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Largely Driven by Climate Crisis, 9 Out of 10 Least-Reported Humanitarian Crises of 2019 Were in Africa
"Does a crisis really happen if it is not in the headlines? YES."
Jan 27, 2020
Out of the top 10 most under-reported humanitarian crises in the world last year--many of them climate-related--nine were on the African continent, according to a new report.
Madagascar had the least-reported crisis in the study--entitled "Suffering in Silence" (pdf)--released Tuesday by CARE International, as 2.6 million people in the country are affected by chronic drought which has left more than 900,000 in immediate need of food assistance.
Out of 24 million online media articles examined by CARE International, just 612 reports were about the humanitarian emergency in Madagascar--and the country was just the most extreme example of the international community's neglect of the world's second-most populous continent.
"In 2019, over 51 million people suffered in 10 crises away from the public eye," the report reads. "Although for the average person on earth, life is better today than ever before, around 2% of the global population (160 million people) will require $28.8 billion in humanitarian assistance to survive. This is a fivefold increase of needs since 2007."
With 80% of Madagascar's population engaged in agriculture, the climate crisis and resulting drought has caused damage to many families' livelihoods. The food shortages brought on by chronic drought conditions also led to Madagascar having the fourth-highest rate of malnutrition in the world, making it easier for diseases like measles to infect over 100,000 people in 2019.
CARE International noted that millions of people in Africa are "suffering in silence" even as the climate crisis gains more international attention, thanks to grassroots climate activists like Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, and students all over the world--including across Africa--who have led climate marches over the past year.
"It is shocking to see how little media reporting there is about human suffering related to global warming in the South, the lack of political action to address this injustice, and solutions applied to ease the burden for communities."
--Sally Austin, CARE International"The increased public attention for the global climate crisis is encouraging, but we must ensure that the conversation is not limited to the Global North and much-needed transformations there," said Sally Austin, head of emergency operations for CARE International. "It is shocking to see how little media reporting there is about human suffering related to global warming in the South, the lack of political action to address this injustice, and solutions applied to ease the burden for communities."
Other crises in Africa that have been intensified by the climate crisis include Zambia's droughts, which left 2.3 million people in need of food assistance, and a mix of extreme drought and flooding in Kenya.
In southern Africa, where Zambia lies, temperatures are rising at two times the global rate. The pattern has contributed to a sharp drop in wheat and maize crops as well as in safe drinking water in much of the country.
Daily life for many in Zambia illustrates what climate leaders mean when they warn that people in frontline communities--who have contributed the least to the climate crisis--are suffering the most.
"The drought has placed additional hardships and risks on women as they cope with the changing climate," the report reads. "For example, some women now report waking up as early as 3:00 am in order to be the first to collect the scarce water available and then spend all day searching for food. Many have resorted to collecting whatever wild fruits they can find to feed their families."
In Kenya, rainfall in 2019 was at least 20% below average, and as CARE International says, "When there is not too little rainfall, there is far too much."
"Heavy rains displaced tens of thousands of people during the fall months and destroyed farmland and livestock," the report reads. "This worsened an already dire food situation in the country."
North Korea is the only country on CARE's list that isn't in Africa; other under-reported emergencies are taking place in Eritrea, Central African Republic, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and the countries of the Lake Chad Basin--made up of Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon.
None of the countries on the list were covered in more than about 9,000 media articles all over the world throughout 2019.
Armed conflicts are major drivers of humanitarian crises in several African countries. CARE's report notes that the climate crisis is worsening political and economic instability across the continent.
"We're seeing increasing linkages between the effects of man-made climate change and the longevity and complexity of humanitarian crises," said Austin. "From Madagascar to Lake Chad to North Korea, the majority of crises ranked in our report are partly a consequence of declining natural resources, increasing extreme weather events and global warming more broadly."
The report notes that three of the least-reported crises in the world are also on the United Nations' list of the least-funded international emergencies.
With this in mind, CARE says, media outlets and humanitarian groups can help to close the gaps by considering "reporting as a form of aid."
"Crises that are neglected are also often the most underfunded and protracted," the report reads. "With close links between public awareness and funding, it needs to be acknowledged that generating attention is a form of aid in itself. As such, humanitarian funding should include budget lines to raise public awareness, particularly in low-profile countries."
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Stopping the Violence in Burundi
With the recent mass political unrest and failed military coup against Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza--after he announced his run for an extraconstitutional third term--the African Union along with the United Nations appealed for ethnic harmony there. This addressed fears that weeks of political unrest could prompt another round of fight between Hutus and Tutsis in the center of Africa's Great Lakes region.
