NEW YORK Women are natural peacemakers who should be able to help resolve conflicts everywhere, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Tuesday, ahead of International Women's Day on Thursday.

"While women are often the first victims of armed conflict, they must also be recognized as a key to the solution," he said in a statement Tuesday. "We must strive to integrate women more effectively in peace processes worldwide."

Annan said he would personally work toward bringing more women to negotiating tables and into leadership positions everywhere. Women's unrestricted participation in preventing and solving conflict should be the "credo for a more peaceful millennium".

"It is increasingly realized that women possess particular skills and experiences that enable them to contribute to all stages of a peace process," he said.

Women could "work together and communicate across barriers and divides".

They "understand the root causes of tension and know which power groups within communities and countries are most likely to support peace initiatives," Annan said.

The first International Women's Day was marked in 1976. In the quarter-century since, the status of women had mostly improved, in part thanks to laws enforced by the UN.

But despite the gains, Annan said, daily life remained "a difficult and sometimes dangerous struggle" for the majority of the world's women.

"It is one of the tragic features of modern conflict that women and girls suffer its impact increasingly and disproportionately," Annan said.

"They are neither the initiators nor the prosecutors of conflicts, and yet they have been specifically targeted, often as a way to humiliate the adversary and break the morale and resistance of whole societies," he said.

The secretary general greeted steps taken to limit anti-women aggression, including the international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and at the International Criminal Court, which tries war criminals.

For the first time in modern history, rape was recognized as a war crime punishable under the tribunal.

Last month, the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague gave three Bosnian Serbs long prison sentences for rape and forcing Muslim women into sexual slavery in the town of Foca during the Bosnian War.

(DPA)