Scene 1: As a visiting tourist goes through the aero bridge outside the flight gate into the Bandaranaike International Airport lobby, walking past airport officials and smartly-clad SriLankan Airlines’ ground staff, the mood is anything but welcoming. They are greeted by glum or stern faces.

Feizal Samath

Scene 2: Last week, bringing my car to a halt at a pedestrian crossing on Galle Road near McDonalds, Kollupitiya, when the lights had turned red, I was intrigued by a young Sri Lankan who was waiting to cross the road. He was engrossed in a conversation with an elderly, respectably-dressed woman who appeared to be begging. He suddenly realised that traffic had stopped and the green indicator to cross had come on. Quickly dipping into his pocket and fishing out a note, he gave it to the woman, gently tapping her on the shoulder in a gesture of “I understand or empathise with your plight” and ran across the road. I quickly tooted the horn, causing him to turn around quickly as he rushed across and gave him a ‘thumbs up’ to acknowledge his good gesture. Surprised at first, he then returned the smile.

While the second case exemplifies the natural Sri Lankan trait – being a generous, warm and friendly nation of people, the first case gives a wrong notion of Sri Lanka being an unwelcome place for visitors – when in fact all channels should be switched on to greet visitors with a pleasant smile.

And in the month of December where there is a lot of goodwill, sharing and pleasantry, public and private sector organisations involved in tourism should begin a crash course on making Sri Lanka a more welcome place for the four million-plus visitors the country hopes to welcome by 2020.

Sri Lankans have a good heart, a warm smile and are generous to a point – as depicted in the example above. So how can the country benefit from an ‘asset’ that comes naturally (and at no cost) particularly in making tourists welcome at the first point of contact – the airport?

First impressions matter to any visitor and this is where the authorities and private sector institutions engaged in tourism have failed over the years, focusing more on the hardware than the software. Large billboards greet visitors with a woman, palms pressed together, smiling brightly. But below the poster, an official or ground steward would often have an indifferent, bored or even sullen look. There is no warm and friendly atmosphere at the airport, particularly at the unfriendly immigration counters.

With tourism taking precedence in the country’s growth model through increasing foreign exchange revenue, more employment and more benefits trickling down to community level, this year’s budget provided a lot of benefits to this sector.

All the good vibes in the ‘hardware’ context are there: Para-tariffs removed off some imported food and beverages; home-stays encouraged with a credit facility which has been budgeted at Rs. 10 million (though this would be just enough for 10 or fewer homes @ the rate of Rs. 1 million for renovation); rationalising liquor licences; developing ancient forts as tourist attractions; enhancing the value of railway stations like Nanu Oya, Colombo Fort, Galle and Ella by declaration as archaeological sites; developing domestic airports; and holding three street festivals and exhibitions in Los Angeles, London and Mumbai during the coming year to coincide with Sri Lanka’s 70th Independence celebration (the trade says the Rs. 50 million allocated is peanuts compared to the cost of an event in those countries). However, let’s leave those negatives for another day.

In the area of ‘software’ which is the focus of today’s discussion, the authorities deserve praise in introducing a tourist-friendly ‘tuk tuk’ where the drivers will be provided free training as tourist guides.

As I type on the desktop – one finger at a time, the old ways of using a typewriter or computer keyboard for an untrained person — the morning’s silence is broken by Kussi Amma Sera’s voice at the gate, reprimanding a young beggar, “Aei kollo, umbatawedak karanna bari de, hinga kanne nethuwa?” However, despite her severe tones and scoldings, she takes out a couple of 10-rupee coins from a hembiliya hidden, under her hette and within her buxom bosom, gives it to the man and sends him away. Generosity seems to be over-spilling this Friday morning, the first day of December despite the gloomy overcast skies, continuous rains, gusty winds and personal tragedies. December, in fact, is the month of greetings, giving, sharing of gifts and, for the high rollers, partying notwithstanding the political chaos in the city with the rumblings of thunder not in the skies but electioneering during the upcoming local government elections.

State authorities dealing with tourism must combine with the privately-led tourism industry to provide a warmer welcome to every foreign guest arriving in the country (and even on departure). It should be the kind of warmth to some extent seen at the Colombo Port where Kandyan dancers and drummers greet visitors arriving on any cruise ship.

