 It is my great pleasure and honor to introduce Ambassador Donald Steinberg, the new Deputy Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. It is a particular pleasure to introduce Donald Steinberg because he is also an alum of the Jennings Randolph Program. Before taking up his post as Ambassador and now new Deputy Steinberg was Deputy President at the International Crisis Group responsible for advocacy and policy formation. In that position, he became a very powerful voice for women's rights. But I think it is as a diplomat, as a U.S. Ambassador to Angola, that he came to understand the importance of taking into account a gender perspective when we're dealing with issues of war and peace. I think we're all very lucky to have Donald Steinberg in the position of Deputy Administrator of USAID. And before we move to the next panel, why UN Security Council Resolution 1325 matters to men, we wanted to give him the opportunity to outline his vision as Deputy Administrator for the next few years. So without further ado, please join me in warmly welcoming Donald Steinberg. Thank you so much and thanks for the opportunity to reconnect with so many friends. I have been at AID for all of about three weeks right now. So I have huge basis of knowledge and information to share. What I really wanted to do was to introduce our panel, the next panel, and the topic is indeed why UN Security Council Resolution 1325 matters to men. But I wanted to use that title as a proxy for the real question in Washington, which is how do you persuade men, policymakers, negotiators, and other leaders to understand that the participation and empowerment of women, especially in the context of armed conflict, post-conflict reconstruction, peace negotiations, implementation, and post-conflict governance really matters and is at the center of our interests. As advocates for this agenda have put it forward, there are a variety of different arguments that we have tried to use. We've used the argument of fairness and equity. Women are 50 percent of the population. They deserve to be at the table. Women are the principal victims of armed conflicts and therefore they deserve to be at the table. We often try to use the, in effect, the legal side of this, that there is the declaration of human rights, that there are international conventions that assure women a role in these processes. We sometimes use sort of the, what I would say, value-based argumentation. Women are inherently more peaceful. Women are inherently more cooperative. And they are inherently less corrupt. And I actually believe all of those things. And then sometimes we even use the personal side of this. Every man who negotiates a peace agreement had a mother. Every man, thank you. Every man, most men have wives, most men have daughters, and we try to put it in the context of that. But speaking to men about these issues, the real argument that works is the argument of effectiveness, reminding negotiators that their vaunted peace processes usually fail and that the failure to involve women in peace negotiations, peace implementation processes, as planners, as implementers, and as beneficiaries is one of the reasons that the agreements fail. And it is essential to use that effectiveness argument. In that regard, I wanted to tell you one story that's in the book that we're about to come out with at the U.S. Institute of Peace regarding my experience in Angola. In 1994, I was Bill Clinton's advisor for Africa, and I helped those who were negotiating the Angolan peace agreement that was designed to put an end to 25 years of civil war that had cost about a half million lives and left about 4 million people homeless. I remember when the agreement was signed in November of that year doing a speech very similar to this setting, and in the Q&A somebody raised her hand and said, how does this agreement affect women who have suffered in the conflict? And I said, very proud of myself, there is nothing in this agreement that discriminates in any way, shape, or form against women. It is gender neutral. Well then Bill Clinton asked me to go out to Angolan as the American ambassador to help implement that peace process, and it took me about three weeks to realize that a peace agreement that calls itself gender neutral is by definition discriminatory against women. And let me cite some of the examples of that. There was nothing in the peace agreement that said women had to be at the table or in the peace implementation body. And so what you had was 40 men sitting around the table trying to figure out how to implement a peace agreement that would affect the lives of the entire country and mostly women. Not only did that silence women's voices, but it meant that issues like sexual violence, vulnerability, girls' education, et cetera, were simply given short shrift if addressed at all. Secondly, the agreement was based on 13 separate amnesties that forgave the armed parties for anything they might have done during the conflict. There was even one amnesty that forgave you for anything you might do six months into the future. Get out of jail free card as it were. I've learned that in most of these contexts, amnesty simply means that men with guns forgive other men with guns for crimes committed against women. And in addition, these amnesties put at the heart of our entire peace effort in effect a void, a cancer. It said justice, rule of law, not really that important. This is an agreement all about the men with the guns. Third, we had demobilization programs where anyone who had a gun could hand it in, go into a demobilization camp and get all sorts of benefits for private life. The problem was that in most of these situations, women who were with the armed parties were not given guns. They were bearers, they were messengers, cooks, sex slaves, and therefore we completely ignored them. In addition, the camps themselves as well as the IDP camps generally were not put together with women in mind. And so we had constant difficulties as women went out to collect firewood, went out to collect water outside the camps, they were threatened with rape, they were threatened with death, and even within the camps we had too many latrines in dimly lit areas and you literally risked your life when you went there. When we demobilized the soldiers, we sent them back with a little bit of money to their villages, but what we hadn't realized was that they didn't have a role in the societies anymore. They didn't have skills, they didn't have relationships, they didn't have power, and the bottom line was that they felt disempowered, they felt embittered, and we had massive amounts of domestic violence, wife-beating, murder of women, rape. It was as if the end of the formal conflict had begun a new era of pernicious violence against women. Finally, we had a situation where there were literally millions of landmines planted throughout the entire country. So we cleared those landmines off of the major roads and had all the, or many of the IDPs and refugees go back to their homes, but what we hadn't done in many cases was to clear the fields and the schools and the wells, and so as women were sent out to do those duties, they were blowing off their legs in ridiculous proportions. We weren't idiots. We understood what was going on in this situation and we very quickly tried to change course. We brought out gender advisors, did empowerment programs, did human rights issues, psychosocial training, but the bottom line was that women in that society understood that this peace agreement was not for them. This was for the men with the guns. So as the peace agreement started to fall apart and we went out to civil society and in particular women's groups and said put pressure on your political leaders to keep this on track, it failed miserably. They said, why are you coming to us now? You didn't talk to us in the earlier period and the bottom line was that the country reverted to war for four more years of suffering and only ended when Janus Sevinbi died in 2002. If this were an isolated case, it might be acceptable, but we're seeing exactly the same phenomenon in the DRC, in Sudan, in Afghanistan, in Colombia, and you'd think we would have learned our lesson and the hopeful element of my presentation here is that I think we are learning our lesson and anyone who sat in the Security Council last Tuesday and heard Hillary Clinton announce our commitment seven years too late, but our commitment to develop a national action plan to implement 1325 and anyone who heard her announce $44 million worth of time-bound accountable assistance in this whole area had to say maybe they finally get it. At AID, I'm hoping to be able to say we get it and as I have been there for just three weeks, it's a little premature to announce major changes, but I will pledge to you that there are at least four areas that we will be focusing on with renewed vigor and renewed attention. The first is the area of empowerment. What that means is making sure in the political, economic, and social life of countries around the world that women are in the political party networks, that they have civil society groups that they're working in, that they have microenterprise, but not just microenterprise, that they're involved in the entire economic lives of the country, and then taking those provisions to scale so that they're not simply one-off programs around the country. Secondly, we're going to focus on participation and protection, and that's the 1325 agenda, that's anti-trafficking, that's sexual and gender-based violence, that's the national action plan development, et cetera. Third, we're going to focus on mainstreaming. The president has announced three major initiatives at 4AID and the government in development, food security, global health, climate change. We are going to make sure that women are at the center of each of those programs. And then finally, we're going