Women in 2008 and beyond: Challenges, risks, obligations

Dr. Rounaq Jahan

The world has changed tremendously and particularly the lives of women have changed significantly since I was a graduate student in the mid-1960s. In the last 40 years, in the United States as well as in countries around the world, gender gaps in education, employment, income, decision making, and even in political leadership have been narrowed. In many countries, including the US, women now outnumber men in schools and colleges. They have a significant presence in many fields; e.g., science, medicine, business, and law, which in the 1960s used to be heavily dominated by men. Women's labour-force participation has also become near equal. Marriage and family patterns have changed enabling women to have greater voice within the household, which had traditionally been a major site of women's exploitation. We have travelled far but we still face many challenges, some old and some new.
   So what are the challenges? I will focus on four which are old, but they still continue to challenge women. Our first challenge is to shape our own identity, to be our own person and not be defined by others. This is not always easy, as our families and societies are constantly telling us who we should be. But from my own experiences, I know that when we stand firm on what we want to be, we can break many barriers. When I began my academic-activist life in my country Bangladesh in the early 1970s, I used to stand out as a young, single woman pursuing a path very different from other women. What I find remarkable is how quickly our society changed. Change happened because I was not alone; many other women also decided to fulfill their own potentials.
   
   Confronting challenges
   Of course, we have to recognise that achieving our own personal goals cannot be our only challenge. We need to confront the challenges that condition the lives of the vast majority of the world's women. We need to focus specifically on areas where progress for women has been relatively slow in the last 30, 40 years.
   Our second challenge is then to improve the terms and conditions of women's work, both paid and unpaid. We all know that women's employment rates have increased significantly in the last 40 years, but women's share of earned income has not been at par with their employment.
   For example, at present in the US, women constitute nearly half (46 per cent) of the labour force, but their share of earned income is about two-thirds that of men's. It is even lower in India, which is less than one-third. A part of the problem is that the conditions of poverty have pushed women to take any employment, no matter how poor the terms and conditions. This has resulted in women being predominantly concentrated in low-paid, insecure, casual jobs. For example, in Bangladesh, men dominated manufacturing jobs in the 1970s. Now the situation has reversed where young women make up a majority of the industrial workforce.
   
   Woman's wage $1 a day
   Further, 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the workers of the garment industry are young women. This industry, which constitutes Bangladesh's main exports, annually earns 9 billion dollars, whereas these women workers earn less than a dollar a day while putting in 12-14 hours. However, Bangladesh is not unique. The economic boom of many countries is dependent on women's cheap labour. Additionally, the burden of unpaid work in the care economy (i.e., child care, care of the sick and elderly family members) continues to be a problem for women as they expand their participation in paid employment. Getting governments and the private sector to recognise women's contribution to economic growth, their poor work conditions, and their labour in the care economy remains a major challenge for women in the future.
   
   Violence against her
   Our third challenge is to reduce violence against women. We have succeeded in making violence against women, particularly domestic violence, a criminal offense in many countries. But this has not resulted in any significant reduction on the incidence of violence. Even in a country such as Sweden, which generally ranks number one in the global women's empowerment index, police reports of assaults on women have increased by 40 per cent during the 1990s (from 14,000 in 1990 to 22,400 in 2003). What is worse, war and political and ethnic conflicts have routinely embraced violence against women as a part of their arsenal. In recent years we have witnessed rape being used as a weapon in war and conflict situations in Asia, Africa, as well as Europe .
   Our final challenge, and here we have near stagnation, is to improve women's presence in political leadership positions. With the exception of Nordic countries, where women have made significant progress; in the rest of the world progress has been extremely slow. For example, in Sweden, women constitute 47 per cent of parliament and 52 per cent of ministerial level positions. In contrast, in the USA, women hold 16 per cent of Congressional seats and 14 per cent of ministerial positions. In India, which has been a model for a long-standing stable democracy among the Southern countries, the progress of women is even slower, though a woman prime minister has governed India for more than a decade (1966-1977; 1980-1984). In India, women's share of parliamentary seats is 9 per cent and ministerial positions are 3 per cent.
   