If the tourism authorities can come up with a model where every guest arriving at the airport is greeted with a flower and a smile, with the immigration counters manned by a smiling officer, a small ‘welcome’ notice and a bowl containing fresh flowers or sweets, that would go a long way in enhancing the Sri Lankan product. This is in addition to ensuring tourists not getting harassed like the case of a British national, a Buddhist herself, who was deported for sporting a Buddha tattoo on the upper arm but later awarded compensation by the Supreme Court upholding that her fundamental rights had been affected.

Being an island nation helps. Many island states have pitched their tourism product on the warmth of the country, its people, food and music. The latter two make a world of a difference to the traveller.

For instance, during the three-month closure of the airport earlier this year, there was a calypso band playing at the departure lounge which was a welcome diversion and helped passengers while away the long hours in the departure lounge. Selfies were taken, children ran around and long hours quickly went past as visitors absorbed the island’s culture of music and song. Given that success, this should have been continued. It is still not too late to re-introduce this, both in the arrival and departure lounges.

If one is to play on the psyche of a traveller, first and last impressions matter more than hardware (nice hotels, good food, visiting important sites). They create an everlasting impression of a country that is warm, friendly and welcoming to visitors.

Visiting Hawaii some years back, all that I can remember is the greeting at the airport: A smiling young woman garlanding every visitor, with Hawaiian music from a typical ukulele in the background. That was more than 30 years ago and that warm welcome will always remain as the high point of a brief visit.

As an island nation, Sri Lanka is at an advantage over its regional peers in sharing the tourism pie. Islanders are often considered fun-loving, easy-going and laid-back, and lovers of music – and as the pithy Sri Lanka saying goes “Neva gilunath ban choon” (Even while the ship is sinking the people are partying). Come sun or rain, Sri Lankans – most of the time – are happy islanders. And, a tot of toddy with a little ‘bite’ enhances the mood!

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

It was a very intriguing topic. Earlier this month, Don Carlson, an education specialist from Microsoft Singapore visiting Colombo, and I were discussing education into the 21st century when we came to the point of: Will teaching as a vocation, survive this century?

Feizal Samath

No one can be absolutely sure because at the frenzied pace the world is moving, I don’t even know whether our jobs as journalists would be obsolete.

But Don thinks differently. Yes, teachers will no more be, in his own words, ‘fountains of knowledge’ where the student must listen to what they say, every time and all the time.

But teachers would transform to become enablers in a new environment of learning, more on the lines of being a facilitator rather than forcing information into students.

It reminded me of college days when one of our teachers would ask us to write an essay during the 30-minute work period, amble outside, do a nice, lazy jaunt and return just before the bell rings in the hope that we have finished our task. Those days this would be considered a lazy teacher but fast forward years from now and new tools will enable teachers to be as relaxed in the classroom.

Learning, rather than teachers, would be a shared experience with computer and modern-tools savvy students likely to acquire more knowledge than teachers themselves. Much like today’s physicians, who are sometimes given a dose of their own medicine when confronted by patients who know more about medical advances (Internet) than the doctors themselves do.

Technology in classrooms, public and corporate spaces and in science is so advanced that predicting the future should be easy. In 1964 when space fiction writer, the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke in a newspaper interview said that with technological advances “it will be possible, in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now (thus 2014), for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London”, no one believed him.

He was spot on. Renowned physicist Prof. Stephen Hawking, in a recent interview, believes the days of the human race on Earth are numbered. He has previously warned that robots could wipe out humanity and that leaving Earth is our only hope.

In a new book, ‘How to Make a Spaceship’, the physicist has warned that this planet is becoming a dangerous place because of the threat of war or disease and finding a new home in space would be the only option left. Unlike Sir Arthur’s prediction, Prof. Hawking’s warning cannot be taken lightly.

Back to the conversation with Don and we are discussing personalised teaching which is how the classroom of the future would look like. The fun part for the millennial generation who will rule the world in a couple of years is that with the tools available today, anything is possible. Learning is not laborious. It’s interesting, includes real-life scenarios and the tools make it even more engaging.

The strides that new technology is making in the medical field for example are short of amazing, with cutting open parts of a body for surgery no more necessary with the advent of laser techniques.

