WRAP UP COVERAGE ON WSSD: WOMEN AND POPULATION
"We won. We won," said June Zeitlin, Executive Director of Women's Environmental and Development Organization (WEDO). "Never underestimate the women of the world." Hours before the end of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, women's health issues emerged as the final bone of contention. The Independent (London) reported September 5 that the sticking point was paragraph 47, the very last paragraph to be agreed in the summit's action plan. It referred to increasing the capacity of health services throughout the world to deliver basic care to everyone. According to The Los Angeles Times September 4 story, final negotiations were completed Sept. 2, and the document then said health services should be offered “consistent with national laws and cultural and religious values.” But delegates from Canada and Europe succeeded in reopening the document to add the words “human rights” as one of the factors that health services needed to consider. Without that phrase, women's groups, including WEDO, said, the language would open the door to practices such as female genital mutilation, forced and child marriage, honor killings, death by stoning and gang rape. The U.S. delegation opposed the change until the final minutes. Read: The Independent, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times

LATEST COVERAGE ON UNFPA
Appropriations: U.S. Foreign Aid for UNFPA
A September 12 story by the Associated Press noted that the $16.55 billion foreign operations bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee included $27 million for U.N. family planning programs overseas. The increase in aid is largely due to more spending for the Agency for International Development, mostly for AIDS programs. The agency would receive $4.1 billion, $345 million more than Bush requested, and $500 million more than last year. AP mentioned that last year, Congress approved $34 million, but the Bush administration withheld the money. Read: Associated Press

Closing the U.S. Funding Gap
The Madison Capital Times’ September 3 editorial showed continued support for UNFPA by highlighting the two American women, Lois Abraham of New Mexico and Jane Roberts of California, who have taken matters into their own hands and are working to close the funding gap this nation created when the Bush administration decided to withhold $34 million from the United Nations Population Fund. "This is an example of the commitment of the American people to be part of international efforts to improve the quality of life of families in developing countries, especially of women who are the immediate beneficiaries of UNFPA-supported programs," declared Thoraya Obaid, the fund's executive director. The Santa Fe New Mexican featured a September 6 story on Abraham who was deeply disappointed by Bush's decision, Abraham said she e-mailed 30 to 40 of her closest friends and asked them to send $1 each to the fund. "This is a humanitarian issue," she said in a column by Kate Nelson of The Albuquerque Tribune (NM). "How many pictures of under-nourished children clutching under-nourished mothers do you have to see before you say, `We need to help them'?" The New Mexican noted nearly three weeks later, the fund has received $32,384, said Mari Tikkanen, a U.N. resource-mobilization officer. Read: The Albuquerque Tribune

[NOTE: To date, there have been 152 editorials and 87 columns supporting UNFPA funding, while only 8 editorials and columns have opposed.]

SAVING WOMEN’S LIVES
Afghan Women: Rights and Reproductive Health Care
In a revisiting of Afghan women’s rights one year later, The New York Times reported on September 11 that if urban women felt the brunt of Taliban rule, they have also tasted the sweetness of its lifting. In the cities, girls have returned to school, and women to work. Many young women fear covetous soldiers, and thus still wear burkas—but they are wearing them to university classes. In the villages, where 80 percent of the country's women are believed to live, particularly in the vast Pashtun belt south of Kabul, things are as they were. The Times noted that most girls go uneducated, become child brides, produce children and hardly expect their daughters' lives to be different. Rural women view urban women with envy. "Life is difficult for women here," Mishgan said. "Kabul women are educated people, and we are not. They know a lot of things we don't." Urban women view rural women with a mix of pity and condescension. As Malalai, a female doctor who lives in Kabul and works in a clinic in Wardak, put it: "In the city, women can decide about marriage and life. In the village, they cannot." Read: The New York Times

"This is the last one. That's enough for me," said Makai, the 40-year-old farmer's wife who has seen nine children die of malnutrition and disease, reported the Associated Press on September 10. After undergoing a Caesarean section, she was expected to recover for 10 days in the main public hospital in northern Afghanistan. AP noted women face more risks during childbirth because they lack basic rights in a traditional society where unskilled midwives assist the vast majority of births, reported a study by the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights. Dr. Lynn Amowitz, who conducted the survey, said other factors that may contribute to the high maternal mortality rate include forced marriages, lack of access to birth control and lack of control over the number and spacing of one's children. "What appears to be simply a public health catastrophe in Herat Province also speaks to the many years of denial and deprivation of women's rights in Afghanistan," she said in a statement. Read: Associated Press

