Beijing Conference: Gender justice and global apartheid

At Beijing, women refused to be silenced by the dominant discourse which focused attention on a narrow concept of human rights, gender justice and gender empowerment. They advanced a more holistic concept of gender justice which incorporates environmental, economic and social justice.

by Vandana Shiva

THIRTY thousand women gathered in Beijing for the largest conference ever - the Fourth UN World Conference on Women.

The coverage of the Beijing conference by the global media gave the impression the world's largest conference was on China, not on women. Even the Secretary-General of the Conference, Gertrude Mongella, had to chide the media covering the conference in Beijing for harping on logistics rather than real issues affecting women.

Most of the media focus was on the site of the NGO Forum at Huairou. Huairou, a beautiful scenic resort with full tourist facilities and hotels, was falsely projected as a 'muddy and primitive site' in most media reports. Of the UN Conferences at which I have been present over the last decade, the NGO Forum site and arrangements at Beijing were undoubtedly the best and they clearly surpassed what was available to NGOs in Nairobi, Rio, Cairo and Copenhagen.

The focus on the 'site' and on the 'logistics' started when the site of the forum was shifted from the workers' stadium in the city to a scenic resort 60 km from the city centre. Much has been made of the distance between Huairou and Beijing.

In fact, the NGO Facilitating Committee focused the energies of women's organisations and movements across the world by initially refusing to accept Huairou, even though it was far more appropriate for NGO activities because it was in a green area, had tourist facilities, and offered open spaces for self-organising.

At the Earth Summit in Rio, the NGO Forum and the UN Conference were also far apart, but no one made a fuss about it and the environment movements did not get diverted by the issue of logistics and siting. In fact, the issue of the distance was far less significant in Beijing because the Chinese hosts provided free shuttle services to take people from Beijing to the NGO Forum, a facility that was not available in Rio. The Chinese hosts also specially constructed apartments in Huairou for low-cost subsidised accommodation for $10-15 a day for representatives from grass roots movements who could not afford hotels at $100 a day.

An encounter between 'barbarians'

Huairou in Chinese means 'Be kind to the barbarians'. In an ironical way, the biggest cross-cultural event was reduced from being a celebration of cultural diversity and an exchange between different civilisations to being a strange encounter between Western Civilisation (led by the US) and the Chinese - with the others also considered as barbarians.

Hillary Clinton, whose participation was not confirmed till the last minute, gave a talk at the NGO Forum on the 6th. To create a venue for her, a major rally of women activists was cancelled by the NGO Committee. Even while Mrs Clinton's own speaking opportunity was created by violating the rights of NGOs to organise their events as planned at the NGO Forum, the focus of Mrs Clinton's speech was on the violation of rights of NGOs by the Chinese authorities. The Chinese later indirectly and politely told the US to mind its own business.

The Americans projected China to themselves and the world as a primitive society, not as one of the oldest civilisations. Wangari Mathai, the leader of Kenya's greenbelt movement, and I observed the strange interactions between the Americans and Chinese taxi drivers. It was assumed that because the taxi drivers did not speak English, they did not understand anything and were stupid. It was never recognised that the lack of understanding was on the part of visitors who had no knowledge of Chinese.

These interactions reflected how the refusal to recognise and respect cultural diversity has prevented the West from being guests in other cultures - respecting the people, their ways, and their languages. The inability to be a guest creates the behaviour of the coloniser. Such colonising tendencies were evident in Beijing even though the language of colonisation in this situation happens to be the language of human rights.

Which human rights?

Human rights emerged as a major theme at the Women's Conference, with speaker after speaker insisting that women's rights are inseparable from human rights.

The US human rights group, 'Human Rights Watch' even prepared and distributed a booklet Your Rights in Beijing: A Brief Guide for delegates to the 1995 NGO Forum On Women. The booklet has sections on 'Getting your message across: restrictions on freedom of expression' and on 'Security, Surveillance and Safety'. The false idea created among US participants by such propaganda material became evident to me when I was travelling from the airport to the hotel and an American guest said in a puzzled way, 'Where is all the military?'

The language of surveillance used by groups like Human Rights Watch, Hillary Clinton and even the NGO Committee tried to present the Beijing Conference in a very different light from the reality of the situation. Given that Timothy Wirth of the State Department had last year announced that 'women's rights' would be an important weapon used in US foreign policy, this should not come as too much of surprise.

Besides presenting a false picture of the Beijing conference to the world, the US-inspired speeches, literature and media coverage constructed a narrow notion of human rights which excluded human rights based on economic, environmental and social justice.