to make sure we walk the walk within AID, that women within our institution are empowered to contribute fully, that women understand that this is a place where their talents are valued and where they have the full opportunity to contribute. This is a pledge that I make here three weeks into the job, that the promise that we all made in October of 2000, when we passed the 1325 resolution, that that promise will be kept. Thank you for your attention. And while the panelists take their seats, let me briefly explain to you why we thought it important to organize this panel. Whether it's in New York or in DC, discussions about 1325 are often discussions between and among women. But it has been stressed, I think, the last week, as well as this week in DC, that we need to engage men in this discussion. And we believe that the best way to engage men in this discussion is to let them talk as well. The panel before you is composed of ordinary men who each in their own way became champions of women's rights and thereby became trailblazers and hence not so ordinary anymore. I would also like to thank on behalf of all our partners, Frank says no, the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University for accepting to moderate this panel. Frank, as a former work correspondent, immediately knew what we were talking about, and he himself is one of those trailblazers. So is that, Frank, it's all yours. Well, thank you very much, and we really appreciate the introduction. And it's, yes, in case you hadn't noticed, we're all men here. So cigars are not allowed and not necessary for this conversation. It's a great privilege to be here and to be able to participate and facilitate this conversation. Because as mentioned, I have had, and it's an odd thing to say the privilege, but it is a privilege to travel the world and to see some of our darkest places and some of our darkest moments as a species. And to be able to shine the light on a part of that conversation. And the half of humanity that is too often disempowered and disengaged from this process, which is what this UN resolution and what this discussion here today is meant to address, is both important and a privilege. Let me introduce the guests, I will give a brief introduction because they are, they exist in more detail in your handouts. But Ambassador Steve Siner is the former senior advisor for the Office of Global Women's Issues at the Department of State. Has great experience, as you will hear in the course of our conversation in key areas around the world that have led him to his involvement in this issue. Joost Hennan, honan, okay. Is a gender expert and he works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the Netherlands, special area of interest is Afghanistan at the current time. Yook Madut Yook is the Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow now. The United States Institute of Peace and Ambassador Steve Steiner, you met and you've heard from. So, I'm sorry, Steinberg, Steiner, Steinberg, I know. Guys, I'd like to start though by asking each of you, how you came to this issue set? How you came to care and devote yourself so much in terms of the protection, awareness, and concern for gender issues. Perhaps you'd like to start. Okay, thank you Frank and thank all of you for being here. It's good to see all the support for this cause. I did not really have an aha moment like Don did. His story about Angola, which is very dramatic. Mine was a little bit more gradual in that I was a foreign service officer for 36 years. I was an old Soviet and Russian man and because of that, my last 14 years in the foreign service were involved in nuclear arms negotiations, the old INF and START treaties. And toward the end of that, I wanted something new to do intellectually. I wanted to retire from the foreign service and I wanted to do democracy work. Because just as I once felt that nuclear arms issues go to the heart of our national security, I had come also to the conclusion, so does democracy work around the world. And I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to do that for my next career. And I talked to Paula Dobriansky, who was then under secretary for democracy and global affairs, said I want to come do democracy work with you and then go out to the NGO world and work in your world, so many of you. And so I went with Paula, I worked on the community of democracies, a global democracy process, and on helping to set up the Millennium Challenge Account. And it just was natural that women's empowerment has to be part of this. There's no democracy if half of a population is disenfranchised. There's no democracy if half a population can't be economically enfranchised, as well as politically able to have leadership jobs in both areas. So it was crucial to us as we set up the Millennium Challenge Account. It was crucial to us in community democracy work. I retired again the second time about a year and a half after that. But never got to the NGO world because I was called to come back to state. They'd got $10 million in reprogram money from the old CPA in Iraq to set up a democracy training program for Iraqi women. And in 2004, I came back in after very brief retirement and started up that program. And from there on in, I was hooked. I'm a believer and it's not women's issues, these are issues for all of us. These are national security issues. You were also working extensively on issues related to trafficking, human trafficking. Yes, I spent time dealing with our efforts to combat human trafficking. And also I've been very involved lately in working on support for women in Afghanistan. Clearly the trafficking issues must have driven this attention repeatedly because disproportionately that falls on women, does it not? Yes, it does. Although I was also involved on the labor side of human trafficking, which involves a lot of forced labor of men and children. So I worked that part. But I've already become a believer in this earlier, Frank, because of the work on democracy before I did the work in combating trafficking. The work in democracy showed me this is the only way to go. Yes, you have an interesting journey yourself. Yeah, I think that my case started already when I was a young boy. Looking at my parents, how they received and answers to questions from people who came to our farm from the government. With questions on how the household was led and organized. And each time my mother would say on a question, who's in charge in the family? She would say, that's of course, that's my husband. And my father would say, yes, that's me. And at the first time I heard that, I almost burst it out and laughed at her. Because for me, at the age of seven, my mother was the boss. And it was as strong, I mean, my father was a village council member for 30 years. But for each meeting they had, my mother would go through the agenda with him. I'd like to meet your mother, I would like that. And tell him what the results should be for each point. And also, what he should say if Mr. So-and-So came up with that argument, then this is the answer to it. And then my father went out with his cigar and his suit. And of course he talked in the meeting the way exactly my mother had instructed him. And later he would come back and he had to what we call now debrief. And my father was in trouble the moment he didn't perform my mother wanted him to do. My second, I mean, from that onwards, I developed also a sense of perceptions. I mean, we think that we know what's going on on household levels between men and women. But sometimes it's different. When I was a student, in fact, I went back to my village and asked all the other village council members, how is it in your families? And I mean, I think 80% had the same experience that the women were organizing the decisions in the background. If I say it is in Africa, I mean, many times it's hilarious because it's something which they experience also. They actually acknowledge it. Yeah, exactly. To keep it short, I mean, that's the issue of gender or the issue of women as leaders or informal leaders sometimes. And of course we should aspire for women as formal leaders. But the issue of women in peace and security issues came when I was a young, ambitious, I would say, country director for one of the Dutch NGOs. And I was asked to restart the program of three Dutch NGOs in Rwanda in 1995, one year after the genocide. And I had a colleague, a lady, who was on her own right. She was the chair of the Rwanda Women's Network, Rezo de Vam. And she showed me the whole country. And there were two things which struck my mind. One is that the issue of orphans, and we did all kinds of programs for them, but sitting next to children who have lost their parents and their brothers and sisters. And when you do something, they needed warmth. And I had children of the same age. And that struck me very much. The second was that at the end my colleague, she asked me whether I could moderate a workshop for the Women's Network to develop their new strategic plan. And of course we organized it in a way we always do with a short introduction. And then we do a general presentation, we do breakouts in smaller groups, we come back, etc. But when I saw this group, there were about 80 women from all over the country. I realized quickly that you can't do it like that. So I said, let's just talk, let the women talk amongst them for the first day. Because all of them had lost the majority of their families. They were all victims of this. They had been raped and whatever. They had lost their colleague women in the Women's Network. So there was a lot of emotion. And I thought, my God, now my program is gone. Because I mean, I had a three-day program and the first day was gone. I thought, let's see where we get. But the thing which struck me was that the next morning everybody started and there was such an energy to get things done. And I think it has been said many times today and yesterday. Women are victims, but they know they have an energy to get over it and move on. And I mean, we talk always about 50%, but at that time women were 65% of the population. 