May 31, 2015
With the recent mass political unrest and failed military coup against Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza--after he announced his run for an extraconstitutional third term--the African Union along with the United Nations appealed for ethnic harmony there. This addressed fears that weeks of political unrest could prompt another round of fight between Hutus and Tutsis in the center of Africa's Great Lakes region.
The conflict started April 26 after Burundi's Constitutional Court ruled in support of President's Nkurunziza's decision to overrule Burundi's constitution and stand for a third term. There were reports that judges were intimidated. As a result of the upheaval, tens of thousands fled the country.
His critics say Nkurunziza's attempt to defy the constitution endanger a peace deal brokered to keep ethnic tensions in check since the end of the civil war in 2005. The bloody conflict between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi since have all but disappeared, although political parties still have distinctly ethnic features. The president is Hutu, most of the opposition leaders are Tutsis, and they have seized on the ethnic divisions and distorted them into something far more complex.
Burundi emerged from a brutal civil war a decade ago but according to United Nations there are fears that the crisis right now could reignite the frictions that existed during the civil war. Burundi has experienced 40 years of armed violence and civil war since gaining independence from Belgium in 1962. The United Nations along with Amnesty International estimated that 300,000 people died in the conflict in Burundi, which has the same ethnic mixture as neighboring Rwanda, where 800,000, most of them Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed in a 1994 genocide. It's clear that political instability and deep rooted unresolved grievances continue to threaten inter-ethnic cooperation and security in the country and the Great Lakes in general.
So what is behind the current political instability in Burundi? Even though the conflict is based on President Nkurunziza's decision to campaign for a third term, the conflict has an economic dimension. Many Tutsis argue about the lack of access to job opportunities and resources, and their grievances cut across the ethnic divide. It's well documented that unequal distribution of resources perpetuates dominance and creates violence as seen in many African conflicts. Wars arise from distributional conflict; achieving political stability will require the establishment of institutional mechanisms that correct the legacy of inequality, and afford parity access to economic and political power across the ethnic groups in Burundi.
Failure to find solutions to Burundi's political instability will have devastating social, political, and economic effects on the Great Lakes region, an area that is already worn out by conflict and poverty despite--some say because of--an abundance of valuable natural resources.
There is, indeed, reason for seeing Burundi as a catastrophe in the making. It has a vicious cycle of intergroup violence, with militias pre-empting politics and crowds of refugees on the move. The conflict in Burundi could metastasize to other areas of the Great Lakes, which could throw the entire region into danger yet again.
The African Union, in concert with the United Nations, must spearhead solid multilateral conflict resolution mechanisms to avoid the spillover effects. If not, ethnic conflicts are contagious in the Great Lakes and can rampage virally across borders.
In light of this conflict, I hope that the international community will increase its efforts to avert disaster in Burundi. Already the EU has pulled election observers and the Catholic Church has announced it will not assist, as it usually does, in organizing and monitoring the election. Leaders in the Great Lakes region should take a hard look at their actions and policy choices. Emphasis here should be on discouraging corruption, embracing ethnic harmony, transparency, and good governance.
It is therefore important that if President Pierre Nkurunziza is serious about building peace, he must stop repression of opposition figures and tolerate dissent--or he should face serious personal economic, social, and travel sanctions from the international community. He must also implement constructive methods of handling ethnic differences, engineer institutions that uproot the legacy of discrimination and promote equal opportunity for social mobility for all members of Burundi's ethnic groups. The UN and African Union stand ready to help.
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Who's Afraid of African Democracy?
May 25, 2015
Poor Burundi. Landlocked, tiny, and known mainly for ethnic conflict, it was for years the subject of one of the most intense international peace-building efforts in history. By the time the Arusha Peace Agreement was finally signed in 2003, 300,000 Burundians had died in a civil war rivaling in ferocity that of its neighbor Rwanda. Huge sums had been invested in grassroots workshops, high-level meetings and summits to end the fighting. According to Burundi specialist Peter Uvin, taxi drivers in the capital Bujumbura joke that the per diems received during these protracted negotiations built the poshest neighborhood in the city. Now, a decade after the peace process came to what seemed a successful conclusion, and despite billions of dollars in humanitarian aid, the country appears to be falling apart again.
