DOHA, Qatar-Like a
queen surrounded by buzzing bees which
swarmed from all directions, Annemie Neyts-Uyttebroek,
looked at the journalists, smiled and said
of the talks: "They have reached a
very difficult, but fascinating stage.
This is all really very interesting." Cameras
clicked, pencils raced furiously on notebooks
as they hung on every word she uttered.
Neyts-Uyttebroek,
Belgium's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, is
in Doha as the representative of the 15-nation European
Union's Executive Commission. Is being a woman in this
business, and especially in a country where males rule
supreme difficult in any way?
She just laughed: "Personally, being a woman,
poses me no problem at all." For her, gender
issues are not a barrier. "As far as I can
see, nobody questions my authority when I'm presiding
at the council," she said. The same applies
for European women Ministers here, she said. A
former member of the European Parliament who has
traveled widely throughout the world, she was at
ease as she spoke in French, Flemish and English,
seamlessly switching from one language to the other.
Calmly she looked,
and smiled and thought as she held court wearing
a brown crepe suit, a green
blazer, smashing black heels. Confidence exuding. "I
see with pleasure as far as I can judge, an increasing
number of women delegates compared to what I used
to see at previous international meetings," she
said. "So that's a very positive development.
I will always keep paying attention to that and
encouraging these developments."
Neyts-Uyttebloeck
navigated through the myriad complexities of
international trade with grace,
and with concern. "I do believe that the opening
up of societies, opening to trade, opening to exchange
can only be beneficial for gender issues and greater
equality between men and women," she said. "It's
closed societies that are most likely to be very
slow in that process."
|
