[Peace-discuss] Fwd: An Era of Women Leaders Ends at the U.N.

[Margaret E. Kosal]

fyi ...
Off the top of my head, i am also interested in shift (if there is one?) to 
agency heads with business backgrounds?
And emphasize the need to support the progressive women who are in 
Directors positions at UN orgs other than the "major agencies", i.e. 
Patricia Lewis, Director of the UN Institute for Disarmament.

Best,
Margaret

>http://www.womensenews.org
>
>INTERNATIONAL
>By Barbara Crossette - WEnews correspondent
>
>(WOMENSENEWS)--The face of power in the United Nations was
>transformed in the 1990s as women took over leadership of six
>important agencies and Canadian Louise Frechette was named the
>organization's first deputy secretary general. But it wasn't just a
>matter of numbers. These women found common cause in expanding
>women's rights and, although they were based far apart--in New York,
>Rome and Geneva--they became close colleagues and friends, setting
>aside time to meet over a meal when United Nations business brought
>them together anywhere in the world.
>
>"It was just fabulous," said Catherine Bertini, the American who
>headed the World Food Program, the largest international food-relief
>organization. "It was a special group."
>
>That era, if glorious, was also brief.
>
>When Mary Robinson stepped down on Wednesday as United Nations high
>commissioner for human rights, she became the third of those
>pioneering women to leave the system. Sadako Ogata retired last year
>as United Nations high commissioner for refugees and Bertini ended
>her run as executive director of the World Food Program this spring.
>All three have been replaced by men.
>
>Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway, said she
>will not seek a second term as director general of the World Health
>Organization when her first term ends next year. No successor has
>been chosen.
>
>So far, only Nafis Sadik, who as the first woman to head a major
>agency, transformed the United Nations Population Fund from a non-
>controversial family-planning agency to an organization fighting for
>women's reproductive rights, was succeeded by another woman when she
>retired two years ago.
>
>Apart from Brundtland, soon to depart from the World Health
>Organization, and the population fund's new executive director,
>Thoraya Obaid, a Saudi Arabian national, there is only one other
>woman now at the head of a major agency, Carol Bellamy, the executive
>director of UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund. Bellamy, an
>American, was a former New York City Council president and United
>States Peace Corps director.
>
>Leaders Helped Women's Rights in Difficult Decade
>
>The 1990s was a disastrous decade for women, marked by vicious civil
>wars in which 90 percent of the casualties were civilians. Women were
>killed, forced to flee their homes, starved, brutalized, enslaved and
>raped, often in the refugee camps that were expected to shelter them.
>The women who headed United Nations agencies pushed ameliorating
>measures that were often unpopular with governments, such as making
>the "morning after" pill available to refugee women.
>
>Bertini said that when she arrived at the World Food Program in 1992
>and asked why there were so few women in professional grades, she was
>told, "Well, we do logistics things--we do things with trucks and
>trains and planes, and these aren't women's things." She more than
>doubled the number of high-ranking women in the agency, then turned
>to the poor women who were its beneficiaries.
>
>"We really had a sea change of policy to direct food aid to women,"
>said Bertini, who now teaches at the University of Michigan and
>serves as U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's roving envoy on
>humanitarian issues. "If we're going to have food and it's for ending
>hunger, then get it to the people who cook." Village women were also
>entrusted with allocating supplies. Programs were introduced that
>gave free food to families who sent their girls to school.
>
>Bertini stood down the Taliban, demanding that women be allowed to
>work in bakery projects in Afghanistan or there would be no bakeries.
>She was surprisingly successful.
>
>At UNICEF, Bellamy began to explore the darker recesses of a child's
>world into areas of sexual abuse and family violence. She would argue
>that women as well as girls were her concern, since no child could
>develop freely if a mother suffered and had no status or rights.
>
>Sadik, a Pakistani physician, ran the watershed 1994 Cairo conference
>on population and development, fending off foes from the American
>anti-abortion lobby and the Vatican to conservative Islamic
>governments. The meeting ended with a bold call for the right of
>women to decide how their bodies are used.
>
>At the World Health Organization, Brundtland, a public health
>specialist, led a worldwide campaign against smoking and oversaw a
>global fund to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
>
>Robinson, a human rights lawyer and former president of Ireland, had
>the stormiest tenure. When she became High Commissioner for Human
>Rights, she said that she wanted to listen to the concerns of people
>in developing nations, who often accused Western human rights
>organizations of finding fault only with poor countries.
>
>Human rights advocates respected her, though, for strong stands she
>took for justice for the East Timorese brutalized by pro-Indonesian
>militias in 1999 and for more human rights protection in China. But
>she angered the Bush administration for what Washington called her
>failure to curb outbursts of anti-Semitism at the 2001 U.N. World
>Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and for her
>criticisms of American limitations on civil rights after the Sept. 11
>attacks. Israel, also outraged by the Durban conference, blocked her
>attempt to lead a human rights monitoring mission into occupied
>Palestinian territories earlier this year.
>
>There were also some criticisms from women. Robinson took a very low-
>key initial approach to Afghanistan under the Taliban, saying
>she needed to learn more about Islamic law. And in the spring of
>2001, at a meeting in Teheran, Iran, to frame part of the agenda for
>the U.N. conference on racism, Robinson acquiesced to the
>government's demand that all women be covered from head to toe. It
>was an international gathering and many women were outraged.
>
>"I would not equate the wearing of the veil with a repression of
>women as such," she told a BBC interviewer later that year, saying
>that she too had to cover her head and didn't like it. "I wouldn't do
>it if it was a custom, but it was part of the law and out of respect
>as high commissioner, I abide by laws," she said.
>
>But by the end of her tenure, Robinson, who served on four-year term
>with a one-year extension, had become an outspoken critic of
>trafficking in girls and women. In a visit to Cambodia in August, she
>told the national parliament that something needed to be done
>about the 200,000 victims of traffickers in Southeast Asia alone.
>
>"The women and children who are subjected to this inhumane cruelty
>are not foreign to us," she said. "They are our sisters and
>daughters; they are our children."
>
>Barbara Crossette was The New York Times U.N. bureau chief from 1994
>to 2001.
>
>For more information:
>
>Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights -
>"Farewell Speech in Geneva by Mary Robinson, High
>Commissioner for Human Rights": -
>http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/view01/608B646C44611148C125
>  6C31002FF3E8?opendocument
>
>World Health Organization - "Brundtland starts new movement to
>address - environmental crisis affecting children's health": -
>http://www.who.int/mediacentre/releases/who66/en/
>
>UNICEF: - http://www.unicef.org