Protest

The Chinese authorities allowed many activities that would be restricted in many countries. I participated in a protest against McDonald's that was opened in the NGO Forum. Across the world, citizens are resisting the spread of these junk food systems of global monoculture. Our direct action was not stopped by the Chinese authorities and it was in fact reported on Chinese TV.

The closure of citizen space by corporate rule is an aspect of human rights violations that is the basis of most movements fighting to protect the environment, human health and citizens freedom in this era of globalisation. Human rights in this context includes the right to influence the kind of production and consumption systems we have and the right to enough economic, political and environmental space to meet basic needs.

The right to meet basic needs does not figure in the US discourse on human rights even though in the Third World, the denial of basic needs is the real issue of violation of human rights. This will also increasingly become the central human right that will be violated in the North as globalisation leaves larger numbers unemployed, homeless and without economic security.

The Beijing conference provided an opportunity to widen our thinking about human rights to include issues of economic justice.

China, the world's most populous country, has undertaken the largest experiment in this century in making the right to food, clothing and shelter a fundamental human right for all. Instead of focusing on this tremendous achievement, which is the foundation of China's confidence in the world community, the US and its lobby groups focused only on the violation of narrowly construed human rights in China.

The narrow notion of human rights that distorted the Beijing agenda was also exemplified in the manner in which women's health rights have been reduced to reproductive rights, and reproductive rights have then been distorted to imply population control.

Third World women protested against this narrowing and distortion by holding a series of seminars on women's comprehensive health rights and on environmental links to health, aspects that are being systematically excluded by the population establishment, US AID, and the World Bank. A protest was organised against hazardous, long-acting contraceptives such as Norplant. There was a deliberate attempt to reduce women's concerns to those of reproduction alone. But as Dr Mira Shiva said at the Norplant demonstration, 'women are not just wombs and tubes'.

There was an attempt to undermine the history and content of the women's movement by linking the Beijing conference exclusively to the population conference in Cairo. The slogan 'Remember Cairo' on buttons distributed by UN agencies tacitly suggests 'Forget Rio' and 'Forget Nairobi'. It was this imposed amnesia that the expressions of creative self-organising rejected at the NGO Forum.

The narrowing of women's health rights to reproductive rights was another issue which drew criticism from the Secretary General of the women's conference, Gertrude Mongella, who said 'Sometimes when people highlight reproductive rights, they make me feel like a little womb.'

The NGO Forums at all earlier women's conferences were concerned with synthesising and developing the concerns that women have in their daily lives and around which they organise on the ground. The spontaneous gathering and expression of diverse strands of the women's movement has constantly brought up new issues in a constantly changing world.

In Nairobi, the two new dimensions that emerged from grass roots movements were the links between women and the environment, and between women and the economy. Women questioned the way the environment had been treated as a resource and raw material and not recognised for the wealth that nature creates, which is also the basis of women's subsistence economy. They also questioned the way the dominant economic system excludes the contribution of women and subsistence economies.

Even though both in the official conference document and in the official NGO Forum in Beijing, an attempt was made to undermine the contributions of Nairobi and Rio, women from the environment movement were present in large numbers and organised interesting events.

The French nuclear test in the Pacific engendered protests from large numbers of women. Indigenous women from the US talked of uranium mining in native lands and the violation of human rights of indigenous people by the US government, which preaches to the world about human rights. The environmental justice movement of the US had a very dynamic workshop about selective dumping of toxics in poor and coloured communities and Third World countries.

WEDO with 70 organisations had woven together a nine-day programme as a WEB of activities on emerging issues - on trade, intellectual property rights, technology, communication, militarisation, health and environment, resurgent and emergent epidemics. We released a set of Primers on the World Bank, the transnational corporations (TNCs), and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to empower women with the information on forces and structures of globalisation. What we had planned for the NGO Forum with 70 organisations working on women, environment and health was a 'Daughters of the Earth' programme to be held in one place like Planeta Femea in Rio so that women would know where to go for the women and environment activities. However, the NGO facilitating committee split the events and put them in different venues, thus preventing a focus on emerging issues to which women were responding.

The NGO Committee also cancelled the rally planned by the 180 days/180 ways Women's Action Campaign that had been launched on International Women's Day, (8 March) in Copenhagen and in which hundreds of organisations had participated, to make the venue available for Hillary Clinton's speech on 6 September. This negative role played by the NGO Committee in excluding NGOs and undermining their activities at the NGO Forum was not known because the Chinese authorities were being constantly blamed for actions and decisions taken by the NGO Committee.