In April, President Pierre Nkurunziza, in power since 2005, announced he'd be running for a third term in elections scheduled for June. Opposition supporters, church leaders, student and civil society groups, much of the international community, and even many in Nkurunziza's own party say this violates the Arusha agreement, which limits a president to two terms in office. They also accuse Nkurunziza--a former warlord who became a born-again Christian and travels with his own Hallelujah football club and choir--of presiding over a regime of corruption remarkable even by East African standards. Many also claim President Nkurunziza has condoned politically motivated killings of opposition figures and provided tacit government support to an armed militia known as Imbonerakure, which could be deployed to intimidate voters during the election.
Thousands of Burundians took to the streets in mid-April to protest Nkurunziza's plans to run for office again. Hundreds were arrested and perhaps twenty--the number is disputed--were killed. Security forces were split, with some in the army on the side of the people. On May 13, a group of army officers led by former intelligence chief Godefroid Niyombare announced they'd ousted Nkurunziza, to much rejoicing in Bujumbura. Nkurunziza was in Tanzania discussing the crisis with other African leaders, but he quickly snuck back across the border where he was met by his own forces and retook the capital a couple of days later.
Niyombare is said to be on the run, and most of his fellow coup plotters have been arrested. Three who were wounded were subsequently shot in their hospital beds by men in police uniforms as horrified nurses, doctors, and other patients looked on. An estimated hundred thousand refugees have fled to neighboring countries. The protestors are continuing their demonstrations, while Nkurunziza seems determined to go ahead with his plans to stand for reelection. On Wednesday, Radio France Internationale reported that police in Bujumbura had cordoned off an entire neighborhood and were shooting at anti-third term activists among their homes.
What makes events in this tiny country so important, and so heartbreaking, is that they are part of a recent pattern that actually seemed hopeful. When protest movements swept across the Middle East region--in Iran in 2009 and then in the Arab Spring countries--they didn't stop at the Sahara desert. In their new book Africa Uprising, Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly document more than ninety political protests in forty African countries in the past decade--most in the past six years. Many have had the same aim as those in the Middle East: to force corrupt leaders out of power.
Some have been encouraging: after Senegal's Constitutional Court ruled--under duress, some say--that President Abdoulaye Wade could run for what many maintained was an unconstitutional third term in the 2012 elections, people poured onto the streets in outrage. Police in riot gear fired tear gas and rubber bullets, and a handful of protesters were killed. But the country's citizens got their point across. Wade lost the election and conceded defeat.
There's also cautious optimism about Burkina Faso. When President Blaise Compaore tried to strongarm the National Assembly into removing term limits so he could contest the 2015 election, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in front of the building while some forced their way in. He was deposed in October 2014, and an interim military council is now organizing elections to take place later this year. And when demonstrators in the Democratic Republic of Congo took to the streets of Kinshasa in January, they managed to halt President Joseph Kabila's attempt to alter the constitution, which would have extended his term beyond its end date of 2016.
Attempts at tyrant-removal are unlikely to end anytime soon. Over two dozen African countries are headed for elections in the next two years, including Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and other countries whose leaders have signaled an intention to remain in office no matter what. Protest movements in some of these countries are gathering force, and army commanders are quietly choosing sides between the autocrats and the people.
Why do so many African leaders assume they can ignore their constitutions, cling to power, and get away with it?
In order to understand this epidemic of folly, it's important to appreciate how much influence the West has over these countries--either through foreign aid given bilaterally, via institutions such as the World Bank, or in the form of clandestine military support. For example, Western aid pays for half of Burundi's budget, roughly 40 percent of Rwanda's, 50 percent of Ethiopia's and 30 percent of Uganda's . All these countries receive an unknown amount of military aid as well. This money enables African leaders to ignore the demands of their own people, and facilitates the financing of the patronage systems and security machinery that keeps them in power.
The problems started with the debt crisis in the 1970s. African countries that had borrowed and spent lavishly in the years following independence found themselves unable to repay the commercial banks that had lent them money. The Western nations, via the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, took over and restructured these loans, but demanded large public spending cuts. Huge numbers of teachers, nurses, doctors, and other public servants lost their jobs; programs to expand health care and education, improve roads and bring water and electricity to rural areas ground to a halt; poverty deepened; infant mortality rose.
In many cases, the new austerity programs, intended to lead to more efficient government, instead encouraged unprecedented corruption. Those who managed to hold on to government and civil service jobs scrambled to grab whatever they could for themselves and their increasingly dependent extended families. This patronage system helped control dissent, as many African leaders used what Cameroonians term "the politics of the belly"--bribery--to compromise their critics and coopt opposition groups. But it also led to deteriorating public services, as I documented in Uganda, where the maternal mortality rate in the largest referral hospital had increased seven-fold since the days of Idi Amin, according to a World Bank consultant who had worked there in the 1970s.
