By Suzanne Hoeksema
NEW YORK, Dec 23 2009 (IPS)

A group of Rwandan women enjoy a night of unbroken sleep for the first time in 15 years, and see their depression and physical pains fade after having taken part in yoga classes.

Deirdre Summerbell teaches a yoga class. Credit: Project Air

“Yoga gives these women back the sense that they still have untapped reserves of life and health and youth in them – that they are not old and maimed and sick at all, but still very much alive,” says Deirdre Summerbell, a yoga teacher and founder of the organisation Project Air.

Since its launch in 2007, thousands of women who were raped during the genocide in 1994, many of whom were consequently infected by HIV/AIDS, have been reached with yoga classes given by Project Air.

In partnership with local gynaecologic health centres that perform fistula operations for survivors of rape, the organisation is now planning to expand into the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman or girl.

With the formal endorsement by the United Nations – the first ever given to a yoga initiative – Summerbell is thinking of expanding into other areas as well, such as Burundi, Somalia and Sierra Leone, and has received suggestions from the U.N. to go into Gaza, Afghanistan, Guatemala and Colombia.

On a recent trip to New York, Summerbell spoke to IPS about the challenges of teaching yoga in poor and conflict-ridden countries to people who had experienced terrible emotional and physical damage.

“Having spent part of my youth in Tanzania, I saw many ideas from the West come and go in the region,” she said. “Yet as well-meaning as some of those ideas were, they were often also naïve or worse, something I was afraid this yoga experiment would turn out to be, too.”

But the experiment proved instead to be successful and, as a result, it became the first time yoga was included as a programmed mental health service of a medical NGO in Africa (WE-ACTx).

Experts of the interview follow.

Q: Can you describe what you encounter when teaching yoga in a place like Rwanda? A: It is very different from the way women do yoga in the West. For Rwandan women, the “body beautiful” is definitely not the first focus. And it’s this that makes it more effective because these women have no preconceived ideas about yoga and what it is supposed to be.

In our classes, moreover, we confine ourselves to yoga as a physical exercise; it does not need the overlay of spirituality.

Yet one thing of course that is very painful is to ask women to be physically active when you know they do not have enough to eat and drink. Therefore, besides yoga mats, I also provide food and potable water. But I would like to create some sustainability in this respect by teaching the women, for example, how to disinfect water by means of the sun, which can serve as an income generation project too.

In terms of hostility towards us, we have encountered some difficulties as a result of a view espoused by Rwandan evangelical churches that yoga is a form of satanism. But, for me, the name yoga is not important. We may well call it psycho-physiotherapy or trauma mitigation. It is a means to an end.

Q: What kind of impact does yoga have on the women? A: There was one woman who said that her body and bones hurt all the time, and that during yoga, she did not feel the pain any more.

In the beginning they always think that they can’t do it, that it is for children. “I am too old for this,” a 28-year old woman will say. But when they start moving around and actually using their bodies, they suddenly feel proud of being strong and so end up leaving with big smiles on their faces.

With a strong body there comes a revolution in perspective. If you feel weak, you do not feel happy with yourself. But if you feel strong, you will begin to enjoy tremendous psychological benefits, as well.

And this applies not only to the women we work with, but also to their families. This is because they bring their children or their entire families with them, which means we sometimes end up with scores of additional people watching and participating in our classes.

Q: What is on your agenda? Will you be expanding into other regions? A: People are massively ignorant and indifferent to the use of rape as a tool of war, which is heartbreaking. It’s a perpetual mystery to me why women tolerate this. Every conflict that uses a particular tool makes that tool acceptable for the next conflict to use.

Western women do have to stand up to these crimes. This is one of the underlying interests I have in teaching yoga to the women I work with. Of course, in every region we will need to adapt our approach to different cultural and social circumstances.

In the case of the DRC, we will most likely work with women and girls who have been recently raped and whose traumas are much fresher than those of the women we worked with in Rwanda.

Because it is a region at war, I know our safety cannot be guaranteed fully, but honestly, I would find it difficult to live with myself if I didn’t do something to try to help.

Excerpt:

By Suzanne Hoeksema
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 11 2009 (IPS)

With the exception of South Africa, most African countries criminalise same-sex relationships with imprisonment, while incidents of violence against gay women and men are poorly investigated and rarely taken to court.