65%. And I mean, we don't talk about half the population. We talk in fragile states, it's always the majority. It's between 52% and 60%. 65%. And yeah, let me stop here. So before you stop, you are now with the Gender Division of the Department of Human Rights, Gender and Good Governance, correct? Yeah. And you are the coordinator on women, peace and security. Yeah. So your responsibilities include what? I mean, I am supposed to advise the ministry and in fact the minister and the top management of the ministry on issues of women, peace and security with a focus on countries like Afghanistan, Burundi, the DRC and not the DRC, the Sudan and some other countries like Pakistan, Yemen. We'll come back to Afghanistan and some of the countries specific, but this is part of the National Action Fund, correct? Yeah. And my second institutional focus is the NATO. Okay. Yo, how are you? I'm all right, thank you. This is good. Now, this is very interesting. You're one of six boys. Is that right in your family? Yes. But you describe yourself as perhaps Africa's first male feminist. Not first, but one of few. One of a few, okay. How did you get there? Well, like Joseph, I think there are three stages in my development into someone who focuses on gender and feminist explanations of the lopsided relationship between men and women. The first is, of course, from growing up in such a patriarchal family and a society where my family being made up of seven men and one woman. In a strictly gender specific division of labor where most of what happened around the house was done by that single woman to serve seven men. And that brought a lot of questions to me. How? What was your frame of reference for the questions to even occur to you? Well, I took pity on my mother because every single day we will go to the farm. We will take care of the cattle. We will do everything that needs to be done around the farm. But then she continues to pound the grain, to go to the market, to get the firewood, to go to the water from the well, to milk the cows. By the time people eat in the evening, she has been up for 12 hours, day in, day out, her entire life. So I had to ask questions about why can't we help her with some things. But we were socialized. And there are certain things men don't do. But because she's the only one, she has no daughters to help her around the house. I took pity on her and I began to do some of these women's work. And I became quite brilliant at detection, in fact, at pounding grain and carrying water on my head without holding it. The sort of thing that... So good at it that my grandmother said to my mother that actually your boy was intended to be a girl. God called him back at the exit and gave him a penis. You may be way ahead of us. How am I supposed to follow this? You're not going to follow that. This is in Sudan, right? You're growing up in Sudan. So actually, but doing women's work and being so good at it was to the detriment of my reputation among my male peers. And I became a sissy. Among your other kids? In your family as well. Even my father chastised my mother for turning me into a girl. And the moment came when my mother called me as I said, nonsense. You are actually a better man, knowing what women have to do. There was no more teachable movement than that. How old were you in that? 9, 10. But this took courage. This must have taken courage for our little kid to be enduring that kind of criticism. Were you ostracised? Were you isolated by other boys? A lot of times, yes. I was quiet. I was not one of these guys that was always seeking a certain type of attention. And therefore I was somewhat isolated and spending a lot of time with my mother. And I learned a lot of things that came to be very, very crucial in my life when I left home as a young boy to go to university outside the country. At an age where most people still stayed at home and still to be served. But now I was on my own having to look after myself. That came handy, that training. So how did you connect this early experience and how did that develop through your academic and career interests? Two other moments then happened. When I was in university I began to be exposed to theoretical explanations for the gender differences. The feminist theories which then contextualized my experience in my family and made all that experience make sense to me. In the fact that one of the main theoretical explanations from the feminist perspective about why the situation is the way it is is the issue of socialization. We all get socialized in our own respective societies into men and into women. And because of that socialization it affects us all when we grow up. For example one of the things that I used to hear growing up was this idea that boys can only do certain things and girls are not supposed to do. For example my cousins, my female cousins were told they cannot play soccer, they cannot climb trees, they cannot go hunting because you don't have a penis. They would say that. So if you are a child growing up being told you cannot engage in play just like other children because you don't have the organ. Of course you are going to wish you had one. So that theoretical explanation made that life all make sense to me. There was a third stage in my coming of age in this field and that is going back to Sudan in the middle of the war in the 90s to do field work. And I lived in war in 1994, 1995, and 1996 during which I began to talk to women and I began to understand women's experience with war. One of the things that men were always saying was that all these horrors that are happening to women, the rape and the assaults and all of this is a result of the madness of war. But when I was talking to women they said that no, it is not just about the madness of war. It's because the madness of war itself builds on things that were already pre-existing that are ingrained within the culture that consider women mere appendages to men. That is why the war affects women more. It's because of the cultural practices that are rooted in people's everyday lives. And I think that would have been the aha moment as Americans would say where I said finally I understand why women are always targeted, why women are always more victims of war. And it is because in the Sudanese society and a lot of African societies women carry the honor of the society on their shoulders. If something dishonorable happens to a woman she dishonors the entire society. It's not the same for men. It's a single man who is dishonored. But when it is a woman it's her entire family, it is in the entire tribe that is being dishonored. So now combatants began to see this as a way to bring women into being part of the war. Because of that issue of honor an army might attack the women of the other side, of the opposite side as the way to dishonor them, as the way to humiliate them. Whereas the people on this side also think that because the war is happening and so many people are dying and so many women are dying and so many children are dying because of the impact of war perhaps women should be considered, should be pushed to contribute to the struggle. In the part of South Sudan where I come from women became part and parcel of the revolution but not in terms of combat but in terms of being expected to uphold the reproductive front as it was called. They were supposed to contribute to the revolution by maximizing their productive efforts. By having babies. By having babies. Which means then it is usually translated as giving men the right to take sex whenever because they have been given a license to expose women to as much as possible to be pregnant. Let me bring the ambassador and others in and ask you to comment on some of the fascinating things. This notion of socialization and what the socializing elements are, how when you think about what you're going to try to do to reorganize internally do you take into account and match that up with the need to recognize and reorganize externally to take into account some of these facts? I wanted to briefly respond to the initial question and I think it relates as well because there is a presupposition that many of us make that our society ingrains in us these sexist roles and in my case it just was never ingrained. I had parents who were very sensitive to these issues. I was a child of the 60s. My hair at present not withstanding. I went to read college which was the single most radical school in the country and I will always remember Shirley Chisholm coming to our university and saying that she had always in her life felt more discrimination for her being a woman than for her being black. And that started a whole set of thinking about these issues. I was a member of the national organization of women from the age of 18. Why did you join now? What prompted you to do that? Because it was the only group that was calling for equal rights for women. I was strongly, I worked for the ERA amendment. We still should pass it. Although that's not a position of this administration necessarily. Got to protect my three weeks of tenure. So indeed, I mean there are people who are predisposed to look at this and I guess a couple of moments I also wanted to stress. I was in South Africa from 1990 to 1993 at that very exciting time when we were moving from apartheid to non-racial democracy. And the ANC recognized the power of women and it wasn't rhetoric and they empowered people throughout their whole system. And you just watched it and you said, my goodness, you know, they get it. They're using 100% of the population. They cannot afford in that environment to go back to old patterns. I also wanted to say that when I was telling the story about Angola at a key moment in that