   Emerging threats
   However, we cannot effectively address these challenges without recognising the emerging threats/risks for women's empowerment. I will now turn to the risks for women. I will be selective and focus on four major risks. The first risk is the global trend of cutting back on the role of government and the public sector and relying more and more on the market and the private sector; which can adversely affect women's-and particularly poor women's-health and education.
   From our past experiences, we know that government laws and policies have played a critical role in improving women's conditions. Nordic women are doing better compared to women of other regions mainly because Nordic governments have been proactive. Their equality laws, women-friendly social policies, 40/60 principle of political representation, and public sector provisioning of health and education have contributed significantly in pushing Nordic countries to the top of the women's empowerment index.
   The second risk for women is the persistent and alarmingly widening inequalities between different groups of women, which has held back our overall progress and created obstacles in building a strong and cohesive political voice. The gains women have made in the last 40-50 years have not been equitably shared. Class, race, place of residence have been major markers of disparities. Let me give a few examples of these disparities: Lifetime chances of dying from maternal deaths are 1 in 2,500 in USA and Europe, 1 in 94 in Asia, and 1 in 16 in sub-Saharan Africa.
   
   North-South disparities
   However, there are not only North-South disparities, but also great disparities within countries. In India, less than half (43 per cent ) of births are attended by skilled personnel, compared to near universal attendance (99 per cent) in USA. But disparities within India are greater than that between India and USA. Only 16 per cent of the poorest families compared to 84 per cent of the richest families in India have skilled birth attendance. Within USA also, black women (7.5 per cent) have double the rate of unemployment compared to white women (4 per cent). If we want to sustain our progress, we need to work towards reducing these disparities.
   The third and related risk for women is the narrow constituency base of the women's movements. Women's movements around the world have played a key role in mobilising women to demand their rights and pressurise governments to enact laws, adopt policies, and take specific actions. But the constituency bases of these movements in most countries have been limited to upper- and middle-class women. Working-class and poor women have generally not been drawn into them. This gap has considerably weakened the capacity of the women's movement to work as a strong unified political force.
   The task of widening the constituency base becomes particularly urgent when we consider the fourth risk for women: the backlash from conservative groups, many of whom are religious extremists. These extremists are to be found in all religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism. In recent years, the resurgence of political use of religion and the political strength of faith-based groups have directly threatened women's rights.
   For example, the religious extremists in the USA are not only limiting women's choice in this country; via the gag rule, they are also threatening the reproductive rights of women globally. The secularists who have been in the forefront championing women's rights are in a much weakened position politically in many countries. The global war on terror has further exacerbated the risks for women by legitimising the political use of religion and religious groups.
   Let me finally turn to women's obligations. Again, I will be selective and highlight four. Our first obligation is to ourselves. As I mentioned earlier, we need to always stand up for our own rights, to be constantly vigilant and ever-ready to defend and promote our rights.
   Our second obligation is to assist other women who are less privileged and resourced than us in our own countries as well as globally. We may all have our own paid and unpaid work responsibilities. But we still need to volunteer time for civic and political actions that address the issues of inequities and exclusion. I became involved in the women's movement in the 1970s, when I realised that I could no longer be a silent witness to the plight of thousands of women who were raped during our war of national liberation and were socially stigmatised and abandoned by their families..
   Our third obligation is to recognise the critical role that education has played in fueling women's progress. This is more crucial for us who had the privilege of receiving an excellent education. Evidence from all over the world indicates that women's education has been good not only for women; it has also led to family well-being and economic growth. But millions of girls and women around the world are still denied access to education, particularly quality education. Girls account for more than half of the 57 million children who are out of school. We and institutions such as Radcliffe and Harvard need to move beyond simple knowledge generation. We have to get involved in quiet initiatives as well as public campaigns to ensure that quality education becomes available to all of the world's citizens.
   Finally, we need imagination to create a vision of a society, economy, polity, and world order that will be equal, just, and inclusive; and we need to be in the forefront and provide leadership to a shared struggle of women and men to reach that vision. We need stamina and courage, but above all, we need to be committed and have faith in our own strength to transform the world.
   
   - SAN-Feature Service
   This is an excerpted version of the address of Dr. Rounaq Jahan to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on receipt of the Graduate Society Award on June 6. She is an adjunct professor of international affairs, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. She divides her time between US and Bangladesh.

