The United Nations must set an example in its advocacy of women's participation by the appointment of more women to senior leadership positions in the Organization, including in areas dealing with conflict resolution and peacebuilding. At the grass-roots level, we need to address the causes of the lack of women's participation in peace processes, and to empower women's groups socially, politically and economically.

Ms. Taj (United Republic of Tanzania): We wish to join other delegations in commending the delegation of Viet Nam, led by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, for organizing this important debate. Today's debate further attests to the need for the Security Council to continue to be seized of the challenges of protecting women and girls in conflict and post-conflict situations.

Let me conclude by reiterating the commitment of the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania to addressing the challenges faced by women and children in conflict situations and promoting and protecting their human rights. We also wish to express our support for resolution 1889 (2009), which the Council adopted today.

Furthermore, as part of the conflict-resolution and peacebuilding process, the Security Council and the Peacebuilding Commission must ensure that resources are provided to restore the rule of law and strengthen the judicial and law-enforcement systems. Mechanisms also have to be in place to take to task all those who have been involved in violations of human rights.

We must see linkages across the system and fit responses to the gaps which are identified. The composite United Nations gender entity will also help achieve that goal. In its resolution 63/311, adopted last month, the General Assembly gave strong support to the establishment of the entity. We hope that that will now be taken forward expeditiously.

We have one year remaining before the tenth anniversary of that resolution. That will be an important moment for the Council. We will want then to take stock of progress and set an ambitious forward agenda. To ensure that there will be real progress to take stock of, in the year ahead we will need to, first, generate imaginative solutions to the many obstacles to implementation, making use of the whole United Nations system.

We have a saying in the United Kingdom that sometimes you can stand for ages and ages at a bus stop waiting for a bus to come, and then suddenly two or three come at the same time. And it feels a little bit like that on this issue in the Council at the moment.

We all have a role to play in ensuring that a full and effective contribution can be made by women during peace processes, that their needs are met as survivors of conflict, that their voices are heard in local civil society and that greater numbers of talented women are appointed to senior peacekeeping and peacebuilding positions.

Today's debate, however, is about the particular contribution of women to peacebuilding.

The Security Council has agreed that we need to focus more attention on the linkages between peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Ensuring the engagement of the local female population is one obvious such link: empowered women both make peace and build it. And incidentally, this is not a new insight — very far from it. The playwright Aristophanes dramatized it for war-weary Athenians in his comic play Lysistrata nearly 2,500 years ago.