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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/ahn05252011.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/ahn05252011.html<br><br>
</a></font><font size=2 color="#990000">May 25, 2011<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Systematic
Violations of Women's Rights<br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">The
IMF: Violating Women Since
1945</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By
CHRISTINE AHN and KAVITA N. RAMDAS<br><br>
</font><font size=3>As Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the world's most
powerful financial institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
spends a few nights in Rikers Island prison awaiting a hearing, the world
is learning a lot about his history of treating women as expendable sex
objects. Strauss-Kahn has been charged with rape and forced imprisonment
of a 32-year-old Guinean hotel worker at a $3,000-a-night luxury hotel in
New York.<br><br>
While the media dissects the attempted rape of a young African woman and
begins to dig out more information about Strauss-Kahn's past
indiscretions, we couldn't help but see this situation through the
feminist lens of the "personal is political." <br><br>
For many in the developing world, the IMF and its draconian policies of
structural adjustment have systematically "raped" the earth and
the poor and violated the human rights of women. It appears that the
personal disregard and disrespect for women demonstrated by the man at
the highest levels of leadership within the IMF is quite consistent with
the gender bias inherent in the IMF's institutional policies and
practice.<br><br>
<b>Systematic Violation of Women's Human Rights<br><br>
</b>The IMF and the World Bank were established in the aftermath of World
War II to promote international trade and monetary cooperation by giving
governments loans in times of severe budget crises. Although 184
countries make up the IMF's membership, only five countriesFrance,
Germany, Japan, Britain, and the United Statescontrol 50 percent of the
votes, which are allocated according to each country's
contribution.<br><br>
The IMF has earned its villainous reputation in the Global South because
in exchange for loans, governments must accept a range of austerity
measures known as structural adjustment programs (SAPs). A typical IMF
package encourages export promotion over local production for local
consumption. It also pushes for lower tariffs and cuts in government
programs such as welfare and education. Instead of reducing poverty, the
trillion dollars of loans issued by the IMF have deepened poverty,
especially for women who make up 70 percent of the world's poor.<br><br>
IMF-mandated government cutbacks in social welfare spending have often
been achieved by cutting public sector jobs, which disproportionately
impact women. Women hold most of the lower-skilled public sector jobs,
and they are often the first to be cut. Also, as social programs like
caregiving are slashed, women are expected to take on additional domestic
responsibilities that further limit their access to education or other
jobs.<br><br>
In exchange for borrowing $5.8 billion from the IMF and World Bank,
Tanzania agreed to impose fees for health services, which led to fewer
women seeking hospital deliveries or post-natal care and naturally,
higher rates of maternal death. In Zambia, the imposition of SAPs led to
a significant drop in girls' enrollment in schools and a spike in
"survival or subsistence sex" as a way for young women to
continue their educations.<br><br>
But IMF's austerity measures don't just apply to poor African countries.
In 1997, South Korea received $57 billion in loans in exchange for IMF
conditionalities that forced the government to introduce "labor
market flexibility," which outlined steps for the government to
compress wages, fire "surplus workers," and cut government
spending on programs and infrastructure. When the financial crisis hit,
seven Korean women were laid off for every one Korean man. In a sick
twist, the Korean government launched a "get your husband
energized" campaign encouraging women to support depressed male
partners while they cooked, cleaned, and cared for everyone.<br><br>
Nearly 15 years later, the scenario is grim for South Korean workers,
especially women. Of all OECD countries, Koreans work the longest hours:
90% of men and 77% of women work over 40 hours a week. According to
economist Martin Hart-Landsberg, in 2000, 40 percent of Korean workers
were irregular workers; by 2008, 60 percent worked in the informal
economy. The Korean Women Working Academy reports that today 70 percent
of Korean women workers are temporary laborers.<br><br>
<b>Selling Mother Earth<br><br>
</b>IMF policies have also raped the earth by dictating that governments
privatize the natural resources most people depend on for their survival:
water, land, forests, and fisheries. SAPs have also forced developing
countries to stop growing staple foods for domestic consumption and
instead focus on growing cash crops, like cut flowers and coffee for
export to volatile global markets. These policies have destroyed the
livelihoods of small-scale subsistence farmers, the majority of whom are
women.<br><br>
"IMF adjustment programs forced poor countries to abandon policies
that protected their farmers and their agricultural production and
markets," says Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, an international
organization that promotes sustainable agriculture and biodiversity.
