UNITED NATIONS Meetings, rallies, conferences, rallies and a death threat marked International Women's Day, which at the United Nations focused on equality at the peace talk table.

In India, women in brightly colored saris marched in New Delhi on Thursday for health care, education and equal pay for equal wages.

In Ankara, women demanded an end to "sexual exploitation" during a march and rally that included a minute of silence for rape victims. Police barred signs written in Kurdish.

And in Mogadishu, tens of thousands of Somali women and children in colorful dress attending a rally organized by the president, a rare scene in a country that saw nothing but warfare and destruction for a decade.

"There isn't a single country or institution in the world where men and women enjoy equal opportunity," Gro Harlem Brundtland, head of the World Health Organization, said at a gathering in Geneva.

Enforcing her point, Juan Somavia, the head of the International Labor Organization issued a report showing women concentrated in menial jobs throughout the world with only a few breaking through the "glass ceiling."

For women who also experience race discrimination, the barrier to top jobs seems to be made of unbreakable Plexiglass, he said.

At UN Headquarters in New York, discussions focused on an October 31 Security Council resolution, calling for special protection for women in war zones and insisting they be included as partners at the peace negotiating table.

"Throughout history, women and girls have been routinely assaulted and raped during armed conflicts," said Thoraya Ahmed Obaid of the UN Population Fund. Their assailants "are rarely apprehended or punished."

Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) said the council's resolution would "not remain on the level of words."

"Definitely the pressures will be on," she said. "It is not only the fact that women need peace but peace needs women."

Heyzer organized a millennium peace prize to four women and three organizations to acknowledge the role women play in resolving conflicts, which unifem said was largely ignored by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.

Associates of one winner, the Colombian Ruta Pacifica de Las Mujeres, (women's road to peace), group were harassed by right-wing paramilitary forces in Barrancabermeja, a steamy river port city where women tried to distribute pamphlets.

Gunmen grabbed the literature and barred any demonstrations, according to Olga Ramirez, a member of the group attending the award ceremony in New York. She reported that Yolanda Bercerra, director of the Popular Women's Organization, was the target of death threats.

The Colombian women have organized protests against violence throughout the country and arranged meetings between warring rebel factions.

Flora Brovina, a poet and physician and Kosovo's most prominent political prisoner, who sheltered women and children and taught medical skills to thousands. She spent 19 months in jail and was freed in November, a month after Slobodan Milosevic was removed as Yugoslav president.

Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, two Pakistani sisters who founded an organization to help women obtain divorces from abusive husbands.

Veneranda Nzambazamariya of Rwanda, who was killed in a plane crash in January 2000. She headed a collective of more than 30 women's organizations created after the 1994 genocide in her country.

Leitana Nehan Women's Development Agency, a Papua New Guinea group that helps to bring together divided communities, and women in black, an international organization that protests against aggression and violence.

International Woman's Day was first proposed by the German Socialist Clara Zetkin, who convinced Lenin to make it a national holiday in the Soviet Union. In the West it was celebrated in the 1930s but died out until the 1970s when the United Nations revived it.

(Reuter)