RIGHTS-ASIA: No End in Sight to Violence Against Women

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Sep 1 2000 (IPS) - Whenever members of Afghanistan’s main women’s rights group travel abroad to attend conferences, they carry hand- made carpets or other exquisite handicraft from their country.

They sell these to other delegates to raise much-needed funds for their work.

Aeman, a young member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) brought some to an Asia-Pacific women’s meeting in the Sri Lankan capital held late August.

The two-day session on the issue of violence against women in the Asia-Pacific region was organised by the Thailand-based Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development.

It was a regional consultation with Sri Lankan academic Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Violence against Women. Coomaraswamy will sumbit a report on the subject to the U.N. General Assembly in December.

Representatives of women’s rights groups in Indonesia, Korea, Burma, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, Fiji, India, Japan, Pakistan, Tibet, Bhutan, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia and Cambodia, were present.

The meeting was closed to the press and besides Afghanistan, took up the emergence of the women’s rights movement in Indonesia and the issue of ‘comfort women’, among others.

A copy of Aeman’s speech, made available to IPS, spelt out details of the repression of women in Afghanistan by the Taliban regime.

Women are stoned in public for not wearing clothes according to Taliban norms, using cosmetics, laughing loud in public, playing any sport or watching movies or television.

“Homes where a woman is present, have their windows painted so that outsiders can never see her,” she said. Women cannot appear in public without a male relative accompanying them.

“Widows starve to death, beg on the streets, take to prostitution or just commit suicide. Desperate mothers sell their children on the streets as they can’t feed them,” she added.

Aeman, who is now working in Pakistan as a RAWA activist, like many others studied at one of the RAWA schools secretly run in dozens of homes. Her mother is also a RAWA activist.

The location of these schools is changed from time to time to escape detection by the Taliban regime ruling Kabul, she said.

“The Taliban says schools are the gateways to hell. Even males have access only to religious education,” she said. The RAWA schools not only impart formal education, but train girls in nursing, carpet weaving and handicraft making.

The situation is not so bad for women in Indonesia, said Kamala Chandrakirana, Secretary General of Indonesia’s National Commission on Violence against Women.

The turning point for the women’s rights movement in her country came during the May 1998 riots when Indonesian women of Chinese origin were raped in large numbers, she said.

The violence came in the wake of the South-east Asian economic crisis, which had its worst impact in Indonesia, and led to the collapse of President Suharto’s authoritarian regime.

“People were compelled to sit up and take notice of the violence against women. Until that time, domestic violence was unheard of and not even documented although it may have been happening on a large scale,” Chandrakirana told IPS.

“The (rape) issue became a public problem and the upshot to that was that violence against women became part of people’s consciousness and suddenly everybody understood what violence against women meant,” she said.

Women activists demanded action against the attackers and community crisis centres were set up for the traumatised victims. “There is now increasing awareness of violence against women, and more and more women are going to these crisis centres,” she said.

Women under the Suharto regime had a very limited role as mothers and wives, Chandrakirana said.

“They were considered dependants and treated as objects of development. Laws didn’t recognise domestic violence. There was no legal mechanism for women to address their problems, even when they were violently beaten at home,” she pointed out.

Although things are changing for the better now, much remains to be done. Issues like sexual exploitation of women in Indonesian regions troubled by separatist violence, remain unresolved.

“Rape and sexual assault of women by soldiers are common in these areas,” the Indonesian activist said.

Indai Sajor of the Philippines-based Asian Centre for Women’s Human Rights (ASCENT), agreed that sexual violence against women is common during conflicts.

“In most countries, whether it is an internal armed conflict or a border conflict, the most common violation against women is mass rape, sexual slavery and, in some cases, mutilation like slashing the breasts or being scarred in their faces,” she told IPS.

Sajor said her group also wanted to raise the issue of comfort women with the U.N. Rapporteur. These were women, mainly in the Philippines and Korea, who were used as sex slaves by Japanese occupation soldiers during the Second World War.

“We want her to do a follow-up as these women have decided to come out and tell their stories after 50 years and have challenged the Japanese government and filed court cases against the government,” she said.

The case of the comfort women is a good reminder to others that sex slavery still exists in countries where conflicts are taking place, like East Timor and Indonesia, she said.

This was also true in Sri Lanka where Tamil Tiger rebels are waging a violent campaign for a separate home for the minority Tamil people in the Indian Ocean island.

There was little redress for sexual assaults on Sri Lankan women in the conflict areas, she said.

In many countries the government itself was aiding such crimes by refusing to address the issue of violence against women, Sajor added.