February
1996
Beijing ‘95:
A Pale Green
By Cathleen McGuire
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The Fourth World Conference on Women took place in Beijing, China, September
4-15, 1995. Concurrent with the United Nations event was the NGO Forum
on Women, August 30th-September 8th, held over an hour’s drive
away in the town of Huairou (pronounced WHY ROW). Cathleen McGuire
reports.
As one of the largest gatherings of women in history, the UN Conference
and the NGO Forum offered an extraordinary opportunity for over 40,000
women from around the world to network, organize, and return to their
home countries with reinvigorated agendas. Choosing which workshops
to attend from the 3,000-plus NGO Forum options was a daunting task.
When I realized that the Forum activities were spread out over a two-
to three-mile radius, I wasted no time in purchasing a spunky Chinese
bicycle for $45. I especially enjoyed my daily commute to and from the
Forum. My hotel was located in a relaxed rural setting, a pleasant 30-minute
bike ride from Huairou.
By now, everyone has heard about the conference’s two main spoilers:
the Chinese "security" and what I dubbed a Chinese water torture
— the rains. Although the U.S. press persisted in spotlighting
the Chinese government’s strong-arm tactics (all too often at
the expense of covering our actual work), I personally witnessed few
infractions. As for the rains, they helped cleanse the air from a suffocating
combination of muggy weather and hovering smog. Most women at the Forum
were jubilant to be in a milieu teeming with so much female energy.
Yet overall, I was a bit disappointed by how narrowly focused it was
on the political side — UN objectives notwithstanding. As a veteran
of womyn’s festivals, I have become accustomed to an environment
in which the creative, artistic, and spiritual is given equal weight
with the political. This more balanced approach is what I found lacking
at the Forum, and feel that most of the women had but a glimmer of
the
transformative possibilities that open up when the nonlinear sides
of our consciousness are given full accord.
Nonetheless, the politics was hard hitting with a strong focus on the
issue of violence against women, including such workshop topics as
the
selling of Nepalese girl children, Zambian battered women’s shelters,
and female genital mutilation. The global network of activists opposed
to trafficking in women constituted a strong, vocal presence at the
conference. Conspicuously absent were Western proponents of that dribble
from Camille Paglia and the like that regards prostitution as a viable
career "choice" for women and pornography a liberatory expression
of female sexual agency.
Only a Pale Green
I was astonished by the lack of environmental consciousness on the
part of the Forum organizers. Why was this not a "green" conference?
Thousands of plastic water bottles were just tossed away with the regular
trash, and it didn’t seem like any of the vast reams of waste
paper were destined for recycling. Was I the only one appalled —
rather than awed — when over 20,000 doves and hundreds of balloons
were released at the Forum’s opening ceremonies? Aren’t
the Forum organizers aware that many animals mistake the deflated balloons
for food and often choke to death? Also, there were tents galore for
special constituencies such as a disabled tent, a peace/anti-nuclear
tent, a youth tent, an indigenous tent, a lesbian tent, etc. Why was
there no environmental tent?
Another primary indicator of the absence of an ecological consciousness
on the part of the Forum was with respect to food. I’m sorry to
say this was definitely not a vegetarian conference. Long lines queued
before too few stands, most offering some variation of processed food,
much of it meat-based. Unless one had a bike (a surprising number of
people did!), the vast distances made it difficult to zip over to Huairou
restaurants for a quick, healthy lunch. Worst of all, the Forum organizers
saw fit to consign valuable booth space to the granddaddy of junk food,
McDonald’s.
Daughters of the Earth
The most flagrant act of eco-suppression was the treatment of the thoroughly
ecofeminist contingent, "Daughters of the Earth: The Environment
and Development Collaborative Web." Known as the Web, this coalition
of 78 global organizations presented a remarkable two-day tribunal,
the Second World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet. The Web
grew out of the First World Women’s Congress held in Miami in
November, 1991, spearheaded by the Women’s Environment and Development
Organization (WEDO) under the leadership of Bella Abzug.
The Miami Congress marked a watershed in grassroots feminist politics
as women from around the world networked, organized, and collectively
devised a strategic plan of action. The resulting document, the "Women’s
Action Agenda 21," is a paragon of ecofeminist politics. Its presentation
at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 was a historic step forward in solidifying
NGOs’ and women’s influence on United Nations policymaking.
The Web’s tribunal in Huairou was followed by six days of intense
plenaries focusing on issues critical to women’s empowerment:
Trade and the Global Economy, Technology and Communications, Health
and Healing, Peace and Militarism, Resistance Strategies and Sustainable
Alternatives, and Indigenous Perspectives on Biodiversity. Unlike the
official NGO Forum English-only program books, the Web’s program
book was printed in five languages. A who’s who of predominantly
women of color activists such as Wangari Maathai, Dessima Williams,
Miliani Trask, and Urvashi Vaid addressed the panels. The Web’s
agenda represents a model of international multilateral organizing.
So why was it apparently sabotaged?
From the beginning, attending the Web’s activities was made difficult.
