By IPS Correspondents
SANTIAGO, Mar 31 2000 (IPS)

Soledad Alvear, an attorney with a degree in economic development and a 49-year-old mother of three, has managed to breakthrough what was formerly regarded as a male stronghold.

She has been appointed the minister of Foreign Relations in the cabinet of Chile’s new president Ricardo Lagos – a post generally reserved for men.

In fact political analysts say that Alvear embodies change and that she may well become the first woman president in Chile’s history. ‘It is perfectly possible that she may become the first woman president in Chile’s history,ö says Christian Democrat Party, PDC, senator Jorge Pizarro.

He says Alvear embodies ‘a different leadership style that is powerful, novel, believable, respectable in its content and ready to take on the future.’

But for the moment Chile’s new foreign minister has important issues to deal with such as the full integration of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), the renewal of political ties with Europe – damaged as a result of the ‘Pinochet case’ -, a decisive diplomatic role in opening the national economy and the conquest of new markets.

‘Chol,’ as she is known to her friends and family, has been an active member of the PDC since she was a student at the University of Chile. She served as consultant to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) until 1991, when president Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994) named her minister of the National Womens Service (SERNAM).

In SERNAM, Alvear initiated the nations Equal Opportunity Plan and pushed through other programmes to improve the conditions for women in Chile, which have been characterised by low levels of political participation and inequalities on the professional arena.

On Mar 11, 1994, she became the minister of Justice under the Eduardo Frei government.

Public opinion polls gave Alvear the highest rating among Frei’s ministerial cast. On Dec 14, 1999, she resigned from her Justice post to become the executive director of the Lagos campaign for the presidential run-off vote held last January.

Political analysts say Alvear’s role in the campaign was key to Lagos’s January 16 victory over Joaquin Lavin, the rightist coalition candidate, by over 180,000 votes. The two had virtually tied in the first round of elections Dec 12.

The new foreign minister is married to legislative representative, Gutenberg Martinez, who is also an attorney as well as PDC president. In a recent interview with the ‘La Segunda’ daily, Alvear said: ‘If I had to live my life again, I would still choose ‘Gute’ as my husband. If there is one thing we agreed on when we met each other at the university and got married, it was to work on a lifetime together,” she said.

As a practising Catholic, “I have the grace of God in believing that matrimony is indissoluble, but that does not mean I do not accept that marriage is not a sacrament for many people like it is for me,” added the minister.

Alvear says she values the ongoing support she has received from her spouse and three children. “They have never said I work too much. On the contrary, they tell me I am a woman who has done important things for the country, and that gives me a great deal of comfort.”

“All that Gutenberg and I do in the political sphere may be publicly evaluated as good or bad, as can the fusion of our private and public lives,” said Alvear, who is a harsh critic of journalistic sensationalism.

She condemned the way the press treated an incident involving her 17-year-old son in February, in which he was attacked by a group of young people as he left a pub, leaving him with serious wounds that required his hospitalisation.

Some media outlets suggested that the boy ‘was involved with the wrong crowd,’ implying that the attack was the result of drug and alcohol use among other illicit activities, though such claims were later proven false.

“What is one to do in this country when rumours start to fly — get a certificate of good conduct to show to the media? Alvear wondered.

“I am concerned that one of the great costs of being a public figure is that horrors may be said about you publicly. Because they fear becoming a victim of this, many upstanding people are not willing to dedicate themselves to public service – and that is a shame.

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By IPS Correspondents
QUITO, Mar 31 2000 (IPS)

Nina Pacari, the first woman vice-president of Ecuador’s single-chamber parliament, is also an indigenous leader.

“The fact that I was named vice-president of the Ecuadorean parliament shocked a lot of people, because we are not used to seeing an indigenous woman in the leadership of such an important public authority,” said the parliamentary deputy.

Pacari, a member of the Kichwa indigenous community, was born in 1961 in Cotacachi, a town in the northern province of Imbabura. A lawyer, she headed the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) commissions on land and territory in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“For indigenous people, the earth is the mother,” said the lawmaker. “And that period was very important, because we were able to work out 80 percent of the land disputes that pitted our brothers and sisters against landowners.”

In 1997, Pacari was named chair of the National Planning Council on Indigenous and Black Peoples, a government body created to design policies on issues involving ethnic minorities and to plan and implement projects for the development of those communities.

In November of that same year, she was elected as a member of the National Constituent Assembly that rewrote the constitution, and in 1998 headed the Pachakutik Movement of Multinational Unity’s list of parliamentary candidates.

