MCASKIE ONE OF U.N.'S FEW WOMEN SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVES
By Barbara Crossette

June 4, 2004 – (UN Wire) The spotlight shining on Lakhdar Brahimi in Iraq, and before that in Afghanistan, has made many more Americans aware that the United Nations has its own corps of very skilled diplomatic troubleshooters known as special representatives of the secretary general. These envoys, like viceroys in the age of empire, can wield considerable administrative power and influence, especially when countries implode and need to be rebuilt, as Cambodia was more than a decade ago, or are in the process of being created anew, as East Timor was under U.N. guidance most recently.

A special representative, however, is almost never a woman, and more often than not he is drawn from a background in politics or the military.

That makes the appointment of Carolyn McAskie to the top U.N. job in war-ravaged Burundi a newsworthy event. She is a development and aid expert from Canada.

Burundi, a small country in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa, has been torn apart and terrorized by civil war and overrun by refugees fleeing brutality at home and the fallout of the vast and persistent conflict that has spun around the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Where a Burundian national economy should be, there is instead a huge hole between subsistence farming and the bank accounts of the rich elite, McAskie said in an interview Friday as she was preparing to leave for Africa.

Now, a U.N. peacekeeping force is on the way. An election is due in the fall. Development aid has been promised. McAskie's job will be to see that all this comes together to give Burundi a second chance at national life.

Women, few as they are in this line of work, seem to get the toughest assignments. Margaret Anstee was sent to Angola as special representative in 1992 by Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and struggled against impossible odds — an experience she wrote about in the book Orphan of the Cold War: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Angolan Peace Process. The title tells the tale.

Dame Margaret, who also wrote an entertaining book titled Don’t Learn To Type: A Woman at the United Nations, cut a formidable and at the same time fashionable figure in the field. She took her Viennese cook to Luanda so that dinner parties would be up to scratch and had some vaguely military-looking tropical suits tailored in London to give her a rather more authoritarian appearance. In Angola, she lived through long periods of frustration punctuated by extreme danger. Angola's warring factions were not predisposed to listen to a woman.

McAskie says she is aware that a woman in the role of special representative in another African country is still a novelty.
"Well, it is an issue because to start with there aren't very many of us," she said. "But my sense is that you can turn that to advantage. Because of that people go out of their way to work with you and to give you respect."

McAskie, a former ambassador to Sri Lanka whose career in the Canadian government began in Kenya and included running the Canadian aid agency's Africa department, has traveled from crisis to crisis in Africa in recent years as a U.N. assistant secretary general and deputy head of the organization's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She was part of the protracted Burundi peace negotiations begun by the late Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania.

At the peace talks in the Tanzanian city of Arusha, she said, "We were trying to get the Burundian delegations themselves to include women. The status of Burundian women is pretty poor, but amongst the elite there are women in senior positions, women ministers. I just had lunch in Ottawa yesterday with the Burundian ambassador to Canada. She's a woman."

McAskie is hopeful about Burundi. Out of the peace talks, she said, an "Arusha effect" has developed, linking people from all factions pledged to work on the country's future. The key to keeping this spirit alive, she said, is moving without undue delay toward national elections while persuading the last armed rebel faction to disarm.

More broadly, McAskie is upbeat about Africa. "I've seen a lot of changes in Africa and, frankly, I'm one of the people who's more optimistic than not," she said.

"Africa has suffered a lot of setbacks, but if you look over the horizon — you look across Africa right now — there are two things that are pretty remarkable," she said. "One is how many of the countries themselves are struggling to come out of crisis. Secondly, the fact is that the international community seems to be learning a lesson and supporting them. So you have, all of a sudden, all these new peacekeeping missions going to Africa, which would have been unimaginable five years ago."

Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, has been a violent place over the last decade. McAskie said she has been warned by some people that various factions, including in government, have shown a tendency to take the law into their own hands with little provocation.

"We have had cases where U.N. staff have been lined up against the wall and shot point-blank," she said. "But my sense is that those days are hopefully behind us. And I may be one of the more high-profile people in Burundi, but I'm also going to be one of the best-protected. So I have absolutely zero personal fear for my own safety."

McAskie is confident that she is a known quantity because of her participation in the Burundi peace process in recent years, and that she will not be treated as a stranger.

"In Bujumbura people know me and they're going to welcome me," she said. "What I do and say as soon as I hit the ground will set the tone, so I can't live on this forever, but it does give me a positive edge in that there will be a welcome there."

From: http://www.unwire.org/Features/Columns/522_24568.asp