ACRIMONY at the women=D5s forum at Huairou has provided an unhappy=20 prelude to the United Nations women=D5s conference which opened in=20 Beijing on Monday.=20 The forum is made up of hugely diverse non-governmental women=D5s=20 organisations. They have come as legitimate pressure groups, invited under=
the UN banner, to press their interests at the Beijing conference. But many=
at the forum, not least the Tibetan women=D5s group, also rightly see this =
an opportunity to protest in China against Chinese human rights violations.=
The authorities, first by marooning the forum 80 kilometres away from=20 Beijing and then by harassing them, have acted clumsily and created a=20 crisis. China is wrong to try to muzzle protest, and the women=D5s forum wa=
right to use an ultimatum to secure fairer treatment. These are important matters. But they are not the main purpose of this=20 women=D5s gathering. The participants =D1 and those reporting the=20 proceedings to the world =D1 should not be diverted from focusing on the=20 main business at hand: the search for practical solutions to raise the stat=
of women and give them equality in their public functions and their private=
There always has to be a question mark over the wisdom of staging these=20 mammoth international conferences =D1 and in numbers, this women=D5s=20 conference will beat all previous records. But this must not serve as an=20 excuse to ignore or dismiss the important issues that will be exposed in=20
Of course, much will be said that can be held up to ridicule: there will be=
tedious speeches and tortuous negotiation about the wording of conference=
resolutions. Yet for all that, the previous three UN women=D5s conferences=
have already proved great for networking, for developing new ideas and=20 campaigns, and for opening new worlds to delegates more used to narrow=20 national and cultural confines. In Nairobi in 1985, the UN women=D5s conference set a target for equality b=
2000. This was unrealistic then, and unhappily remains so now. Western=20 feminists argue that far from progress, in some respects women have=20 moved =D1 or have been forced =D1 backwards with conservatives=20 recapturing ground on issues such as abortion and birth control, and on=20 broader concepts of family.=20 A UN study on the status of women, prepared for the Beijing conference,=20 has provided a graphic overview of women=D5s inequality. The statistics of=
disadvantage in work, earnings, illiteracy, political rights, domestic=20 violence, property, or by almost any other standard, are dramatic. Yet ther=
is surely also much wider acceptance that women are the key to economic=20 growth and all that follows from that in terms of equality in the workplace=
in decision-making, in public and private life.=20 There is an obvious gulf between Third World priorities and those of the=20 more privileged Western societies. There is also a new divide between=20 fundamentalists =D1 Catholics, Muslims, Jews =D1 and mainstream thinking.=
But since Nairobi this has been tempered by better understanding of the=20 communality of interest between all women. With the end of apartheid and=20 communism, and dialogue between Israelis and Arabs, the element of=20 confrontation so intrusive in Nairobi has also been eliminated.