The continent's foreign aid donors were not oblivious to these problems. They knew that this new loan regime, known as Structural Adjustment, would hurt huge numbers of people. For example, in a notorious 1981 World Bank report about the program , the authors acknowledge that some reforms would be resisted by "consumers and producers, parastatal managers, civil servants and industrialists,"--meaning just about everybody in the nations involved. The state had to be "willing to take strong action on internal problems," the report continued. As Branch and Mampilly note, many African scholars interpreted this as tacit donor permission for repression in countries receiving loans. This would be consistent with the donors' tendency to look the other way when Adjustment-friendly leaders--like Burkina Faso's Compaore, Cote D'Ivoire's Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Uganda's Museveni and Kenya's Daniel Arap Moi--jailed, murdered, or exiled their critics. The donors' tolerance for human rights abuses may help explain why, when ethnic discrimination and repression escalated into genocide, as it did in Rwanda and Burundi, the international community did nothing until it was far too late.
Another reason so many African leaders feel they can afford to ignore their own people has to do with America's "War on Terror." During the 1990s, the Clinton administration began securing military ties with African leaders who seemed willing to cooperate in the fight against what Clinton officials saw as the rising threat of Islamic militancy on the continent. These ties have only grown in the years after September 11. According to journalist Nick Turse, the US military has sponsored more than one thousand African missions since 2011, with countries such as Nkurunziza's Burundi, along with Rwanda, Ethiopia, Chad, and Uganda, deploying troops and guards across Africa and the Middle East at America's behest. The primary purpose of this seems to be to monitor and prevent the emergence of terrorist groups in weak states. But it's no coincidence that the US's military allies in Africa have often used security forces against their own critics at home. As the events in Burundi suggest, providing support to ugly regimes may ultimately undermine the very stability we are supposedly seeking.
Now, fed up with decades of lies, plunder and abuse, Africans across the continent are finally rising up to challenge these Western-backed thugs. Some have been inspired by protests elsewhere in the world; some are united in new ways by Facebook, Twitter, and chat programs. Foreign aid has also brought thousands of NGOs into Africa. Not all are effective, but their American and European employees and volunteers have, naively or not, exposed African people to liberal Western attitudes and ideals of human rights as never before.
Branch and Mampilly lament that whereas past African protest movements had clear ideologies, like Independence, African Nationalism and Pan-Africanism, the only thing today's protesters appear to want is the removal of the current leadership of their countries. But this lack of a grand objective may not be such a bad thing, as long as whoever takes over pursues a modest program of obeying the rule of law, eschewing corruption and respecting human rights. This is why this spring's election in Nigeria, in which incumbent Goodluck Jonathan graciously conceded defeat, was so welcome. Some opposition supporters had threatened violence if it felt the election was rigged, but this proved unnecessary. Though Nigeria's new leader, former General Muhammadu Buhari, behaved like a tyrant when he briefly ruled the country between 1983 and 1985, he also cracked down on corruption. For two years, Nigerians formed orderly lines at bus stops, the streets were clean, and politicians didn't steal. Many Nigerians, exasperated with their supremely corrupt country, are hoping for a spell of modest probity, as long as Buhari honors his promise to respect human rights this time. If we're seeing the dawn of a new movement, let's forgive it for lacking a glamorous label. Right now, it's the best hope this beleaguered continent has.
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The Way to Peace Can Be Paved With Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Negotiation
Peace activists are often accused of being naive dreamers when it comes to dealing with conflict or dangerous enemies.
So what is the alternative? Usually it's to fight fire with fire (i.e., revenge and retaliation).
The very nature of peacemaking, however, is not to fight but rather to confront "the opponent" with intelligence, craftiness, humor and a thirst for justice. We have some splendid examples of this approach in Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, just to name a few. Skeptics recoil and sputter that such people were exceptions.
Apr 18, 2008
Peace activists are often accused of being naive dreamers when it comes to dealing with conflict or dangerous enemies.
So what is the alternative? Usually it's to fight fire with fire (i.e., revenge and retaliation).
The very nature of peacemaking, however, is not to fight but rather to confront "the opponent" with intelligence, craftiness, humor and a thirst for justice. We have some splendid examples of this approach in Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, just to name a few. Skeptics recoil and sputter that such people were exceptions.
However, let's not forget that these "peace heroes" inspired ordinary people to follow them and choose to become part of a movement for change.
