The widespread sectarian violence and ongoing military conflicts in
several political hotspots, including Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, have not
only claimed thousands of human lives and devastated fragile economies
but also undermined the U.N.’s longstanding plans to eradicate hunger
and extreme poverty worldwide.
The
U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the world body’s lead agency
monitoring human development, points out that the political turmoil,
including in countries such as Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, is threatening
to derail the U.N.’s highly-touted
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
specifically in the
Arab world.
Addressing violence against women, in all of its forms, is a global
imperative and should be one of the international community’s top
priorities, including in forthcoming intergovernmental processes, such
as the post-2015 development agenda.
The translation and full implementation of these global norms into
national laws, policies, and measures remain uneven and slow. This is
clear from the prevalence of all forms of violence against women seen
throughout the world.
The focus of prevention and response to
violence against women should therefore be on strengthening the
implementation of existing global policy frameworks and in ensuring
accountability mechanisms are in place.
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action identified
Violence
against Women as one of its 12 critical areas of concern, and the review
and appraisal of the Platform for Action is a key opportunity for the
international community to not only acknowledge the progress made in the
past 20 years but to also assess the remaining gaps and challenges in
its implementation, including violence against women, to feed the
lessons learned into the post-2015 development agenda processes.
UN
Women has developed several good practices in engaging other
stakeholders to hold member states accountable on their commitments to
gender equality and the empowerment of women, in addition to our norm
setting and knowledge building, and programmatic work in 81 countries.
UN
Women has established global, regional, and national level Civil
Society Advisory Groups, has worked through the U.N. Secretary-General’s
“UNiTE campaign,” and the newly established “Empowering Women,
Empowering Humanity: Picture it!,” and the “HeForShe” Beijing + 20
campaigns to engage the global citizenry on ending violence against
women.
Since 1994, the year of the landmark
International Conference on
Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo when 179 governments
committed to a 20-year Programme of Action to deliver human rights-based
development, UNFPA has identified significant achievements with regard
to women’s rights and effective family planning, but also a dramatic
increase in inequality. When we look at what is going on in Africa at the moment we should be more worried.
Not only is there ISIS which presents the women as a
dish cloth to use for all the dirty work, which can be used to release sexual urges without any commitments and to try out the validity of the female slaves.
In much of the Arab world, women’s participation in the labour force,
out of home, is the lowest in the world, according to the United Nations, while
women in politics are a rare breed both in the Middle East and North
Africa.
Perhaps one of the few exceptions is Algeria, says
Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of U.N. Women.
Sanam Anderlini, co-founder of the International Civil Society Action
Network (ICAN) and a senior fellow at the Center for International
Studies at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told IPS:
“We should steer clear of assuming that the low levels of participation
in public spaces – political and economic – are ‘entrenched ‘cultural or
religious values.’
“There is no doubt that culture and religion
play some role, but the fact remains that over the past 30 years, and
particularly in the last decade, we have seen the rising tide of very
conservative forces in the region – largely supported by regional
governments themselves – that are promoting a regressive agenda towards
women.”
Let’s not forget that Egypt had a feminist movement in the 19th century, she added.
Puri listed several factors that negatively affect outcomes for women and girls.
These, she pointed out, include family codes and parallel traditional
legal and justice systems that deny women property and inheritance
rights, access to productive resources, sanction polygamy and early and
child marriages, and put women at a disadvantage in marriage and
divorce.
At the same time, it is essential to tackle negative
misinterpretations of religion or culture that not only condone but
perpetuate myths about inherent inequality between men and women and
justify gender-based discrimination.
“As we at UN Women have
pointed out, along with many faith-based and other organisations,
equality between women and men was propounded centuries ago in the Arab
region,”
Puri said.
Gender-based violence is one of the world’s most prevalent human rights
abuses, and has one of the greatest degrees of impunity surrounding it,but in Africa this seems to be tried tout into the top.
At the same time, governments along with all
stakeholders, including civil society, need to put in place an enabling
environment in order to increase women’s participation in all spheres of
life, said Puri.
Maternal mortality has dropped by almost
50 percent and more women than ever before have access to both
contraception and family planning mechanisms, supporting a decrease in
child mortality. Furthermore, women are increasingly accessing
education, participating in the work force and engaged in the political
process.
