It's a great honour to be here celebrating International Women's Day at the United Nations, again devoted to the urgently relevant issue of peace.

One year ago on this day, Ambassador Chowdhury of Bangladesh, the then President of the Security Council, the SG and the High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson spoke so eloquently about women and peace, that my colleague from Sierra Leone, Isha Dyfan and I both cried. As representatives of an 85 year old organisation that formed as a women's response to the first world war, we felt an incredible sense of hope and relief, that issues so long ignored were registering at the highest levels.

Those issues include first, the totally undemocratic, systematic and institutionalised exclusion of women from decision making about war and peace, second, the acute violence and deliberately inflicted agonies women face in all wars - the 30 wars currently raging, the 170 wars since 1945 every war before then- and, third, the unrecognised, under utilised and under valued contribution women make to preventing war, to building peace and to putting societies and individuals back together again after wars.

Sitting in this building last year on this day, many of us felt that after decades of knocking until our knuckles bled, doors were starting to open more widely. But the doors were opening to the obvious, what has been obvious for so long, and so our tears of joy and relief were also of frustration and a knowledge of the sheer magnitude of pain and death that it took for these obvious tragedies and obvious injustices against women to be recognised so clearly.

A publication is being circulated that is a first attempt at putting together all the references made to women and peace from the UN Charter to today. It is a way of tracing the path to Security Council resolution 1325.

A pamphlet is also being circulated called Women Count At Last, and it contains the text of Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, passed on October 31, 2000. Read it, use it, spread the word. For the first time in 55 years, the Security Council discussed women, their participation, their protection, gender perspectives in training and in peacekeeping and gender mainstreaming in UN reporting systems and mechanisms. Thanks to Ambassador Andjaba of Namibia who agreed to put this on the Security Council agenda, and thanks to Ambassador Chowdhury of Bangladesh who raised it on March 8 last year and thanks to Ambassador Durant of Jamaica the only woman Ambassador on the Security Council who supported us all the way, and thanks to Angela King and Noeleen Heyzer who have raised this issue for years and thanks to Graca Michel, and Florence Martin and Eliza Kimball and Elisabeth Wren and Rhadika Coomarawaswami, and thanks to the women in Latin America who dared to question military juntas about their disappeared relatives, the women in Liberia who rallied together to call for disarmament, who stood at arms deposition stations across their country taking guns from men and boys, and thanks to women in the Philippines who ran peace zones around villages, and thanks to the women in Bosnia who work across ethnic lines to rebuild their communities, and to the women in Burundi who struggled to bring the voices of those most affected to the peace table, and thanks to the women in Sudan opening up new avenues for peace talks, and thanks to the Israeli and Palestinian women who have been working for years to build the trust needed for sustainable peace and thanks to the Women's Forum in Sierra Leone and the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice at the International Criminal Court, and thanks to the Women in eastern DRC who this past weekend demonstrated to support the Lusaka Peace Accord and to call on the UN to act quickly in disarming and demobilizing the military and thanks to the millions of women who have survived war, and in belated honour of the many millions of women who have died, people who are hardly ever considered heros, thanks to all these people, the Security Council, the worlds institution to ensure international peace and security decided to notice women, their experience and their contribution. And the resolution is international law, binding on all countries.

The doors were open just wide enough for women to squeeze into a Security Council debate. We are determined that the words of Resolution 1325 will be acted upon and we will use those words and those stacks of papers to jam those doors permanently open, so we can enter the rooms where peace agreements are negotiated and into the rooms where peace keeping operations are planned. And we come bearing gifts and insights, we come with a willingness to work and with methodologies that work that are not naiive or simple, but serious and political, we come with a track record of creative successes, we come knowing that war is a gendered activity, we come to end the scourge of war with a global action plan to prevent war and we come ready willing and able to identify, prosecute and punish any soldier, civilian, or for that matter peacekeeper that violates our human rights as women in war or peace. We're here, and I'd like to suggest, with respect and with excitement to our new allies in the Security Council that they get used to it, because we don't plan on leaving.

I'd like to invite you to a panel today in the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium at 1.15, to talk more about the potential of Security Council resolution 1325 and how we are going to put it to work.

The words must become action. I call on everyone here to sign the letter to Secretary General Annan, urging him to turn words into action in getting equal representation of women and men judges in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. At the moment, of 25 nominations for permanent positions on that Tribunal, only one is a woman! We must ensure that the first principle of resolution 1325, the inclusion of women, is at every level of the tribunals on Rwanda, East Timor, and Sierra Leone to address the crimes that have been committed in the past. We must ensure that women are included but also listened to in order to prevent wars, because wars are not mysterious eruptions of human nature, but are planned for, trained for, created, and we can see them coming from a long way off.

The words must become action. From the UN Charter to the Beijing Platform for Action there are words about reducing military spending, reducing the preparation for war in the building and selling of the tools of war from nuclear weapons, to small arms, to national missile defences, but military spending is back at an absurd 90% of Cold War levels and the military corporations get fatter and richer and more political power. Where is the security in that? Who's security? Not human security, not environmental security, not economic security, not our security and certainly not the security of future generations who are instead inheriting tonnes and tonnes of plutonium and massive amounts of radiation from the 36,000 nuclear weapons in existence which means cancer, and tonnes and tonnes of lead in the form of bullets and guns, which also means cancer, an epidemic of physical cancer but also cancers of violence in politics and cultures. Sisters, we have to operate.

I'd like to conclude by referring to the work of bell hooks, who I think is the most important writer alive today in the United States. Her brilliant writings in Killing Rage Ending Racism about rage and racism refer to the solidarity and the strength that comes from expressing rage, not with violence, but through action for justice. I think that is the kind of rage-at-work we see in the women's peace movements who are often working against racism when war's propaganda and violence dehumanise entire races and cultures as the enemy. So while I think we have good news to celebrate, some real shifts in this field, I want to say that creative rage and activism with a determination for justice is more needed than ever. Please join us tonight to celebrate the judgement of the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on the Comfort Women - their struggle for justice requires our support. Please join us tonight and have a happy Internationl Women's Day!