Women aim to increase role as global peacemakers

Two years ago, 1,200 of the world's religious and spiritual leaders gathered in New York for the United Nations-sponsored Millennium World Peace Summit. The mission of the summit was to create a greater role for religious and moral leaders around the world to help bring peace to longstanding conflicts.

But just 15 percent of the delegates were women.

Now women are insisting that the other half of society be heard. As conflicts continue to fester in areas such as the Middle East, Afghanistan, and parts of Africa, consensus is growing that involving women in conflict resolution is vital .

To this end, some of those same religious leaders reconvened at the UN Thursday for the launch of the Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders. The initiative, organizers say, will press for a greater role for women at the negotiating table, and spotlight successful women-led efforts at reconciliation. Hundreds of delegates will convene next month at the UN's Geneva offices to forge a plan of action.

"It's not that I think women magically have the answers and men are the problem, but I think adding women's voices to the debate can only help," says Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, the first woman to serve as spiritual leader and general secretary of the US National Council of the Churches of Christ. "Women tend to look at an issue from a more family-oriented stance, and it's in our nature to think about what will happen to the children. And most women – not all women – prefer peaceful alternatives to war."

Women as peacemakers is not a new concept, but this is said by organizers to be the first time that women spanning the world's spiritual and religious faiths, together with women in business and government, have united for the cause. It's also the latest in a series of moves to shatter the glass ceiling for women in conflict resolution.

Two years ago, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1325, which, among other things, called for greater involvement of women in peace processes and for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to appoint more women as envoys. (Women's groups are still pushing for the resolution's full implementation.)

Meanwhile, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe last year called for greater roles for women in security issues, following what they say were failures to include them in the reconciliation process in Macedonia and Serbia.

And the new International Criminal Court will also pursue "gender justice" for such crimes against humanity as systematic rape and sexual slavery.

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