Beijing NGO Facilitating Committee

By falsely targeting the Chinese authorities for the problems faced by movements, groups and individuals, attention was diverted away from the role played by the NGO facilitating Committee. Such committees are appointed to facilitate NGO activities at UN Conferences. Since they merely facilitate, they are largely invisible. However, the Beijing NGO Facilitating Committee did everything but facilitate.

First they fixed an arbitrary $50 fee for registration, which excluded large numbers of women activists, especially from the Third World. Then they focused everyone's energies on the debate over the site in Huairou, and diverted attention from substantive issues. Later, they used the uncertainty about the NGO Forum, because of non-acceptance of the site by them, to block off registrations in a totally arbitrary manner. I personally was refused NGO registration for the forum though I was registered at the UN Conference and finally made it to the forum through accredition as media person - something over which the NGO Committee had no control. Thousands of women who arrived in Beijing were denied access to the forum on grounds that they had not registered in time. While all along it was the NGO Committee which blocked participation, a well orchestrated campaign was run by the US administration, US human rights groups and the forum secretariat complaining of Chinese attempts to exclude NGOs.

Two NGO Forum

The NGO facilitating Committee also overstepped its role by usurping and monopolising the largest halls and plenaries for events it themselves organised. Never before at an NGO conference had an NGO Facilitating Committee (FC) taken over activities in this manner. The attempt quite clearly was to manipulate the Beijing and post-Beijing agenda. The FC plenaries focused on making women adjust to the New World Order. Women's movements, on the other hand, are demanding that the global order adjust to the needs of women, which best reflect the needs of society as a whole.

Since the space for the movements had been usurped by the secretariat bureaucracy, the movements created their own space.

There was, as a result, not one but two NGO Forums. One was the outcome of the Forum Secretariat's manipulations, which were a reflection of the priorities of the economically and politically powerful global interests.

The second forum was the free and independent NGO Forum, reflecting the concerns of movements, through events and activities created through self-organisation. Since the allocation of rooms for events had been manipulated, the real concerns of women were to be seen in the activities they organised in the open spaces - the rallies, the sit-ins, the protests.

One of the most impressive happenings was the silent march of 'Women in Black'. For one hour women stood silently in a vigil outside the Global Pavilion. They held up banners calling for peace in Palestine, Bosnia, Rwanda. The 'Women in Black' actions which started in Palestine and spread to ex-Yugoslavia have been used by women across the world as an expression for a call for peace. The speaker from Belgrade at the 'Women in Black' action said that peace and non-violence are rooted in the acceptance of diversity. That is probably the strongest message from Beijing - that diversity is strength, not weakness - in the women's movement, in society and across civilisations.

Gender justice and global apartheid

When the Brazilians marched in a large procession against Neo-liberalism or the Asians had a march for food security ending in the protest against McDonald's, or when the women gathered to say 'No' to structural adjustment in the South and welfare cuts in the North, they were bringing up the issues of global economic injustice that women's struggles are addressing at the grassroots - issues that the NGO organising committee and the Draft Platform for Action is attempting to silence. As in Nairobi and in Rio, women refused to be silenced by the din of the dominant discourse. They kept alive the issues that are matters of life and death to millions in the world.

The Beijing conference was full of paradoxes, conflicts and contradictions. The World Bank which has been the architect and implementor of SAPs was also the leading agency talking of reducing the 'gender gap'. The US which pushed the Uruguay Round of GATT to weaken the role of national governments in regulating commerce inequality and injustice was the champion in Beijing of the demand that these incapacitated governments guarantee 'gender justice' and 'gender equality'.

It is clear that the new world order based on deregulated commerce and free trade will create a global apartheid, and an unbridgable gulf between those who participate in the global economy and those whose local livelihoods have been destroyed and whose very survival is threatened. There can be no gender justice in a world of global apartheid when the social and political structures to protect the weak have been dismantled as 'barriers' to free trade or as 'inefficient' or 'wasteful' in the market logic of profitability. When people's right to food, health, education and shelter are being undermined through the free market ideology, how can women be guaranteed access to food, health and education?

'Gender justice' is an empty slogan in a period where there is no place for justice between rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, among human beings and among nations.

Precisely at a time when the UN has been weakened and has been made subsidiary to the Bretton Woods institutions, focus is being put on how only 30% of UN staff are women, and how more women should get into positions of power in UN agencies. In fact, a series of panels was organised to expose women at the NGO Forum to senior women bureaucrats from UN agencies. They were paraded as 'success' stories. The issue of international democracy, of making the World Bank, IMF, and WTO accountable to citizens of the world was sidelined by the narrow agenda of getting more women into the UN. What power will women have through the UN when the UN itself is losing power and all significant issues are controlled by the Bretton Woods institutions?

