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NEPAL: Excluded, Women Seek International Advice

Marty Logan

KATHMANDU, Jul 8 2006 (IPS) - On the evening of Jun 23, lawyer and activist Sapana Pradhan Malla confided to IPS that the deputy prime minister had just told a group of women occupying his office that the committee drafting an interim constitution would be expanded to include two women.

No announcement came, and exactly a week later Pradhan Malla told IPS, “the announcement will come in a few hours”.

That was one week ago but still no news has arrived. On Friday, Pradhan Malla and other women from civil society and political parties united as ‘Women in Alliance’ sat with UN officials and international experts to plot out how they can ensure women will have a say in the ‘new Nepal’ now under construction.

The rebuilding started after an alliance of seven parties (SPA) led hundreds of thousands of angry citizens to the streets across this small South Asian country to protest 14 months of direct rule by King Gyanendra. Within three weeks, and after 21 deaths, the monarch gave in, agreeing to restore the House of Representatives, empty since 2002.

Since then, parliament has made many proclamations, including one meant to signal a bigger role for women in a rejuvenated democratic Nepal. It reserves one-third of places in the civil service for women and permits children to take citizenship from their mother or father, instead of only from the latter.

But the proclamation’s words still need to be passed into law and its spirit has yet to infuse political leaders, say activists. The restored house is 95 percent male and the government’s cabinet includes only one woman, Minister of State for Women Urmila Aryal, who has threatened to resign if ad hoc bodies like the constitution drafting committee are not changed to include women.

On Friday, Home Minister Krishna Sitaula said the government was unable to expand the committee because the SPA was unable to find a suitable candidate. But new members will be named Sunday, he added.

“If (committee members) are really democrats then they should just say ‘we won’t work until women are included’,” activist Stella Tamang told IPS. “I think we have to change that committee. If we don’t succeed in doing that, if we lose that battle, then it will set a bad precedent,” she added at Friday’s meeting, organised by the local United Nations office in the capital Kathmandu.

Women must be included on these committees, agreed the representative of the United Nations Population Fund in Nepal, Junko Sazaki. “Government officials are saying there are no qualified women but .they just have to understand the legal process and reflect women’s voices – that’s all,” she said in an interview after the meeting.

The revival of democracy has also signalled a tentative end to a decade-long Maoist uprising that left 14,000 dead, displaced more than 100,000 others and destroyed millions of dollars worth of roads, bridges and other infrastructure in one of the region’s least developed countries.

More than one-third of Nepal’s population live on less than one US dollar a day and many villagers still have to walk hours, if not days, to reach the nearest government centre.

Involving women in processes like demilitarisation, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of Maoist cadres means discussions must be “much more expansive than women at the talks table”, said Sri Lankan Sunila Abeysekera, with the Global Campaign for Women’s Human Rights.

Women’s voices must be considered in talk about rebuilding roads, homes and schools. “For example, everyone knows that distance from home is a critical factor when it comes to whether girls attend school,” she added.

It is also important that women organise because “whether we like it or not, the international community is going to come in with a lot of money plans and programmes. If we’re not ready, after five years we will be swamped,” said Abeysekera.

Sazaki said that the work plan to emerge from Friday’s workshop will be presented to a meeting of international donors working in Nepal in one week. “I can see strong donor interest especially because 35-40 percent of Maoist combatants are women,” she added.

One of the main tools that the women are using to argue for their participation is Resolution 1325, adopted by the UN Security Council in 2000. It urges governments to involve more women in decision-making during and after conflict situations and asks the UN secretary-general to see that the world body’s peacekeeping operations incorporate a gender perspective.

Unfortunately, 1325 has not been very effective to date. Gender perspectives are still not fully integrated into the terms of reference of peace operations, according to UN Under-Secretary-General Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, who piloted 1325 through the UN system in 2000 as Bangladeshi ambassador and president of the Security Council.

“We continue to find reports that women are still very often ignored or excluded from formal processes of peace negotiations and elections and in the drafting of new constitutions or legislature frameworks,” he told the IPS UN bureau in June.

Nor have process of transitional justice, such as truth commissions, readily incorporated gender issues, said Vahida Nainar a legal researcher with the Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Rights based in Boulder, USA. “Looking into the truth about sexual violence was almost always an after-thought…but in almost all the (conflict) situations there was rampant sexual violence,” she told Friday’s workshop.

Likewise, “in almost all the processes, reparations for gender-based violence were not identified and if they were, they were not a priority,” added Nainar.

Abeysekera suggested that the former Maoist rebels, now fiercely negotiating for a role in Nepal’s government, will take up the challenge to include women in post-conflict activities. Mainstream parties, on the other hand, have the “classic approach”: ‘Let’s get everything fixed and then deal with women’, she added.