Never Be Silent

The work she’s doing to bring women’s issues to the forefront of US foreign policy makes me like Hillary Clinton even more than I did before. Read some of my previous Hillary posts to learn more about how she’s speaking out on behalf of women around the world.

From NY Times Magazine, excerpt:

Q: I’m curious about what priorities you’re setting. Will the Obama administration have a signature issue — sex trafficking or gender-based violence or maternal mortality or education for girls — in the way that H.I.V./AIDS came to symbolize the Bush-administration strategy?

Clinton: We are having as a signature issue the fact that women and girls are a core factor in our foreign policy. If you look at what has to be done, in some societies, it is a different problem than in others. In some of the societies where women are deprived of political and economic rights, they have access to education and health care. In other societies, they may have been given the vote, but girl babies are still being put out to die.

So it’s not one specific program, so much as a policy. When it comes to our global health agenda, maternal health is now part of the Obama administration’s outreach. We’re very proud of the work this country has done, through Pepfar, on H.I.V./AIDS [the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief was begun by George W. Bush in 2003]. We’ve moved from an understanding of how to deal with global AIDS to recognizing it’s now a woman’s disease, because women are the most vulnerable and often have no power to protect themselves. And it’s increasingly younger women or even girls.

But women die every minute from poor maternal health care. You know, H.I.V./AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria — those are all, unfortunately, equal-opportunity killers. Maternal health is a woman’s issue; it’s a family issue; it’s a child issue. And for the United States to say to countries that have very high maternal mortality rates, “We care about the future of your children, and in order to do that, we care about the present of your women,” is a powerful statement.

From the Washington Post, excerpt:

Clinton’s just-concluded 11-day trip to Africa has sent the clearest signal yet that she intends to make women’s rights one of her signature issues and a higher priority than ever before in American diplomacy.

She plans to press governments on abuses of women’s rights and make women more central in U.S. aid programs.

But her efforts go beyond the marble halls of government and show how she is redefining the role of secretary of state. Her trips are packed with town hall meetings and visits to micro-credit projects and women’s dinners. Ever the politician, she is using her star power to boost women who could be her allies.

“It’s just a constant effort to elevate people who, in their societies, may not even be known by their own leaders,” Clinton said in an interview. “My coming gives them a platform, which then gives us the chance to try and change the priorities of the governments.”

A nice, long Wall Street Journal interview with Hillary Clinton on the administration’s approach to foreign policy and human rights. Go read this in its entirety, it’s fascinating. Excerpt:

…Elsewhere, the confident assertion of values gets muted in favor of what Mrs. Clinton called in her Council speech “a more flexible and pragmatic posture.” Neorealism is the new hot word in Washington. On her first trip abroad, to Asia, when asked why the U.S. isn’t pressing China harder on human rights, she said, “We already know what they are going to say.” The administration puts non-proliferation ahead of democratization in Russia and Iran.

Why push human rights and democracy so hard in Africa, I venture, and not in Russia or China? Some see a double standard. “First I think it is important to stress that human rights remain a central driving force of our foreign policy,” she says. “But I also think that it’s important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It’s a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment.”

Mrs. Clinton adds, “we have very strong differences with the Chinese. We have stood up and talked about that and pointed it out and they will continue to disagree with us. We know that.” But the administration sees an opening to get closer with Beijing on the global economy, climate change and North Korea—and touts results already.

China for decades shielded their clients in Pyongyang, but Mrs. Clinton credits the administration’s “efforts to really expand our engagement” and North Korea’s recent missile and bomb tests for a shift in Beijing. “I think that long-time China watchers are quite surprised at the unanimity of support that we have obtained for these very strong sanctions against the regime in Pyongyang. Both in private and in public we know that the Chinese government is putting greater and greater pressure on North Korea,” she says. “They’ve worked closely with us.”

She takes the same approach to Russia. Engagement—in this case, “a restart”—is supposed to win a significant power’s “cooperation” on non-proliferation in Iran. De-emphasized are the reasons the relationship turned bad, such as last year’s war in Georgia and NATO’s plans to take in new members from the ex-U.S.S.R., though Mrs. Clinton says “I want to reassure our friends and allies that there are absolutely no tradeoffs” to improved relations ties with Russia.