Skeptics also claim that the American "sheeple" cannot be moved because they are asleep, unaware, too numb and too busy to care about injustices. They also say it is impossible to fight against the awesome power of Corporate America, Big Government and other power brokers.
OK, then maybe that's a cue for peace activists' next challenge: How can we inspire others so deeply that they choose to form a movement for change from violence and war to peace; from hatred to love; from revenge and retaliation to forgiveness and reconciliation; from an obstinate refusal to communicate to negotiation?
Let's look at some recent examples of the impossible.
The Amish
On October 2, 2006, ten Amish girls were gunned down in a schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.
A community known for its gentleness, religious faith and the rejection of modern technological society had been severely violated. However, within six hours of the shooting, Amish leaders reached out to family members of the killer to let them know that they forgave him and still regarded them as part of the community.
The typical Amish attitude about forgiveness is: "We have to forgive others so that God will forgive us." They formed this outlook on life 300 years ago when their ancestors, the Anabaptists, were persecuted and tortured by Catholic and Protestant religious authorities who objected to their belief in a second baptism. And even as they were burning at the stake, those same Anabaptist martyrs forgave their persecutors, just as Jesus did to his persecutors during his crucifixion 2,000 years before.
The Amish practice of humility, submission and patience "provides them with an enormous capacity to absorb adversity, forgo revenge and carry on-gracefully," say the authors of Amish Grace, a book about the Nickel Mines community's response to this terrible tragedy. It was forgiveness that opened everyone to grace and everyone and everything was suddenly changed.
April 27, 1994, marked the day apartheid ended and all of South Africa voted. Nelson Mandela, who had been released from prison after 27 years with 18 in solitary confinement, was elected South Africa's first black president.
Mandela's victory became even more incredible when he called on the post-apartheid government's efforts to create peace and equality among the races. He did this by getting the new government to pass a general amnesty toward those who were guilty of the crimes and atrocities of apartheid as long as they made a full disclosure of all the facts of their activities.
The victims of apartheid would likewise waive their right to sue for compensation and instead accept reparations. Reparations, then, became a symbolic gesture of the nation that bore the victims' pain and trauma. Mandela's underlying assumption was that peace in South Africa could only be won when the people admitted that evil was present in everyone.
"We sat down and negotiated with our former enemies," said Bishop Desmond Tutu, presidential appointee of the Truth and Reconciliation Committees, the key instrument in healing the wounds of apartheid. "We forgot the past, looked for the best in everyone, and came to terms with the ghastly things done by both sides."
Tutu illustrated how this worked by citing an "incredibly moving" inter-faith service he attended in Pretoria.
Survivors who had endured the killing of 11 people in their community held hands with the white police officer who had given the order to kill their family and friends years before.
The officer had applied and was granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but he also was required to make a public show of regret for his actions by asking the community to forgive him of his deeds. At first, the community was hostile toward him and disbelieved his repentance, but he pressed them to move beyond the past.
"In that moment, barriers toppled," said Tutu, "and the community forgave him."
"We don't know how it can happen, but it happened. Former enemies were able to find one another in magnanimity, even after they experienced untold suffering. They all had good reasons for revenge, but by discovering their own capacities for evil as part of the whole picture of themselves, they were able to forgive and forget."
Burundi
Burundi is a geographically-isolated country in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa with a population of 6 million, down considerably after four decades of civil war, genocide, displacement and an epidemic of HIV affecting nearly four percent of the adult population.
Roughly 85 percent of the population is of the marginalized Hutu ethnic origin while most of the minority is the politically dominant Tutsi.
The coffee-based economy (78 percent of its export trade) make it the lowest GDP per capita in the world at US$90 compared to $43,594 in the United States.
It's no wonder that Burundi was recently declared the country with the lowest "satisfaction with life". Howard Wolpe, currently director of the Africa Program for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former seven-term U.S. congressman, had been working with Burundi for 10 years including five years as presidential special envoy to Africa's Great Lakes region. After getting the go-ahead from the World Bank, Wolpe instituted the Burundi Leadership Training Program (BLTP), which aimed to develop the leaders' communication and negotiation skills needed to guide Burundi's recovery and transition to democracy.
Wolpe went beyond conventional diplomacy, which is usually aimed at obtaining a "quick acceptance" to agreements hammered out by lawyers. The missing element in that process is to take into consideration the personalities of the leaders who harbored decades of fear, mistrust and suspicion.
