|
|
POLITICS-U.S.: Foe of 'Radical Feminism' to Train Iraqi Women
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (IPS) - A U.S. group opposed to government-provided
childcare, equal pay for equal work and quotas for women in government
service will train Iraqi women in political participation and democracy
prior to the 2005 elections in that country.
The anti-feminist, Washington-based Independent Women's Forum (IWF) is one
of a number of organisations chosen by the State Department to carry out
its 10-million-dollar Iraqi Women's Democracy Initiative.
But unlike the other groups, which include the Meridian International
Centre, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National
Democratic Institute (NDI), IWF has no experience in international exchange
and democracy-promotion activities.
The organisation was founded in 1991 by a number of prominent right-wing
Republican women to act as a counterpoint to what they called the "radical
feminism" of the National Organisation for Women (NOW), a grassroots group
with about 500,000 subscribing members nationwide.
Among the IWF's founders were Lynne Cheney, the spouse of Vice President
Dick Cheney and former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities;
Labour Secretary Elaine Chao; and Kate O'Beirne, Washington editor of the
right-wing 'National Review' and a former senior vice president at the
Heritage Foundation.
Another founder was Midge Decter, the former co-chair - with Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - of the Committee for the Free World and one of
the founders of neo-conservatism along with her spouse, former 'Commentary'
editor Norman Podhoretz.
Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky, who announced
the grant at a press briefing last week, has also served on IWF's board of
advisers.
"Talk about an inside deal - the IWF represents a small group of right
wing, wheeler-dealers inside the (Washington) beltway," according to
Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation.
The IWF, which according to its mission statement was "established to
combat the women-as-victim, pro-big-government ideology of radical
feminism," has taken a number of controversial positions over the years in
pursuit of that goal.
It has strongly opposed the United Nations Convention for the Elimination
of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in part because it would mandate
governments to enforce laws guaranteeing equal pay for equal work.
"This is 'comparable worth', a system of government wage-setting that
Americans have rightly rejected as inefficient and antithetical to free
market principles," the IWF has argued.
It has also objected to CEDAW's requirements that governments guarantee
"maternity leave with pay" and child care facilities as well as its
suggestions for minimum quotas to ensure that women are represented at all
levels in governments.
Ironically, the Bush administration adopted the latter suggestion for Iraq
in the interim law approved by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA), which is supposed to guide elections currently scheduled for January.
The IWF has also opposed affirmative action and federal programmes designed
to prevent sexual discrimination in educational institutions that receive
federal government funding. The administration appointed IWF President
Nancy Mitchell Pfotenhauer to the National Advisory Committee on Violence
Against Women despite the fact that the group opposed the Violence Against
Women Act.
The IWF has also been accused of partisanship for its staunch defence of
Republican Party positions and its attacks on prominent Democrats.
Last May, for example, it issued a statement assailing Democratic
presidential candidate John Kerry for demanding that Pentagon chief
Rumsfeld step down to take responsibility for the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse
scandal, insisting Kerry was publicising the issue "to raise money."
Several weeks earlier, it launched an aborted petition drive to condemn
"the bitter political grandstanding" by Democratic members of the
bipartisan 9/11 Commission, who IWF accused of "working for Senator John
Kerry," instead of for "all Americans."
IWF's staff consists primarily of former Republican activists with
extensive government and lobbying experience but little or no experience in
democracy promotion, international affairs or the Middle East.
The one exception is Senior Vice President Rieva Holycross, who has a
doctorate in anthropology and a 30-year career in academia and work for a
multinational engineering firm, as chief marketing officer in charge of
strategic communication, according to the IWF website. It is not clear if
she will be working on the Iraq project.
Announcing the grant, Secretary of State Colin Powell said each of the
recipient groups "will work with Iraqi partners on the ground to prepare
women to compete in Iraq's January 2005 elections, encourage women to vote,
train women in media and business skills, and establish resource centres
for networking and counselling."
IWF Senior Fellow Michelle Bernard, who has practised business law and
government relations in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa, said the
group had already begun recruiting 150 Iraqi women to participate in a
Woman Leaders Programme and Democracy Information Centre before the grant
was officially awarded.
"We'd like to train 150 pro-democracy women on the fundamentals of
democracy, women's political activism in a democracy, and to exchange ideas
à basically to enable Iraqi women to participate in their country and help
Iraq develop a democracy that best suits the needs of that country," she
was quoted as saying in a State Department press release.
Bernard also said IWF has planned a five-day conference in December in
Amman, Jordan that will be followed by future meetings on a quarterly basis.
Rather than recruit women to run for office, she said, "we're just looking
for people who want to participate at the community level, people who are
interested in education (or) people who might want to be policy makers in
the equivalent of a think tank here."
(END/2004)
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
What is RSS?
