2007 Keynote Luncheon
Speech by Ms. Carolyn McAskie,
Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding, United Nations
"The Development of Peacebuilding - Ensuring the Participation of Women"
June 11, 2007
WIIS Annual Summer Symposium Keynote Luncheon: Speech by Ms. Carolyn McAskie, Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding, United Nations
Canadian Embassy, Washington, DC
I’m delighted to be here, and delighted to be here at my Embassy. And I am delighted to have you looking out at the sculpture, ‘Spirit of Haida Gwaii,’ which is representative of how we are all together in a very tiny boat and we all have to work together or the boat will tip, and we have to keep going forward. It’s a good image for peacemaking and peacebuilding. Let me thank the organizers here, of course the WIIS organization, which is doing some fantastic work, and I’m very happy to be associated with you, and with Jolynn and Chantal. This invitation goes back almost a year now, when I first met the folks from WIIS through the UN. I soon discovered when I started the peacebuilding job that we were the flavor of the month—I’d never had so many suitors coming through. And it was very exciting because it made me realize that peacebuilding—it’s much like the environmental movement was 20 years ago—it is something that people are more and more aware of worldwide now. And that’s very encouraging. Academic institutions, civil society, government institutions, and of course now this whole UN peacebuilding architecture. I’m very glad to be part of this wonderful WIIS Symposium for all of these bright students, and I really do congratulate you on being part of this group, and I’m very privileged to be part of your agenda. It’s good to meet you here today.
The whole question of peacebuilding—let me give you a little bit of background as to what it looks like, and then I’ll say a few words on the issue of women and peacebuilding. Over the period of 2004, 2005, 2006 the United Nations member states, despite the fact that that really was a rather tricky time for member states, as inter-state relations at the UN were not at their best, for a variety of reasons, were able to overcome divisions and create this whole new set of institutions. Over the last while, the United Nations has in fact made an honest stride on peacemaking and peacekeeping, and the international community has made an honest stride on a development agenda. I have been at this a long time, and I can honestly say with some conviction that there’s far greater coherence around a development agenda than there ever has been. We still have a lot to do: the question of resources remains a serious challenge—I don’t want to minimize the issue—but in fact there is a much better sense of what needs to be done and where we need to go next. So, on the other end of the spectrum, with peacekeeping and peacemaking, people still refer back to the tragedies of the 1990s, in Somalia and Rwanda, but for those of us who’ve lived through what’s happened in the UN in the last ten years, I can tell you with absolute conviction that it is very different. And people say, ‘yes, but how about Darfur,’ and I’d be happy to deal with that if someone wants to ask that question later on. But in terms of how we actually do a peacekeeping mission, it is night and day, and peacekeeping missions now are very multi-disciplinary and very complex and leave behind incredible results. And the statistics are beginning to show that because of improved international efforts, the number of wars is actually reducing dramatically. We don’t realize this because of what’s on our screens—Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East. But in fact the number of actual wars, particularly inter-state conflict/civil wars, has actually reduced dramatically in the period of 1992 to 2005. And this is because of increased tools. But statistics were showing us that the part we hadn’t gotten right was how to keep countries on track after that.
There was a very high risk factor for countries falling back into conflict. So the peacebuilding architecture emerges out of that realization, and the Peacebuilding Commission is now in place: 31 member states, who are elected every two years according to various formula, and the Peacebuilding Support Office, which I’m heading up, and the Peacebuilding Fund (a 250 million dollar fund), which can be used for catalytic or emergency response but is not the answer to peacebuilding. Peacekeeping costs billions of dollars a year. The peacekeeping mission in Burundi alone—where I served for two years—cost 300 million dollars a year, and that’s cheap for peacekeeping. Liberia’s mission costs 700 million dollars a year. So the challenge for the international community is: are they prepared to spend that kind of money on peacebuilding, as well? So, the question is: ‘Can we make the same kind of investment in peacebuilding that we are making in peacekeeping, and how do we get it right?’ What the Peacebuilding Commission is trying to do now is put in place what it actually decided were going to be its major objectives. The resolutions that created the Peacebuilding Commission were joint resolutions of the General Assembly and the Security Council, and those of you who know UN affairs will know how important these things are, and everyone has their say. They charge the Peacebuilding Commission with bringing together all of the relevant actors, to mobilize resources, and to develop integrated approaches to peacebuilding and recovery. Let me add one more thing, which I consider to be of paramount importance: they are also mandated to ensure that there is sustained international attention on the post-conflict period. And I think therein lies the truth, because what has been happening in these countries is that now the peace negotiations are over, and maybe we stick around long enough to help the country run an election, and then say ‘okay, guys, you’re on your own, let the development actors and the response agencies take over.’ And that takes a long time. 
