Miren Gutiérrez

ITALY: Being a Refugee Becomes a Dream

By Aldo Ciummo*

ROME, Jul 16 (IPS) - Ernestine Kayindo fled Goma town in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997 amidst fighting between the regular army and rebels of the National Congress for the Defence of the People (NCDP), a Tutsi armed group that is still active.

“All of us Congolese felt in danger of being killed,” says Kayindo, who now works in Rome with the Società Civile Congolese.

More than four million died in the 1997-2003 civil war that destroyed most of Congo. Many fled the violence, famine and disease.

Some sought refuge in Italy. But today they face uncertainty again, as parliament considers a law to punish undocumented migrants with six months to four years imprisonment. Many of those who fled violent conflict, and without documents under the circumstances, may now be refused asylum, and instead face jail.

The new law would be lethal for migrants like the Congolese in Italy. These number less than 4,000 within a migrant population of about 3.7 million. But their plight is a vivid illustration of the dangers from the proposed law.

The Commission for Constitutional Affairs and the Commission of Justice of the Italian Senate will finish examining the proposed immigration law Jul. 18. The Senate will vote on the penalty for undocumented migrants Jul. 24.

Last year only 57 Congolese submitted requests for asylum, and just 14 were successful. In 2006, 102 Congolese citizens applied for asylum; only 33 were accepted.

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By Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, Jun 9 (IPS) - “We should not be all that surprised that we are stalled,” says Jane Ransom, executive director of the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), referring to the absence of women leaders in media organisations.

“We have a few generations of educated, free women,” she notes, but this must be considered in the context of many preceding generations in which women were barred from journalism. “Men still control most of the media, and most cultural, financial, and political structures are still male-dominated,” she says.

According to the report “Women Make the News 2008″, published by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, “Progress of women journalists’ careers is still hampered by lingering stereotypes and subtle discrimination. Women journalists continue to face substantial obstacles to full participation in the newsroom — particularly in terms of management opportunities.”

This “patriarchal ideology” seems ubiquitous and culture-blind in the media sectors of many countries.

Editor of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, Ferial Haffajee, says that a 2006 “Glass Ceiling Study” published by the National Editors Forum and the NGO Genderlinks found that “the larger media contingent in South Africa lags behind, that the number of women in senior positions is not near equality, and that women felt themselves to still inhabit patriarchal workplaces.”

It seems that women’s access to universities and newsrooms is more or less equal, but at some point, their progress stops. Do women “opt out” or are they “pushed out”?

“Women are pushed out because of unfriendly, child-unfriendly working hours,” says Haffajee. “Owners haven’t created crèches or made job arrangements which allow women to thrive and climb. Journalism is a hard slog. Stories happen at inconvenient times, deadline is way beyond normal societal hours, maternity leave provisions are poor. The lack of paid maternity leave, and the unsociable hours of journalism really emerged as huge push-factors.”

Ransom concurs. “My observation is that women in the news media have some extra special challenges,” she told IPS. “Compared to women in some other key professions, such as law and finance, I think women journalists receive less institutional support addressing career advancement, work-life balance, and skills training.”

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By Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, Jun 6 (IPS) - Observe any summit picture — you won’t find many women. The mystery of female underrepresentation in the echelons of power persists: after so many decades of the feminist movement, why are women at the helm scarce? A look at the media sector may provide some answers.

“The media is a mirror on society so it needs to be a reflection of that society. If our newsrooms are male-dominated spaces, they will reflect a male-dominated world. That, for me, is not living true to our mission of creating non-racial (in the case of South Africa), non-biased, non-sexist societies,” says Ferial Haffajee, the first woman editor of the South African Mail & Guardian.

Media organisations are the gatekeepers of much of what is known in the public sphere, while journalistic stories contribute to perpetuating stereotypes, or changing them. It is quite revealing, then, to find out who is in the kitchen cooking the news.

“The influence of women in journalism is one of the most central problem areas in feminist media research,” acknowledges a recent report entitled “The Gender of Journalism”, authored by researcher Monika Djerf-Pierre.

It is difficult to draw global conclusions about the role of women in media organisations, since studies are largely focused on specific countries, and deal mainly with western women or with how women are portrayed in stories as sources or topics. So let’s have a look at some examples, even if fragmented.

Djerf-Pierre’s study shows that even in a female-friendly nation such as Sweden, “journalism as a field has remained male-dominated”. (Sweden ranks number one — or the country with the narrowest disparity — in the Global Gender Gap [GGG] published by the World Economic Forum).

A period of tokenism was followed by the upsurge of a critical mass of women who entered the newsrooms in the last 25 years. Today, almost half of Swedish journalists are women, she says in the study. However, three out of four leaders in the media industry are men.