Akinyi M. Ocholla Credit: Courtesy of Akinyi M. Ocholla

In an interview with IPS, Akinyi M. Ocholla from the Nairobi-based Minority Women in Action, a community-based organisation that stands up for the rights of lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex women and girls, said that the taboo on homosexuality in African countries will only be broken when schools start to include sexuality and sexual orientation in their curriculum.

“We really have to start from scratch,” she said. “Kenya is such a deep-rooted Christian and Muslim society, and most people feel extremely uncomfortable to discuss sex, even between boys and girls, so one can imagine how difficult it is to raise the issue of homosexuality.”

Minority Women in Action was founded in 2006 by a group of lesbian women who felt that their specific needs were not met by the existing male-dominated gay organisations in Nairobi. The group fights for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Kenya and wants to create an open and safe space for LBTI women to come together and exchange experiences.

Sections in Kenyan law state that so-called “sex against the order of nature” is punishable with 14 years in prison, and men can be charged with “sodomy” risking five years of imprisonment.

And lesbians do face harassment and violence, including cases of “curative rape” so as to ‘heal’ her ‘homosexual tendencies’. They are also often dismissed from their workplaces, simply on the basis of their sexual orientation – even though that has no relation to the efficiency of their jobs, Ocholla explained.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: How is the situation relating to gays and lesbians in Kenya, and on the African continent? AKINYI OCHOLLA: In East Africa, the emergence of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex (LGBTI) movement in the public sphere is fairly recent, and very much misunderstood and disliked by the religious and conservative people.

Uganda has recently become very harsh on gays, and now they are discussing a ridiculous bill in parliament that wants to prohibit any form affiliation with homosexuals, while encouraging citizens to report gays to the police, even when they are your family.

In Kenya, there are many unreported human rights violations of LGBTI people. Those that are reported to the police do not necessarily receive any hearing nor will offenders be prosecuted. Often the police themselves beat, sexually harass, or even blackmail LGBTI individuals.

Schools barely touch upon topics like sexuality, and alternative sexual orientation is relegated to one of the many subjects of ‘deviances’ taught in colleges. Topics like transgender and intersex issues are not even taught because those are even less understood.

It is interesting that homosexuality is a topic of debate in the media – in newspapers, gutter presses, on radio, TV, and soon even in Kenyan soap operas. To me this is a good beginning. Even though most comments are predominantly negative, it is at least a sign that people start to discuss it.

IPS: Can you talk about the historical context? AO: There are people who say that homosexuality is brought to Africa by the “white men”, but that does not make any sense, because there are people who grow up in rural areas and without ever having affiliated with white people, and they turn out to be gay.

There are even certain pre-colonial practices that hint at homosexual practices, such as women marrying other women. This was often done in cases where the older woman had no children to carry her family name, or her husband’s name.

She would marry another woman who would then be expected to bear her children, and they stayed in the same house. Often they would have very close bonds with each other and even love each other. There are also documented cases of men engaging in homosexual practices, such as the oral exchange of semen as rites of passage.

IPS: What is the role of religion in the discrimination of gays in Africa? AO: Christians might be a little more tolerant, but only marginally so. Generally religious conservative people just cannot accept LGBTI people amongst them.

A religious system that teaches hetero-normative values to its congregations is very unlikely to want to accept homosexuality as ‘normal’, because it turns upside-down their perceptions regarding genders, gender roles and power dynamics.

Religion as it is taught today is very good at keeping patriarchy alive, giving men power to rule the country and in the domestic spheres and thereby oppressing women.

IPS: What can civil society, and your group in particular, do to support lesbian women and girls in Kenya? AO: There are lots of instances where they are either beaten up, or disowned by their family, and there are cases of ‘curative rape’, even within the family. This is not reported very much, because it is so taboo.

In such cases, when the girl decides to take the case to court, we would provide all the support we can, but we can obviously not force her to do so.

IPS: What can be done within the United Nation system to promote the rights of LGBTI people in Africa? AO: If the U.N. system is to support LGBTI rights, it must undergo a lot of change and its staff has to release their hold on religious doctrine.