Personalised teaching is where each student is pre-assessed to ascertain strengths, weaknesses and whether they have special skills and competencies and then material catering to these needs in a general education framework prepared.

In a competitive world, education is more about outcomes and not structures. It’s not about setting curricula or syllabi or structured learning where the product is all about studying, cramming, doing tests and passing. Education now looks globally at the needs of society, development, governments and economies and is tailor-made to the needs of the workplace.

Out of sync with outcomes-based education? Then we can kiss goodbye to a development paradigm where Sri Lanka moves faster to the next level – developed-country status — with reduced poverty, increased incomes and green development.

In the classroom, creating platforms for personalised teaching is what companies like Microsoft are doing. It makes good business sense to develop technology that would help countries in the middle and lower end of the development pyramid to fast-track the pace of development and also make money in the process. A win-win for all!

Classrooms of the future, according to Don, would involve creating platforms and infrastructure that enable teachers to assess students more effectively — for example, do they have problems in science or mathematics and address these problems individually, immediately and effectively.

The classroom of the future would prepare kids for jobs that are unimaginable now or not even thought of now – maybe driving a space craft for instance – and prepare them for the future with different tools for different competencies.

However, these ‘futuristic thoughts’ come crashing down to Earth when I am interrupted by Kussi Amma Sera who has just woken up after a long afternoon snooze.

“Mahattaya mokada wenne Internet eka crash wunoth? Bunkaloth neda? Paththare kiyanawa pirewall thiyanavanam, virus eka adukaranna puluwan kiyala. Habai Internet crash wunoth mokada wenne?

Much as I am annoyed by the interruption, KAS seemed to have a point. If the worldwide web or Internet crashes, despite all the advances in IT protection, a lot of data will get lost and this could lead to war and disease as Prof. Hawking predicted. Gone will also be the tools for new teaching methods.

Would this be the Armageddon that Earth was reluctant to admit would happen? Not bad for KAS with her kitchen ‘politics’ to come up with a mind-boggling thought.

More, however, on that on another, future day. For the moment ‘personalised teaching methods’, that’s the future and the faster Sri Lanka embraces these techniques the quicker the country will rise up the ladder of development.

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

Confused by the heading? Well, this is the golden age of the millennials. Many moons ago while discussing small and medium scale businesses with a young entrepreneur, he referred to start-ups and a new ecosystem.

Intrigued and pursuing further led me to one of the meet-ups ( a regular meeting of people having the same interests) of the start-up community at a Colombo café, resulting in an energetic conversation on a new generation of entrepreneurs who are taking on the world, without waiting for government facilitation, banking handouts or too much mentoring.

Bootstrap, bitcoins, artificial intelligence … these are all new terms that have come into the vocabulary in recent times mostly due to the entry of millennials into the creative and innovative workspace. Along with that new job titles and designations are emerging like chief innovation officers, chief information officers, etc. Many years ago the chief information officer of an organisation was the public face of a company and from whom the media could get information and developments of a company. That title, description and role have changed dramatically to communications officer while the chief information officer is generally nowadays regarded as the ‘brains’ in an organisation, particularly a tech-heavy one. It may even be something else, such is the rapid pace of development.

“Mahattayo, mokade mey bootstrap kiyanne? Boot eka denawada?’ asked the gossipy Kussi Amma Sera, as usual butting into a phone conversation I was having on this subject.

Most of today’s start-ups have emerged through bootstrapping where an entrepreneur starts a company with little capital, often raised from personal finances. This is unlike the generation of small and medium scale industrialists in the late 1970s to the 1990s where entrepreneurs resorted to bank funding.

However, the generation of entrepreneurs born before the Second World War walked the streets or rode bicycles selling their wares funded through their own resources, later turning to be successful, millionaire businesspersons across the world including Sri Lanka. Some of those businesses in Sri Lanka have been taken to the second and third level through the millennial generation, bringing in new ideas and creative thought.

Start-ups are developing rapidly in Sri Lanka, at a faster pace than the emergence of SMEs in the 1970s-1980s for multiple reasons: They start young, don’t wait for bank funding or government handouts or a regulatory framework.

