I am in the halls of the United Nations building in New York attending the 69th yearly sessions of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. This is the 30th time for me; for 30 years I have represented an NGO (Non-governmental Organization), PEN International, at these sessions. I am among representatives of many other organizations. The numbers grow and grow. 3,600 organizations have shown up already this year.
We receive very little encouragement. The CSW takes up a lot of time; there is no money in it and there is inconvenience after inconvenience. The other member of my delegation, Elizabeth Starčević, and I waited, standing outside in a line for 2 hours 40 minutes to get our passes. Since then, we have been thrown out of one event and another because the sessions are all full. This is absolutely normal. Only the newbies express astonishment.
Women are interested in opportunities for women. They know they probably will not live to see the changes they want, but they are not discouraged. They just keep hoping that this time something will be a little better. Why do we choose to come to the UN and to this commission that meets in New York? Most of them say, fairly quickly, “This is what we have.” Yes, this is the tiny alternative to despair, the possibility that the groundswell of us will be so noticeable that something will happen.
We are committed to doing things by consensus. We want to talk to each other and find common ground and make coalitions. We want to agree. This way of working is chosen by almost all the NGO’s and by the UN itself. We want to state our issue, and we want to tell our experience. (in our case, we talk about freedom of expression) We want to listen to the issues and experience of others.
This idea of how to do things is not very old. The idea of a nongovernmental organization first was mentioned somewhere in the 19th century, but it was the mid-20th century before the United Nations and people in general used the term. It coincided with my coming to awareness and needing the term. It also coincided with the growth and needs of my organization, PEN International.
Nowadays it is frequent that we are called CSOs, not NGOs, Civil Society Organizations rather than Non-Governmental Organizations. I think it is to characterize us by what we do, not what we do not do. There are also some organizations that fall through the cracks because of their relation to their government or else their work methods are not typical.
Like all parts of the United Nations, its CSW is mainly a way for governments to talk to each other, in this case about women. There are always representatives from 45 countries serving on this committee. All countries serve but they take turns 45 at a time. The NGO representatives have varying relationships to their official representatives, depending on their country’s government’s attitude toward civil society. Sometimes an official representative of a country is obliged to say things they know are untrue. One year some groups of NGOs made “shadow reports” which made available evidence of a completely different state of affairs from what was being said about their country in Room 4, the place the official CSW convenes.
It’s a whole new way of doing things, what we NGOs are doing. It is a new motor for change, from the bottom up. In the past things didn’t work this way. The king decreed something, or the upper class decided things on the golf course. Maybe on some places the authorities still act this way, but now many civil society organizations are prepared to contest them.
The way of dialog and looking for consensus takes much longer and is more frustrating than other methods. It’s also not so clear whether it works. However, it has the very strong attraction that it seems more just.
Governments have reacted in various ways. Some use the same methods as their NGOs. Since 2011 the Mexican government has had an organism, the AMECXCID, Agencia Mexicana de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo, charged with interfacing with civil society organizations. However, some governments dislike the influence of NGOs and consider them essentially disrespectful of their work. In some cases, people representing civil society, especially independent journalists, are taken into custody, jailed and fined for covering peaceful demonstrations. The countries and regions where the ways of the UN are respected of course are doing much better at creating mutually beneficial relations with their NGOs.
Will this ever work? Does our attending the Commission on the Status of Women every year do any good? Is it worth the many sacrifices? Elizabeth and I are here in the installations of the United Nations in New York. We are taking a crack at it. We have been coming here for a long time, and we plan to continue. Here’s an example of what I heard:
Yesterday I went to a session about migration which was conducted in Spanish. (English is the dominant tongue of sessions here as it is in PEN Congresses. Other than in official government sessions, sessions in Spanish or other languages are rare.) The topic, an effort to look at migration as a positive opportunity for some women, was a new focus. The women participants and listeners were mostly Mexican with some Colombians, indigenous etc. All Latinas. The mood of this round table was clearly celebratory because everybody was relieved to be speaking Spanish again after some days in English.
Reports about the women migrants were mixed. Some communities, even those which are happy to accept men who come home, are not so welcoming to women returning. What sort of diseases are they bringing? What condition are they in? Some of them have crossed the Darien Gap on foot, carrying a child. Many have been raped and robbed. They will need every kind of social service and the communities they are going to are already strapped for resources. An indigenous woman said that though they sympathized with the migrants, they have left her land in Panamá a mess: altered the ecosystem, destroyed crops etc. Now her community has to look for relief from them.
On the upside, the migrants, especially the women, brought their culture with them, to the benefit of those who had already migrated, even generations ago. They brought the family. They brought the language. They do this under any circumstance, even when it would seem their lives are hanging by a thread.
This was just one session in hundreds or thousands over the years. It was about Latin American women, but it could be a round table of Togolese women talking about their migration experiences just as well. I chose it because it is typical of my region.
Lucina Kathmann is a board member of Chicago Network JP and an officer of San Miguel PEN