"As a result, many countries became dependent on food imports, as
local farmers could not compete with the subsidized products from the
North. This is one of the main factors in the current food crisis, for
which the IMF is directly to blame."<br><br>
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), IMF loans have paved the way
for the privatization of the country's mines by transnational
corporations and local elites, which has forcibly displaced thousands of
Congolese people in a context where women and girls experience obscenely
high levels of sexual slavery and rape in the eastern provinces.
According to Gender Action, the World Bank and IMF have made loans to the
DRC to restructure the mining sector, which translates into laying off
tens of thousands of workers, including women and girls who depend on the
mining operations for their livelihoods. Furthermore, as the land becomes
mined and privatized, women and girls responsible for gathering water and
firewood must walk even further, making them more susceptible to violent
crimes.<br><br>
<b>We Are Over It<br><br>
</b>Women's rights activists around the globe are consistently
dumbfounded by how such violations of women's bodies are routinely
dismissed as minor transgressions. Strauss-Kahn, one of the world's most
powerful politicians whose decisions affected millions across the globe,
was known for being a "womanizer" who often forced himself on
younger, junior women in subordinate positions where they were vulnerable
to his far greater power, influence, and clout. Yet none of his
colleagues or fellow Socialist Party members took these reports
seriously, colluding in a consensus shared even by his wife that the
violation of women's bodily integrity is not in any sense a genuine
violation of human rights.<br><br>
Why else would the world tolerate the unearthly news that 48 Congolese
women are raped every hour with deadening inaction? Eve Ensler speaks for
us all when she writes, "I am over a world that could allow, has
allowed, continues to allow 400,000 women, 2,300 women, or one woman to
be raped anywhere, anytime of any day in the Congo. The women of Congo
are over it too."<br><br>
We live in a world where millions of women don't speak their truth, don't
tell their dark stories, don't reveal their horror lived every day just
because they were born women. They don't do it for the same reasons that
the women in the Congo articulate – they are tired of not being heard.
They are tired of men like Strauss-Kahn, powerful and in suits, believing
that they can rape a black woman in a hotel room, just because they feel
like it. They are tired of the police not believing them or arresting
them for being sex workers. They are tired of hospitals not having rape
kits. They are tired of reporting rape and being charged for adultery in
Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.<br><br>
<b>Fighting Back<br><br>
</b>For each one of them, and for those of us who have spent many years
investing in the tenacity of women's movements across the globe, the
courage and gumption of the young Guinean immigrant shines like the torch
held by Lady Liberty herself. This young woman makes you believe we can
change this reality. She refused to be intimidated. She stood up for
herself. She fought to free herselftwicefrom the violent grip of the
man attacking her. She didn't care who he wasshe knew she was violated
and she reported it straight to the hotel staff, who went straight to the
New York police, who went straight to JFK to pluck Strauss-Kahn from his
first-class Air France seat.<br><br>
In a world where it often feels as though wealth and power can buy
anything, the courage of a young woman and the people who stood by her
took our breath away. These stubborn, ethical acts of working class
people in New York City reminded us that women have the right to say
"no." It reminded us that "no" does not mean
"yes" as the Yale fraternities would have us believe, and, most
importantly that no one, regardless of their position or their gender,
should be above the law. A wise woman judge further drove home the point
about how critically important it is to value women's bodies when she
denied Strauss-Kahn bail citing his long history of abusing
women.<br><br>
Strauss-Kahn sits in his Rikers Island cell. It would be a great thing if
his trial succeeds in ending the world's tolerance for those who
discriminate and abuse women. We cannot tolerate it one second longer. We
cannot tolerate it at the personal level, we must refuse to condone it at
the professional level, and we must challenge it every time it we see it
in the policies of global institutions like the International Monetary
Fund.<br><br>
<b>Christine Ahn</b> is a<a href="http://www.fpif.org/"> Foreign Policy
In Focus</a> columnist and the senior policy and research analyst at the
Global Fund for Women. <br><br>
<b>Kavita N. Ramdas</b> is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, a
visiting scholar at Stanford University, and the former president and CEO
of the Global Fund for Women. <br><br>
<br><br>
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