By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Mar 23 1999 (IPS)

The women’s movement has attracted a large following in South Asia, barring Sri Lanka where women are more literate and believed they have fewer problems, according to the winner of a prestigious U.N human rights award in 1998.

“In Sri Lanka, women have better educational status while social mobility is also greater. There is a tendency (for them) to say they are better off than their South Asian sisters,” said Sunila Abeysekera, top women’s rights activist here.

That, she pointed out, obfuscated a reality which is only now becoming apparent – of a patriarchal social structure that discriminates against women heads of families, for instance.

At least a million women – Sri Lanka’s population is 18 million – head households as single parents since their husbands are fighting in the civil war or gone abroad, or they may be war widows. More than 100,000 people have died in 16 years of war, and most of these households are run by women.

“Because of a patriarchal society, women are – often by government officials – not accepted as heads of households,” said Abeysekera, 46, who heads the Sri Lanka human rights documentation centre called INFORM.

Internationally known, Abeysekera was chosen for the quinquennial U.N Human Rights Award last year, joining a roll of honour which includes Martin Luther King (U.S-178), Baba Amte (India-1988) and South African President Nelson Mandela (1988).

She said the women’s movement in South Asia was very dynamic with some countries more pioneering than the others – like India which has worked hard to ensure legal reforms in violence against women or sexual harassment.

In Bangladesh, women have been in the forefront on issues relating to economic participation and reproductive health. They won a landmark case for compensation in U.S courts against a U.S company that manufactured a contraceptive device called Dalkon Shields which was proved to have a link to cancer.

In Pakistan, women have actively fought against discrimination created by the legal system and recently women’s groups filed several cases in courts against forced marriage demanding that adult women must have the right to choose their partners.

Nepalese women have led the way in fighting against trafficking of women and forced prostitution and have managed to achieve a great deal of visibility in this area.

“Each country has had different progressive ways of movements which depends entirely on situations that particularly affect women in that society,” Abeysekera said.

While India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal have the capacity to mobilise thousands of women to fight for the rights of women, “it is very rare that we (Sri Lankan women) have been able to mobilise thousands on any one issue,” Abeysekera lamented.

In October 1998, women’s groups held a street demonstration in Colombo to protest against the brutal rape and murder of an Indian woman which attracted a few hundred women.

But Abeysekera believes attitudes are changing in Sri Lanka. The problems faced by Sri Lankans working abroad and of women married to foreigners unable to pass their nationality to their children are a growing concern here, and in the region.

There is a great deal of networking among women’s groups in South Asia and the airing of common problems on one platform, like the recent critique of a draft regional convention against the trafficking of women and children.

At a meeting in Colombo, last month, women activists from the region slammed the draft as flawed and said it did not adequately cover the key issues of migrant workers or forced marriages.

The SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) Convention on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution, is likely to be endorsed at this year’s regional summit in Kathmandu in November.

Abeysekera said that governments have to protect migrant workers. There have been innumerable complaints by Sri Lankans working in the Arab Gulf countries – majority of the 750,000 are women – of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Also the issue of nationality rights of women married to foreigners is their responsibility. India changed the laws in this context some years ago but the situation remains the same in other South Asian countries.

Abeysekera says that the official response is that only a few women marry foreigners, so why change the laws. “We feel that

denying a woman the right to pass on her nationality to her children is an indication of the social status of women in society reflecting in the legal system.”

South Asian women’s groups have been drawn together also by separatist conflict in areas like Punjab, Kashmir and North-east India; the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh; the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan; and the Northeast of Sri Lanka.

“Women who are caught in these struggles for self- determination on either side have a common understanding of the impact of the consequences,” she said.

In conflicts, like Sri Lanka’s where thousands have been displaced, women struggle to keep the families together, feed them and cope with the new social structure.

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