A colleague of mine in the UN once said that the definition of a relay race in the UN is where somebody runs up with a baton, and they stop and have a chat about the negotiation, and then somebody else gets that baton and they keep going with it, and in the meantime you’ve lost a lot of momentum. So in a way, this is a way of improving a relay race—have all of the runners run at the same time so that as the baton is passed, you haven’t lost the momentum. And for peacebuilding, what this means is getting all of the players together. So this aspect of the resolution that says ‘bring all of the actors together’ is very, very important. And what the Commission has done is—they’ve created country specific configurations of the Commission, whereby in addition to members of the Commission, anybody who has an interest in Burundi is on board. And I don’t just mean member states—we’ve got regional organizations, the African Union, the Economic Organization of West African States, and other players, the European Commission, etc.
So, the idea is that if you’re going to get it right for peacebuilding in Country X, the only way to do it is for all the players to agree and for all the players to agree with government authorities, because we all know there’s a lot of talk about ownership, and if there isn’t ownership, what’s going to happen? These things have to be internalized, they have to be what that society wants to do, or it won’t happen. It really is an absolute non-starter and without it nothing’s going to happen. So, getting them all together around the table means that you have a hope that you would build a strategic approach that will look at what’s already happened—we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel—in most of these countries, there are very, very dedicated actors who are trying their best. The World Bank, the European Commission, regional organizations—the political support for the peace process in Burundi was phenomenal. The UN likes to think, ‘well, my little peacekeeping mission was really successful,’ and up to a point, it was. But it was the African neighbors who brought peace in Burundi, really. It was Africa who delivered on that. So you bring them together along with the development actors and the people inside the country. And up to a point, civil society: we’re still not good at getting civil society into UN deliberations, although we’re better and better at getting civil society engaged on the ground at the field end. So once you have all the players together, then you do have a hope that you can look at everything that’s happening and say, ‘Out of all of these things, what are the fault lines?’ What are the things you absolutely must do to make sure this country stays on track for peace and meets the immediate needs of the population? Because meeting people’s expectations after a conflict is one of the fundamental priorities. And, in my mind, one of the most important things that you can do at that point is get women engaged. And this is where the kind of work that organizations like WIIS is doing is so important. And the founding resolution of the Peacebuilding Commission—I mentioned the joint resolutions of the General Assembly and the Security Council—reaffirmed the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts and in peacebuilding and also stress the need to increase women’s participation in decision-making on peace and security issues.
This is a fundamental responsibility of the Commission, and it’s coming out in the strategic work that the Commission is doing. Those same resolutions, in fact, mandate the Commission to ensure broader gender perspective in everything they do. And so following this, what we have done with the two countries on our agenda, Burundi and Sierra Leone, we are looking at women’s involvement, how women have been affected by the war, and why things need to change. We’re looking at all of this. Now, my own experience in Burundi is that it’s really an uphill struggle. I participated in the peace talks in Arusha eight years ago, and I sat in while the delegations decided whether women’s organizations should be in the room, and I’ve never heard anything like it, ever. It was one of the most discouraging arguments I have ever heard, as to why women’s organizations should not be there. And it wasn’t necessarily deliberately an anti-women thing. It was because the people at the table were political parties, and that’s who they thought should do the job—just the political parties. They didn’t see the broader issue. Now, peacebuilding, in order to be successful, has to be something that’s captured in at every stage of the peace spectrum. And one of the things we’re trying to avoid is the idea that peacebuilding is something that happens after peacekeeping and before development, even though I’ve mentioned that that’s where we have identified the greatest gap. But if it’s going to work, you have to start much further back. And peace accords have to include issues that affect the long-term growth of society. Peace accords have to address issues that touch on why the society failed and why conflict erupted, and why the society or the economy or the political situation failed. And it’s in the peace accord that we need to get to the women’s issues right away.