The U.N. has to allow even more women into positions of influence and transform its power structure, and it has to allow more openly out LGBT individuals into its hierarchies and these should come from all countries around the world, particularly from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

I feel that many of the U.N. documents, conventions, covenants, and declarations do not tackle LGBTI issues head on. They talk about sex, or sexuality, but rarely about sexual orientation or gender identity.

It’s almost like they are pussyfooting around the issues, for fear of putting off homophobic partners from within and outside the U.N.

Excerpt:

By Suzanne Hoeksema
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 5 2009 (IPS)

On Sep. 14, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted a resolution that gave the green light to the creation of a new U.N. agency for women.

Naisola Likimani Credit: FEMNET

It will draw together under one umbrella all the existing entities for women in the U.N. – U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), International Training and Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) and Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues (OSAGI).

Civil society organisations have long lobbied for a women’s agency, and in 2008 these efforts were combined in the Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) campaign involving some 310 organisations.

IPS spoke with Naisola Likimani of the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) on the opportunities and challenges that the new agency which will be headed by an under secretary general faces. Likimani, based in Nairobi, Kenya, is also the focal point for Africa for the GEAR campaign.

Excerpts from the interview:

IPS: Where should the headquarters of the new U.N. women’s agency be located? NAISOLA LIKIMANI: It should be in Africa, in an easily accessible capital.

Africa is terribly lagging behind in the realisation of women’s rights, for instance in maternal and child mortality and morbidity rates; increased poverty rates and the feminisation of poverty in the region; and gender gaps in primary and secondary enrolment, to name only a few.

Housing the new agency in Africa would call global attention to these disparities and hopefully lead to increased prioritisation and more strategic resource allocation.

IPS: What will be the main challenges and opportunities of forming the new agency? NL: Among the opportunities are that women’s issues will benefit from a higher profile, as has been accorded in the past to environmental issues and children’s issues.

The new agency will also provide for a more coherent global policy on gender equality, and coherent and strategic resourcing rather than the current fragmented way in which gender equality is handled at the U.N.

Among the challenges are bringing together four bodies to become one – like negotiating a merger. Harmonising the cultures of the four entities into one that facilitates the work of the new entity is both an opportunity and potentially a challenge.

There has to be a political commitment to provide the necessary resources right from the start. It is important that the entity is not dependent on the occasional support from the super powers. It has to maintain its independence in order to respond to the needs of women both in the global north and south.

IPS: What would you recommend the under secretary general’s (USG) priorities be in her/his first year of office? NL: FEMNET feels that it is imperative that the USG be female, particularly at the time of establishing this entity.

During the first year she should establish the office, negotiate and define the mandate of the new entity in relation to the other U.N. bodies, and mobilise ambitious, regularised funding.She must ensure a minimum of one billion U.S. dollar that is allocated to this institution, with plans for growth over a few years.

A priority will also be accelerating implementation of international human rights standards that protect and promote women’s human rights.

IPS: There is much happening on gender empowerment between civil society and the U.N., that it seems only right that the agency adopts a bottom-to-top approach taking its cue from civil society. Do you expect any conflict of interest here? NL: It must be acknowledged that the new agency is a U.N. body and it is established by the member states.

Consultation will be key to its way of work with the member states, other U.N. bodies and civil society. What is most important is that it should not lose touch with the realities of women’s lives.

FEMNET anticipates systematic and meaningful participation of civil society in this new agency, particularly in its Executive Board. The campaign to establish this new agency is testament that the U.N. and civil society can work in partnership for the realisation of a greater good.

IPS: What will be the contribution of your organisation (as far as goals and information) to the new women’s agency? As a regional focal point in the GEAR campaign, FEMNET has been very active in promoting the proposal for establishment of the new entity.

As a regional membership-based organisation, FEMNET is also ready to be a key partner in Africa, through providing technical support to the agency and popularising the agency and its initiatives that are key for African women’s development.

*IPS is running a series of interviews on the U.N.’s decision to create a new women’s agency.

Excerpt:

Countries emerging from conflict need more international assistance to rebuild their food production, since hunger and scarcity may prompt a return to fighting, United Nations and development officials warned this week.

Speaking at an event titled “Food and economic crises in post-conflict countries” Thursday, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon noted that “too often, it takes many months before the essential government functions resume or basic services are available. The result can be resumed conflict.”

