A travesty for women & the environment
By
Deirdre Griswold
Published Mar 28, 2010 10:41 PM
It seemed like a scandalous disconnect, a case of the right brain not knowing
what the left brain was doing.
On March 12 Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations announced the
appointment of a High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing. The
group is supposed to mobilize the money to help poorer countries deal with
climate change, which had been promised them during the U.N. conference in
Copenhagen in December.
March 12 also happened to be the last day of a two-week session of the U.N.
Commission on the Status of Women, which of course had received high praise
from Ban and other officials. At those meetings, reports were given on how
climate change impacts women and their children even more severely than
men.
Ban had also issued a statement on International Women’s Day saying that
“empowering women is central to all other millennium development
goals.”
And, according to Selina Rust, writing from the U.N. on March 18 for the Inter
Press Service news agency, “Ban himself gave a speech last September
underlining the importance of ‘an environment where women are the key
decision makers on climate change, and play an equally central role in carrying
out these decisions.’
“’We must do more to give greater say to women in addressing the
climate challenge,’ he said at the time.”
It was all just talk.
Of the 19 appointees to the high-level climate change group announced March 12
by the secretary-general, not one was a woman. Jaws dropped. Women’s
groups still gathered at the U.N. were shocked and outraged.
Was it just an oversight? Certainly from the point of view of public relations,
it was a huge blunder to make such an announcement that day. But leaving timing
aside, this was not unusual. High-level appointments in which women are shut
out get made all the time by capitalist governments and supposedly
international bodies. Sometimes they include just a token woman —
something the secretary-general’s office scrambled to do once news of his
all-male appointees hit the fan.
It should be noted that the meetings on the Status of Women, like many other
progressive activities that use the U.N. as a venue, are organized through the
General Assembly, which currently has 192 member states. However, the
secretary-general of the U.N. is nominated by the much smaller Security Council
and is subject to a veto by any of its five permanent members.
Thus it is the Security Council — dominated for decades by U.S., British
and French imperialism, which occupy three of five permanent seats — that
pulls the strings in matters like these appointments. They are the ones who get
to decide what is, to them, the most important question regarding climate
change: money.
They also represent highly industrialized capitalist countries whose drive for
profits is responsible for most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is
causing climate change.
The usual suspects
So who were on Ban’s list of appointees? They included:
• Lawrence H. Summers, current director of the
White House’s National Economic Council, who in 2006 had to resign as
president of Harvard after he had tangled with African-American activist
professor Cornel West and also had said in a speech that the
underrepresentation of women in the top levels of scientific academia could be
due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high
end.”
• George Soros, the multibillionaire currency
speculator and founder of the Open Society Institute, which played a big role
in getting control of the media in Eastern Europe and engineering the overthrow
of the workers’ states there. This led to a disastrous decline in living
conditions, especially for women, and soaring rates of sexual
trafficking.
• British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has
alienated much of his Labour Party constituency, but pleased Washington, by
sending thousands of British troops to Afghanistan.
• Executives from the central banks of both France
and Germany.
Of course, this group would have no credibility without also having members
from the global South. But the imperialists made sure that the person who is
co-chair, along with Brown, is someone they can trust: Meles Zenawi. He became
prime minister of Ethiopia after an imperialist campaign brought down the
revolutionary government there. His troops have collaborated with the Pentagon
in the invasion and bombing of Somalia.
The IPS article on the Status of Women hearings cited a report by the
British-based Women’s Environmental Network showing that more than 10,000
women die each year from weather-related disasters such as tropical storms and
droughts, compared to about 4,500 men. Women, it says, are also the main
producers of food, providing 70 percent of agricultural labor in sub-Saharan
Africa, and so are particularly affected by reduced agricultural output. And
because of diminishing water supplies in many developing countries due to
climate change, women must travel farther each day to collect water and
fuel.
Any group tasked with finding the money for poorer countries to survive climate
change that does not include genuine representatives of the people affected
will bend to the will of the financiers, the bankers and the imperialist
politicians. What has just happened is a travesty not only for women but for
all people struggling against the horrific consequences of unbridled
capitalism.
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