HILLARY CLINTON, IN CHINA, DETAILS ABUSE OF WOMEN
By PATRICK E. TYLER
Published: September 6, 1995
Speaking more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has on Chinese soil, Hillary Rodham Clinton catalogued a devastating litany of abuse that has afflicted women around the world today and criticized China for seeking to limit free and open discussion of women's issues here.
"It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights," Mrs. Clinton told the Fourth World Conference on Women assembled here.
"It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls," Mrs. Clinton said, or "when women and girls are sold into slavery or prostitution for human greed.
"It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small" she continued, or "when thousands of women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war."
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Addressing the full conference in the afternoon, Mrs. Clinton expanded on a theme that Pakistan's Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, raised on Monday when she told the delegates that violence against women thrives when there is a "crisis of silence and acquiescence."
As Mrs. Clinton recited her litany from the podium, many delegates applauded, some cheered and others pounded the tables.
Continuing with references to domestic violence, genital mutilation, coercive abortions and sterilizations, Mrs. Clinton told the delegates from more than 180 countries, "If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all."
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"I think she spoke from the heart and she spoke with great power," Ms. Maloney said.
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