Creating New Visions for Ending Conflict

Rabbi Perry Cohen, Facilitator, Teacher and Author; Rachel Kennedy, Student, Parkdale Collegiate Institute; Col. Frederic L.R. Jackman, CSt.J, PhD, LLD, President, Invicta Investments Incorp. and Past President, 1993-94, The Empire Club of Canada; David Agnew, President and CEO, UNICEF Canada and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Heather Ferguson, Director, Development and Alumni Relations, Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Beth Hitchcock, Features Editor, Chatelaine Magazine; Dr. Carolyn Bennett, Member of Parliament, St. Paul's Riding; Agnes Di Leonardi, Vice-President, Legal and Corporate Secretary, Ford Credit Company of Canada; and Pam Jeffery, President and CEO, The Jeffery Group Limited and Founder, Women's Executive Network.

Introduction by Ann Curran

I now have the opportunity of introducing to you a fascinating woman--Sally Armstrong. She is a human rights activist, documentary filmmaker and award-winning author. Sally Armstrong was editor-in-chief of Homemaker's magazine from 1988 to 1999. She is presently the editor-at-large of Chatelaine magazine and a contributing editor at Maclean's magazine.

She has covered stories about women and girls in zones of conflict all over the world. From Bosnia and Somalia to Rwanda and Afghanistan, her eye witness reports have earned her awards including the Gold Award from the National Magazine Awards Foundation and the Author's Award from the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters. She received the Amnesty International Media Award in 2000 and again in 2002.

Sally is the co-producer and host of several documentaries including "They Fell From the Sky" that aired on CDC's "Rough Cuts" in November, 2001. A new documentary called "The Daughters of Afghanistan" will air on CDC's "The Passionate Eye" on March 2, 2003.

In 1996. Sally was honoured by the YWCA of Toronto with the prestigious Women of Distinction Award in Communications. In 1997 she received the Achievement Award for Human Rights for Women from Jewish Women International. In 1998 she was honoured with the Media Watch's Dodi Robb Award. She received an Honorary Doctor of Law degree from Royal Roads University in 2000 and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from McGill University at the October, 2002 convocation. In 1998 she was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

In 1997 Sally Armstrong, then editor-in-chief of Homemaker's magazine, wrote an article about the women of Afghanistan and their lives under the misogynist Taliban regime.

More than 9,000 letters poured in from readers demanding that something be done to get these women out of bondage.

Since then, Armstrong has stayed in touch with the women she met while researching the article, as well as the ones she met on subsequent visits to that troubled, complex country.

Recently named UNICEF's Special Representative to Afghanistan, Armstrong has an insider's view of the terror, abuse and misogyny the women and children in Afghanistan have faced for more than two decades of civil war and in particular, when the Taliban were in power.

On May 23, 2002, her book "Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan" was published by Penguin Books.

Sally has kindly agreed to stay after this luncheon to sign copies of her book.

Having travelled extensively, interviewed so many people and witnessed the ravages and devastation of war, she is here to say: "It's time to dump the old formulas and create new visions for

ending conflict. People are fed up, it's time for the UN to alter its course; the world cannot afford more Afghanistans."

Ladies and gentlemen please welcome Sally Armstrong.

Sally Armstrong

The first thing most people ask me when they see my book "Veiled Threat" is why did you go to Afghanistan in the first place. Well I went because I couldn't believe my ears when I heard about what was happening to the women there--that the Taliban had virtually put the women under house arrest with the most misogynist edicts the world had ever known. I wanted to know how the women were coping. And I wanted to know how the Taliban were getting away with it--right under the noses of the international community. Where the heck was the United Nations, I wondered.

The book puts those facts on the record. As much as it describes the brutal treatment of women under the Taliban, the book review in the Washington Post called it "inspiring, uplifting." The review also said, as most have, that the book is critical of the United Nations. And that is also true. As UNICEF's special representative to the region, some have asked how I could be critical of the UN. I agreed to this volunteer post because I care about those children, as UNICEF does. I'm asking for change for their sake and feel it's time we addressed the problems that are getting in the way of rescuing the world's most blameless citizens.

