Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet is a smart, highly educated politician, and a skillful negotiator, but I wonder whether she did the right thing in agreeing to head the United Nations' new agency for women's rights, scheduled to start operating Jan. 1. She will face formidable obstacles to get things done.

Her $500 million annual budget agency, known as U.N. Women, will bring together four existing U.N. women's rights organizations that are known to barely talk to one another. And the new agency will be overseen by a 41-country board that includes some of the world's worst women's rights offenders, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Congo.

In an interview for a soon-to-be aired TV show, I asked Bachelet how she expects to advance the cause of women's rights with board members such as Saudi Arabia, where women can't vote and are even prohibited from driving.

Bachelet responded that the U.N. Women executive board was elected by U.N. member countries, and that she, as U.N. Women's executive director, "will work with all countries that have been elected to this executive board. We hope to have the best relations with all member nations, and seek that all countries of the world, absolutely all, be able to improve women's conditions."

But will you be able to denounce states that oppress women when they sit on your executive committee? I asked. She said that "there are thousands of different problems ... In some countries, we will be able to advance more rapidly on some issues, and in others it may take more time. But I am persistent, patient and very optimistic."

She added, "What's important is to be able to work with the respect that we owe to all member nations, but also complying with the resolution of member nations stating that U.N. Women's task is to improve women's conditions all over the world."

But isn't there a double standard at the U.N. when it focuses on abuses against women in relatively weak countries such as Somalia or Congo, but doesn't denounce abuses by powerful oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia, or nuclear powers such as Pakistan?

"We will work with all countries in ways of obtaining results," she responded. "And that means, just like when one is president of a country, that one picks priority issues, the most suited strategies, to obtain results."

She added that one of her top priorities will be to "generate leaderships" by supporting people who are fighting to advance women's rights everywhere.

Asked whether there is still a "macho" culture in Latin America, she said that "finally, we are seeing a cultural change that allows many people to vote for women" in the region, as shown in the recent election of women presidents in Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, and of her own case in Chile.

"But I think that we still have machismo, because we still have very few women heading big banks, or heading other big companies, or in areas such as physics, mathematics or science," she said.

Marianne Mollmann, a women's rights specialist with the Human Rights Watch advocacy group, told me she has "all the hopes of the world" that U.N. Women will succeed.

Asked whether U.N. Women won't become like the U.N. Human Rights Council -- whose membership includes several dictatorships that stop any investigation into their abuses, turning the group into pretty much a joke -- Mollmann told me that's unlikely to happen. U.N. Women's executive board will have fewer powers than members of the Human Rights Council to set the organization's agenda, or "act as spoilers," she said.

My opinion: Bachelet has a distinguished record on women's rights issues. During her presidency in Chile, she set up a national network of kindergartens for working women, and a system of social security for housewives.

She was rightly criticized for not having been a more forceful defender of universal rights abroad -- she made an official visit to inaugurate a book fair in Cuba, a military dictatorship that jails dissident writers and bans independent media -- but overall was a good president.

I hope that she makes waves in her new job, and that she won't succumb to the U.N. bureaucracy and its political shenanigans. If she makes big headlines, it will be the best sign that she's changing things.

 

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(C) 2010 Andres Oppenheimer