After becoming one of the female candidates for Congress to win the greatest number of votes in the 1998 elections, she was designated vice-president of parliament.

“This event is historic for the indigenous movement, because so far not one single member of our community, and much less an indigenous woman, had occupied any seat of authority in parliament,” said Pacari.

Ecuador’s indigenous people have been fielding candidates in elections since the Pachakutik Movement – a broad umbrella of indigenous, environmental, and women’s groups and other social movements – was created in 1996.

Pachakutik designates its candidates for each city government after holding lengthy assemblies, in which the local communities participate.

The same system is used at the provincial and national levels.

“Ecuador must get used to seeing indigenous people and women, who do not lose their identities or their commitment to the sectors they represent, in decision-making positions,” said Pacari.

The lawmaker sees Congress as just one more area of struggle for indigenous people and women.

“The legislative setting is different from the autonomous city councils, where proposals designed by our communities can be developed and implemented more easily,” she said. “But it is still important as a forum for gaining visibility for indigenous views on social, political and economic issues.”

Indigenous people have won spaces on city councils and the national legislature after “500 years of organising and fighting oppression,” Pacari stressed.

“Through our actions, we have demonstrated that we do not only rise up against and demand an end to injustice, but that we have come up with proposals on social and economic issues and have presented alternatives that have frequently been ignored by government,” said Pacari.

Several draft laws of interest to rural areas submitted by indigenous lawmakers were shelved by the previous legislature, which sessioned from 1996 to 1998.

“We must try to reach agreements (with other parliamentary forces) that will enable us to carry out our proposals, and we must help public opinion get to know us,” said Pacari.

She added that efforts must also be made to keep women and indigenous legislators from falling into the trap of “bad bureaucratic habits” in parliament.

“Although legislators cannot actively participate in the indigenous organisation, they must not lose their links to and coordination with it. For that reason, they make constant visits to indigenous communities, and we have different mechanisms for keeping those connections alive,” she said.

Pacari’s team of advisers is divided into three sections: the first focuses on aspects of social organising; the second on political and structural questions; and the third on mainly technical questions.

The section focusing on political-organisational questions coordinates support for proposals put forth by indigenous organisations.

“A team works on the proposals in workshops and meetings and then submits them to Congress,” she explained. “The same thing occurs with issues involving women. As legislators, we become part of a process, and gather proposals that arise from the social movements.”

Pacari said that while unity among indigenous peoples is strengthened by CONAIE, she underlined that “Indian peoples are not all one and the same thing.

“We are 11 nationalities with different visions, processes and strategies, which arise from different geographic settings, among other aspects. For example, you can’t ask indigenous communities in the Amazon jungle to use the same forms of struggle as those living in mountainous regions.”

But there is consensus that the unique characteristics of each ethnic community must be taken into account. “We must keep in mind that diversity of viewpoints in the movement does not mean divisions, but pluralism,” said the lawmaker.

In the past eight years, Ecuador’s indigenous people, who total 3.5 million in a total population of 11.5 million, have made significant strides towards getting the country’s multinational nature recognised.

The new constitution recognises the collective rights of indigenous peoples and the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the country.

The right to practice indigenous medicine was also recognised, and the development of that area of knowledge is to be supported by the State, according to a constitutional clause.

“Until they gained recognition by the constitution, our Yachags or shamans were persecuted and sent to jail. But that is no longer true,” said Pacari. “But laws are necessary, due to the need for controls against abuses by non-indigenous people who claim to practice our medicine.”

International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention 169, which recognises the rights of indigenous peoples, was also approved by parliament.

Convention 169 was approved by the previous legislature thanks largely to the unflagging efforts of indigenous Deputy Miguel Lluco. Ratification of the convention signified a major stride forward for indigenous peoples, by providing a legal basis for their demands.

“Now it has been made clear that judges who try indigenous suspects must also look at indigenous norms, customs, and culture as extenuating circumstances when it comes to handing down sentences,” said Pacari.

“It has also been recognised that our peoples, through our authorities, can exercise authority in their territory, settle conflicts, and administer justice based on our traditions. The simultaneous exercise of indigenous law is being recognised.”

But she also stressed the need to harmonise laws and clearly establish competence, in order to prevent contradictions between indigenous traditions and national laws.

