MALAYSIA: Raids are Rewards for ‘Right Livelihood’ Winner

By Baradan Kuppusamy Reprint | | Print |

Baradan Kuppusamy

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 4 2005 (IPS) - Volunteers at Tenaganita, a leading rights group that works with migrant workers, cheer when grim-looking authorities pay them a visit. They see harassment by officials as an unmistakable sign that they are on the job.

This week, though, Tenaganita volunteers were cheering for a different reason – the non-government organisation (NGO)’s founder and director, Irene Fernandez, has just won the 2005 Right Livelihood Award that is also called the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize.

For Tenaganita (Women’s Force) volunteers, the award that honours pioneers of ”justice, fair trade and cultural renewal”, was the best recognition yet of their work- protecting migrant workers and changing attitudes in this affluent country.

”The award recognises our work and brings into focus the plight of hundreds and thousands of migrant workers who suffer constant abuse, harassment and exploitation,” an elated Fernandez told IPS.

”The recognition will spur us to work even harder,” said Fernandez, who founded Tenaganita in 1991 and turned it into a premier NGO that helps battered maids, women with HIV/AIDS and Malaysia’s plantation workers, sidelined by mainstream development.

Though recognised abroad for their work, it is a different matter at home and Fernandez and her volunteers often find themselves maligned for their commitment to giving a voice to the voiceless.

A one-year jail sentence hangs over Fernandez for publishing ‘false news’. Her passport has been seized and she needs to apply for temporary release of the document from authorities each time she travels abroad.

It was a report she published in 1995, detailing horrific living conditions, beatings and harassment meted out to migrant workers at detention camps that landed her in trouble.

She was charged with maliciously publishing false news and sentenced in 2003 to one year in jail. She has appealed against the sentence, but strangely, no date has been fixed for a hearing.

Malaysia’s government-controlled media malign her and Tenaganita as ”traitors and anti-nationals”, but to the many migrant workers, whose cause she untiringly champions, she is a hero.

The prize of two million Swedish kronor (257,000 US dollars) will be shared with Canadian free-trade defenders Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke and Roy Sesana, an advocate for the rights of the Kalahari indigenous people of Botswana, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation said in a statement.

Over 70 candidates from 39 countries were nominated for the award this year.

The award, established in 1980, was announced in Stockholm on Thursday by its founder Jacob von Uexkull, a former member of the European parliament.

Jacob said in an e-mailed statement that Fernandez was honoured for her ”outstanding and courageous work to stop violence against women, to stop abuses of migrants and poor workers in Malaysia”.

”For many people this is no longer an alternative (to the Nobel Prize), this is the new mainstream,” he said emphasising that the laureates do not just offer ”’hope and inspiration, but actual practical support and solutions”.

”She is a very brave woman who has continued to work for poor workers even after she was sentenced to one year in prison,” he said.

The prizes will be awarded at the Swedish parliament on Dec. 9.

Fernandez has a three-decade record as a grassroots campaigner which reads like the history of the NGO movement in Malaysia. She was in on every issue – consumerism, women’s rights, education, freedom, democracy, migrant workers and HIV/AIDS.

She is also a senior member of the National Justice Party of opposition icon, Anwar Ibrahim.

A visit to her 14th floor office tells a lot about her ideals. Portraits of Ibrahim and Che Guevara adorn the walls as does a quote from the Latin American revolutionary that says: ‘To Resist is to Win’.

”We only live once. That is why life is precious for each one of us. Life is nurtured, protected, secured but for more and more people, life is being threatened. As globalisation grips us, inequalities sharpen and the divide between the north and south increases. Poverty is one major factor that threatens life,” she told IPS.

”In Asia more than 600 million people go to bed hungry. Workers are treated as commodities and not human beings,” she said.

Over the past 14 years, Tenaganita has championed the causes of lowly migrant workers, young women trafficked into prostitution, undocumented workers arrested and held for months without trial in detention camps and domestic workers violently abused and raped.

It has also brought out the horrors of working women in Malaysia’s infamous rubber and oil palm plantations where working hours are long and life dangerous.

”I started as a teacher where I saw the effects of poverty on poor urban studentsàit was terrible,” said Fernandez, mother of three grown-up children. ”The students were hungry, lost, neglected and very depressed”.

In 1976, she joined the Consumer Association of Penang (CAP) which, then, was the leading advocate of consumer issues and growing to be an influential grassroots organisation.

”At CAP I had a well-rounded experience forming consumer clubs, organising workers and farmers and fighting big multi nationals like the giants making infant food formula,” she said.

>From CAP she moved to another consumer association in 1985 and took up feminist causes, researched and organised women workers, opposed violence against women and raised issues like domestic violence, exploitation of women in the media and gender bias.

The year 1987 was a turning point for Fernandez and many other activists in Malaysia. This was the time when the government came down hard on a democracy movement, arresting over 100 opposition politicians, activists and reformists.

Although Fernandez was not arrested, her work was badly affected and fear gripped activists in grassroots organisations. The government-controlled media also portrayed NGOs as enemies of the people.

After a break of a few years, spent in reading and soul-searching, she was back in the fray, founding Tenaganita in 1991as her vehicle for change.

The 1990s was when a sustained economic boom saw some three million undocumented workers pouring into Malaysia to work in the factories, construction sites and plantations.

With abuse, maltreatment and exploitation at a high, Tenaganita set up telephone counselling, research and services providing legal aid and making representations to the government on behalf of migrant workers.

When she was found guilty of publishing false news by saying that migrant workers’ detention centres were overcrowded, food sub-standard and medical care negligible, activists and others were certain it was a case of the state getting back at her.

”To me, the trial and the conviction are a symbol of our victory and their defeat because it shows we have achieved success in our work and that is why the oppressor is angry and wielding the axe,” Fernandez said. ”We have to press on”.