process, and I really want to stress this for the civil society groups that were here, a number of American NGOs came out and took us aside in a very quiet way and said, you're screwing up. The Women's Refugee Commission under the remarkable Mary Diaz at that point came out, looked at what we were doing, sat me down as ambassador and said, here are six things you're not doing. You know, we can blast you publicly or we can tell you very quietly. What were some of the six? You're treating women as victims. You're not empowering them. You are not even talking to them as you put these programs together. And she said to me, remember the adage, nothing about us without us. And in fact, that has pretty much stayed in my mind throughout of this. You're not empowering individual groups in civil society to do the relief and recovery effort. You're not focusing on men, well-established organizations, but you're never going to have as much money in a post reconstruction period as you do in that emergency period, so use those resources in that way to empower women's organizations to actually do the work. And, you know, Human Rights Watch came out, did the same thing, a remarkable NGO called PACT came out, told us the same thing. The same manner as opposed to just, you know, they don't get it, public announcements, nasty reports, was exactly what was needed. And we learned. So let me ask you now, as you've all explored and explained a bit how you've been brought here, and they're all powerful experiences, powerful experiences. When you hear this fascinating and really trailblazing story of confronting this powerful societal norm and challenging, I'm very curious, A, as to what your reaction is from your own experiences, and B, how that gets incorporated in these national policies and these priorities that 1325 envisions, because this does not happen in a vacuum. They're very brave. No, I mean, the Dutch have a national action plan. I mean, we're one of the first, I would say, and we have gone through a process of bringing together not only government, but also civil society and knowledge institutes, and have them sign, actually, about close to 30 organizations, institutions, an agreement to work together on this issue. And, I mean, down the line, I mean, it's easy to sign something, but it's, of course, more difficult to implement, especially when you have a group of stakeholders. But the importance is that a large group can bring in different perspectives, different points of view, different language, and by the fact that you sign something, you are obliged to talk and communicate and consult. And that's one level, let's say at the Dutch level, but the most important one is that, and that evolved gradually, is that we should allow the women's movement in the respective countries to talk, and we can't decide and invent all the goodies we should bring them. You were telling me over lunch, though, for example, just as an example of this, that you were concerned about the challenges that you would face in Afghanistan because of some of these issues. Perhaps you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, again, a very special experience is, when I started in 2008 with this job, I got the Afghanistan file. And although I've worked with, and very pleasantly worked with, let's say, all the women's movement in Africa, but also in Yemen and in countries like Sri Lanka, I thought, my God, what should I, as a man, do over there? And because my perception, I mean, again, the perception is that you can't talk to these women because then you bring them in trouble. You can't do anything. But my experience straight away was when I went there, and I managed to get to meet a group of women leaders. And, I mean, the thing that struck me most was that I said, at one point, one of the ladies said, you see, we are eight women here. In five years, we might be five or four. But, I mean, we'll have to do this. We'll not give up. We need to be short. I mean, they're as stubborn or courageous as they're men. And we need, I mean, that gave me also the thing, they want to organize their struggle. And what they need is two things. I mean, they need moral support, they need financial support, and then there's another, a third one, which is most important. They said, talk with us. If you think you should come up with a statement, let's say on the Shia law, which was an issue last year, discuss with us how the approach should be. Because if you just do it, it might be dangerous. I mean, it might bring gender or women's leadership into the perception of that something of the West, which the West wants to impose on us. So the most important thing is to bring a national action plan to the stakeholders, which are the owners of the process in their countries. I mean, it's exactly the same experience you had. And help them, and listen to them, and treat them as equal partners, because they can teach you a lot. They can teach you, like in Afghanistan, that there are thousands of women who are interested to take leadership roles in their society. I mean, most of us think it's impossible, but they are there, thousands. But they are isolated. And there's nothing to encourage them, or to help them a little bit to organize their campaigns, their security, et cetera. And that part is, I mean, there's still a lot to do, and we can do a lot, because they are natural allies again. Yeah, I want to build upon the theme of Afghanistan, and also mention Iraq. One of the reasons I'm so dedicated to this work is because I've met so many wonderful women from Iraq and from Afghanistan. And in the early days working with Iraq, we had some delegations of Iraqi women leaders over here. It was always amazing to see their dedication and their courage to cause. And the situation over there was quite violent at the time, particularly as we got into 2006, 2007. And often I would see them off at the airport when they were going back to Iraq. And it was just an incredible feeling to think the dangers they're going back into, particularly as activists, not just the general violence, but as activists, as women activists. And one or two that I knew did get assassinated for their activism and for their ties to our country. So you can't help but be dedicated to this cause when you've met with these women leaders. And I totally agree with Malan. And I always quote what she said this morning about the Afghan woman that she saw in her first trip in 2009 who said, please don't look at us as victims. Look at us as the leaders that we are. And that's exactly the case. These are leaders. Their countries need them. We're helping their countries by helping to support them and empower them. The other point I want to make is men have to be involved, which is another reason I'm involved. But in those countries men have to be involved. First of all, some of the women don't support the concepts that we're talking about here. In some cases out of fear, in some cases because of cultural background, often more tribal than religious reasons that they don't support this. I've been giving training to people in our government, civilian and military, going out to Iraq and Afghanistan. And I've told them you have to reach out not only to the women but to the men, particularly in the provinces you're going to. And there are male defenders of human rights, which means women's rights, in those countries. And there are others who are, you know, amenable but need some persuasion, need some talking to, need some training. So there are lots of people you can work with and you have to bring the men on board, enough men, the good men, so that this whole thing succeeds and so their country succeeds and so that our politics succeed because in those two countries, for example, this is really crucial, I think, to our national security, that we get it right and the people in those countries get it right and are able to build a humane and reasonably, hopefully, eventually totally democratic society. Yuck, let me ask you to comment on this. I mean, the pillars of 1325 involve an equality of men and women. It involves a seat at the table, at the negotiating table, a real role in post-conflict resolution. How do you get the champions to be the men in societies like the one that you've talked about today that have been through such a traumatic experience? Well, I think there are three important steps that need to be recognized and taken. The first is that when we talk about including women in peace processes, it's not just to be nice and it is, it's not to be politically correct. It is the only way to have a sustainable process. