Success in South Africa.

• Author: King, Angela E.V.
• Position: Impact of women in the peace process in South Africa - Includes related article on women in peace missions

In this article, Angela E. V. King talks about the impact of women to the peace process in South Africa--the contribution women can make in a United Nations team--and also of South African women and their contribution. She puts in the context of certain findings made by the Division of the Advancement of Women since it commenced the study of this issue approximately five years ago.

To date our evidence does not show empirically that women are better peacemakers than men. My thesis is thee women in partnership with men at all levels and in all aspects of the operation--political, civilian, police, military, and administrative--make an operation or a mission more effective than if there are few or no women.

In its work on "the impact of gender difference" as it relates to peace-making and peace-building, the United Nations has learned that bringing a gender perspective to bear on decision-making and conflict resolution means the recognition that women and men are sometimes differently involved in those processes. Much of the existing political and social research has been carried out in a way that was blind to gender considerations. This has Usually meant that male norms were taken to represent the norms for the society as a whole. In other words, women remained voiceless and invisible. The United Nations must apply a gender perspective routinely in the way in which it prepares for and executes its peace, humanitarian and human rights missions. Only then can a fuller understanding of the processes involved develop, which would change not only the current concept of the role of women and men in politics, but also the political agendas and priorities. It would also broaden the scope of conflict resolution and the achievement of UN goals for equality.

South Africa, despite some problems, has been such a success story since the elections in May 1994 that few remember how the United Nations came to send a mission there. A brief background to the situation immediately leading up to the elections' arrival in September 1992 might be useful.

A great surge of optimism swept the international community in 1989, when all the main political entities in South Africa committed themselves to a negotiated political settlement of the conflict in the country. In the Harare Declaration that same year, the international community hailed the commitment of South Africans to reach a peaceful settlement themselves. There followed rapidly the release of Nelson Mandela and other key political prisoners, the unbanning of a number of political organizations, primarily the liberation movements, and the repeal by 1991 of some of the most discriminatory apartheid legislation concerning land, population areas. By December 1991, formal constitutional negotiations on the future of the country began with the establishment of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, which was to chart the way forward to elections and constitutional stability.

Between May and June 1992, a wave of violence swept the country culminating in the Boipatong massacres. The constitutional negotiations broke down as a result, and the Security Council, in its resolution 772 (1992) of July 1992, requested the Secretary-General to deploy, as a matter of urgency, United Nations observers in South Africa. The Council also invited the United Nations to assist in strengthening the structures set up under the National Peace Accord. The purpose of the Mission known as the United Nations Observer Mission in South Africa (UNOMSA), together with the Organization of African Unity, the Commonwealth and the European Union which participated in this effort, was "to assist in bringing an effective end to the violence and in creating conditions for negotiations leading towards a peaceful transition to a democratic, non-racial and united South Africa".

In short, the Mission was to observe what was going on throughout the entire country, and provide the Secretary-General with firsthand knowledge of developments on the ground and thus enable him to report accurately to the...