I didn't make the accusations lightly. My beat in the journalism world for the last two decades has been covering zones of conflict--and what happens to women and girls in those places. They are raped, beaten, tortured, starved and used as pawns of war. But nobody ever seems to be accountable. Look at what the Taliban did. Because of their hatred of women, they made crazed edicts to control them. For example, one young woman who had been married the day before the Taliban crashed into town had a manicure. When the Taliban saw her nail polish, they threw her to the ground, splayed her fingers apart and chopped off her finger tips. In the absence of international protest, this evil was nourished and in fact flourished. Everyone knows that silence is seen as consent.

I met with Dr. Sima Samar a few weeks ago. She's the woman who was the hero to women and girls in Afghanistan. She's the one who defied the ridiculous edicts of the Taliban and kept schools open for girls and continued to treat women at her hospitals, even though the Taliban said they would kill her if she didn't close them.

One day in Jaghori, the Taliban stole the generators out of her hospital and indeed managed to shut down the operation. A few days later, one of the Taliban leaders brought his sick mother to Dr. Samar's clinic in Quetta (she is known as an excellent physician). Dr. Samar examined the woman, realized she had tonsillitis and needed an antibiotic. But she told the Taliban boss to leave his mother with her and to come back the next day to collect her. When he returned she sat him down and said: "Tell you what. We've got a problem. You've got my generators. I've got your mother." They made a trade!

This is a woman with moral courage.

She became the Deputy Prime Minister in the new government. But last June she was ousted by the fundamentalists--the very ones the international community had put in place when they played another menacing card in the poker game of power. When we talked recently, I said to her: "At least with the Taliban we knew who the enemy was." She replied: "Of course it's different during war. During peace, people are supposed to be accountable." Her remark could be hooked to any of dozens of civil wars that have raged in the last two decades. There is so much sameness about all of them. Everyone from accountants and teachers to plumbers

and students can predict the process of today's calamities. It begins with sabre-rattling headlines and proceeds to dire threats from the belligerents, hand wringing from diplomats and wordy documents from the United Nations Security Council. Then the bombs fall and the resulting civilian catastrophe becomes the new headline. A compromising and complicated ceasefire is drawn up with a promise of international aid that never really arrives. And nobody is accountable. The world cannot afford more Afghanistans. An increasingly savvy civil society is the raison d'etre for calling on the UN to alter its course. It's time to dump the old formulas and create new solutions for ending conflict.

While in Afghanistan making a documentary for the CBC, "The Daughters of Afghanistan," I was fortunate enough to stay at a guest-house that had become home to a collection of diplomats, UN experts, NGO chiefs and seasoned journalists. The dinner table conversation was fascinating. Most of us had covered the same conflicts over the last two decades--Liberia, The Gulf War, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan. We shared stories about belligerents, best hotels, narrow escapes. But we also shared the same sense of frustration with the seemingly intractable conflicts. I posed the questions: Which country did this massive international rescue work for? Which of the countries we've all been in has emerged successful? The answer? Cambodia and maybe Mozambique. With the rest--Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kosovo and now Afghanistan--it's a toss-up at best, a continuing collapse at worst. Success depends on the willingness of the local people to compromise. If they won't, what should happen next? Shouldn't we be building on that knowledge and using it to alter the failing course we're now on?

Consider the entrenched rules of the UN; nobody dares to alter them. So we end up with Colonel Muammar Gadafi of Libya as the Chair of the Human Rights Commission. This is farcical to the max. The man who is known to have tortured and killed his political opponents, who financed an eclectic array of guerilla groups, not to mention Pan Am 103, and whose police have been implicated in racist attacks on black African refugees is now in charge of human rights. Many people say the rotation system used at the UN is based on: "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours." This may be an okay comment for idle office gossip, but it's ludicrous for the body that's supposed to be managing world conflict.

So why do we cling to the old formulas? Why aren't we searching for new solutions?

