Just weeks ago, Serb soldiers reaped the rewards of a conquered city in Bosnia's 40-month war and raped the young women of Srebenica.

In the United States, a woman is beaten every 18 minutes and raped every 6 minutes.

At tandem conferences in China late this month and in September, representatives from 184 nations will discuss ways to improve women's and girls' lives, among them giving women an equal role in creating laws, in acquiring education, in leading countries and in finding jobs.

Attending will be at least a dozen women from the Tampa Bay area.

"In each region, the problems are very similar," said Tampa lawyer Arthenia Joyner, who was selected by President Clinton as one of four public members of the delegation to the U.N.'s Fourth World Conference on Women, being held in Beijing Sept. 4-15.

With more than 40,000 people expected to attend, it ranks among the U.N.'s largest conferences ever.

A 10-day parallel meeting of private advocacy groups opens Aug. 30 with the theme, "Looking at the world through women's eyes." Participants will try to influence the U.N. conference positions, and run workshops, exhibits, marketplaces and cultural events.

A nervous Chinese government changed the location of the private forum from Beijing, site of the official conference, to Huairou, an inconvenient hour's drive away. That action was widely protested.

Joyner, 52, attended preparatory meetings with other delegates in Indonesia, Senegal, Argentina, Austria and Jordan to develop a draft action plan.

One goal will be to provide universal access to basic education before 2015. More than two- thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women.

"We need to make sure in this conference that we go from rhetoric to implementation," Joyner said. "We want to make women full partners in the decisions that affect them. Women want civil and legal protection."

The draft document recommends expanding women's roles in government, ending violence against women and girls, eliminating wage inequalities, increasing educational opportunities and making health care and family planning more accessible.

Nearly all of the draft's 149 pages have disputed wording. The document will be finalized in Beijing, then go to U.N. member countries for approval.

"Women see this conference as affecting their lives," Patricia Licuanan, chairwoman of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, said in a teleconference briefing from New York City. "There's so much that can be done. It's just a matter of buckling down and doing it."

Some fear the conference may get bogged down in controversies.

And with the opening only two weeks away, many haven't yet received visas, Licuanan said.

Of the 2,201 groups that asked for admittance to the conference, a U.N. committee barred 11, including Tibetan advocacy groups.

Last week, China took steps to generate a positive image at the conference. It unveiled a five- year plan to boost the status of women by giving them top government jobs, stopping female infanticide and protecting women from kidnapping and sale.

Yet, Chinese security forces have been busy rounding up dissidents and expelling rural migrants so authorities can showcase the Communist country as a rising regional power.

Relations between the United States and China are at the lowest level since the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. Last month, Republican leaders in Congress urged Clinton to bar American participation in the conference as long as Chinese-born American dissident Harry Wu remains detained.

Wu was charged with stealing state secrets, and has been imprisoned for seven weeks.

His captivity will be a factor in the decision, yet to be made, of whether first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton will journey to China for the conference.

"Some of the significance of the conference is being lost because of problems China has with the U.S.," said Nancy Natilson, who teaches international studies at the University of South Florida. She doesn't think Beijing was a wise choice of location.

Natilson, who is embarking on a consulting career, will use the private forum to make business contacts. She wants to help women in Third World countries become entrepreneurs selling handicrafts and producing food. Natilson will assist them in gaining access to credit from banks and teach them money management.

Women who can make more money can send their children to school, buy better food, purchase birth control and improve their lives overall.

"As women earn money, they spend a large percentage of dollars on their family," said Natilson, 43.

Cherie Aldridge, 40, an English teacher at Tampa's Jefferson High School, is traveling to Beijing to compare curriculums and discuss women's roles with Chinese teachers.

Society views teachers as nurturers because many are women, she said. Educators aren't highly valued, as reflected in their comparatively low salaries.

"That's one reason teachers haven't had a lot of power, because they're women," said Aldridge, 40.

Linda Osmundson, executive director of CASA, a St. Petersburg domestic violence center, and Candice Slaughter of Hudson will lead a private forum workshop on communities trying to end domestic violence.

Slaughter represents the Women's Peacepower Foundation, which raises money for grass- roots projects to stop domestic violence.

For women to become free from domestic violence, other issues such as child care and equal employment need to be resolved, said Osmundson, 46.

Anthropologist Mary Elmendorf of Sarasota says people need to think about partnerships between men and women, old and young, countries as well as people within countries.

She is on several U.N. panels, including one reviewing progress made since the first global forum in 1975 in Mexico City.

"We've made an awful lot of progress, but there's still a long way to go," said Elmendorf, 78, who attended the conference in Mexico City and a later one in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Since the first meeting, maternal mortality rates have been nearly halved worldwide, and the life expectancy of women in developing countries has increased nine years. Three million children have been saved each year through basic immunization facilities.

But the gap between rich and poor is growing in both developed and developing countries, and help must first go to those deprived of basic needs, Elmendorf said.