Rwandan Women: Women in Conflict
The September 15 front-page story of The New York Times Magazine featured Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, Rwanda’s former national minister of family and women's affairs, and her involvement in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Reporter, Peter Landesman, detailed one of the many violent instances where one of the Interahamwe, thuggish Hutu marauders whose name means "those who attack together," told him through a translator that Pauline ordered him and the others to burn the women. Nsabimana recalled that one Interahamwe complained that they lacked sufficient gasoline. "Pauline said, 'Don't worry, I have jerrycans of gasoline in my car,' " Nsabimana recalled. "She said, 'Go take that gasoline and kill them.' I went to the car and took the jerrycans. Then Pauline said, 'Why don't you rape them before you kill them?' But we had been killing all day, and we were tired. We just put the gasoline in bottles and scattered it among the women, then started burning." Though most women were killed before they could tell their stories, a U.N. report has concluded that at least 250,000 women were raped during the genocide. Many more women were killed after they were raped. In an interview at the State House in Kigali, Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, talked about the mass rapes in measured, contemplative sentences, shaking his head, his emotions betraying him. "We knew that the government was bringing AIDS patients out of the hospitals specifically to form battalions of rapists," Kagame told Landesman. According to one estimate, 70 percent of women raped during the Rwanda genocide have H.I.V.; most will eventually die from it. Read: The New York Times

Brazilian Women: Reproductive Health and Fertility
According to a September 8 story by The Chicago Tribune, birthrates in many developing countries are shrinking to the point that some demographers are shelving long-held views that the global community would reach 10.5 billion people by the end of this century. It was believed that as long as poverty and illiteracy were widespread, most nations would not see significant declines. "Brazil is a country where there were few government programs for family planning, and the church was against limiting the number of births, but despite all this, women decided to have a couple of kids and then stop," said Joseph Chamie, the Director of the UN Population Division. The Tribune noted that the trend is being felt in many nations and in diverse cultures, from Bangladesh to Mexico, where surveys show that women's rapidly changing attitudes about family life are pushing birthrates progressively lower. Read: The Chicago Tribune

HIV/AIDS WORLDWIDE
Efforts to uplift the world's poor will be meaningless without a massive international campaign to fight the AIDS pandemic ravaging Africa and other developing nations, said Dr. Peter Piot, head of UNAIDS, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. The Associated Pres reported August 30 that the pandemic is reducing life expectancies, devastating families and destroying economies, according to a report UNAIDS released yesterday in an effort to emphasize how crucial the AIDS fight is to development. "It's not rocket science; the problem is just money," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York. "If every person in the rich world would just spend $10 a year for the global fund, we would have $10 billion a year." Read: Associated Press and Reuters

UNICEF also released a report that found that Southern Africa's food crisis is taking place in the context of a severe HIV/AIDS epidemic, and coping mechanisms that previously saved lives may now facilitate the spread of the disease, reported the UN IRIN on September 4. "During food crises, affected populations adopt a variety of coping mechanisms to survive. Such strategies often include: finding additional sources of food or income, migrating, dropping out of school, engaging in hazardous work, exchanging sex for food or cash," UNICEF said. But these coping strategies are putting young people, especially girls, at high risk of HIV/AIDS infection. For some young girls, commercial sex work provides the only way to support themselves and their families. Read: UN IRIN

EDITORIALS AND OPINIONS
Women make up half the world, yet get the smallest scraps from its table, noted a September 7 editorial by The Star Tribune (MN). That so many women suffer—from poverty, from discrimination, from ignorance, from oppression—hurts the whole planet. “So why wasn't population at the top of the summit's agenda?” asked the editorial. “The answer may lie in the abiding White House allergy to anything remotely related to family planning—a concept it considers synonymous with abortion.” The Bush administration has moved repeatedly to block funding for population control—most recently by squashing a $34 million congressional grant to UNFPA. “Such nonsense, and so predictable. If the White House had its way, the world's women would remain the world's scrap-eaters—having more children than they can care for, enduring indignities men never suffer, dying when they might live.” Read: The Star Tribune

The Washington Post September 12 editorial noted that the past half-year has seen Washington retreating from its promised engagement in the international AIDS crisis. It further noted that the challenge posed by AIDS is not shrinking in line with Washington's enthusiasm for facing it. In Africa, the continent worst affected, the disease kills 5,000 people per day; the virus is advancing fast in other regions, such as India and Eastern Europe, too. The Post concluded, “The battle against AIDS requires a huge commitment of resources. But even in a time of terrorist threats and budget stringency, it is a commitment that the United States must make. It's sad to see the president and Congress wavering even on the modest commitments already made.” Read: The Washington Post

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The above summary was written by Elena Cabatu and Kathy Bonk at the Communications Consortium Media Center, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005, 202/326-8700. Redistribution is encouraged with credit to CCMC.