Precisely at a time when national parliaments and elected bodies are being marginalised by decisions made in global bureaucracies like the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, we are being told there should be more women in parliament. The debate is again being deflected from the erosion of national democratic space, into a narrow discussion of 'women in politics'. What power will women exercise through parliaments when parliaments themselves are losing power and are being bypassed?

Precisely at a time when all land security is being removed by 'trade liberalisation' policies that allow corporations limitless land ownership, there is talk of women's land rights divorced from people's land rights. In India, under structural adjustment pressure state after state is being forced to undo land reform, remove land ceiling laws, and allow corporations to own thousands of acres to grow flowers and vegetables for export. In Mexico, as a result of NAFTA, the communal lands were put on the market. This was the background of the Zapatista uprising in the Chiapas on 1 January, 1994.

New forms of property

In the absence of inalienable rights and equitable distribution of land, women's land rights cannot be guaranteed. When everything is tradeable, and there are no limits to ownership and control, the ranks of the dispossessed will increase. Gender equity in property rights in a context of tradeable rights and monopoly control amounts to an equal right to be displaced and disenfranchised.

The narrow discussion of women and property rights also failed to address the emergence of new forms of private property through Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in GATT. IPRs in the area of biodiversity and seeds enabled TNCs to take away from Third World women farmers their right to seed. The real gender injustice that is emerging through these new property rights is between women of the Third World, the original custodians of agricultural biodiversity, and TNCs of the Northern countries claiming Third World biodiversity as their property. Obviously this gap between the wealth and monopoly of corporations and the poverty and dispossession of Third World farmers will not be the measure that will be constructed by World Bank and UN experts.

The UNDP and the World Bank are already busy constructing measures for assessing 'gender gaps' in different countries. Their focus will be on the gap between men and women within households, within countries - not the gender gap between TNCs dominating the global food system and the Third World women farmers. Through these constructions the real inequalities will be hidden.

As corporations take over production from small producers, including women, and as the free market transforms rights into access through purchasing power, the gulf between the rich and poor will deepen, leaving us with a global apartheid between the dispossessed and those who have made it in the global economy and the global market place. Talking of 'gender justice' without allowing discussion of economic justice between rich and poor allows the creators of inequality to emerge as the champions of equality. This is the real politics in which global powers are engaged in at Beijing.

The global economic apartheid that is an inevitable consequence of structural adjustment and free trade policies will create an apartheid among women of the world. This equality in a divided world will create an elite minority of 'successful' women as UN bureaucrats, CEOs of large corporations and heads of states - and large numbers of women who will have equal rights with their men to be poor, hungry, homeless and unemployed. Women of the world do not want such empty equality within the brutal inequality of global apartheid.

An indivisible justice

The strength of the women's movement has always been that it has been built on compassion, solidarity and cooperation, not on competition and privilege. The women's health movement grew out of 'successful' women doctors treating women as subjects not as objects of medical science and technology. The environment movement grew because women scientists like Rachel Carson were humble enough to 'listen to nature', not try to enslave her in the Baconian vision of control and mastery. However this vision of 'connectedness' between planet and people and between the privileged and those who have been marginalised has failed to inform the officially organised NGO Forum, nor does it inform the UN conference. The very fact that the poster prepared by the UN for the Beijing conference represents a woman holding the planet in a symbol of control shows how deeply the symbols of domination and mastery have been internalised by the official system. This imagery of humans being external to and controlling the planet had been severely criticised by environmentalists at the Earth Summit. Now this image based on domination has become the logo of a women's conference.

It was the humility and compassion maintained by women who were privileged and rose in their professions but who were conscious and aware of the needs, aspirations, strengths and rights of their less privileged sisters that showed that other ways were necessary to organise our lives, our thoughts, our actions in order to ensure justice for all. This search for alternatives guided by the values of justice in economics, in science and technology, in agriculture, in medicine, in politics is still alive in the women's movement and was expressed in the activities of the free and independent NGOs in Beijing.

The message from the self organised, movement-based NGO Forum activities was that all forms of domination need to be resisted and overcome. In place of domination, women want solidarity. In place of violence, they want peace. In place of injustice, they want justice. However they want a gender justice that is not separate from other forms of justice. For women's movements, justice and equality is indivisible. Gender justice includes environmental justice, economic justice and social justice.

It is this indivisible concept of justice that will guide the struggles of women's movements in a deeply divided and globalised world in the post-Beijing era. (Third World Resurgence No. 61/62, Sept/Oct 1995)