact that the violence of the sexual assaults in the Congo create easy avenues in the reproductive tract through which the AIDS virus passes. Dr Mukwege talks of increased numbers of HIV-positive women turning up at Panzi hospital.

The secretary-general, taking a leaf from Eve Ensler, should insist on a network of rape crisis centres, rape clinics in all hospitals, sexual violence counsellors, and Cities of Joy right across the Eastern Congo, indeed, across the entire country. The secretary-general should demand a roll-call, an accounting, of which countries have contributed financially to ending the violence and in what amounts, plus those who have not, and then publish the results for the world to see so that the recalcitrants can be brought to the bar of public opinion. (By way of example, how’s this for a juxtaposition? Over the course of more than a decade, the UN trust fund to end violence against women has triumphantly reached $130m. The United States spends more than $3bn per week on the war in Iraq.)

But there’s more. The secretary-general should launch a personal crusade to double MONUC’s troop complement. The protection provisions for women in the new so-called peace accord cannot be implemented with current troop numbers, large though they may seem.

And finally, the secretary-general should pull out all the stops in getting the UN to agree that the Congo is the best test case for the principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’. Heads of state universally endorsed this principle at the UN in September 2005. It is the first major contemporary international challenge to the sanctity of sovereignty. It simply asserts that where a government is unable or unwilling to protect its own people from gross violations of human rights, then the international community has the responsibility to intervene. That responsibility can be diplomatic negotiation, or economic sanctions, or political pressure or military intervention – whatever it takes to restore justice to the oppressed. The principle was originally drafted with Darfur in mind, but it is equally applicable to the Congo. We have to start somewhere.

The secretary-general has a tremendous challenge. He has the opportunity, the wherewithal, the influence and the majesty to save thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of women’s lives, physically and psychologically. And once the process began in earnest in the Congo, it would spread to all dimensions of violence against women everywhere.

To whom else is such an opportunity given? The secretary-general has said that violence against women is one of the gravest issues of our time. Well if that’s the case, surely he can understand that speeches aren’t enough. And if he truly believes what he says, then let him stake his tenure on it. I believe that the struggle for gender equality is the most important struggle on the planet. Ban Ki-moon should say to the 192 countries that make up the UN ‘either you give me evidence that we’re going to prevail in this struggle or you find yourself another secretary-general’.

‘Ah,’ people will say, ‘Lewis has finally lost it’. I don’t think so. We’re talking about more than 50 per cent of the world’s population, amongst whom are the most uprooted, disinherited and impoverished of the earth. If you can’t stand up for the women of the world, then you shouldn’t be secretary-general.

Alas, I guess I know whether that will happen. We’ve already had signals. Last autumn, in an unprecedented initiative, a high-level panel on reform of the UN recommended the creation of a new international agency for women. The recommendation was based on the finding that the UN’s record on gender has been abysmal. If that agency comes into being, headed by an under-secretary-general, with funding that starts at $1bn a year (less than half of UNICEF’s resources) and real capacity to run programmes on the ground, issues like violence against women would suddenly be confronted with indomitable determination. The women activists on the ground, the women survivors on the ground, the women activist-survivors on the ground, would finally have resources and support for the work that must be done.

But the creation of the new agency is bogged down in the UN General Assembly, caught up in the crossfire between the developed and developing countries. The secretary-general could break that impasse if he pulled out all the stops. He and the deputy secretary-general make speeches that give the impression that they support the women’s agency. In truth, the language is so carefully and artfully couched as to gut the agency of its impact on the ground were it ever to come into being. Again, the advisers read the tea leaves in a soiled and broken chalice.

This weekend has been filled with hope in the struggle to end violence against women. Thoughtful, decent men have come to the fore on this very platform, and women from so many countries have made the case for sanity in words that are moving and compelling in equal measure. I have chosen to link the Congo and the UN because as Eve said at the outset, the Congo is the V-Day spotlight for the coming year, and the UN can truly break the monolith of violence. We just have to apply unceasing pressure so that the issue is joined rather than manipulated.

I don’t have Eve’s rhythm and cadence. But I cherish a touch of her spirit, a lot of her anger, and a microscopic morsel of her trusting love, commitment and courage that will one day change this world.

*Stephen Lewis,is the co-Director of AIDS-Free World. These remarks were delivered at the 10th Annual V-Day Celebrations, New Orleans, 12 April 2008.

**Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

There is a crying need for an international agency for women. Every stitch of evidence we have, right across the entire spectrum of gender inequality suggests the urgent need for a multilateral agency. The great dreams of the international conferences in Vienna, Cairo and Beijing have never come to pass. It matters not the issue: whether it’s levels of sexual violence, or HIV/AIDS, or maternal mortality, or armed conflict, or economic empowerment, or parliamentary representation, women are in terrible trouble. And things are getting no better.

This Panel can create such an agency and show fundamental courage by doing so, or it can tinker at the edges of ‘gender architecture’ and consign the world of women, yet again, to perpetual second-rate status.

I’m not going to equivocate about my expectations: I expect the Panel to take the road of least resistance, and come up with some high-sounding scheme, probably with a few choice rhetorical morsels about ‘gender-mainstreaming’ and expect that that will do the trick. It won’t. If that’s the chosen path, I can confidently predict that we’ll be back again, less than ten years from now, driven by a new impetus for UN reform, the Millennium Development Goals unmet in a majority of countries, and the lives of women will be every bit as hazardous, compromised, marginalized and desperate as they are today.