The approval of the ILO convention confirmed the official use of indigenous languages. Indigenous people carrying out paperwork in public offices have the right to be attended in their own language, if they do not speak Spanish.

Pacari said she was confident that participation by women and indigenous peoples in public office would continue to grow. “A state that admits such participation will gradually become multinational, and will be much more equitable,” she maintained.

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By IPS Correspondents
JAKARTA, Mar 31 2000 (IPS)

Dita Indah Sari vividly recalls the events of July 8, 1996. She was leading a demonstration of about 20,000 workers in Surabaya, the capital of Indonesia’s East Java when she was beaten up and arrested by members of the army and the marine.

A law student at 23, Dita was then chair of the independent Indonesian Labour Struggle Centre, set up in 1994. She was campaigning alongside workers for an increase in the national minimum wage, an improvement in working conditions and end to military intervention in labour disputes.

“But the Suharto government repressed the demonstration,” says Dita. She was charged with subversion for organising one of the biggest protests in the history of Suharto’s New Order and was sentenced to five years in jail, nine months after arrest.

The government branded the young labour leader as a communist, who should be isolated from the rest of society. This troubled her family, especially her mother, who died while her daughter was in her second month in detention.

“My mother, who did not understand politics and the nature of the Suharto government could not cope with the situation,” Dita laments. But unexpected political events intervened and saved Dita from serving her full prison term.

It was a time of political turmoil in Indonesia that year, forcing Suharto to step down after more than 30 years in power. He handed over power to his protege, Bacharrudin Jusuf Habibie, who instituted reforms and called for fresh elections.

A freer political climate, as well as pressure from international human rights organisations, prompted authorities to free Dita, along with hundreds of other political detainees. She walked out of prison in July 1999.

Now Dita is absorbed in raising the consciousness at the grassroots level about the significance of the first of May, observed as Labour Day. In public meetings across country, she has been spreading the word that May 1 should be declared a holiday by President Abdurrahman Wahid.

“We see ourselves as part of the international working class movement so we demand from the government that May 1 be declared a national holiday with pay,” says Dita, now chair of the National Front for Indonesian Labour Struggles, which she helped set up while she was behind bars after her previous organisation was banned during the Suharto regime.

On Aug. 1, 1999, the National Front made an official declaration of its organisation in Jakarta with thousands of workers in attendance. It is still in its infancy, with only 15,200 members spread in 11 regions. But Dita intends to see the group transform itself into a movement.

“We want to raise the awareness of the working class in Indonesia and to do that we have to work with other groups,” says Dita, who has put aside her studies – she needs 18 months to get her law degree from the University of Indonesia – for a greater cause.

Dita’s group plans to launch a campaign at the top level to make the Labour Day celebration legal for Indonesian workers. Since Suharto’s New Order regime, it has been illegal, and branded a communist tradition.

The campaign also includes a call on the Wahid government to increase wages of workers by 100 percent and eliminate the contract-based work system. The minimum daily wage for workers in the Jakarta-Bogor-Tangerang-Bekasi (Jabotabek) area is 7,700 rupiah or about one US dollar.

In Central Java, the minimum wage is 5,880 rupiah. “We also want to improve the rights of women workers,” Dita says, adding that companies should put up day care centres in their places so working mothers can breast-feed their babies.

Born on December 30, 1972 in Medan, North Sumatra, she is the younger of two siblings. She became a student activist at age 20.

“When we had intensive discussions, we realised that the task of the student movement is not only organising the students, but also organising the workers and making them understand their economic and political rights,” she says.

“At that time, we saw the working class in Indonesia as one of the most oppressed classes. The workers were very poor. They could not form unions. They could not have a demonstration without the military or the police harassing them. They could not have bargaining position when they have a collective bargaining agreement with their employers.”

Munir, a leading human rights activist who chairs the Commission on Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, says the most important contribution Dita has made was her belief that “a student can be a leader in the labour movement”.

“She came up with the view that the student movement should have a coalition with the labour movement,” Munir says.

To Sri Bintang Pamungkas, a former parliamentarian and political prisoner jailed by Suharto, Dita is a guiding light in the labour movement. “She has inspired the workers to have a strong union and increased their consciousness of their rights.”

“When I was arrested I told the police officer that I was responsible for the demonstration because I came there as a leader,” recalls Dita, who looks up to the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as her role model.

She spent nearly three years in prison where the authorities asked her to forget politics and do as the others prisoners were doing: cleaning, sewing, planting, and attending religion classes four times a week. “I did not pick up any political lesson from prison. The only lesson I learned was how to survive without losing my identity,” Dita says.