Unclear is whether the policy is bearing fruit. Mrs. Clinton hesitates to say if the Kremlin is on board to help the U.S. stop Iran from acquiring a bomb, before noting “a very positive framework for our discussions.” Can we be sure Russia isn’t helping Iran with nuclear and missile technology? She answers in a single sentence: “We know that Russia has shown restraint during the six months we have been discussing this with them.” Iran will likely be the acid test of the administration’s outreach to Moscow…

From CARE, send a quick e-mail in support of preventing violence against women.

It is estimated that more than 200,000 women and girls have been raped in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during the past 12 years. Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated, “The United States condemns these attacks and all those who commit them and abet them. These acts don’t just harm a single individual, or a single family, or a single village, or a single group. They shred the fabric that weaves us together as human beings. Such atrocities have no place in any society.”

Please, join CARE and show your support of Secretary Clinton’s firm stance against the situation in the DRC, and urge her to continue U.S. leadership in helping women and girls around the world by taking steps to prevent and respond to this type of violence.

From the NY Times, excerpt:

Mrs. Clinton used her unprecedented visit — she is the first secretary of state to venture into the war zone here — to unveil a $17 million plan to fight Congo’s stunning levels of sexual violence, a problem she called “evil in its basest form.”

She announced that the American government would train doctors, supply rape victims with video cameras to document violence, send American military engineers to help build facilities and train Congolese police officers, especially female police officers, to crack down on rapists.

“This problem is too big for one country to solve alone,” Mrs. Clinton said after meeting with Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila. Her visit was part of a seven-nation Africa tour intended to strengthen relations with strategic African countries and to use American influence to stop Africa’s wars. She arrived Tuesday night in Abuja, Nigeria, and planned talks Wednesday with Nigerian officials.

Eastern Congo is home to the worst war on the continent right now, an intensely predatory conflict driven by a mix of ethnic, commercial, nationalist and criminal interests, in which various armed groups often vent their rage against women. The United Nations calls Congo the rape capital of the world and says hundreds of thousands of women have been raped in the past decade. Nothing so far — not 18,000 peacekeepers, not various regional peace treaties, not other high-level diplomatic visits — have stemmed the violence.

Recent Congo-Rwanda military operations along the volatile border may be making things worse. The operations have spawned revenge attacks that have driven more than 500,000 people from their homes. Dozens of villages of have been burned. Hundreds of villagers have been massacred. And countless women, and recently many men, have been raped. Often the rapists are Congolese soldiers.

(I’m still catching up on the news from the past week. Forgive me if I’m posting things you’ve already seen.)

From The Wall Street Journal, an op-ed in its entirety:

Though overshadowed by hubby Bill’s rescue mission to Pyongyang, Hillary Clinton is in Africa speaking some useful truths. The Secretary of State’s seven-country jaunt began yesterday in Kenya, where she took aim at political corruption and graft. A disputed 2007 election resulted in a power sharing deal between President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, but not before related violence claimed more than 1,000 lives.

“The absence of strong, effective democratic institutions has permitted ongoing corruption, impunity, politically motivated violence, human-rights abuses and a lack of respect for the rule of law,” Mrs. Clinton said at a press conference. “These conditions helped fuel the post-election violence and they are continuing to hold Kenya back.” According to Transparency International, a bribe is expected or solicited in nearly half of all transactions in Kenya, which is high even by New Jersey standards.

Secretary Clinton was critical of the government decision not to appoint a tribunal that could hold those responsible for the election-related violence accountable. She acknowledged that prosecuting the perpetrators without igniting more unrest is “complicated” but said it’s no excuse for inaction. “There needs to be a beginning,” said Mrs. Clinton. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

She also expressed regret that the broader reform agenda agreed to by the coalition government “has not yet translated into the kind of political progress that the Kenyan people deserve,” and she left open the possibility of economic or travel sanctions if the situation doesn’t improve.

African leaders aren’t used to such blunt public criticism from Western liberals, but the Obama Administration has put a notable focus on failed governance as a major source of Africa’s woes. “Africa doesn’t need strongmen; it needs strong institutions,” said President Obama in his address to the Ghanaian Parliament last month. “No country is going to create wealth if leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves or if police can be bought off … No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end.”

Too often, the World Bank and other international aid agencies have been complicit in this failure by turning a blind eye to corruption while pouring more money into these governments. The West has spent an estimated $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the past five decades. Yet in a typical African country, one-third of the children under five still have stunted growth due to malnutrition.

We’d like to see Mrs. Clinton follow up those words by denying aid to corrupt leaders, and for that matter speaking more candidly about stolen elections in places like Iran. But her forthright approach to African leaders is a welcome development, not least for Africa’s suffering people.