Only in two sectors, public broadcasting and magazines, do women fill more than 40 percent of leadership positions. Djerf-Pierre explains that a general pattern — she calls it “gender logic” — persists: men typically cover the public sphere of politics, business, and power, speaking to male sources and assuming the mantle of objectivity; women tend to cover the private sphere, drawing on female sources and writing in a more intimate style.

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By Miren Gutierrez and Aldo Ciummo*

ROME, May 27 (IPS) - The room is packed, the film ends with pounding music, and the word “Gomorra” is shown in an uncomfortable fuchsia over black. The audience applauds and leaves quietly while the music continues to hammer home the message.

“Gomorra” ­­ an inside look at Naples’ notorious Camorra gang ­­ has won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and the book of the same title on which it is based has been translated into dozens of languages, and sold millions of copies. But for Italians, it is not mere entertainment.

“We’ve known this to be true already,” said Eliana Villa, as she left the theatre. “But this movie has showed us the reality in an unprocessed, detailed way.”

“It is impossible to be optimistic, but we need to fight this situation,” added audience member Lidia Marzoli.

The publication of the book in 2006 was followed by death threats against its author, Roberto Saviano, who relates the first-person account of a young man learning the ropes of illegal toxic waste disposal.

“I am constantly escorted by police, I have to move all the time… I don’t lead a normal life anymore,” Aviano told the daily La Repubblica last year.

From underworld warfare to the Camorra’s control of the building industry, arms and drug trafficking, haute couture manufacturing, and even the handling of toxic waste, Saviano depicts a shocking portrait of a crime syndicate that has killed 3,600 people in the last 30 years, according to different accounts, including that of former prosecutor Gen. Pier Luigi Vigna.

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Interview with Sylvia Borren, former executive director, Oxfam Novib

ROME, May 22 (IPS) - Sylvia Borren was executive director at Oxfam Novib from 1999 until Feb 2008. Before that she was programme director.

Oxfam Novib is the “elephant”, in her words, at Oxfam International, a confederation of 13 organisations working with over 3,000 partners in more than 100 countries, whose aim is to fight “for a just world without poverty”.

She talks with IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutierrez about her legacy and other issues such as aid and how that intermixes with gender, and her work at the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP).

IPS: Oxfam International is a heterogeneous association… Was it difficult to keep a common goal and work together?

Sylvia Borren: Oxfam Novib is not large or influential enough on its own. The idea was to try to achieve greater impact through collective efforts. We had to jump over our shadow and link hands in order to have an impact. This became a strategic priority.

We are heterogeneous. At Oxfam we say we are an organisation of elephants (Oxfam Great Britain, Oxfam Novib), mice (Oxfam Australia, the U.S., Belgium, Hong Kong) and fleas (New Zealand, Ireland). And to my great delight Oxfam India and Oxfam Mexico are joining.

To handle this diversity we went from a representational to a competency business model, which made it possible to benefit from everyone’s strengths. For example, New Zealand is excellent in evaluation; Belgium, in mobilisation; Australia, in working with youths in parliament; Great Britain has more people on the ground… You have less paternalism this way… The win-win situation comes when you combine these qualities.

IPS: Surely it wasn’t always a harmonious relationship…

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Q&A: “We Are Haunted By a War Begun Under False Pretences”
Interview with Chuck Lewis, founder of the Centre for Public Integrity

WASHINGTON, Jan 23 (IPS) - Eight key players in the George W. Bush administration, including the president himself, made at least 935 false statements in the run-up to and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.These are some of the findings of a mammoth report just released by the Centre for Public Integrity, directed by founder Chuck Lewis.

Lewis asked his researchers to track every utterance by the top U.S. officials made from Sep. 11, 2001 through Sep. 11, 2003, regarding Iraq, “weapons of mass destruction”, and the alleged link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. These officials include President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and former White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

What this report proves is remarkable, even though it is now a matter of public record that there were no WMD in Iraq and that the attacks against the U.S. in 2001 had no connection to Saddam Hussein.

Lewis concludes in a statement: “Clearly, this Iraq chronology calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were merely the unwitting victims of bad intelligence. More broadly, consider the timeless words of the late historian and Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, in his classic 1961 work, “The Image”: ‘We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.’ America went to war nearly five years ago after an orchestrated campaign of false statements by the nation’s top officials, a war begun under the illusion of an imminent national security threat. We are haunted by a war begun, in other words, under false pretences.”

Lewis spoke with IPS’s Editor in Chief Miren Gutierrez about what he says is “an unprecedented, 380,000-word, online searchable, public and private Iraq war chronology, the public statements interlaced with the internal knowledge, discussions, doubts, and dissent known at the time. What they said publicly juxtaposed against what they knew internally.”

IPS: You have tagged how many false statements were made by these top officials over the two years. How many exactly? Can you make any comparisons?