According to the Wilson Center Web site, the BLTP, "seeks to enable leaders from belligerent parties to address four challenges that are key to the achievement of a durable peace: (1) shifting key leaders from a zero-sum mindset to one that recognizes interdependence and the importance of collaboration; (2) rebuilding the trust and relationships among key leaders that have been fractured by conflict; (3) strengthening their communication and negotiation skills; and (4) rebuilding a consensus on how power should be organized and decisions made."
The Burundi Program has been so successful that Wolpe has been invited to work with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and most recently, East Timor.
For those of us who want change we need to remember that just because our leadership does not possess the qualities of forgiveness, reconciliation and negotiation, does not mean that "we the people" can't. And if we really believe in democratic governance, then it is incumbent on us to initiate and "be the change" in order to show our leaders the way.
Forgiveness, reconciliation and negotiation are not easy. However, they are essential if we are to move beyond our present divisions, hatreds, violence and war both at home and abroad.
Peace activists, in particular, can make a difference everyday to serve as bridges in our local communities so that the spirit of forgiveness, reconciliation and negotiation can spread throughout our country and the world.
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Women Out in the Cold at Peace Talks
Mar 04, 2008
UNITED NATIONS - As the United Nations continues its two-week long discussions on the status of women worldwide, there is one nagging fact hovering around the conference rooms in the Secretariat: peacemaking is still largely in the hands of "men in suits, puffing on cigars".
This is primarily male-dominated territory, says Gina Torry, coordinator of the non-governmental Working Group on Women, Peace and Security.
As an example, she points out that there is no gender adviser to the ongoing peace talks on Darfur, Sudan, where women and children are the most victimized in what the United States calls "genocide".
"That was troubling because such experts could help women face challenges and overcome divisions," Torry adds.
Getting women's voices heard in the conference rooms would be a start, she adds, "but getting them to (positions of authority at the negotiating) table will show real progress."
However, that is still mostly in the realm of political fantasy, says the U.N. Fund for the Development of Women (UNIFEM)
A Security Council resolution (1325) adopted in 2000 called for equal participation by both men and women in maintaining and promoting peace and security. But that resolution "was a long way from being adequately implemented", says Anne Marie Goetz, UNIFEM's chief adviser on Governance, Peace and Security.
She told the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women -- which concludes its two-week session Friday -- that very few women participated in peace talks as official negotiators or observers.
"Disarmament, demobilization and re-integration processes still rarely addressed the needs of women associated with fighting forces, and post-conflict planning and financing for women's recovery, remained weak," she added.
Goetz called for a gender-sensitive perspective on conflict resolution, peacemaking and rehabilitation.
On the positive side, UNIFEM has recently supported capacity-building of women's groups in Darfur and national peace consultations with women, while facilitating women's access to institutions involved in the peace process.
In northern Uganda, UNIFEM has joined hands with the Department of Political Affairs to appoint a gender adviser to the peace talks. At the same time, it has supported efforts to improve military and police tactics to prevent sexual gender-based violence in conflicts.
Assistant Secretary-General Carolyn McAskie, head of the U.N. Peacebuilding Support Office, points out that despite much rhetoric about women's roles in peacebuilding, women's contributions had rarely been fully recognised.
But both her office and UNIFEM have actively promoted women's groups to participate in the peacebuilding processes in two countries: Sierra Leone and Burundi.
The government of Sierra Leone and the U.N. Peacebuilding Commission have adopted a Peacebuilding Cooperation Framework that recognizes gender equality as a cross-cutting peacebuilding issue with specific commitments to advance that goal.
These commitments include family support units, capacity-building of national gender institutions and implementing laws relating to domestic violence, inheritance and property rights.
In Burundi, McAskie said, women have participated in the peace process, integrating gender equality into democratic governance and the peacebuilding framework.
As a result of quotas spelled out in the peace agreement and Burundi's new constitution, women were now better represented in government, holding 30 percent of parliamentary seats and seven ministerial posts.
"Despite those significant achievements, much more must be done," McAskie told the Commission on the Status of Women last week.
"We have learned that our ability to affect real change in gender equality through peacebuilding greatly depends on how the international community establishes its priorities and uses its resources," she declared.
McAskie also said the much publicized Security Council resolution 1325 of eight years ago should be used as political leverage to ensure the presence of gender advisers in the planning stages of U.N. peacekeeping missions.
She said the Security Council should also ensure that Secretariat briefings include "gender impacts" on conflict situations.
At the same time, there should be more women in senior level decision-making positions who could raise the relevant issues.
"We all need to be speaking the same language," she added.
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