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By James Hall
MAZANI, Mar 31 2000 (IPS)

When the city councilors of Swaziland’s second largest city, Manzini, elected Fikile Mtembu as the first woman mayor, some of them mistook the soft-spoken, self-made attorney as a person they could manipulate to do their bidding.

“I am afraid I disappointed the ones who expected me to be pliable,” the mayor says with a smile. “I chair the often rowdy city council meetings, where everyone has their own agenda, and I never raise my voice, but somehow I am able to communicate and they settle down. Because I am a lawyer, I can discourage schemes that are legally impossible,” she says.

Manzini is a rapidly growing commercial centre with a host of new problems like homelessness, crime, high unemployment, urban migration, and the daunting effects of an AIDS epidemic.

Mayor Mtembu finds that compassion coupled with fiscal responsibility and a willingness to improvise are the ways to handle these crises of today, and press forward to the promises of tomorrow.

Manzini’s Mayor since 1998 is a classic case of a reluctant politician who never sought office, but was persuaded by constituents who saw her potential.

“My neighbours asked me to put my name on the primary ballot for councilor. I finally agreed, hoping that I’d be defeated. But no one registered as my opponent! Then, for some reason, the other councilors thought I would make a good mayor,” she modestly relates.

At the time, Mtembu had an established reputation in the city’s top law firm. Her dream to be a lawyer had been lifelong.

“I went to a Catholic missionary school, where we were told truthfulness was the highest good. But we would even tell stories to the priest. In the confessional booth, we would say we had stolen fruit from the garden when we had not, just to have something to confess. One day, our teacher read us a poem about a man to whom everyone told the truth. I thought, ‘I want to be this man who everyone tells the truth!’ At the end of the poem, he turns out to be a lawyer.”

Mtembu never lost sight of her goal, despite the crushing poverty of her upbringing in the southern Swaziland town of Hlatikhulu.

Her father died when she was six, and her mother, who suffers from severe asthma, was unable to raise five children.

That job went to her older brother Jabulani, until tragedy struck. The area where they lived was notorious for witchcraft, ritual murders and the harvesting of body parts for black magic. Both of Fikile’s brothers became soldiers, and were EEboth murdered.

Her younger brother was found drowned in a stream. Her older brother was bludgeoned, and his body placed in a tree for later retrieval when herd boys discovered it and sounded the alarm.

“We are grateful we found my brothers before they were cut up. But their murderers were never apprehended,” she relates. “The loss of my brothers is a wound that will not heal.”

The murders inspired a quest for justice along with Mtembu’s desire to be privy to the truth in people’s lives. She never lost sight of her goal to become a lawyer, but halfway through secondary school, she was forced to drop out because there was no money to pay fees. She moved to Manzini, and took odd jobs to finance her education, completed at night classes.

Correspondence school followed, “but studying to be a lawyer was too difficult that way.” With her savings, she went to South Africa, and earned her law degree at the prestigious University of Witswatersrand.

As a Manzini lawyer, Mtembu was at the forefront of raising Swazi women’s awareness of their legal rights. She counsels women about acquiring property, starting businesses, making out wills to provide for their families, and ways to leave an abusive situation they might suffer at home.

As mayor, her pulpit is grander, her voice carries further, and her opportunity to target resources at problems is greater. Homeless children, orphaned when their parents in rural areas succumbed to AIDS, are migrating to the city, where they scavenge for survival. Mtembu is working on a new programme to attach them to caregivers in their home villages.

For urban dwellers, a new AIDS hospice is opening under her watch.

Unemployment has brought new levels of crime. “Almost nobody commits a crime because they want to,” she says, and to prevent the necessity of stealing for survival, programmes to attract retail and service businesses to Manzini are at the top of the mayor’s agenda.

Swazi women flocked last week to a prayer service to end gender violence, and they listened attentively as Mtembu, the lawyer turned mayor, instructed them on their rights. She is something new in Swaziland’s patriarchal society: a poised, attractive, quietly confident woman who can be assertive without alienating conservative menfolk.

The women at the prayer service recognised a role model who had overcome poverty and tragedy, and was leading not only their city but their nation forward.

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By IPS Correspondents
PENANG, Malaysia, Mar 31 2000 (IPS)

When a young woman stepped out from nowhere to contest last November’s general election as a candidate representing women’s groups, Malaysians sat up and took note.