Ban said that the soaring food prices in 2008 and 2009 drove countries affected by armed conflict to the brink of collapse, sparking food riots in 30 countries and triggering the breakdown of at least one government, in Haiti.

Security cannot be provided by military means only, argued Sarah Cliffe, director of the World Development Report 2011 on conflict, security and development, issued by the World Bank.

“Access to basic needs is just as crucial for peace to be rebuilt,” she said.

The event was organised in an attempt to close the gap between the work of the U.N. Peacebuilding Commission and the World Food Programme (WFP) and develop a more coherent U.N. strategy in post-conflict countries.

Just returned from visits to Yemen, the Philippines, Indonesia and Uganda, the U.N.’s top humanitarian official, John Holmes, also appealed for international support to help countries damaged by conflict and natural disasters to recover and rebuild.

The 50,000 displaced people of northern Yemen, an area that has been “neglected” by the international community and the media, urgently need humanitarian aid and “there is no doubt that the situation is getting worse”, Holmes told reporters.

A U.N. request to the warring parties, which resumed fighting in August after five years of peace, to cease their attacks to allow humanitarian assistance to reach uprooted civilians was rejected.

Just 36 percent of the 24-million-dollar flash appeal for Yemen launched several months ago has been funded so far, Holmes said.

Holmes also expressed concern about the situation in northern Uganda, where the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been accused of widespread human rights violations against civilians.

“The good news is that 85 percent of the two million internally displaced people have been able to go home,” he said.

Now that the LRA seems to have left northern Uganda, surviving by means of plunder and pillage in southern Sudan, eastern Congo and the Central African Republic, emergency relief efforts are being scaled down.

Identifying a risky “aid gap”, Holmes called for continuing support to the region, especially the province of Karamoja, to make sure that people can continue to return to their homes, regain access to basic services, and help restart food production.

There are hopeful examples. Josette Sheeran, head of the WFP, praised the government of post-conflict Liberia for its efforts to reduce the impact of spiraling food prices on its people by swiftly scaling up school feeding programmes.

“Food is the foundation of stability,” and investments should therefore not only be directed at food aid, but also to land, credit, fertilisers, tools and local markets, to reduce people’s dependency and create a “vital safety net”, she said. Paul Farmer, the deputy special envoy for Haiti, said that providing food security in conflict-ridden countries requires three key elements: a village-level approach since national governments cannot yet be relied upon; response to acute malnutrition among vulnerable groups; and assisting the work of local farmers.

However, these measures will remain insufficient as long as the international community does not show real commitment to change macroeconomic mechanisms that keep poor countries in a position of susceptibility in times of financial and food crises, Farmer contended.

Whereas western countries are hit by the financial crisis mainly through their financial institutions, poor and conflict-ridden countries do not have the buffer of banks, but they are hit by rising food prices, declining exports, pressure on the aid budgets of donor countries, and a sharp decrease in remittances sent home by migrants.

Especially in those countries where the entire household income is spent on food, the dependence on reliable food prices is one of life and death.

Cliffe said that more focus is needed on prevention and crisis resistance, while “the aid budget should not steal from investments”.

While supporting the effort to combine peacebuilding and food security, the Tanzanian ambassador to the U.N., Augustine P. Mahiga, argued that in countries emerging from conflict, the food and agricultural sector takes the longest to recover.

As a recipient of hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighbouring countries the past decades, Tanzania has gained longstanding experience in the field of humanitarian assistance.

While political and military peacebuilding remains of high importance, food security in peace seeking countries has not yet received the priority it deserves, Mahiga said.

By Suzanne Hoeksema
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 2009 (IPS)

Chile is leading the way towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), while Honduras is seriously lagging behind, says Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Alicia Bárcena Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

In an interview with IPS, Bárcena highlighted the main achievements and challenges of the region as it moves toward the 2015 deadline for the MDGs amid global financial turmoil.

Poverty reduction, child health and primary education are among the goals that will most likely be met on time by at least one-third of the Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Poverty across the continent has decreased from 48.3 percent of the population in 1990 to 34.1 percent in 2007 – from 200 million people to 184 million people.