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that it is good for all of us that we have a sustainable peace and in order to get that sustainable peace women have to explain what they have experienced in wartime and what they see as the best way to overcome those challenges of the wartime because they have been the ones who have lived it day and every day. So that is one thing that I personally try to drive home whenever I speak to people back in my country, government people and ordinary people in my own family that improving women's lot is not just for the welfare of the women. Can you get the champions that way? Can you turn doubters, skeptics, people maybe who haven't even thought of it in this way into champions? There is one component which is women's education. I have to emphasize what Admiral Mullen was talking about in terms of girls getting education. I started a girl's school, well a girl's school that accepts boys as well, but the idea in principle is that to make this school where girls learn tools that they can use to challenge the situation themselves so that they are the ones speaking, they are the ones who are agents of their own change so that when they go home they are the ones who bring ideas about hygiene to their family, they are the ones who bring home ideas about disease and about the need for them to reach a certain level of education in order to contribute to their families. They are now going home and say that if I finish high school I'll be able to be employed and I can bring more money than my dowry can ever give you. And they are the ones now challenging the need to marry them off at age 14. They are the ones saying if you just wait for me to be 18 and 20 I'll have enough education and even if that society had decided that the only value of women is to be mothers and to be wives there will be much much better added with some education. And it's the women who are now, it's the girls in my school who are now going home and telling this story. The third part of it is a lot of evil is being committed in the name of culture that our culture says this and our culture says that. What is the essence of culture if it is not to enable people to adapt to their circumstances? It is of no use to have a culture that does not help you to cope with your environment. So if there is a culture that says girls have to marry at age 14 and have children when they are still children themselves and have breach and have obstructed labor and die or have other consequences then it's no longer culture. So what you do and what we all need each other for is to suggest to many communities that it is not against the culture that we are driving it is making culture more adaptive and the way to do it is there are people within each culture that are critical of their own culture. Those are the people you want to add your voice to so that there is no accusation of imperialism or cultural imposition because it is basically taking the voices of the people within that community and adding yours to and maximizing that and amplifying that as a process to bring change will in essence become the initiative from the local people. So you are saying you must find local allies, cultural allies to argue that the culture must adapt. Indeed and there are many of people who say this. I mean some of you remember may remember the case of a Nigerian woman Amina Lawal who was accused of adultery and tried and sentenced to death by stoning. There was a lot of international campaign against this verdict. In the end it was the Nigerian woman who said that hold on we have certain homegrown techniques to challenge this verdict. If you come in from outside everybody will be defensive. They will say oh there are these people coming from outside and telling us what to do. Let us come up with our own ways and then when we have figured it out we will want the global sisterhood to help on our own initiative. That is the kind of thing you want to do. Just on that point absolutely it is up to the indigenous women whose lives are at stake who are taking the chances to dictate the terms of all of this. I remember in Angola when I heard women who were stepping forward and making political statements and realized that they may be at risk of some very awful things I would call them and say do you want me to come over and wrap the American flag around you and make it clear that if anybody touches you the full power and weight of the US government will be behind you and it was great that George Moose was my assistant secretary at the time because he backed me up on all of that. Or do you want me to stay as far away from you as I possibly can because I am going to make you the target if this is the case. It is really up to us to let them dictate the terms to us. I think about this a lot in terms of the National Action Plan that we are going to be developing. It is a bizarre document because remember this is not about what the United States will do vis-à-vis women in the United States it is what we will do vis-à-vis women in the context of armed conflict and so it is pretty absurd to talk about this being a process that goes on in isolation within our government. We have to look at bringing in all the expertise from the field there is a process now going on called 20 where more and more National Action Plans are being developed in Europe in conjunction with National Action Plans being developed in countries that are either in conflict or coming out we have to do that as well. In addition we have to use the National Action Plan as a means of developing consensus and ownership within our own government and within our own society. I would have said one of the key targets of that is the Defense Department but obviously with Admiral Mullen he is so far ahead of most of us that you don't even really need to say that but we do need to use that process as a means of education as a means of ownership not only with members of our own government but with civil society as well. You have a National Action Plan would you talk about how that works and specifically how that's changed the way your government is conducting this outreach and policy? I started in my last presentation I mentioned a few points I think what we came up with last year we did a review or we thought a review was needed because we felt it was too ambitious to have 19 goals and let's say 81 activities I think run by different organizations in combination or not and we felt that we needed to do something and again I mean that's the beauty of the process is that you find out that you can improve your process and what we came up with this year in April is that we should focus on one theme and our theme is women's leadership because most of our activities in the past were on what I would call the two other elements of gender which is the rights issue women should have their rights the equal rights mentioned in constitution or laws and whatever then if you have the rights in the constitution and in the laws let's say the right to education or health do we have a school in the neighborhood where your girls or whatever can go to that's the access to the last one is you can receive as beneficiaries or you can be protected as victims but the last one is women to make it sustainable because somebody who can give you things can also stop it so you can only overcome it when women are part of the decision making so the influence element of the whole process so that's why we said we did too little on the last part the influence the women's leadership part so that becomes our joint effort and what we also felt is and that joins the ambassadors speech maybe I mean part of the strategic focus is of course bringing the issue back to the four countries and that's a difficult process but the second one is we have a role to play in our own country and not so much in 30-25 terms that we should change the different I say gender policies in the government or whatever but what I find very much important in these turbulent days political days I mean also in the Netherlands we have turbulence I say political changes we know a little about that is that we need to work on the on the public support on the public conscious that this is a good cause to fight for are you going to work on the public conscious I mean is this country going to sign on to an actual formal national action plan as 1325 calls for Hillary Clinton announced that the United Nations Security Council last Tuesday that the United States was developing and would sign a national action plan I will tell you that there was a buzz of electricity in that room at the council and I myself got chills when she said it and when you think about what it will take to navigate through the political process do your chills become a fever or I mean because no I don't you think this can be done you think this will be done well first of all it will be done because it is a national action plan for the administration yes we will consult with the Hill yes we will bring the political process in yes we will reach out to civil society but it is a plan for the administration so it doesn't require legislation it doesn't it requires changing the way we do business but I don't believe that there will be very many needs for legislative fixes but more importantly than that I don't think this is a partisan issue I think there's a broad understanding among all of the activists out there no matter where they come in the political spectrum that this if the 20th century was about race in America the 21st century is going to be about women and that's the agenda on the radar screen and I'm sorry I understand the concerns but you know we are having more women elected to senior positions I mean this was a landslide in terms of women's participation in the last election and I do believe even though this panel is about how men have to step forward it is indeed women who are going to push this agenda you know Swanee Hunt who is a dear friend has a group called Women Waging Peace and I consider myself the leader of the auxiliary to Women Waging Peace but it's her leadership in this role yeah a couple points one I completely agree with Don that we have bipartisan support in this country for these efforts when I said that we got ten million dollars we programmed for the Pentagon initially to start up training programs through American NGOs for Iraqi women we grew it into a 40 million dollar program from 10 to 40 and the reason was we had sustained support on the hill there was an Iraqi women's caucus it was bipartisan and there were some men in it too and Iraqi women who came over here always liked seeing the fact that we had some male members of Congress and other men who would support their cause and I think that helped to build up their courage going back home so it's definitely a strong bipartisan or I would even say non-partisan issue secondly the NGOs are indispensable in all this work all the work we did the state went through American NGOs there are the implementers on the ground 95% of the training for Iraqi women we did was done by American NGOs on the ground in Iraq who even when security went way downhill did not cut and run but they kept the programs going so thank God for them and