In fact, in most cases across the world, governments see this ecosystem as a useful tool of revenue to bring in all kinds of taxes because traditional businesses also do complain of the need for a level playing field. In the recent budget, taxing online travel platforms was one of the measures.

However, governments like in the Sri Lankan context are neither tech savvy nor clearly understand how start-ups work and pounce on them through rigid systems and taxes which could “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs”. For that matter, quite a few proposals in the budget were not properly thought of and seen as knee-jerk reactions as the desperation to collect revenue overrode any rationale decision-making or thought.

Over the past fortnight there have been two discussions on tech-related sectors and the evolution of the start-up community, raising some interesting issues. In a conversation with senior journalists last week, Krish Canekeratne, co-founder Chairman and CEO of Virtusa spoke about where the world was heading, in fact rapidly, in today’s .com generation.

Millennials are driving societies, businesses, cultural change and norms. Things are moving so fast that it’s difficult to predict the future, so much so that at an interesting discussion on start-ups at the monthly meeting of the Sunday Times Business Club on Wednesday in Colombo, Deputy Chairman of John Keells Holdings Ajit Gunewardena – when asked what businesses would look like in the next two decades — said some of us would be fossils and not survive in a business environment that is unpredictable and is changing so fast, unless you keep up with the times.

Wednesday’s discussion brought together Ajit who is also Chairman of Pickme and involved in funding a few other start-ups and Thilan Wijesinghe – Director/co-founder Wow.lk and Director/co-founder SLIIT, both of whom after years of experience in the organised corporate world, plunged into the start-up ecosystem.

Joining them on the panel were Lahiru Pathmalal – CEO and co-founder of Takas Pvt Ltd and Mangala Karunaratne, Founder/CEO – Calcey Technologies, LLC. This discussion looked at how the start-up community has evolved in Sri Lanka, its progress, how the government perceives this new ecosystem and its future.

Interestingly, both Lahiru and Mangala come from families with entrepreneurship in their veins and succeeding after a long struggle. The formative years of takas.lk and Calcey were the same – some struggles, a lot of frustration, despair and ‘tearing your hair out’ situations.

The point they made in the discussion is that success doesn’t come overnight and multiple factors can stymie promoting new ventures. The poor education system or the way it is structured kills entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka and is the cause of many start-up failures, according to Thilan while Ajit’s simple take on the success of start-ups is: Proper execution of a business plan, finding funding sources and a mentor in the absence of business experience.

No doubt, millennials are taking on the world. New ideas, different work ethics, shifting cultural norms – some of which are frowned on by the baby-boomer generation like casual dress in the workplace, too casual indeed –, and a lot of money in their pockets.

In fact according to real estate developers, many of the investors in apartments today are young, wealthy business professionals – some making their first million bucks as young as 20 years – and buying 2-3 apartments for rental purposes.

Where the real estate market is heading with growing numbers of new apartments coming up – 10,000 units according to some estimates – and whether it could lead to a possible bubble in the rental market, no one knows and probably should be the focus of the next KAS column. Maybe we should check this phenomena in coming weeks.

In many of the tech-savvy companies, millennials rule the roost and are the dominating force. At Virtusa for example, 80 per cent of its 10,000-strong workforce comprises millennials.

The start-up ecosystem is disrupting business practices like never before. Acquiring huge infrastructure like machinery, vehicles or even computers is becoming a thing of the past. For example, at least three to four of the richest people on the planet like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have little or no assets unlike the oil magnates and car manufacturers in the 1950-60s. Just like for example Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce web, Alibaba, and the second richest person in China.

In the US, rather than acquiring, farmers are hiring tractors and farm equipment. Outsourcing is the name of the game. Rental car companies like Hertz, probably the largest car rental company in the world working in 150 countries, are finding it tough against Uber-type companies that don’t own vehicles, offer more competitive rental rates and are driven by mobile apps and limited human contact. Kodak collapsed with the entry of smartphones sans films while Fuji films moved to other product lines. Innovation and creativity are the new mantra. Innovate or go bust just like Ajit’s assertion that if you don’t embrace today’s technology and move with the times, we become fossils.