The Forum planning committee assigned the Web a space that was almost
a half-hour walk from the site proper. To add insult to injury, the
official Forum map misrepresented the Web’s location by several
blocks. Then, midway through the conference, their space was yanked
out from under them and the panels were splintered into several sites.
The Web’s plenaries should have been a centerpiece of the Forum.
The fact that their agenda was undermined by logistic legerdemain borders,
I submit, on the scandalous.
LaDuke’s message
I was one of the lucky few to gain entrance into the 1,500-seat conference
center in Huairou for both Hillary Clinton’s talk and the two
keynote addresses. In my opinion, Winona LaDuke’s keynote was
one of the most important speeches of the entire conference. LaDuke,
an Anishinabeg from Minnesota and co-chair of the Indigenous Women’s
Network, named names, and spoke strong, proud, and unequivocal.
LaDuke located the origins of today’s problems in the predator/prey
relationship industrial society (the predator) has developed with the
prey: nature, women, and indigenous peoples. What law, she challenged,
gives corporations like Conoco, Shell, Exxon, Diashawa, ITT, Rio Tinto
Zinc, and even the World Bank the right to decide how land is to be
used? "Is that right contained within their wealth, which was historically
acquired immorally, unethically, through colonialism, imperialism and
paid for with the lives of millions of people, species of plants and
entire ecosystems?" she asked.
One of LaDuke’s most cogent points is that often there is no difference
between the countries of the North and those of the South. Uranium mining
in the First World presents the same dire consequences for indigenous
peoples and Mother Earth as clear-cutting rainforests does in the Third
World. She demanded an end to profligate consumerism and rampant development.
"Consumption," she declared, "causes the commodification
of the sacred, the natural world, cultures, and the commodification
of children and women." From a Western perspective, LaDuke’s
speech is classic ecofeminism at its very best and deserves to be read
in full. (To order a copy, send a check for $5.00 payable to the Seventh
Generation Fund, Route 1, P.O. Box 308, Ponsford, MN 56575.)
Marching against Ronald McDonald
I smelled that unmistakable odor of charred flesh and congealing grease
before I actually saw the tent bearing those notorious golden arches.
The Forum organizers were obviously in the dark on this one. Let’s
face it: If you’re gonna install a McDonald’s booth at an
international gathering of women, and seat a life-size, plastic Ronald
McDonald out front on a bench, you’re asking to be zapped! Two
women from Earth Island Institute in San Francisco, Emily Miggins and
Sarah Chamberlain, initiated a spontaneous protest. They upturned Ronald,
smeared him with blood (catsup), and endeavored to educate the gawking
customers about the evils of Big Mac consumption.
Meanwhile, Vandana Shiva, the renowned ecofeminist activist and scientist
from India, called for a march to culminate at the McDonald’s
tent. Her contingent joined a large crowd of spirited protesters by
then already at the scene. Our chants included: "McDonald’s
is not an NGO," "Eat Chinese, Support the Local Economy,"
and "Monoculture is Bad Food." One placard said it all: "Stop
Poisoning Our Bodies! Stop Clearcutting Our Forests! Stop Polluting
Our Environment! Stop Concentration Camps for Animals! Stop Cultural
Imperialism!"
Before an army of cameras, a group of us picked up Ronald McDonald
and hurled him in the mud. (A friend in the U.S. saw this fabulous
footage
on CNN.) The Ronald statue was molded in a seated pose, such that when
he was face-down, his behind stuck ignobly in the air. Vandana Shiva
couldn’t resist jabbing her umbrella point into his obnoxiously
bright yellow buttocks. The crowd cackled uproariously while we high
fived each other in glorious triumph. Eventually, three shaken Chinese
McDonald’s employees rescued Ronald, hauling his battered body
away never to surface again for the rest of the conference.
McDonald’s was not the only representative of transnational capitalism
at the Forum. Apple and Hewlett Packard logged maximum advertising mileage
in exchange for providing Forum participants unlimited access to hundreds
of computers as well as free Internet training. Esprit’s donation
of thousands of tote bags bearing the official NGO logo created uncomfortable
PR problems for Irene Santiago, Executive Director of the Forum. Activists
involved in campaigns against international sweatshops distributed flyers
indicting Esprit’s custom of underpaying and overworking primarily
female laborers. In a puff piece in the Forum’s free daily newspaper,
Forum 95, Santiago "strongly refuted the [Esprit] allegations,"
claiming the Forum Secretariat "had taken every precaution to ensure
that all its sponsors were socially responsible." Yeah, right,
and Ronald McDonald is a card-carrying member of Greenpeace!
Cathleen McGuire lives in New York City and is
a writer and ecofeminist activist. She went to Beijing as part of the
Ms. Foundation for Women’s 125-member delegation. This article
is reprinted with permission from Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter,
Volume IX, Nos. 3-4, Winter 1995-96. For information about Feminists
for Animal Rights, please send a SASE to FAR, PO Box 694, Cathedral
Station, New York, NY 10025-0694.
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