By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Sep 5 2000 (IPS)

It had the world’s first woman prime minister and is one of the few nations with a woman head of state, but Sri Lanka continues to treat public life as a male preserve.

This was evident again when nominations closed Monday for the Oct. 10 election to choose a new parliament and government for the Indian Ocean island nation after six years.

The main political parties have again put up a handful of women to contest the polls.

According to the Election Commissioner’s office, some 5,048 candidates from 29 political parties and 99 independent groups, are in the running for the 225 seats in parliament.

The main opposition United National Party (UNP) said it was fielding 11 women out of a total of 291 candidates. The number of women put up by President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s ruling People’s Alliance (PA), was not known.

The former extremist People’s Liberation Front, better known by its Sinhalese acronym JVP, which is Sri Lanka’s third largest political force, has put up 23 women out of 291 candidates.

Fifty five women contested the 1994 parliament election, which brought the PA to office. A total of 1,450 candidates contested that election, which sent 11 women to parliament.

“It’s a bit of a shame. It appears that in the political mainstream, we have not moved forward,” said Nimalka Fernando, a well-known women’s activist.

Fernando is contesting the election herself from the Colombo parliamentary constituency as a candidate for a small party, the New Left Front.

“Women are not contesting only to win. By contesting, we make a public statement that women are also in the fray and by doing so we open a little public space for women candidates and women’s issues,” added Fernando, who is an internationally known women’s rights activist.

She was disappointed that women like her were still reluctant to step into public life. “Most women activists, while pushing for a higher percentage of women in the political arena, are reluctant to themselves enter the fray,” she said.

Women’s Affairs Minister Hema Ratnayake in a statement late July, appealed to the leaders of the main political parties to have at least 25 percent women in their poll nomination lists.

She urged political parties to encourage women to contest, noting that this would help reduce political violence in the country.

Women’s rights groups say that poll violence is a deterrent to women entering politics. “Our political culture is so bad that leave aside a female, a male alone cannot contest,” said Bernadeen Silva of the Centre for Society and Religion (CSR).

In one of the worst incidents of poll violence against women, two women political workers were publicly stripped during provincial elections in the country’s north-western region in January 1999.

“Ironically, if there were more women — say 70 percent of all candidates — then the level of violence would fall and there would be a different and more saner political culture,” said CSR’s Silva.

Rohan Edrisinha, director at the Colombo-based Centre for Policy Alternatives, agrees that poll violence deters women from entering public life.

“I would think…the political parties themselves wouldn’t have nominated many women, preferring to go with tougher men who can withstand violence and even perpetuate a little bit of violence,” he said.

So far, women have made their mark only in local politics, with an estimated 77 women among 3,720 elected local councilors.

“Women were much more knowledgeable about local issues which were closer to their heart than national issues,” explained Kumudini Samuel of the Women and Media Collective.

Aspiring woman lawmaker Fernando said that unlike most other women candidates from the main political parties, she was contesting purely on a women’s agenda.

“I may belong to a political party but my campaign is based on women’s rights issues, while female candidates from other main parties are just party stooges and don’t fight for women’s rights,” she said.

Despite appeals by women’s groups, the government has done little to tackle serious issues concerning women, like the problem of the women widowed by the Tamil Tiger insurgency, she pointed out.

“The only way we can make things happen for our under- privileged women is by being represented in parliament and pushing a women’s agenda there,” she said.

According to Sunethra Ranasinghe, a woman candidate of the main opposition party, who was the country’s first women’s affairs minister in the 1980s, one of the problems of women in politics is the lack of leadership capacity at the grassroots level.

“We need women who are capable…not just merely women,” she said.

The women who been successful in Sri Lankan politics owe it to family links. Many are political widows, like President Kumaratunga, whose politician-husband was killed by left-wing rebels in the late 1980s.

Her mother Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected the world’s first woman prime minister a year after her prime minister-husband’s assassination in September 1959.

The 84-year-old Bandaranaike resigned last month as prime minister due to failing health.

The October national election is being held with no let up in the 17-year-old violent Tamil Tiger separatist campaign.

Candidates filed poll nominations in Jaffna, despite escalated fighting between government troops and Tiger rebels who are demanding a separate home for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil people.

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