In fact, after this terrible setback in ’99, the Arusha peace accords for Burundi had some very significant gains for women, including a mandatory thirty percent participation in government, particularly in the parliament. And they’ve achieved it, and not only have they achieved it, because we all know that getting women to the table is step number one, but then there are other steps after that. But in Burundi, women are working across political lines to try to change the situation for women. But men have to work at it, as well. So what I’ve seen in Burundi are some honest changes, but the situation of women in most of these countries is horrific. And the situation of women in war-torn countries all around the world is horrific. One of the big issues, of course, is the whole issue of violence against women. These issues have to be addressed in the peace accords; they have to be addressed in the peacekeeping missions—and peacekeeping missions now also have gender advisors—but they have to be addressed in the time of peacebuilding. So our job, what we’re trying to do, is get women’s/gender issues into these broad, strategic approaches that the PBC is building for Burundi and for Sierra Leone. A few members of the Peacebuilding Commission took a trip out to the countries themselves, and that was one of the things that came out in their discussion. In Sierra Leone, there is quite an active process going on, and the PBC was able to put pressure on the government of Sierra Leone to expedite consideration of a number of bills that were going through parliament that affected women’s situations, particularly in terms of domestic violence, marriage and divorce, and inheritance.
Inheritance is a big issue in Africa, as many of you will know, and the whole issue of women’s rights and property, and particularly women’s rights to land, because with men being either away because of the refugee situation or because they’re caught up in the rebel groups or because they’ve been killed in the conflict, the whole question of a woman’s right to retain her house and her land under those circumstances is often in jeopardy, and it’s a very serious issue for the women and for the whole family. And in fact a number of gender-related bills have been acted upon in Sierra Leone because of pressure from the Peacebuilding Commission. And in Sierra Leone also they’re trying to match the thirty percent quota that already exists in Burundi. And we’re trying to make sure also that when we talk to focus groups and civil society groups—we usually find already that women are well-represented in these groups, that in civil society, women are extremely active in these countries. They don’t need our help; they need our help to make it happen, but they’re very good at identifying themselves.
And on the gender aspect, let me just mention also that in the Peacebuilding Fund, which was established along with the Peacebuilding Commission and the Peacebuilding Support Office, we have been trying to ensure that gender aspects are addressed. For example, the biggest issue that was identified by the Sierra Leone government for peace and security was youth employment. Because the numbers of young, disaffected youths in the country is a real challenge to peace and security and the difficulty is that in the long run, it will only be addressed once you address the issue of economic reform in the country and the employment situation generally. But in the meantime, there are a number of things that can be done, and included in that, there is also special attention being paid to the young girls. Because too often when you say youth, people think boys. And unfortunately, it is often the boys who are the ones who cause the trouble. The girls learn to cope in a different way. So, as well as addressing the issues of gender, I think we also need to understand it better. Why do girls under difficult circumstances grow up in a way that they’re socialized to cope better with these issues, and can we learn from that to help the young boys cope better, as well? So there’s a lot of work, I think, for us to do. And within our own research, I would like to see my office trying to address some of these issues. We have been trying to ensure that there is a gender aspect in the moneys being spent under the Peacebuilding Fund. So, let me stop there, and as the introductory speakers have pointed out, there aren’t very many people like me in positions like this, and I’m looking to all of you to get into the mainstream and start getting promoted. We would very much like some female company in these positions. We do see that the UN is doing better at the middle levels, but not necessarily yet at the senior levels. ###