Not a comforting thought, though to baby boomers. On the topic of the model of new business entrepreneurs being hiring, outsourcing and connecting suppliers and vendors with customers and clients, another futuristic thought that emerged in these conversations is that millennials are not in the habit of acquiring assets for personal use just like the disruptive business model. For example, this generation is bound to be living in different cities, on the move and with no fixed abode. Thus acquiring a property or owning an apartment, a priority today, is not on their radar. So will the property bubble burst? Maybe, maybe not but something to think of as Colombo’s skyline changes rapidly and won’t be the same in the next five to 10 years. Millennials indeed will decide what we eat, what we wear, what we own and how we live. Last but not least, how we think, too.

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

Condom promotion campaign in Male: Credit: SHE

By Feizal Samath
MALE, Sep 22 2012 (IPS)

For an orthodox Islamic country, the Maldives has made remarkable progress in halting the spread of HIV in the Indian Ocean archipelago through bold awareness programmes and the distribution of condoms.

A few years ago, condoms were available in the Maldives only at drug stores and on production of a doctor’s prescription. Anyone found carrying a condom in the streets  was liable to be arrested by police.

But, a five-year project mounted by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), reports progress in creating awareness of safe sex issues and the use condoms by providing them free. The GFATM is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The GFATM programme in the Maldives addressed the sexually active among the 300,000 Maldivians, but focused on the 110,000 foreign workers in the country – mostly Bangladeshis, Indians and Sri Lankans employed in construction and in the country’s famed luxury resorts.

“We did a lot of work in the five years of the programme, which ended in August,” Ivana Lohar, HIV/AIDS project manager at the United Nations Development Programme in the Maldives, told IPS. “We believe that one more round of global funding would help to sustain the momentum.”

The challenge, Lohar said, is to ensure that the Maldives remains a low HIV prevalence country despite the presence of high-risk groups. As of December 2011, only 15 HIV cases were reported among Maldivians, while there were 289 cases among the foreign  labour force.

At the spanking new Voluntary Counselling and Testing Centre set up in the heart of capital by the Society for Health Education (SHE), a local non-government organisation (NGO), both local residents and foreign workers can avail of the free services.

Asna Luthfee, programme associate at SHE, says her work has included training 40 migrant workers as peer educators to promote awareness at hotspots where foreign workers congregate and provide condoms on request.

SHE offers a range of services through a sexual and reproductive health clinic, including screening for thalassaemia, DNA testing, counselling and psychosocial support. “We distribute oral pills, emergency contraceptives and condoms. We don’t ask people whether they are married or not – we distribute on request,” Luthfee said.

“There is also counselling if testing for HIV shows positive, and these cases are referred to the government,” Luthfee said. The programme, in which SHE and UNAIDS are partners, has been successful enough to be seen as a model for the region, she added.

Mohamed Yahiya, an accountant from Bangladesh who also works as HIV peer educator, said a government decision made earlier in the year to allow workers who contract HIV in the country to stay on and get free treatment, has helped immensely.

“Many were scared to talk about their HIV status fearing deportation, but the new government guidelines have eased those concerns,” he said. Foreign workers, however, undergo mandatory testing on arrival and those testing positive are refused entry.

The campaign has had its ups and downs because of pressure from the public and  religious groups that accused organisers of promoting promiscuous sexual behaviour.

“Though religion has its own inhibitions, Maldivian society is open and able to understand the need for awarenesss,” says Lohar. “We are not trying to interfere with religious beliefs, but flagging a serious public health issue. AIDS is a devastating condition that can impact the economy.”

A spokesman (officials may not be named under briefing rules) for the National AIDS Programme (NAP) said stigma and discrimination are still prevalent and public surveys in 2008 and 2009 showed that them to be  barriers to effectively addressing HIV and AIDS.

The UN-funded Biological and Behavioural Survey on HIV/AIDS – 2008 had noted that the potential for HIV transmission is “accelerated by non-use of condoms and the sharing of unsterile needles and syringes among injectors.”

Unprotected sex is high in all the risk groups. Aside from the risk behaviours themselves, a growing concern is the early age at which commercial sex and injecting drug use start in the Maldives, the study found.

The Maldives, warned the report, “is showing signals of a possible future epidemic which need to be closely monitored by the national programme, including injecting drug use in prisons and rehabilitation centres and risk behaviours found among the 18-24 year age group (selling and buying of sex, group sex, male-to-male sex, sex with non-regular partners, and injecting drug use).”