The world community came together after World War II and created the United Nations so that we would never have another Hitler in our midst. But in fact we have never got rid of these egomaniacs--what followed were Idi Amin, Pot Pot, Karadiche and bin Laden. The fact is, the UN was created for a post-World War II world. It simply isn't working as well as it needs to today. And yet we fear upsetting the status quo more than we fear the disastrous consequences of leaving it alone. It takes awesome moral courage to go against the grain.

We used to think the end of the Cold War would mean peace in places like the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa. But we couldn't have been more wrong. Instead we got a confounding collection of pot-boiling civil wars that erupted throughout those regions. What's happened since almost makes one nostalgic for the good old days of the Cold War.

During the eighties, classical humanitarian aid was viewed both as a universal right and as a politically neutral good. The Cold War ended and gave way to what's become known as the new humanitarianism. But in this revamped relief, bandits steal the food deliveries, war lords kidnap humanitarian-aid workers and rogue presidents put conditions on humanitarian aid. It is still seen as a substitute for the concerted political action that is

the real requirement. Somehow, we cannot get to that political action. Why?

At least part of the answer lies in the way the United Nations is structured.

Although it's practically heresy to say it, one needs to look at the United Nations Charter itself. Written in 1945, it's significant to note that the preamble in the UN Charter deals with people; it begins with "the peoples of the United Nations." But that's only the preamble. The articles in the charter deal with state parties. The fact is that individual states rely on support from the power brokers to stay in power so cannot fulfil the promise the charter makes to people. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written in 1948. It was the document that was to give teeth to the charter. But the declaration uses the male gender and for the most part omits the female gender. So were women's rights not considered human rights when the documents upon which modern society bases its fundamental rights theory were written? The women of Afghanistan would say that they weren't. Imagine if you'd been a doctor, lawyer, teacher, pharmacist or engineer one day and the next you were told you couldn't leave your home, your daughters couldn't go to school and you were not allowed to have health care. Where was the declaration for them?

As for the covenant and conventions that followed, look at the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Despite nearly universal ratification, the convention is not serving the children in the world today. Not even in Canada.

Although it's fair to say the documents were written with the best of intentions for the people they are to serve, they were written without a view to implementation. Gathering countries from all over the world together and having them agree to sign a document is an extraordinary task in itself. Getting the leaders of those countries to agree to actually enforce the document was an impossible task and one that the authors of the documents knew they could not accomplish. Accordingly, there is no iron fist of accountability in the documents. They rely instead on the politics of embarrassment.

States are seldom held accountable for ignoring their international obligations. And the complicated rules at the UN make it nearly impossible to change that. I'm involved right now in the ultra frustrating process of writing a document for presentation to the UN. It is tedious to the max; we can't say this or we can't mention that in this context. The rules are mind-boggling. And they are also barriers to getting the job done: to making peace, to getting people fed and to getting a country with a broken infrastructure rebuilt.

It's true that the UN adds resolutions to try to get around the problems. Resolution 1325 for example was entered into force two years ago. It says that women must be at the peace negotiation table. What a concept. Until then, who negotiated peace? Warriors--the people who want power and turf. I was in Israel and the West Bank last June doing a story about the Women's Peace Movement. These are Israeli and Palestinian women working together for peace. Neither group can even get a meeting with their governments. It occurred to me that women have a different agenda in the peace process. They seek policy not power. They want peace, more than a piece of turf. They need a sense of community rather than a sense of control. So I thought, thank goodness the UN has realized what they can bring to the table. But then when peace was being negotiated in Afghanistan, just 13 months after Resolution 1325 was signed, a senior bureaucrat at the UN, the redoubtable Mr. Prendergast said: "Good heavens, women can't be invited to this negotiation; it's too complicated."

So why can't we change it? Most people say it would be disastrous to reopen these documents. Is there a suggestion that what we are dealing with instead is not disastrous?