"If there's disease, death and pollution in Calcutta, India, we're part of one world. How can we not care? We have to be concerned because with poverty and violence comes war and destruction."

Edie Daly delivered the devices to fellow nurses at a training school in Bucharest, Romania. Midwives in that country now use whatever they can to tie umbilical cords, and some infants die of tetanus from unsanitary methods.

She visited the Eastern European country last week -- one of eight stops on a Peace Train sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The trek from Helsinki, Finland, to Beijing gives women a chance to talk up close and personal about social and economic issues.

"We want to let those women know that they haven't been forgotten, and I want to understand their issues," said Daly, 58, who lives in St. Petersburg. "If we leave peace up to the men, they'll never do it."

More than 250 women from 44 countries are taking the three-week ride that began Aug. 7 and ends Aug. 29 at the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women. There will be a companion forum of private groups that hopes to influence the government representatives at the conference.

Fourteen-year-olds to women in their 70s are riding on the Peace Train, along with a handful of men. The trip is intended to "build a worldwide lobby of women," said Marilyn Clement, the league's executive director in the United States.

"One thing we have to do as North American women is to shed our arrogance and meet with other women and really listen," she said before departing. "We'll be hearing firsthand what they're going through and relating it to our life and our country."

In preparation for the adventure, Daly saved $4,000 for more than a year and applied for nine visas. In all, she will take five weeks off from her job with a home health agency.

She brought two backpacks, filling one with personal items, stuffing the other with gifts bought with money donated by friends at home.

A silk rainbow banner with "peace" written in 12 languages was folded again and again, then neatly tucked into the bag. Daly brought suction cups to attach the banner to the train as it rolls into each city.

Also in the backpack is a card filled with photographs of Daly's Florida friends that she wants to show to women on the train ride. Along the route, she is handing out 500 other cards made by fellow members of the Tampa Bay Peace Education Program, an activist group sponsored by the Quakers.

And there are six pairs of women's work gloves, embroidery floss, pantyhose, bubble gum, razors, markers and pens.

"I'm preparing myself to be open to learn," Daly said before the trip. She looked forward to networking with other women. "The more personal and intimate you become, the more universal it becomes."

STARTED WITH VIETNAM

She became involved in peace issues at the end of the Vietnam War, taking part in demonstrations in New York City, where she lived for 25 years.

Fourteen years ago, she co-founded the Salon, a women's group that meets in the Friends Meeting House in St. Petersburg.

She says she has learned about empowerment and working together from women she has met throughout her life. She tries to teach others the same.

"Every issue is a women's issue," said the mother of three and grandmother of four. She has traveled widely, including to Japan, Korea, Australia and Alaska.

Daly left July 31 for Helsinki for a week of celebrations and meetings marking the 80th anniversary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Thousands of women also gathered there for an Aug. 6 demonstration marking the 50th anniversary of the atomic explosion in Hiroshima.

The league, based in Geneva, is the world's oldest feminist peace organization, with 40,000 members in 42 countries. In 1915, 47 women took a Peace Ship from the United States to The Hague, Netherlands, to speak out against World War I.

The Peace Train commemorates that historic meeting.

"It's the same issues -- ethnic, racial and class -- that create the wars," said the league's Clement, 60, in Philadelphia. "Our intention is to cross the borders and meet with our enemy to come up with a peaceful resolution to conflicts."

For the past year, women's groups at each of the eight stops have been planning to meet with the Peace Train travelers. Daly is one of 88 U.S. women on the train and one of two from Florida - - the other is from Key West.

ISSUES AT EACH STOP

"One of the largest things our group has worked for is disarmament," she said. "As a nurse, I'm very interested in talking to people about surviving a nuclear accident."

The focus of discussions in Bucharest on Friday and Saturday was women's health, HIV, poverty and prostitution.

Then on Sunday, the train stopped in Sofia, Bulgaria, where there was a gathering of Muslim, Croatian and Serbian women from the former Yugoslavia. This was a rare opportunity for them to safely discuss ways to stop the killing in Bosnia's 39-month war.

Sofia was an important stop for Daly, who was in Sarajevo two years ago on a peace mission. "We certainly can be there to support all women who want to talk about peace that's lasting," she said.

Today and Tuesday, the Peace Train will be in Istanbul, Turkey, where participants will talk about Muslim fundamentalism's impact on women and peace in a multiethnic society.

Later this week, they'll spend two days in Odessa, Ukraine, focusing on peace among countries bordering the Black Sea. Then they'll go to Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, to talk about the effects of nuclear testing in the nearby desert.

Urumchi, China, is the last stop before Beijing. At the companion forum to the conference, the league will have a Peace Tent so women from warring countries can talk.

The train's passengers will spend up to five days straight traveling between destinations. During that time, they'll be busy in workshops and seminars, preparing for the forum.

And Daly will share with her fellow travelers many of the 100 peace songs she has learned, such as this one from Australia:

Woman am I, spirit am I,

I am the infinite within myself.

I can find no beginning,

And I have no end,

All this I am.

Source: The United Nations