Nevertheless, a gross disparity remains between the
developed and developing worlds. In a press conference, Dr.
Osotimehin indicated that while the global average likelihood of a
woman dying in childbirth is one in 1,300, this increases to one in 39
when evaluating developing nations specifically.
In January 2012, a Tuareg rebellion triggered a series of events that
lead to the fall of almost two-thirds of Mali’s territory. The Tuareg
rebels were soon ousted by Islamic movements, several of which are
linked to Al Qaeda. But military intervention from French, and later
African, troops, liberated the north in January 2013 and led to
elections here in July of that year.
But hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and refugees have still not returned to their homes.
A year after Mali’s civil war came to an end, there proofed enough reason to be
increasingly concerned that the country risked an eventual return to
violence, particularly as Malian authorities continued to marginalise the
restive north while neglecting to pursue meaningful political and
economic reforms.
Indeed, a lack of
equitable opportunity across Mali has caused northern Tuareg
separatists to cite political and economic marginalisation as their
reason for rebelling in the first place. The Tuaregs have contested
Mali’s north since the 1990s, launching four separate rebellions,
finally succeeding due to arms obtained from the Libyan Civil War
against Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
The Syrian war continued and lots of Europeans found their way to go and fight with the Jihadis. Some of them got their training in Belgium and one of them even was two years in the Belgian army where he learned the trade of weaponry.
In the Turkish camps we can see how people got used to the hopelessness and started to create their own little world with their own renewed economy.
In one of the last camps to be built by the Turkish
government in 2012 Harran is considered the most modern, with a capacity
for lodging 14,000 people in 2,000 containers and having its school for 4,700 Syrian children of all ages run by Helit who had been the headmaster of a school in Syria before the outbreak
of the armed conflict in Syria in March 2011.
In the meantime Boko Haram has been massing and launching lightning strike attacks on several isolated regions frighthening more than 200 trained teachers so that they refused to take up their posts in Cameroon in 2014.
 |
| A group of Nigerian refugees rests in the Cameroon town of Mora, in the
Far North Region, after fleeing armed attacks by Boko Haram insurgents
on Sep. 13, 2014. Credit: UNHCR / D. Mbaoirem |
In 2014 Sima Bahous, chairman of the U.N. Development Group (UNDG) in the Arab States Region already warned:
“The crisis in Syria is a crisis for development across the Arab region,”
While suffering a major setback in human development, including in
education, literacy, health care and life expectancy, Syria has also
been singled out as one of the countries responsible for triggering the
spreading economic chaos in the region.
As the Egyptian revolution against Hosni Mubarak celebrated its fourth
anniversary, having seen the military junta under General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi resurrecting dictatorship under the veneer of “constitutional”
legitimacy and on the pretense of fighting “terrorism”
, Egypt still seems a problem country where even women are not at all safe when in public places. Often they are gangraped and treated as scum but those who call themselves Muslim, but do such things which are against the will of Allah.
Syria
is still ablaze. Yemen has yet to sever the tentacles of the Saleh
regime, and Libya remains in the chaotic throes of tribal fissures and
militia violence.
Tunisia could have been the only “Arab Spring” country that was
transitioning to democracy wisely and pragmatically, though more and more fundamentalist Muslims also bring terror in the country.
In 2013-14 the Salafists, at first wildly successful in channeling the frustration
of Tunisia’s poor after the fall of former dictator Ben Ali, became publicly rejected by Ennahdha. After Ennahdha cancelled the
national conference of ultra-conservative group Ansar Al Charia in May,
and in August 2013 officially labeled it a ‘terrorist group’, average
Tunisian Salafists were facing the heat, like those arrested in Metlaoui.
Residents of Tunisia's two main border crossings with Libya have
begun a general strike to protest what they say is excessive force by
police during clashes at the weekend that left one person dead.
The unrest in Ben Guerdane, near the northern
Mediterranean crossing, and Tatouine, near the southern desert crossing,
is influenced in part by the ongoing civil war in Libya. It is the
first major challenge of Tunisia's new government and underlines the
economic and political obstacles to stability and prosperity.
Locals demonstrated after the imposition of new border taxes disrupted the cross border trade the region depends on.
Residents closed schools, businesses and hospitals at the beginning of this month to protest police action at the second weekend.
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