Some say the world cannot afford these changes. Consider this: the U.S. and the Soviet Union spent $10 trillion on the arms race during the Cold War. The World Bank says it would take $1 trillion today to wipe out world poverty. Indeed that is a lot of money. But the alternative is vastly more expensive. You think we can't afford it? There's more money in the world today than there has ever been, but it's concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. More decisions are made in Davos, Switzerland, than at the United Nations. And let's be honest; you can't make laws to stop terrorists when terrorists are fed by being without.

The people caught in these catastrophes are beginning to ask their own questions. Who gets rescued? If Iraq was exporting potatoes rather than oil, would the world community care so much about the maniac in power in that country? And once the rescue begins (presuming you have oil; by the way there's more oil on the northern borders of Afghanistan than there is in Saudi Arabia), what happens when the international community arrives in town? They're seen cruising around in big SUVs, they have shelter, food and an evacuation plan. The local people also know that they can be abandoned in a nanosecond as the Afghan people learned when the Cold War ended. The international community moved like a school of minnows, suddenly and all at once to a new feeding ground, leaving the vacuum that was then filled by the fundamentalists. As war with Iraq looms, they expect the same thing will happen again.

Still others say, we are meddling, that these issues are none of our business. In many of the stories I cover as a journalist, the issue of cultural relativism rears it head. Some say I have no right to speak of these issues since they are part of the culture or the religion and I am speaking as a western woman. But women have long known that the misogynist acts used against them in the name of culture and religion aren't cultural or religious at all.

Instead it's a way of keeping the taboo. If you can't talk about it, you can't change it. It's like playing a cultural trump card to keep the status quo. Look at the Taliban. Here's a gang of thugs who hijacked their own religion for political opportunism. They said they were doing this in the name of God. There isn't a word in the Koran to support what they did to the women of Afghanistan. There is nothing in the Koran to suggest a girl cannot go to school or a woman cannot go to work or even that a woman must cover her face. These guys were making it up as they went along. And they were getting away with it. The UN officials there told me it was none of my business. It was cultural. This wasn't cultural; this was criminal.

Even now that everyone knows what happened was criminal, who is accountable?

Nobody. Why? Go back to the UN Charter and international law for the answer. In international law there is a difference between state responsibility and state accountability: The state is legally responsible but politically accountable. So if they can get the support, to hell with the law.

The issue for me is that I read lengthy UN documents about the grand plan, but on assignment in these places I don't see it in action. Let me tell you about a little girl I met while in Afghanistan in October. Her name is Lima. She thinks she's 13 years old but she isn't sure. Her mother, father and grandmother were killed by Taliban bombs in 1998. Now she is the sole provider for her four younger siblings. She works from dawn to dark, cooking, cleaning their clothes, taking care of them. Her life is unimaginably hard. She says she has no hope. I asked her if there was something she liked to do when she could get away from the endless chores. She was quick to respond and took me to the edge of the village. While we walked there, I had a cockeyed notion that she was leading me to a play field or some place where she could act her age. She wasn't. She took me to the village cemetery. This is

where this blameless child seeks relief. She sits under a tree praying for and talking to her mother. More than half of the girls and women in Afghanistan are like Lima. It's not good enough.

There's a giant global chess game going on in Afghanistan today. Playing on one side are the fundamentalists who want a destabilized central government, war lords controlling pockets of turf throughout the country and the silencing of women. They are well-funded by places like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Playing on the other side is the international community that made a de facto promise to the people of Afghanistan: Let us invade your country to get rid of the terrorists and your life will be better. The promised funds from the international community have not arrived in sufficient quantity to make that change. What happens in Afghanistan will affect the entire region, maybe even the world. We simply have to demand that the UN find better solutions. There are droves of clever, highly experienced, well-meaning officials at the UN who know what to do. They haven't so far got the courage to do it.

But like I said, it takes awesome moral courage to go against the grain. It's tough to take a stand, to brave the disapproval of your colleagues, the censure of your friends and the wrath of society. It's been said that moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or even great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Col. Frederic L.R. Jackman, CSEJ, PhD, LLD, President, Invicta Investments Incorp. and Past President, The Empire Club of Canada.