CL: We found 935 false statements… Bush made the most statements; McClellan the fewest. No one has ever done this for any other U.S. war, to my knowledge, a public and private chronology of what they said versus what they knew internally. There is no comparison to the past.

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En español

Q&A: ‘Everybody leaves the Forum happier, wiser and stronger’
Interview with Roberto Savio, member of the International Committee of the World Social Forum

ROME, Jan 9 (IPS) - Roberto Savio is probably among the best informed insiders at the World Social Forum (WSF). He has been on its international committee since it was created in 2001, and since 2003 he has been coordinator of the ‘media, culture and counter-hegemony’ thematic area.

He founded the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency in 1964, as well as other news and information organisations, always with an emphasis on the developing world. He is now IPS President Emeritus. He is co-founder of Media Watch International, based in Paris, and Chairman of the Board of the Alliance for a New Humanity, a foundation promoting the culture of peace.

Savio speaks with IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutiérrez about the future of the WSF.

IPS: The World Social Forum (WSF) is an anti-globalisation movement, using the term ‘globalisation’ in a doctrinal sense, not a literal one. But the WSF is a global phenomenon…

Roberto Savio: The WSF is not a movement against globalisation; it is a movement against the kind of globalisation which is based only on the values of market and profit. That is a globalisation spawned by the Washington Consensus, the call for a New International Order made in the late eighties by the International Financial Institutions and the U.S. Treasury Department.

It also coincided with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and an unprecedented return to unilateralism in international relations, based on hegemony, military might, and the idea that the interests of the U.S. were automatically the interests of humankind, as President (George) Bush declared several times. The result of this kind of globalisation was to marginalise the United Nations, international law, and the call for social justice, sustainable development and other values which are enshrined in the constitutions of practically all countries.

Those who identify themselves with the WSF want another globalisation, where social justice, participation, democracy and people are also values. It is significant that when we started in 2001, we were considered a fringe movement; even by then President of Brazil. Now, seven years later, nobody defends any longer the Washington Consensus. The damages it did worldwide have prompted the IFIs to do some significant corrections, and even the Bush administration is having several changes of route.

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En español… 

POLITICS: Is There a Gender-Specific Leadership Style?
By Miren Gutiérrez*

ROME, Jan 9 (IPS) - Is there a female way to lead? Chilean President Michelle Bachelet has raised that possibility in saying that she tries to lead through consensus, not by imposition. “While not wishing to generalise, many women have leadership styles that have been described as ‘empowering leadership’ or ‘consensual leadership’, where they build leadership structures that share responsibilities according to the ‘best fit’, and in doing so, often create new types of leadership,” Ayesha Kajee, researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs and board member of Transparency International’s South Africa chapter, tells IPS.“Since women also tend to discuss problems more openly and utilise ‘group-think’ to seek solutions, such solutions are often more acceptable to teams. Some have described these as inherently female ways of interacting, but these styles can and should be learnt by both men and women leaders.”

An example, Kajee says, is Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who has “clearly indicated that she intends to bring feminine qualities to the Liberian presidency, a very important component in a country which has been decimated and devastated by horrendous crimes and human rights violations.

“But this is not to say that these qualities negate the need for a strong leader in Liberia. She has both — the traditional strength of will, ambition and determination associated with African leaders, which will prevent her being abused by the old boys’ club because she can fight most battles on equal terms with them, and also the nurturing, reconciliatory and healing qualities that her shattered nation requires to rebuild the national spirit and collective human dignity.”

Inevitably, a suggestion of any specifically female style of leadership is controversial.

Joanne Sandler, deputy executive director for programmes at the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), says she is reluctant to buy into the “essentialist argument” that women have a different way of leading.

“Some evidence tends to be true, but you cannot say all women build consensus and men don’t. But I think it is also true that in countries whose parliaments have more than 30 percent of women, where women can more easily access positions of leadership, they tend to get outcomes that address women’s rights more frequently, and other types of rights, so political negotiation is probably vulnerable to gender difference to some extent.”

In places where you have more than 30 percent of women in parliament or congress, “child care policy, security, education, issues that are often associated with women, begin to emerge. I don’t mean that men don’t care about them; but I think that there is evidence that the theory of critical mass is a valid one.”

Charlotte Bunch, executive director of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University in the U.S., tells IPS that “there is a more collaborative style of leadership that more women like and find comfortable. And women are more likely to do that, but I don’t call it female’ because some men are like that, while some women aren’t… But it is a cultural construction our world needs more of.”

Men can take the right decisions for women, too. “I think change comes about not only because of who the president is, but also because of who she or he appoints,” says Sandler.