Stephen Lewis is UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The full text of this statement is available at the link shown.

Stephen Lewis, the United Nations Secretary-General's special envoy to Africa for HIV/AIDS, has been an outspoken critic of the United States administration as well as a number of Western and African governments. He has also condemned the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for their failure to alleviate the AIDS pandemic in Africa. His views on HIV/AIDS can now be read in his new book, 'Race Against Time,' which has just been launched. In this extract from the new book, Lewis criticises the way women have been left out of the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, and blasts the governments that often applaud themselves for their "gender sensitivity."

There's just no way around the constant neglect in addressing the priorities for women. Perhaps the most recent glaring example of that truth is the report of the celebrated Commission for Africa, appointed by [British] Prime Minister Tony Blair. I can't get over it.

Let's start with the commissioners. There were 17 in total, three of whom were women. Three, or 17 per cent. Prime Minister Blair had the whole world to choose from, and he could come up with only three women. Tony Blair claims to be a social democrat; socialists are supposed to have greater sensitivity to such matters. But when it comes to women, sensitivity goes out the window. That commission was fatally flawed from the outset, simply by way of gender representation.

And the report showed it. This is a report that plowed new ground on foreign aid, on debt, on trade, on climate. It was justly saluted on all those issues for the sweep of its progressive recommendations in areas where others had always feared to tread. It recommended an immediate doubling of foreign aid, a cancellation of the debts of the poorest countries, and a vast reduction in agricultural subsidies as the centrepiece of a new trading regimen. Everyone applauded. As a matter of fact, the report even went so far as to challenge the intellectual underpinnings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in their dual adherence to fundamentalist monetarism.

On all those fronts it was bold, oh so bold.

But on women? The report is an absolute throwback. Other than the occasional paragraphs paying obligatory obeisance to women's rights, there's a feckless failure to recognize that women sustain the entire continent of Africa, and should have a definitive role in every single aspect of social, economic, political, civil and cultural life, from peacekeeping to agriculture to trade to AIDS. If there had been a Commission for Africa with 14 women and three men, I can absolutely guarantee that the final report would have differed root and branch from the report we now have in hand. One day -- probably in the next millennium -- such a commission will be appointed.

And just to demonstrate the absolute, unwavering consistency in such matters, allow me to mention, however heretical it may seem, the communiqué issued in July, 2005, by the G8 meeting in Gleneagles. Honestly, it's like a parody.

From my impeccable desktop printer, the document emerges as 18 pages in length, 35 paragraphs in all, 5,000 to 6,000 words, with two full appendices. There are five references to women: two in that most common linguistic fusion of "women and children," one mandatory reference to "pregnant women and babies," one in conjunction with youth employment, and one throwaway line, entirely neutral, incorporating "gender equality."

It is my contention -- a contention with which many commentators would take issue -- that the stunning absence of emphasis on women in the official pronouncement of the G8 is an ominous omen for the delivery of commitments made. You simply cannot be serious about Africa and treat women with such contempt.

It won't work. Mark my words: Come 2010, G8 excuses will be the order of the day. Bush, Blair, Chirac, Schroeder, perhaps even Martin, will all be out to pasture, shrugging shoulders of insouciance. Read the document, note the void, and weep.

But when all is said and done, the ongoing struggle to embrace gender equality was most poignantly brought home to me in confronting the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. [. . .]

Governments in Africa do not do well in the protection of women's rights. In fact, as I shall momentarily demonstrate, they are profoundly deficient. I've been completely taken aback, on more than one occasion, by the wall of indifference thrown up by cabinet ministers when I raise, for example, the plight of women in the era of AIDS. At one point, in the case of Angola, a very senior member of the administration lapsed into locker-room smirking at the mere mention of women.

My argument is quite simple: They would not be allowed to indulge in such asinine and/or negligent behaviour if there were a watchdog, a full-fledged agency or institution as part of the United Nations, whose job it was to ride herd on the recalcitrants. Governments get away with it because no one cares enough to prevent governments from getting away with it.

And what is the upshot? In the UNDP Human Development Report for 2003, there is a gender-related development index which rates most of the countries of the world according to a number of economic and social indices, taking into account, in particular, performance on the overall status of women.

Let me identify the 20 countries at the bottom of the list of 145 which are ranked for gender, starting with the country right at the bottom, and working up: Sierra Leone, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Burundi, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Côte d'Ivoire, Chad, Zambia, Malawi, Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Senegal, Eritrea.

Twenty countries. All are African. While it is appalling that Africa occupies a place of such dishonour, that so many leaders are beyond redemption on issues of gender, it should also give everyone pause about the role of multilateralism.

It's not possible for the UN family in any of these 20 countries to grab the heads of state by the scruff of the neck and shake them into equality. But it should be the role of the UN family to shame, blame, and propose solutions, all the while yelling from the rooftops that inequality is obscene. Only then will change have a chance.

* This an excerpt from Stephen Lewis’s 2005 Massey Lectures, reprinted with kind permission of Stephen Lewis. This excerpt also appeared in a Saturday, October 22, edition of The Globe and Mail. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051022…

* Pambazuka News will carry an interview with Stephen Lewis in our December 01 edition.