the third thing I want to say is Don made a good point how close do you want us to get to you women in some of these conflict-ridden countries in difficult societies with their own internal divisions you have to be careful how close you get you give support you work through NGOs you work through their own women's network but you don't want to put a big USA or Netherlands label on it you want to be careful and as one of the women activists with an NGO here a Muslim herself said don't over hug I mean meet with the women see what they want what their interests are for their communities for their networks and try to support this in a very careful, subtle way but don't get too close certainly don't get any closer than they want you to get and another related point is where are they in their country have a good document or a good plan to work by work with it because that gives you a good national cover to help them in their own work Afghanistan has a good law and paper now outlawing violence against women so the key now is implementation and trading all the people including in the justice system for implementing it properly because really nothing you know very little has been done on that Afghanistan also has a national action plan for the women of Afghanistan it's a pretty good document we can work with that and support it and help to support it which shows we're serving the cause of their country so I think these are ways to work it to show that you're with them you're not trying to impose values from outside one more thing I'd just like to throw out before we go to questions from the audience a very important part of this discussion as I mentioned earlier involves and revolves around bringing women into a peace process giving, providing, assuring a meaningful place at the table so that women have voice and the power to bridge conflict to the peace process and to the reconstruction process and I'd ask each of you perhaps to think about an example is there an example you would cite where that has been successful and what is the lesson that you emerge from that example if you can think of it that can provide impetus or inspiration to broaden that Personally I can't think of any specific case but I know why there has not been such cases and the reason is many of these international or global efforts starting with the 1994 Cairo Conference or Productive Health to 1995 Beijing Conference to now 1325 a lot of women who are suffering from some of these things being discussed actually do not even know that these things exist so they are far removed from the reality of things that are being discussed and those of them who do also have another problem and that is they tend to be the elite women they tend to be the wives of the commanders and the wives of the chairman and very little connection between them and the everyday women that is the challenge which if a plan of action is devised it has to connect to those type of situations in order to be effective so that it is not just something that is in order for us to be seen to be doing something Don an example that One of the problems that is coming up with examples is that you have so many counter examples Ann Marie Goetz with UN Women has produced some documentation that shows one out of every 13 people in a peace process around the world as a woman There have been dozens of agreements that have not had a woman at the table as a negotiator, as an implementer, as a signatory, etc. A couple of examples of successful integration the women vis-a-vis the DRC peace process were brought together as a caucus they did training they came together to develop a constituency they went down to the negotiations in Sun City regrettably they weren't allowed into the room but at least they got to the anti-room and the result was an agreement that was actually pretty good If you look at amendment or resolution 13 of the DRC constitution it's about as good a statement of women empowerment and women participation as you're going to find The problem is taking it to the next step and the DRC is a perfect example I wanted to make two other points One is that in many, many of these societies women are the peacemakers in their local communities If you look at the Acholi people for example in northern Uganda it is the women who are the village elders who solve the problem sort of like in I guess the Netherlands and yet when you then have a negotiation for peace in northern Uganda it is the government with all men and it is the LRA with all men who negotiate, you know, who represents the people of northern Uganda and again it's not like they're not capable of taking their skills and expanding them at large Again, I think it's very absurd that Joseph Coney is negotiating on behalf of the people who he has pillaged and raped for 20 years The final point is we have to drill down we have to consider why women are not participating and there are a number of reasons their cultural values, their political values there are threats that come to women peacemakers that keep even the most courageous women out of the process women are expected to play their traditional roles as homemakers at the same time that they're playing a role in the peace process and so one of the things that we have proposed and this was before I got into government working with the European Union was to put together a fund for women's participation in peace processes to give them stipends to pay for not only the hotels but to pay for their families to be able to continue while they're gone to pay for protection for them to pay for training to the extent that they need that to take the skills that they naturally have and apply them to the new concepts at play and to use that fund for special representatives of Secretary General when they lead negotiations in sort of track 2 processes, etc. So you have to take it the next step you can't simply say let's promote a seat at the table and expect everyone to come Gentlemen, examples briefly because I'd like to go to the audience My example is on South Sudan I worked from Nairobi on South Sudan between 1999 and 2004 with the women's movements in let's say the different political factions as well as in civil society and we changed let's say very quickly our approach from supporting individual women to trying to develop let's say a movement that you reach the grassroots so that women are not isolated somewhere there but they represent something which needed again quite a lot of efforts in terms of let's say organizational issues I think one of the success factors I think and at last also women agree to that is bringing in a professional in terms of financial and organizational management and we had one of the five big accountant firms to do that first of all because they bring real professionalism to these small organizations who don't know how to handle money and how to implement programs and second because they manage to get them within two years on to the level of international accounting they become, the organizations themselves become account they have access to donors because if an embassy person sees a project proposal with a price order or scoopers or KPMG whatever statement that they can run the money you have the funds and the third element was leadership training and negotiating training and content training I mean what is the peace agreement or the issues in Sudan what it is about and in the end they managed to overcome to bridge the difference between the sudden groups in a way that ended with the CPA the comprehensive peace agreement being signed I mean this was not told by the women but by the SPLM leadership and it ended that in 2005 I think they were nominated for the Nobel Prize for this so that's a clear example it's also that during the negotiating period at one point they were at 25% of the groups from the SPLM side so that's one the second most important example is I think Rwanda and we should have a look into it because if there's one country where the government has made an effort to put women and the women themselves had the strength to present themselves in that process of reconciliation and building up the country again it's Rwanda and we should do more research and try to find out what the impact was of having so many women in parliament so many women in decision making positions towards let's say the total stability and of course it's still an instability over there but what has the impact been? just two examples briefly there have been some successes Yosef mentioned 25% we do have in the Iraqi constitution in the Afghan constitution a quota of minimum 25% representation for women in the national parliaments of the two countries and very importantly in all the provincial parliaments because as Tip O'Neill used to say all politics is local so it's really important to work from the local level up and how about that notion of quotas if I may interrupt because that's not something that everybody loves it's not something we believe in here I suppose that we haven't done here it was indispensable in those countries in my opinion they would have had very very little representation the old cultural prejudice that would have come into play and they would have been blocked out 25% doesn't get you everything you want first of all it should be 50 but secondly some of the women in both countries have been creatures of their political parties they've not been very independent so that has to be worked on interestingly in the last election in Iraq a great majority of the members of the national parliament were voted out women and men and a lot of constituents were saying they didn't do enough they didn't represent their cause so you have now a lot of new men and women there and there's hope in that there's a potential in that and again our NGOs, other western NGOs if they do some good political leadership training you can get to these new people and I think it's better than some of