POLITICS-SRI LANKA: Women Grab Chance To Fight Local Election

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jul 22 1998 (IPS) - For the first time, an independent Sri Lankan group is putting up women activists in the upcoming provincial government elections, bolstering a separate campaign here for a women’s political party.

“Yes it is exciting times — but we must tread with care,” said Jezima Ismail, a leading women’s activist and member of the Sri Lanka Women’s NGO Forum.

She confirmed that efforts are underway to form a women’s political party, but was reluctant to give details.

Earlier this month, activists from the non-governmental Sinhala-Tamil Rural Women’s Network in Nuwara Eliya, in the island’s central hills, announced they would be contesting the elections to the Central Province Council on Aug. 28.

Women activists say a women’s party would be able to promote women’s issues more effectively than mainstream political parties have so far.

“We need women leaders … who would represent certain causes instead of being elected merely because they are widows,” Ismail said alluding to South Asia’s preference for women leaders who are either daughters or widows of prominent politicians.

For instance, both Sri Lanka’s president and prime minister have inherited political power. Chandrika Kumaratunga is the daughter of two former prime ministers, and the widow of a popular actor-turned-politician who was assassinated. Her mother, President Sirimavo Bandaranaike, was the world’s first woman prime minister, stepping into her slain husband’s shoes in 1960.

With men continueing to dominate politics, only 4.5 percent of Sri Lanka’s parliamentarians are female. According to Ismail, a veteran educationist and former president of the South Asian Federation of University Women, this has been largely unchanged since the island’s independence from colonial rule 50 years ago.

Vimali Karunaratne of the Sinhala-Tamil Rural Women’s Network, who won a presidential award this March for leadership and community services in the plantation sector, says a poll victory will boost efforts to end the exploitation of women labour.

Karunaratne says some political parties offered her money to stay out of the race, but that strengthened their resolve to fight. “We have appealed to all political opponents that we have every right to contest like anyone else … We want to create a new political culture devoid of armed rivalries and confrontation,” she said.

Elections have been regularly marred by violence and killings in the past. Some government ministers have said that the forthcoming poll might have to be postponed because security forces, bogged down in the war against Tamil rebels in the north, cannot be redeployed for poll duty.

Karunaratne’s group are going ahead with poll preparations. The campaign budget is modest compared to most political parties — “Most of the money spent in the poll is for liquor for party supporters. We don’t have that problem,” she said by way of explanation.

The group has fielded both Sinhalese and Tamil candidates, representative of Sri Lanka’s multiethnic character, which has been severely strained by government policies that favour the majority Sinhalese. Since 1983, Tamil rebels who claim to represent the minority community have been fighting for a separate homeland called “Eelam” in the north and east.

Naomi John, another contestant from the group for the Central Provincial Council, said the NGO believes in ethnic and gender equality. Four of the 22 candidates being put up are male members of the 28,000-strong network.

The group is backed by the Colombo-based Sri Lanka Women’s NGO Forum set up after the global women’s conference in Beijing, in 1995, by a group of activists who want to implement the proposals that emerged there.

Sepali Kottegoda, coordinator of the Forum, said they were campaigning to enlarge women’s participation in political and decision-making processes. “We have been meeting many political parties and requesting that they give more representation to women,” she said.

Many countries have moved to positively discriminate in favour of women, by creating quotas for them in parliament. In Sri Lanka, the ruling People’s Alliance government has promised 25 percent reservation at provincial and local government levels in the draft for a new Constitution the government wants to enact.

At present women are a minority in every parliament in the region: 9 percent of members are women in Bangladesh, 7 percent

in India, 5 percent in Nepal and 3 percent in Sri Lanka.

The Colombo-based International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), which is studying women in governance in South Asia, said in a preliminary paper that gender discrimination restricts women’s participation in politics.

Apart from being inhibited by higher levels of female illiteracy, they are subjected to much greater public and private violence, and sexual harassment, according to ICES. Neither are women nominated by political parties who claim they cannot handle the present culture of political violence.