GRITtv with Laura Flanders » Global Fund For Women: The Breath of Change

By: GRITtv Friday June 27, 2008 7:00 am

At the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, Brazil, author/activist Arundathi Roy opined "Another world is not only possible, she’s on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe." Today on GRIT TV, you can hear the breath of change blowing across traditional patriarchal societies as Laura Flanders speaks with formidable women activists recently honored by the Global Fund for Women struggling to improve the well-being of their sisters in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Listen to how women are engaged in revamping the cultural and social realities of their societies in the face of increased militarization, growing economic disparities, and escalating religious fundamentalism.

In this segment, Laura Flanders speaks with Professor Hoda Elsadda, co-founder, of Egypt’s Women & Memory Forum - an organization that brings together researchers and activists to use art & literature to re-interpreting Arab cultural history, challenging traditional gender norms and cultural biases against women in current Arab societies and with Taida Horozovic, the co-founder and director of the CURE Foundation, a group of young human rights activists in Bosnia and Herzogovina (BiH) organizing street actions and campaigns such as the ‘Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence’, V-Day. Giving an overview, Zeina Zaatari, Program Officer, Middle East and North Africa at the Global Fund for Women, reminds us of the role and responsibility of the us, which in waging war has created a culture of violence in societies where women are victimized and violated not only by the occupier, but within their own homes. Zaatari nevertheless reminds us that even in the most beleaguered societies, women ultimately need solidarity, not rescue. All three women speak to the value and power of sisterhood which extends across and beyond borders.

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One Response to “Global Fund For Women: The Breath of Change”

Nettle June 27th, 2008 at 4:00 pm

Great pleasure, indeed, this segment; I hope these guests will be back for more of this discussion.

One of the recurring themes they pointed out was the many desires of women in the Middle East and Eastern Europe (and US and…) to ‘occupy’ places of being actors in their own right, not pawns of global programs – that have their own agendas in mind.

I couldn’t help but think of John McCain’s campaign chair, Carly Fiorina, and a new intiative “for women” she also cochairs and trotted out with Sec. of State Condi Rice recently. This new one, the “One Woman Initiative” takes the earlier 2004 Iraqi Women’s Democracy Initiative – administered by promarket IWF and hawks at FDD – to utter new heights and blows any definition of cynicism off the charts (meanwhile, Fiorina woos Clinton women? really? run…).

US Secretary Rice said at the Mother’s Day launch (yes, Mother’s Day) of the public/private $100 million corporate funded OWI (ow-ee, at least the acronyms are definitive):

Ironically, such a hopeful idea was actually born of tragedy – from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto last December, just prior to the elections in Pakistan. We recognized the impact that one moderate woman had in a major Muslim country, and it inspired us to help nurture others who could become forces for moderation and peaceful change.

Whatever public hopes Rice had for Bhutto surely fall flat against the private reality of and reasons for her own direct finangling to get Bhutto back in Pakistan.

With mounting political unrest in Pakistan, Washington was desperate to prop up the military strongman, whom it viewed as a principal asset in the so-called war on terror.

“As President Pervez Musharraf’s political future began to unravel this year, Bhutto became the only politician who might help keep him in power,” the [Washington] Post reported.

It quoted Bhutto’s lobbyist, Mark Siegel, as stating, “The US came to understand that Bhutto was not a threat to stability, but was instead the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact.”

[… ]

Musharraf was reportedly opposed to any amnesty for Bhutto, not to mention her return to power. According to the Post report, it was Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte—a veteran of dirty deals with dictators—who finally convinced him. “He basically delivered a message to Musharraf that we would stand by him, but he needed a democratic facade on the government, and we thought Benazir was the right choice for that face,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and National Security Council staff member, told the Post.

And as for OWI’s “priorities…set by the Women Leaders Working Group” (also a US State Dept. creation launched in Sept. 2006, long before Bhutto’s death), Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli, Sec. Rice’s Senior Advisor on Women’s Empowerment (yes,indeed) told an intl. gathering of the WLWG in Greece a few weeks ago that

The empowerment of women that comes through the capacity of the opportunity for them to make some input has resulted, as study after study shows from the UNDP through the World Bank and through the Davos studies, that women, when they become economically viable citizens, help in a much greater way than simply the issue of one woman being able to earn money.

That’s right, economically “viable” citizens. Why not just come out and say “capitalists”? Why always the “democratic facade”, used over and over again now in the Bush State Dept. As Slavoj Zizek notes in InTheseTimes

When Marco Cicala, an Italian journalist, recently used the word “capitalism” in an article for the Italian daily La Repubblica, his editor asked him if the use of this term was necessary and could he not replace it with a synonym like “economy”?

What better proof of capitalism’s triumph in the last three decades than the disappearance of the very term “capitalism”? So, again, the only true question today is: Do we endorse this naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain contradictions strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction?

Capitalism colonizing onward as the new “civil society” for women in Muslim countries. There really is no other way to understand the thrust of Sec. Rice’s and Carly Fiorina’s One Woman Initiative or the earlier IWDI. Its not to make women more safe but to make countries previously hard for Western occupiers to occupy safe for capital, by doing the very thing Laura’s guests identified, exploiting women. Even Benazir Bhutto was expendable, who Rice now, after arranging her return to Pakistan in the first place, rather macably suggests is a martyr for democracy, not the interests of capital Rice represents.

Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban was one of the women leaders at the State Dept. gathering in Greece. Dr. Shaaban is indeed a woman leader, a member of the Syrian cabinet and a 2005 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Last week she wrote in Counterpunch

I was invited by the Foreign Minister of Greece, Mrs. Dora Bakoyannis, to a meeting of Women Leaders Workshop; an initiative that was launched few years ago in the presence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The American delegate who is a senior advisor for Rice started the session with a long demo of how good the US is to women all over the world, conspicuously ignoring the middle East and North Africa region (MENA) which was the main focus of the meeting. Once she finished, most Arab delegates spoke (there were about 12 of us ) and we all pointed out that foreign occupation is the most critical problem that breeds poverty, humiliation and disease for women, and that putting an end to foreign occupation is the most valuable assistance that we can give to women all over the world.

We changed the focus from the kind of charity and the few dollars the American delegate was speaking about to the fact that Israeli and American occupation of Arab countries in the MENA region create the greatest impediments in the way of women welfare and emancipation.

Ministers and representatives of other countries supported us directly and indirectly and we ended up by making the real issues from which Arab women suffer the focus of attention. How could the American delegate defeat us? She had not a clue about the lives of women in our region. However, she would have defeated us if we were either absent or silent.

In early June Dr. Shaaban wrote a lovely opinion piece for the Middle East Times, saying, in part,

The speech of U.S. President George W. Bush in the Israeli Knesset included a troubling phrase. He said:” Our two nations faced similar challenges at birth.”

One wonders what challenge the U.S. faced, except the elimination of indigenous inhabitants and the total destruction of their way of life including their languages, culture and beliefs and the establishment of a new country on the vestige of the indigenous owners of the land.

The question is: Is this the challenge faced by Israel in Palestine and by the U.S. in Iraq? In other words, is the challenge for them to prove that they are coming to save the Arabs by destroying their way of life and transferring them and uprooting them in order to allow settlers who had never been in the region to occupy their homes and grab their land and usurp their culture?

We’re going to need some brave new thinking from our US State Dept. should Obama win this fall. Somehow those he’s got qeued up don’t seem to fit the bill quite like the guests on GRITtv today.