Unlike the World Bank’s dollar-a-day definition, ECLAC – one of the five regional commissions of the United Nations, headquartered in Santiago, Chile – sets the boundaries of extreme poverty at an intake of 2,200 calories a day.

However, the financial crisis poses challenges that will slow down or even reverse some of the improvements that have been made the past six years, she warned.

“In time of scarcity and crisis we are faced with a tough balancing act,” Bárcena told IPS. “On the one hand, we need resources to heal the economy, and on the other hand we must invest in a safety net for the poor and vulnerable.”

Even though there are signs of economic recovery, social recovery will proceed on a slower pace, she warns. In the crisis, “lower income groups lost relatively more income than higher income groups and it will take them longer to regain their losses.”

Despite today’s challenges, the continent seems better prepared for severe economic upheaval than in the 1980s, the so-called “lost decade”.

The current crisis was met with significantly lower inflation, less debts and more fiscal space compared to the hyper inflation and bottomless debts that characterised previous crises.

Bárcena stressed that policymakers must not allow the past to repeat itself. “The social gains made are easily lost and hard to recover. We should protect those gains. The crisis is a challenge, but it also an opportunity to lay the foundation for a basic floor of social protection for our societies and people,” she said.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: When talking about the Millennium Development Goals, which Latin American and Caribbean countries are expected to meet which goals and which countries are still lagging behind? ALICIA BÁRCENA: Chile is doing remarkably well and it will most likely be able to stick to the first MDG, reducing extreme poverty by 50 percent. In Honduras, on the other hand, the situation is worrisome with 49.4 percent of the population still living under conditions of extreme poverty.

Uruguay, Argentina, Costa Rica, Brazil, Panama, Venezuela and Mexico have made considerable improvements in terms of poverty reduction and investing in the poor. However, the distribution of wealth and filling the inequality gap remains a huge challenge, particularly in Brazil and Mexico.

One of the continent’s major successes in fighting poverty is the Conditional Cash Transfer programme (CCT) which provides money directly to poor families via a social contract with the beneficiaries – sending children to school and bringing them to health centres. Cash provides emergency assistance, while the conditionalities promote longer-term investments in human capital.

CCT has proved to be notably successful when provided to women. The programme does not only make women more independent, it also benefits other MDGs such as primary school attendance by boys and girls and children’s health. I expect that most countries will meet both of these goals.

Unfortunately, maternal mortality remains high. The maternal health MDG will not be easily met. First and foremost in the rural oriented countries, women have limited access to health care or they choose to deal with intimate health issues themselves.

IPS: How has the financial crisis affected the Latin America and the Caribbean countries and its people, and what role does ECLAC play in mitigating the effects of the crisis? AB: The difference is made by states who have really committed themselves to reduce poverty and who have continued to do so during the crisis.

As socioeconomic observers, ECLAC reminds governments not to lose momentum and not to uncover the poor. Social spending tends to drop in times of financial crisis and we have been trying to alert the governments of their good practice.

I foresee that unemployment will become the biggest problem. Over the past five years, unemployment dropped from 11 to seven percent but it will expectedly rise again to at least nine percent. Women lose their jobs much faster and easier than men. Around 73 percent of all women work in the informal and domestic field for which there is no social security.

Fortunately, a hopeful example comes from Chile. President Michele Bachelet has pushed for social security and pension for women working in the domestic area – a breakthrough!

IPS: What do you think about the new U.N. woman’s agency that the General Assembly recently agreed upon? AB: I am sure it will upgrade and mainstream the gender issue. [U.N. Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon has really made a difference in changing the gender architecture in the U.N. administration.

I also think that women do have different qualities that can be useful in certain areas such as peacekeeping and peacebuilding. The Department of Field Support, for example, has positively changed since it is headed by Under-Secretary General Susana Marcorra.

ECLAC has become more gender-balanced as well, just as the World Bank. But the IMF [International Monetary Fund] really needs some more women.

Excerpt:

Women’s voices remain highly underrepresented in the climate change debate, say international civil society leaders attending events taking place around the United Nations Climate Summit Tuesday.

The summit was attended by 146 national delegations, of which only seven were headed by women. On the eve of the meet, the head of Oxfam in Britain, Barbara Stocking, noted that “once again, women find themselves left out of the negotiations on issues that affect them most”.