the older people who didn't do the job let me go to the questions now can I just real quickly just two quick points first of all I understand the comment about the concern about quotas in the United States but please remember more than half of the countries on Earth have quotas for women's participation in political processes or government we are not this is not an aberration this is the norm around the world secondly when you're trying to identify women to participate in these processes you have to look harder and just one point I wanted to make I remember being in Sudan and spending the day at a FOD University which is this amazing women's university in the middle of a cartoon it's like a bastion of great thought and they're graduating thousands and thousands of people out of there and then walking over to the UN and talking to the special representative and saying you need to involve bright educated women in these peace processes and him saying I can't find them and me saying walk two miles that way and you will come with me alright we've got a lot of questions and a lot of panelists so I would just ask you please identify yourself keep your question as brief as possible and we'll move it around to try to mix it up as much as possible go ahead my name is Marisa Lino and I now work for Northrop Grumman Corporation but spent 30 years in the State Department I just want to make one very brief comment as opposed to a question if you can be brief I just wanted to point out and I appreciate this panel and I appreciate in particular the personal experiences that have been related by the members of the panel but I just want to point out how far we have come just in my lifetime in the mid 80s I was named as the refugee coordinator and I was the first woman ever to be named a refugee coordinator and the questions were raised at the time you know could a woman do the job and my point was yes because I can also in an Islamic country much more easily speak to the women refugees and if you are handing out money nobody refuses to talk to you thank you very much let me come over to this side have we got a mic going there good afternoon my name is Sanam Anurlili with the International Civil Study Action Network Don mentioned that sometimes we need to talk quietly and other times we need to make a big noise so I'm going to challenge some of the things that the panels have been discussing I saw you shaking your head back there absolutely because I think there are a couple of things one is that we have in the room with us today Liberians who did the peace process in Liberia Sir Alankan who walked into the jungle and negotiated a ceasefire and a Chinese who organized 500 women to talk about to mention peace publicly before anybody else dared to and the problem for their exclusion from the formal peace process was not their culture it was not because they lack training or in that case one of the questions with training is do we assume the men are trained and I think that's a real problem in itself but it wasn't that their culture was blocking them it was that the Finnish mediators the Norwegian mediators and in the case of the Israeli Palestinians the American mediators also excluded them and so it's a political international inertia and lack of implementation of 1325 by the very governments who many of them have national action plans but are not really being proactive on this one so let me that's so good I just want to stop you there I'm sorry I'm sorry I just recounted the story of the SRSG representing the international community who says I can't find any women here absolutely we have two systematically excluded women we have not made this a high priority you know there has still never been a woman who has led the negotiation of a peace process from the United Nations how do we explain that? well we explain it because there is a lack of commitment to this agenda in the political leadership it is men who are appointing the negotiators we still I mean Sanam is a great spokesman spokesperson for these issues we actually served on the advisory panel for the UN Secretary General up until a month ago and she has been making the point very strongly that the United Nations needs to walk the walk as well as talk the talk we still believe these are soft issues that don't figure into the actual peace negotiations I fully agree the main problem or one of the problems is of course in our own western mindset and when I explain for instance the issue of women in Afghan Afghan women being courageous that they want to die for their cause of course amongst this how many think we should try not to have them being killed and then if we say I told my people in the Netherlands that do we have a problem that the Karzai government is under threat because all of them are under threat of being killed I mean there's a slight difference we feel men can be killed women can't and war and peace issues I think in our mindset we feel it's not women's business at least in the western world I mean in many African countries women have an explicit role in war issues for instance in the southern Sudan a number of communities have that principle women consent have to consent if the men go to war and they have also the role to stop it that's very traditional before the English came in I want to move along because I want to take other questions but I also I think I also saw you shaking your head when he was saying that it's the elite women married to elite men right you were that one I can't let go by because very often again we have people in the room who are not of the elite and they did it because their sons were killed or because of other personal reasons and this idea that it's only the elite and even if it is only the elite so what if the process is to promote peace why are we excluding them from discussions about peace I wasn't suggesting that they be included I was saying that working with them they have to also realize that they have to have connection to everyday women in order for them to be seen to be to be fully representative of the views of the excluded people but if because there is a tendency for tokenism in governments so that if there is a if there is one woman representing women regardless of whether she has any relationship with the rest of the women people will say okay fine well women are represented and we that's it we are good to go but I'm saying when that tokenism takes place you marginalize people everyday people go ahead with your question please my name is Agnes Dimangia and I am from Democratic Republic of Congo please be patient with me can you speak up just a little bit please yeah I ask to be patient with me because the situation of Democratic Republic Democratic of Congo is so bad we are there to speak in the name of these women there they can't speak they can't they are sufferings they are raped at this date there is at least 35 women raped per day at this date each day in this country and I thank very much my son Meduk for what he said about the destruction of the society when women African women are raped and it's why we are today as a stone on your feet to speak and again and again about this situation what is wrong in this country we heard from yesterday everyone said we are doing our best for this country but for us the situation never changed this situation is became as a show everyone year after year we saw delegation after delegation go to this country they listen to these women they watch these women but there is no solution no one no act to stop all this situation and the problem is there is not only the problem of affinity is also the problem of the wrong diagnostic who are responsible of this situation from yesterday to today we never heard about the responsibilities of Rwandan and Ugandan because when they speak about rebel there is no Congolese rebel everyone know that this rebel are armed by Ugandan and Rwandan and no one never never for this for more than 10 years no one blame Rwandan no one blame Ugandan for what they are doing in Congo the rep is not we have Congolese Congolese culture and you assist to the restriction of the Congolese people by the rep of these women let's let the ambassador respond to your question you and act to stop all this situation thank you go ahead I'm actually going to very much reinforce that argument so I am very concerned you know the DRC is the poster child now and if you look at the work to pass 1820, 1888 1889 the use of going on and what continues to go on in eastern Congo was the driving point and I am so pleased that there's so many people in this room who were part of that effort to raise our consciousness on this but we have to raise it a lot more and there are two aspects I want to address yeah or actually just one that is two parted it is very important to do the kinds of programs that we're talking about doing in eastern Congo to address the victims of armed conflict to address the women who have been raped to address impunity etc we have to work with the united nations to improve the work of the peacekeepers we have to send in delegations to investigate and to bring to justice those who are accountable but we also have to look at the policy dimension of these issues and I want to highlight one situation which was the decision of the international community to support the action by the Congolese government and the Rwandan government to go after the FDLR in eastern Congo without having developed any plan for the protection of civilians in that environment and so the international community so pleased that the Kinshasa and Kigali were finally getting together and getting on the same page supported the Kamiya II operation which resulted in renegade forces from certainly the DRC government and perhaps both governments raping displacing families etc but it also led to retaliation and so it is all great that we're doing all these programs in the eastern Congo on sexual violence