“In Rwanda, a male head of state (Paul Kagame) has been very supportive of a gender equality policy, and as a result Rwanda has the highest percentage of women in the low and high houses of parliament. The combination of a supportive president and more women in key positions transforms the political structure, and then you start seeing changes.”

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En español

POLITICS: Mum, Can a Man be President?
By Miren Gutiérrez*

ROME, Jan 9 (IPS) - “Do you think a man could ever be president?” the little boy in Ireland asks his mother. All his life he has only seen women presidents, currently Mary McAleese.Joanne Sandler, deputy executive director for programmes at the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), tells this little anecdote to show that in some places it can be routine for women to be found in leadership roles.

“In places like Ireland and Finland it is becoming less extraordinary to see a woman in power,” says Sandler. And it is this kind of female power that could bring more women into leadership, she says.

“When you see women in positions of power, in ministries, obviously the self-image of girls changes, and they envision themselves in those places. But that kind of change will take a very long time, though it has started,” she adds.

The change does not necessarily correspond to a nation’s level of economic development.

Italy ranks 84 in the latest Gender Gap Index (GGI) of the World Economic Forum, where the number one marks the smallest gap. That places it behind Bolivia (80), Peru (75) or Armenia (70), even though it is among the world’s biggest economies.

Panama is number 38 among 128 countries surveyed, while Liberia with Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as president is not ranked. Sri Lanka is ranked 15, the United States 31, Argentina 33, Mongolia 62, Indonesia 81, Nicaragua 90 and Bangladesh 100. The Philippines fares extraordinarily well at number six, after Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and New Zealand. Pakistan ranks 126, with the biggest gap only after Yemen (128) and Chad (127).

Like national wealth, personal wealth is not an essential pre-requisite. “There is not a relationship between more money and less gender discrimination,” says Sandler. “Money and power have an influence in those women achieving power. But money alone doesn’t explain it.

“Look at the elections in Liberia. A woman who has education, a former employee of the World Bank and the U.N., with an impressive resume, against a man who had no high school education, a soccer player (George Weah). Imagine the opposite: against a man with Johnson-Sirleaf’s background, would a woman with Weah’s credentials be a serious contender? To be a contender for high level political office, women have to bring a lot of extra qualities in order to get into the race. They need the same things as a man, plus others.”

Ayesha Kajee, researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs and board member of Transparency International’s South Africa chapter, says “money is most certainly a partial equaliser for women, in terms of access — access to education, capital, property and opportunity. But even amongst wealthy elites, men tend to wield considerably more power than women. Thus, wealth does not guarantee equity between men and women.”

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En español

POLITICS: For Women, Leaning Doesn’t Make For Leading
By Miren Gutierrez**

ROME, Jan 9 (IPS) - “A woman who enters politics changes; a thousand women who enter politics change politics,” Chilean President Michelle Bachelet told the Spanish television channel TVE in a recent interview.It is the former that seems to ring more true. Most powerful women, particularly though not only in developing countries, are or have been members of elite families: widows, daughters, wives of powerful men, in societies where women do not have equal access to most things.

The list of female rulers who have derived their leadership from men is a long and telling one.

Mireya Moscoso (president of Panama from 1999-2004) was widow of three times former president Arnulfo Arias (who was deposed each time by the military). Before her, Isabel Martínez de Perón was president of Argentina from 1974-1976, following the death of her husband, President Juan Domingo Perón. Argentina has just elected its second woman president: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who succeeded her husband Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) in December.

The success — or succession — of women began in Asia in recent times with Sühbaataryn Yanjmaa, widow of Mongolian hero Sühbaatar. She was the equivalent of head of state from Sept. 23, 1953 to Jul. 7, 1954. “If we consider such a post as having a real ruling status, she would have been (excepting queens) the absolute first woman political ruler in contemporary history,” says Zárate’s Political Collections (ZPC), a record of worldwide leadership.

Corazon Aquino was president of the Philippines from 1986 to 1992, after her husband Benigno Aquino — the leader of the opposition against dictator Ferdinand Marcos — was assassinated. Chandrika Kumaratunga, Sri Lankan president from 1994-2005, followed in the footsteps of her mother Sirimavo Bandaranaike, three times prime minister, a rare instance of a woman taking leadership after another female family member.

Benazir Bhutto, assassinated Dec. 27, was Pakistani prime minister from 1988-1990 and again from 1993-1996. She was the daughter of former premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Sukarno (Indonesia’s first post-colonial president 1945-1967), led the world’s largest Muslim country from 2001-2004, and is expected to seek the post again in 2009. In Bangladesh, arch-enemies Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia have both served as prime ministers and as heads of the two largest political parties. Hasina’s late father and Zia’s late husband ran the country at different times.

“These women share dynastic origins and ‘inherited’ political leadership,” says the German government-funded research report ‘Dynasties and Female Leadership in Asia’.

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En español