Oxfam is one of the main contributors of the “tck tck tck” campaign to “stop the clock on the climate change”.

Climate Week, Sep. 20-26, was launched Sunday by a “Human Countdown” in New York’s Central Park. Over a thousand volunteers came together to call on world leaders attending Tuesday’s U.N. Climate Summit to take swift action to curb greenhouse gases.

The crowd of New Yorkers, dressed in green sweaters and blue ponchos, formed a human sculpture “the shape of the earth trapped inside of an hourglass with the earth dissolving like sand”.

Among the climate activists here are four women from the “frontlines of climate change”: Uganda, the Cook Islands, Biloxi, Mississippi and the Carteret Islands, whose lives have been directly affected by flood, drought, hurricanes and rising sea levels.

So why do we need a focus on women in the climate change debate? And what can women’s organisations do for climate change mitigation?

Stocking argued that women are most deeply affected by climate change. “They are the ones responsible for the most basic needs: fetching the water, feeding the family and till the soil and clean the dirt. They work with water in a very direct way,” she told IPS.

In a statement, Finnish President Tarja Halonen said that “climate change hits most seriously the poorest regions and the weakest groups of people. Since about 70 percent of the world’s poor are women, they will suffer most.”

Sharon Hanshaw, director of Coastal Women for Change in the city of Biloxi, Mississippi in the southern U.S. and a mother of three daughters, added that “women have a different perspective on the future. They think of their children’s future, their children’s children’s future and the community’s survival.”

In a compelling story on the effects of globalisation and climate change on the lives on the Inuit people, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Canadian Inuit herself and holding the International Chair for the Inuit Circumpolar Council, connects climate change to human rights.

“We Inuit live do not only live on the ice and snow, but we are dependent on ice and snow for transportation and mobility and therefore safety and food security,” she explained.

“We can recall the hungry polar bear in Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’, but have we come to know the arctic wildlife better than its people?” she wondered.

The Inuit had to overcome many challenges in the past decades due to globalisation and forced assimilation by states. Displacement, abuse by authorities and widespread alcoholism have affected the “spirit of the Inuit”, says Watt-Cloutier.

Despite these changes, the Inuit have held onto their traditions, culture, land and ice to sustain and support themselves, which provided a certain predictability.

“Not so today. Things are changing so quickly that the only thing that we are reaching for is to get us back on that solid ground – or should I say ice,” Watt-Cloutier noted.

Ice and snow form the foundation of Inuit children’s education. “The land teaches our children the character skills required to survive, such as patience, judgement, modesty, reflectivity and courage,” she said.

The same sense of urgency was brought to the audience by another community activist, Contance Okollet, from a village in northeast Uganda that has faced both unexpected droughts and destructive rains over the past three years.

Okollet was appalled by the increasing unpredictability of the weather. In times of flood, such as in 2007, “We would suffer from cholera, malaria, diarrhoea and food insecurity.” Children were not able to get to school or did not feel well enough to attend, she said.

In times of drought, “We were hungry and dependent on aid, which is humiliating.” This was something the women of Osukura Subcounty had not experienced before, Okollet said.

She came all the way to New York to share her story and “make a big tick for Copenhagen”, Okollet told IPS, referring to the major U.N.-sponsored climate conference taking place in the Danish city in December.

In Papua New Guinea, more specifically the Carteret Islands that were once six and now seven since one island has broken into two smaller ones because of the rising waters, Ursula Rakova says she now paddles her canoe in what used to be her garden. “But we do not want to be called refugees. We are a proud people,” Rakova says.

She formed a local NGO called “Sailing the Waves on Our Own” that has raised funds for relocation and the construction of new houses. The government of Bougainville has not been of any help, nor have the visits by 17 international media groups to the islands the past three years, she complained.

Rakova said she is here to speak with her “three sisters with one voice to address our common fate”.

Linking gender to climate change is something relatively new, said Ulamila Kurai Wragg, a journalist from the Cook Islands.

Wragg emphasised the importance of women’s leadership in climate change adaption and mitigation because of their “long-term vision and deep involvement in civil society movements”.

Climate change once was just an environmental concern. Now, scientists, economists and diplomats all have a stake in climate change.

But the four climate “sisters” from all corners of the world showed that the debate still lacks a human face: the involvement of the people who are most affected by climate change themselves.