In a country where men have traditionally dominated politics, Zaitun Mohamed Kasim’s entry into the heat of electoral battle on a women’s platform seemed like an oddity.

Toni, as she is popularly known, was chosen as the standard bearer of a unique initiative by the country’s women’s activists, who realised that if women were to be taken seriously in the decision-making process, they had to be represented in Parliament. This resulted in the birth of the Women’s Candidacy Initiative (WCI).

Two qualities seemed to make Toni an obvious choice: her passionate sense of right and wrong and the fact that she was articulate. “I think I got the sense of justice from my mum,” she reflects. “And I got the gift of the gab from my father.”

But it was only after her mother’s death in 1998 that she felt freer to plunge in the cauldron of Malaysian politics, where those who dare voice alternative views sometimes have to face harsh consequences.

“I didn’t want to worry her as long as she was alive,” says Toni, who never told her mother about the time when police questioned her for hours following a controversy over certain public statements she made a while back.

The WCI aims at increasing public awareness of issues affecting women and promoting the participation of the public, especially women, in decision-making and electoral processes.

It is also involved in trying to get all oppressive laws repealed and revising policies and laws that discriminate against women, including those of the Shariah Court system.

Toni stood as independent women’s candidate for Parliament under the banner of the opposition Alternative Front. “At the time, it felt like a dream,” she recalls. “I couldn’t imagine that at 32 I would be running for office. I wondered if I was making a wrong call.”

Hopes were high in the run-up to the polls. For the first time, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad faced a determined challenge from a united opposition front riding on the ‘reformasi’ phenomenon-a widespread clamour for change that was unleashed following the ouster of former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim.

But a nationwide mainstream media blitz employing scare tactics dashed the opposition front’s – and the WCI’s – hopes. In defeat, Toni walked away with her head held high. She had polled 43 percent of the vote, slashing the winning margin for the ruling coalition from 38,627 in the 1995 general election to 8,835.

Not bad for a first-timer.

“It was such a mind-blowing experience,” says Toni, of her first taste of the heady excitement of electoral politics. “It was nothing like I had imagined.”

More importantly, Toni’s candidacy raised public awareness of the need for women to be involved in political decision-making. “The very fact that we ran brought attention to the issues of women and participation in governance,” she says.

In January, a leading local English daily selected Toni as one of the 10 most significant women in Malaysia in 1999.

“She’s a very good leader and a very suitable candidate to champion issues affecting women,” says WCI volunteer Loh Yin San, who worked closely with Toni.

“She cares for people very deeply, and she does things because she believes that they need to be done. That’s why she stands out.”

As former vice-president and key media spokesperson of the All Women’s Action Society of Malaysia (AWAM), Toni actively campaigned against sexual harassment at the workplace. She co- produced AWAM’s Sexual Harassment in the Workplace training video and helped raised AWAM’s profile as an organisation recognised for its work on the issue.

The interest raised led to more requests for AWAM’s training and finally motivated two ministries to produce a Code of Practice Against Sexual Harassment in the Workplace in May 1999.

Born in Ipoh city, north of Kuala Lumpur, Toni studied economics and computer studies in Australia. She then worked for six years with Community Aid Abroad, a grassroots-development aid organisation in Australia aimed at wiping out poverty and strengthening civil society.

Since then, she has been involved in social movements for poverty eradication, gender issues, human rights and sustainable development.

“Unless people are empowered, it is a vicious cycle,” says Toni. “I like the philosophy of daring to question the structures.” Toni is also involved in disabled people’s issues and environmental concerns. She works together with husband Paul Barter, whom she met in Australia, on sustainable transport issues.

Barter is coordinator of the Kuala Lumpur-based Sustainable Transport Action Network for Asia and the Pacific (SUSTRAN Network). Toni is now producing a video on sustainable urban transport, doing the filming and co-writing the script.

That’s not all. Toni belongs to a group of progressive Muslim women, known as the Sisters in Islam, who study and research the status of women in Islam.

“It’s a tremendous challenge,” notes Toni, “not only because of the prevailing conservative interpretations but because some of those interpretations have been codified into law.” Right now, she is busy producing a booklet on Islam, Women and Polygamy.

“I guess I’m at a crossroads now,” she says, with a tinge of uncertainty. “There seem to be so many paths.” But no doubt her journey will always be guided by her deep sense of justice and her abiding philosophy: “If you believe in what you are doing, then you just do what you have to do.”

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