Radical rout - radical feminism and the UN conference on human settlement - On the Scene - Column

National Review, July 15, 1996 by Mary Meaney

The last major UN conference of the century -- the Second World Conference on Habitat -- concluded with a stunning defeat for radical feminists. Despite intense bullying, arm-twisting, and outright blackmail, the developing countries refused to bow before Western pressure for "reproductive health" and ambiguously defined "families." Instead, representatives of the Group of 77 (G-77) mustered the votes to:

-- reaffirm the importance of parental rights;

-- guarantee respect for member states' religious and ethical values;

-- recognize the family as the basic unit of society (rather than, as the Canadian delegation advocated, "families" as the basic "units" of society, a formulation intended to confer equal status on homosexual "families");

-- delete all references to "reproductive health" except one which was couched in language such that it could not be used to force abortion on the developing world.

Many observers were left wondering how such a document could have emerged from a UN conference less than a year after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Peking. At that conference, the radical feminist lobby had marginalized parents, ignored the family, and denigrated cultural and religious values. The Secretary General of the Habitat II conference, Wally N'Dow of the Gambia, pledged on his personal honor to maintain the Peking language: "I have a responsibility . . . to ensure that there is no rollback on the achievements of any of the conferences," he said.

Moreover, the Istanbul conference marked a watershed in the role of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in the negotiation of UN documents. For the first time, NGOs were allowed to participate in working-group meetings. The U.S. delegation and the Women's Caucus proposed that NGOs should also have the right to speak in the informal drafting sessions, a strategy widely perceived as designed to drown out the voices of small developing countries. As one Pakistani delegate warned, this increase of NGO influence at the expense of national delegations signals "the privatization of diplomacy."

With the deck thus stacked, many countries, such as Guatemala and Malta, sent tiny delegations able to cover only a few of the many sensitive working groups. Several other G-77 countries -- such as Honduras, Venezuela, and El Salvador -- decided not to attend at all. Those developing nations that did send delegates opted for urban planners and engineers, not the team of professional negotiators sent by the U.S., Western Europe, and Canada. All too many of these G-77 delegates were poorly versed in the hidden meaning of modern UN terminology. Indeed, some were entirely unfamiliar with the language of the United Nations, which for conferences such as this is English; but the organizers announced that the UN would provide only extremely limited translation services during certain working-group meetings (and none at all in the sensitive informal negotiating sessions where controversial questions are almost invariably decided). As one French-speaking African delegate said, "Our voices simply are not heard."

How, then, did the Istanbul miracle occur?

First, the flagrant abuses at the Peking conference created a sharp backlash. In Peking, many of the chairmen of working groups had systematically substituted their own radical agenda for the will of government delegations. They allowed certain delegations the opportunity to speak while completely ignoring others. In one working group, the chairman pleaded, "Canada, did you have your hand up?" while failing to recognize the Guatemalan, Holy See, and Slovakian delegates who did have their signs up. Eventually, the Slovakian delegate called out, "Why don't you recognize Slovakia? I am in a red dress, I am eight months pregnant, and I have been standing here waving my sign for half an hour. You cannot pretend not to have seen me." The chairman still refused to recognize her and declared that consensus had been reached despite cries of "There is no consensus. We do not agree."

Remembering this record of abuse, developing-country delegates at Istanbul demanded procedural fairness. They insisted that chairmen of working groups be impartial and follow due process. When, early in the working-group meetings, a chairman asked for a show of hands on a controversial question and blatantly miscounted, several delegations complained immediately. After the incident, the chairman's counting ability improved markedly.

A second factor in the Istanbul success was the backfiring of the radicals' NGO strategy. When the Women's Caucus successfully pushed to gain more influence for non-governmental organizations, it was thinking of NGOs such as itself and Zero Population Growth. However, it thus opened the door to pro-family lobbyists who, for the first time, had prolonged access to national delegates. This enabled them to help call into line delegations clearly at variance with the governments that sent them. For example, the Australian delegation initially supported Canada in its efforts to exclude parental rights from the document, but when pro-family NGOs publicized the activities of the Australian delegation, it performed a back-breaking 180-degree somersault.