but the international community support of that operation led to more victims, more displaced women, more hardship than we could ever have solved with the flip side so we need not only to look at this as a question of projects and programs we have to integrate these concerns into our policies. Okay thank you very much here's what we're going to do because we're at the end of our time but we have some many people still with questions why don't we take take four questions we'll go back and forth I'll write them down you all write them down if you can make your questions very brief we'll get comments very briefly back and we'll have an opportunity to at least hear from more people from the floor and get a response from this terrific panel so ma'am why don't we start with you if you could just give us a question we can try to get all these in my name is Satya Maiaklai director of programs Unitarian and Bustly Service Committee and my question is on education as we talk about girls' education we need to ask the following what type of curriculum are we imposing on the girls if it is that the girls are only going to school to learn the same old things it won't work we also need to pay attention to adult education because it is in these adults that this culture is embedded and if we don't train them it won't work thank you great one number two Ryan Harper actually is pretty similar I was really excited about this panel because I wanted to hear about how you're getting men involved in the process and it's great to hear your personal stories but I still haven't heard how we get men to listen if we do get women to the table because getting into the table we aren't going to bother to incorporate their ideas you haven't really solved the problem great number three sir thank you Anwarul Chaudhary I wanted to cite two examples of how to get men engaged in the process very quick one was when President Mandela came to the Security Council to brief us on the Burundi peace process he would say that men would not involve women in the process so in the evening the women will come to him share their ideas and thoughts and next morning he will try those out and work and the men were very impressed by President Mandela's diplomatic ability and so at one point he told them that these are the ideas women give me in the evening why don't you involve them directly and that really clicked second one when I was President of the Security Council in June 2001 I was leading a Security Council team to Kosovo and I wanted to meet women's group the Secretary General Special Representative despite clear instructions to organize this meeting presented me a program when I arrived there with 15 members of the council he said there was no time to meet these women I said how about after dinner tomorrow at 10.30 and they said well you are supposed to take rest for tomorrow I said no we'll meet and I did meet the women's group in Kosovo at 11 at night in the hotel lobby and it was they are still remembering that involvement with the Security Council now it has become a common practice to involve that was the first time the Security Council mission was involved so I would like to say that the coming situation the discussions that are taking place in Afghanistan why don't we involve 1325 in the strongest possible way we need to engage the Afghan society in a full way particularly Afghan women in the peace process there through invoking 1325 thank you and last one I'm Robot Ali I'm representing General Consensus International it's based in Holland I was I have to ask you to be very brief I'm kind of willing on the questions that have been asked before what can women organizations in these conflict areas do to educate and engage men so they can actually listen to them better because women are being educated we're talking about that this whole time but nobody has talked about like they said before how are we educating men engaging them for them to listen to us because if they don't listen nothing is going to happen thank you very much we're going to call this the lightning round guys and let's start with the first question and that's education and curriculum for girls the question was also about adult education that it's important to be of course girls education is a long term process while adult education is a short term and if I bring in the last person we indeed need to do more about let's say civic education all kinds of yeah to inform and make aware the population aware of different things and sometimes it should be in a smart way with soaps on the radio whatever I mean that's in short term you want to talk about that quickly the question differently about women's education but girls education rather than what curriculum because the curriculum is going to be the national curriculum but instead of asking the question about the curriculum ask the question about what is the environment in the school that allows for girls to be interested in staying in school and also not fear for their lives because of some teachers who are not considerate because of the distance they walk from home to the school if the environment itself is not conducive to women's learning it becomes more important an issue than the curriculum itself many minute things that we may take for granted sometimes affect women's learning for example we came to realize in my school after many months of observing that for a two or three day every month a large number of girls are absent absent we're wondering why this was happening we realize that women girls they synchronize when they live their menstrual period and they don't have sanitary napkins so they don't want to come to school with their uniform the only garment they have to their life and get it stained and be teased by boys and so they stay home they don't come to school something so simple but we had no idea to know it because the teachers were not trained to be sensitive to some specific and unique needs of girls next question how to get men in conflict there is involved in listening we'll be very very quick we have two more two answers here first you force them I'm sorry it's leadership the secretary general about four months ago said for example every single one of his secretary of his special representatives had to spend one day just listening to the voices of women and when it was raised to him why are you doing this and he said at the very least they might learn something and then they had to report back in the context of the 10th anniversary so you force it it's leadership within systems and secondly and it is a combined question you have to make sure it's not one woman at the table two women at the table sociological studies show that you need 20-25% participation that's the critical mass at which women are listened to they reinforce each other they're allowed to talk about issues that don't involve women specifically but providing their input into other subjects and so that notion of a quota for women's participation in peace processes, damn it if the international community is providing billions of dollars to support a peace process implementation we have the right to demand that that process is going to work and unless you have women at the table it isn't I think that's a combined answer to two and four Steve let me give you number three Mr. Chaudhry's question specifically why not 313-25 all the way in Afghanistan I totally agree with the ambassador and his work has been marvelous, thank you so much it's a very tough haul on Afghanistan I have a friend here from Afghanistan who is a terrific leader, Mina Sherzoy you can talk to her, I hope during the break we're trying at all levels and we, I mean American government, the NGO community the USIP businesses we're putting lots of government to government pressure on their government about 13-25 about women and the whole reconstruction process training has been given by USIP and the initiative for inclusive security to help Afghan women be at the table on every one of these big steps that have been taking part like that consultative peace jury and there were a lot of women there it was pretty good participation trying through our NGO training to do this and I agree an important component has to bring in Afghan men, how do you get them to listen so I think some of the training I recommend NGOs is train the women if it's a women's training program how to take the training, the message, the information back to the men and their families and communities and get them to support this process and the cause of equality and 13-25 and also I think we all need to reach out more to men get them into the democracy training programs and other programs and get them on board this issue because they do have to be made to listen and to come to understand and support this cause thank you and I'm going to take the last word before tossing it back over to you merely to say the world needs more guys like you and yes and I think this was an amazing discussion a tremendous discussion very thoughtful one but what you have done and what you have done from your family to your community and now to taking this to a global stage and the courage that you've shown needs to be conveyed to more men around the world to include this country so Godspeed and good luck thank you yeah I'd like to thank you Frank for leading this discussion I think Donald, Jock, Steven Joss you've shown that you don't become a sissy when you become a champion of women's right I think you're all role models and I think that's the way forward of how to engage men showing that it can be done I'd also like to thank the members of the international advisory council of USIP for having joined us at the end of this morning I am instructed to tell you that your formal program is now come to an end but we invite you to stay with us for the rest of the afternoon we have some very interesting other panels coming up we're now going into a break