Battle for women's rights far from over: Hillary

By Kalpana Sharma

NEW YORK, JUNE 6. She came, she spoke and as in Beijing in 1995, she conquered. To continuous applause and a standing ovation, the United State's first lady, Ms. Hillary Rodham Clinton, set the tone of the United Nations meeting on women that opened here on Monday. She reiterated her conviction that women's rights are human rights.

However, this time she also emphasised the central importance of dealing with the issue of poverty and women. Ms. Clinton was part of a panel organised by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) on micro-credit.

The panel discussion is one of the several organised for the five-day special session of the General Assembly which will assess the progress made in implementing the Platform for Action which 189 nations had endorsed at the Beijing conference in 1995.

As with other such U.N. conferences, while the official business is conducted in the General Assembly - where Government representatives argue over the wordings of documents to be adopted - the real action, so to speak, takes place at sessions held outside.

In her 20-minute speech, Ms. Clinton echoed the concerns of many women since the Beijing summit that even though significant progress has been made, much more needed to be done. She said the Beijing conference presented a roadmap for Governments and was a rallying cry for NGOs. As a result, many

countries had changed laws - the legal age for marriage was raised, female genital mutilation banned, rape was recognised as a war crime and more women were getting micro-credit.

Despite this, Ms. Clinton forcefully argued that the work would be far from done if dowry deaths, female infanticide and honour killings continue, if girl children are denied food and education, and if the global epidemic of violence against women continues.

Even as she singled out problems that clearly relate to poorer countries, Ms. Clinton emphasised that in her own country women faced poverty and were not given equal pay for equal work. She also applauded the efforts of women who had recently taken out a march to demand better gun safety laws.

She returned to the problem of poverty - an estimated 70 per cent of the world's poor are women - by speaking of the new dangers that globalisation posed for women. What meaning could free markets have if women who were desperate for economic freedom ended up being caught in criminal networks, she asked, referring to the increasing evidence of global trafficking in women. Globalisation should not mean marginalisation, and its benefits had not reached all people, even in the U.S.

On micro-credit

Dwelling upon the importance of micro-credit, Ms. Clinton made a special mention of the impact that Ms. Mirai Chatterjee, secretary-general of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), had made on the President, Mr. Bill Clinton, and others gathered at the White House for a special meeting on the new economy in April. Saying how Ms. Chatterjee spoke eloquently about what poor people, especially women, need, Ms. Clinton recalled fondly her own visit to the SEWA in Ahmedabad six years ago and how that led to the decision to organise a micro-credit summit with the aim of globalising the concept.

The U.S. first lady said she urged Mr. Clinton during his recent visit to India to meet the women who had benefited from this programme.

The founder-president of SEWA, Ms. Ila Bhat, who shared the platform with Ms. Clinton, gently reminded the audience that micro-credit should not be seen as a quick-fix for poverty. She said credit was the means and not the end and Governments had to recognise the importance of the informal economy in which the majority of participants in most nations were women.

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