As one of the few female heads of state attending the summit, Halonen from Finland said that helping women to survive in their everyday lives promotes the overall goal of sustainable development.

“We need to ensure full and active participation of women in the making and in the implementation of the new deal,” she said.

By Suzanne Hoeksema
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 16 2009 (IPS)

The negative fallout from climate change, including drought, floods, melting glaciers, mass migration, and sea level rise, is being increasingly viewed as a potential security threat to nation states worldwide.

In a statement on Darfur, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon referred to climate change as one of the main causes of the violence taking place in the Sudanese province threatened by drought and desertification.

This view is shared by U.S. Senator John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and a vociferous advocate of mitigation measures for climate change.

However, in an interview with U.N. correspondent Suzanne Hoeksema, the director of DESA’s Development Policy and Analysis Division, Rob Vos, says that such a direct link between cause and effect is very difficult to prove.

“Right now we are faced with devastating drought and famine in Eastern Africa”, but the extent to which this draught will become a humanitarian disaster, he said, has to do with underlying political problems.

In its ‘World Economic and Social Survey, 2009 (WESS) released last month, the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) warns of a high probability of destabilising political consequences as temperatures continue to rise.

Vos observes that within the United Nations, the Security Council and the U.S. government, there has been increasing attention to climate change and security issues.

The survey was released in advance of the climate change summit scheduled to take place in New York Sep. 22 in preparation for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Vos says these climate negotiations will mainly try to reach an agreement on the universal reduction of emissions, but they do not fully address how that will be accomplished, or who will pay the bill.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: What is the link between climate change and political problems? ROB VOS: Climate change and political problems reinforce each other, as in Somalia, where pirates and militias inhibit humanitarian aid supplies. Potential conflicts will arise where people leave their habitats and migrate to other places.

Some would say that the Darfur crisis was caused by climate change. Although this is hard to prove, it remains a truism that countries with underlying political and social risk factors will be more vulnerable to climate change.

IPS: How will the effects of climate change in Africa, for example, impact on security in industrialised nations? RV: More drought in Africa will bring more Africans to Europe with the accompanying societal issues. Then, where people move, there will be conflicts. So we have to respond to the complexities of climate change strategically. Developing countries must be given an opportunity to grow to make themselves defensible to climate change.

IPS: How can the survey’s recommendations be realised? Are growth and reduction of emissions not mutually exclusive? RV: It is always difficult to predict the future. Yet importantly, what the survey attempts to show is that without development, the sensitivity to climate change of developing countries will increase. So both policies need to become part of each other. We have the knowledge and technology, but both are expensive and not easily accessible for developing countries.

First, we have to ensure that energy expertise becomes affordable and accessible, and second, we have to facilitate the actual transformation to durable forms of energy.

IPS: Providing knowledge and technology to developing countries alone is unlikely to mitigate climate change. What about political will and public awareness? RV: Developing countries may say that it is not their responsibility to clean up the mess the developed countries have caused, and they have a point in that, but they also realise that they feel the consequences of climate change more severely than developed countries. Ignorance is not an option for them.

Countries such as China have realised that there is something to gain from the climate change industry. Soon they will be the main producer of solar panels. Clean energy should become an attractive form of energy, not a financial burden. But, it is true that we cannot force people nor governments: you can bring the horse to the water, but you cannot force it to drink.

IPS: Besides emission reduction, what can be done to avoid conflicts related to climate, for example, water wars? RV: Here we have to think about water management, rural development, and other more radical demographic options such as government-led migration. This migration policy is certainly not always possible or desirable, but at some point we might need to think of these measurements.

The question is, what do we do with the people who live in unliveable areas? Do we try to fix the land or do we move the people? Governments of several groups of islands in the Oceania have begun talks with Australia and New Zealand about large-scale evacuations. Nowadays, we only evacuate for short time periods in cases of natural disasters.

It will all depend on governance. For example, people, farms and factories all need water for different purposes. What is needed is a common denominator. When water is used for a single purpose, such as drinking, cooperation may succeed. But when different groups have opposing interests, underlying conflicts can easily take root.

When scarcity is managed by some sort of community or government, conflicts are more likely to be managed peacefully.

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