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THE PROPHEYCY
Terrorism bred by Zionism

Nasrine R. Karim

Blowing up a bus, a train, a ship, a café, or a hotel; assassinating a diplomat or a peace negotiator; killing hostages, sending letter bombs; wholesale annihilation of defenceless villagers - this is terrorism, as we know it. In the modern Middle East, it began with the Zionists who founded the Jewish state aided and abetted by those who wanted to appease their guilty consciences. Now that the Muslims have retaliated after decades of hurt and senseless violence and paying dues for the world with no conscience - it is important to jog one's memory for history of violence and intimidation from the very population that suffered in Nazi hands who were foisted upon the simple Arabs and Jews of Palestine.
   An important part of the story, though not the whole of it, is also the very special relationship between the United States and Israel. Warren Bass's important and timely book 'Support Any Friend,' takes us back to the diplomacy of the 1960s, and to what he argues, were the beginnings of today's extraordinarily intimate alliance between the two countries.
   It is in effect the story of how Israel and its American friends came to exercise a profound influence on American policy toward the Arab and Muslim world. Bass believes it all began with President John F Kennedy. Although in my view the US-Israeli entente actually began with President LB Johnson, after Kennedy's assassination.
   Israel's original sin is Zionism; the ideology that a Jewish state should replace that of the Palestine. At the root of the problem is Zionism exclusivist structure whereby only Jews are treated as first-class citizens. In order to create and consolidate a Jewish state in 1948, Zionists expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and never allowed them or their descendants to return. In addition, Israeli forces destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages and perpetrated dozens of massacres. In 1967, the Israelis forced another 350,000 Palestinians to flee the West Bank and Gaza as well as 147,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.
   Since 1967, Israel has placed the entire Palestinian population of the Territories under military occupation. The effects of the dispossession of the Palestinians and other Arabs are, to this day, a dark shadow over the shattered lives of the millions of people directly affected.
   Zionism and its effects on the peoples of the Middle East were certainly the central motivation behind the events of 9/11, and the most important consequence of which is the ongoing war on terrorism that is smothering their political and economic landscape for good.
   When did Middle East "Terrorism" begin?
   One of the most notorious acts of terrorism occurred during the 1948 war when Jewish forces, members of the LEHI group (also known as the Stern Gang) assassinated Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, a U.N. appointed mediator. Bernadotte was killed on September 17, 1948, a day after he offered his second mediation plan, which, among other things, called for repatriation and compensation for the Palestinian refugees. (This is the same group that assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Military Commander in Egypt and a friend of Winston Churchill in 1944.) This act made it very clear that no Palestinian had any rights to their homeland.
   The assassination of Bernadotte highlighted one of the biggest policy differences at the time, between the United States and Israel, namely the fate of the Palestinian refugees. By that time, Jewish/Israeli forces had already forced more than half a million Palestinians from their homes. The international outcry focused on the implications for Middle East peace as well as on the suffering refugees. At the same time, the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews who resided in the Arab world for centuries, mainly in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Egypt was questioned. They were placed at immediate risk because of Israeli expulsion policy.
   The day before the assassination of Count Bernadotte, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett publicly accused the Count of bias against the State of Israel and in favour of the Arab States. Some historians point to evidence that the Israeli government was itself directly involved in the killing. On the night of the assassination, it is alleged that the Czech consulates in Jerusalem and Haifa were busy processing some 30 visas for Stern gang members who had been rounded up for their involvement in the planning and execution of the assassination. Between September 18 and September 29, most if not all of the 30, left Israel on flights for Czechoslovakia!
   The scale, precision, and speed of the evacuation- made international agencies suspicious that the Stern gang was not involved alone. The operation might have been planned and prepared in Czechoslovakia, and a specially trained squad had perhaps been flown into Israel from Prague for that particular purpose. In addition, historian Howard Sachar noted that Yehoshua Cohen, a friend of the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Ben Gurion, was widely believed to be the triggerman.
