Stephen Lewis on gender inequality, AIDS, and the UN

From a speech from one of the most articulate and well-informed people on the planet, well worth the read:

... one of the most startling statistics is the revelation that women now constitute 61% of the infections in Africa … close to 14 million women infected. There are no words. It’s a catastrophe rooted in gender inequality, and everyone in the highest citadels of the United Nations knows it, but virtually nothing changes.

We have a report from a High-Level Panel on UN Reform, pointing out the lamentable UN record on women, and recommending the creation of a new international agency for women. The proposal lies dormant on the order paper of the General Assembly, crying out for leadership from the Secretary General. The Deputy Secretary General has spoken, strongly and bravely although, given the inevitable and nasty internal rivalries, her words are too often given to rhetorical sleight-of-tongue.

Where is the UN Secretary General when the AIDS pandemic rages, and the women of Africa need him most? No one pretends that the women’s agency is the sole answer, but you can bet that things would not be so excruciatingly horrendous if women had an international vehicle to draw upon, with resources and voice.

So, too, women in conflict zones. My colleagues and I carefully watched the Security Council debate on Resolution 1325 just a couple of weeks ago, and have read carefully the proceedings of the Security Council debate this week on the protection of civilians in armed conflict. The speeches are getting better: more feeling, more informed, more urgent (that is particularly true of the Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs; on the other hand, the Secretary General’s speech last Tuesday on the protection of civilians in armed conflict was so pro forma as to make one weep. He managed to mention Sudan , Somalia , Afghanistan , Iraq and a passing aside to Darfur . Not a syllable on the Democratic Republic of the Congo ).

When you have a savage war on women, as in the DRC, with huge implications for transmission of the AIDS virus, speeches are the road to hell. When will the United Nations actually take hold? There are suggestions cited of the Secretary General leading a new campaign to eliminate violence against women. I recently saw an early draft of this potential Secretary General initiative, and I can categorically say that in more than twenty years of association with multilateralism, I’ve rarely seen anything more vapid, fatuous and insubstantial. It was as if the illusion of progress, dressed up in the Byzantine underworld of United Nations processes was sufficient unto itself. Public relations for inconsolable grief ...