   In May 1949, eight months later, the Israelis revealed to the U.N. that the majority of the Stern Gang members rounded up in the purge had been released within two weeks. Those not released, were held until a general amnesty was granted on February 14, 1949. The facts are that nobody was ever put on trial for the sensational assassination to date!
   The murder of Count Bernadotte made international headlines for a time but more attention was paid to the issue of the Palestinian refugees. His repatriation of the Palestinian programme was never executed.
   Since then, none of Bernadotte's successors has been able to put sufficient pressure on the Israelis to make any concessions for the Palestinians whatsoever. The murder was a warning to any who might have tried to follow the Count's example...
   The other earlier notorious example of Jewish/Zionist terrorism in the post-war period 1945-1948 was the bombing of the King David Hotel and the British HQ in Jerusalem, on July 22, 1946. The King David Hotel was brought down by means of 50 kilos of explosives killing ninety-one people! Why?
   The Zionists were enraged when the British Labour party's sweeping victory in the summer of 1945 did nothing to liberalize the previous government's policy on Jewish immigration. The British insistence on maintaining the restrictive immigration policy led to the unification of the three major factions of the Jewish groups into a United Resistance. The three forces comprised the Jewish Agency's Haganah led by David Ben Gurion who later became the Prime Minister of the Jewish State, the LEHI, the Stern Gang led by, at the time, Nathan Yellin Mor, and the Irgun led by Menachim Begin, who in his book "The Revolt" bragged that he was "Terrorist Number One". At the end of October 1945, they formally agreed to cooperate on a military struggle against British rule.
   Their joint attacks, including the Night of the Trains, the Night of the Airfields, the Night of the Bridges and other operations. They were so successful that a forceful British retaliation was mandatory. Immediately after the Night of the Bridges, June 17, 1947, British Army searches for terrorists were conducted, arrests were made and Jews were killed and injured in clashes. A much larger British operation came to be known as "Black Sabbath" began two weeks later. Thousands of Jews were arrested. British troops ransacked offices of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, seized important documents, arrested members of the Jewish Agency Executive, and carried out searches and arrests in many kibbutzim.
   As a direct result of the "Black Sabbath" operation, the Haganah command decided on July 1st 1946, to conduct three operations against the British. The Palmach (the elite Haganah strike force) would carry out a raid on a British army camp to recover their weapons. The Irgun would blow up the King David Hotel where the offices of the Mandatory government and the British military command were located. (The LEHI task was: blowing up the adjacent David Brothers building which was never carried out.) The rest is history.
   At the time, one never heard of the Arab "terrorism" or of the indigenous Jews of Palestine, who had lived with the Arabs for centuries, creating any problems!
   Livia Rokach, the Minister of Interior during Sharett's Govt., charges in her book, "Israel's Secret Terrorism" that from the earliest days of the State, Israel cynically and with cold calculation used its military power under the banner of security in order to dominate the region. She explains that Israel's leaders were unhappy with the 1949 armistice borders even though, as a result of the 1948 war, they increased Israeli territory from the U.N. allotment of 56% of mandate to 78%. The Israeli government understood that it needed to transform the fledgling state into a regional power in order to conquer the rest of Palestine as well as some of the territory of its Arab neighbours.
   Moshe Sharett's CV includes being head of the Jewish Agency's political department (1933-1948), Israel's first foreign minister (1948 -1956), and its Second prime minister (1954-1955). One of Lehi Gang's leaders Yitzhak Shamir and Irgun's Menachim Begin went on to become Prime Ministers of Israel. Ben Gurion, head of the Haganah Group was the first PM of Israel. This should give the world an idea where the "terrorism" began.
   We see a different Israel now - returning prisoners, actively participating in a truce after over half a century of crazy violence! Is it because of the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah or are the Israelis fed up of the small Palestinian children blowing themselves up in buses and in front of restaurants killing tens and scores of their own citizens alongside their young lives, or is it the continuous and persistent rocket attacks that never ends? Have the tables reversed? Nobody wins in a war, nobody. The Palestinians are suicidal, and why not? They live with death every second of their lives! A mother sends her children to school without knowing whether she will see them again...
   It was prophesized:
   "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb."
   Isaiah (11:6) However, it remains to be seen who is the wolf and who is the lamb now?

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