The NAP spokesman said that religious groups and scholars are supportive of public health efforts to prevent diseases and in this context using condoms is advised. “Prevention efforts are well supported by the religious scholars, and recently they have been involved as partners in HIV prevention work,” he added.

A major component of the programme was the conduct of migrant fairs where free testing for HIV/AIDS was provided. The latest of these fairs, which was held in August,  had collaboration from  government agencies, embassies and high commissions.

“Though most workers don’t understand English, these cultural shows break barriers and provide foreigners access to services, overcoming stigma and discrimination,” Luthfee said.

“Workers are provided information in their own language and when they return to their home countries they go back armed with knowledge on health issues,” said Yahiya.

EU's Bernard Savage at a project site: Credit: EU mission

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Aug 19 2012 (IPS)

Sri Lanka is in for some hard bargaining when it negotiates a new aid pact in 2013 with the European Union (EU), which withdrew a key trade concession  two years ago over this country’s human rights record.

Bernard Savage, head of the EU delegation to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, says political differences do not affect trade. “There are no specific irritants (at the moment) and I would like to stress that in the normal run of affairs political differences do not affect trade.”

Savage told IPS in an interview that the issue of withdrawal of  EU trade concessions was a specific case. “But, if you look at the broad spectrum of trade relations … that was not affected by short-term considerations.”

However, well-known human rights lawyer J.C. Weliamuna believes that trade and aid are invariably linked to human rights and corruption – two sectors where Sri Lanka has been asked to show tangible progress.

“What is promised on paper (by the government) is exactly the opposite of what is implemented on the ground,” the lawyer, a board member of Transparency International, told IPS.

The EU is among Sri Lanka’s largest providers of development assistance and has allocated an overall sum exceeding 478 million dollars for the  2007-2013 period for projects dealing with water and sanitation, housing, income generation, infrastructure, schools, health facilities, food security and others.

“The level of assistance for the next programme – 2013 to 2020 – will be more or less the same. It won’t decrease,” Savage said.

Sri Lanka had won generous tax concessions under the Generalised System of Preferences Plus (GSP+)  for the July 2005  – August 2010, but this facility was withdrawn over unaddressed human rights concerns.

EU investigations had found ”shortcomings in respect of Sri Lanka’s implementation of three United Nations human rights conventions – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.”

However, it was widely understood that the concessions were withdrawn owing to Sri Lanka’s failure to address alleged war crimes during the last stages of the country’s ethnic conflict.

The impact of lost EU concessions is now being felt with garments exports to Europe dropping by 15-20 percent in the five months up to May, said Rohan Abeykoon, chairman of the Sri Lanka Apparel Exporters Association.

Garments, Sri Lanka’s biggest export item, account for more than 50 percent of exports to Europe.

“It’s not the job losses that we are worried about because there is demand for labour, but lost contracts are affecting small and medium businesses,” Abeykoon said. “Local companies are losing out while those with multinational connections will shift production elsewhere.”

Abeykoom told IPS that he has urged the government to reapply for the facility, though there is no sign of that happening yet.  “With regard to GSP + we have had no request from the government for a new facility,” Savage confirmed.  

Trade unions are also backing the call for a revival of the  concessions. Palitha Athukorala, president of the Progress Union of Sri Lankan Apparel Workers, said the government seems unconcerned and has made no attempt to apply for GSP +.

“They (government) should ask for it. We are badly affected as small factories are closing and workers are losing jobs,” Athukorala told IPS.

Padmini Weerasuriya, coordinator of the Women’s Centre, a non-government organisation active in the country’s free trade zones, says there are no job losses owing to the loss of GSP + concessions, though this may change.  

“Our members (workers) have reported a drop in orders which then affects other incentives outside the monthly wage,” she said. Unions have already been campaigning for decent living wages.

On the political front, Sri Lanka this month did a major about-turn to invite the U.N. Human Rights Council to visit the country to review the human rights situation.

Earlier, Sri Lanka had even refused entry to a EU team examining Sri Lanka’s application for a renewal of GSP+ benefits.

The government has prepared an action plan on human rights and sent it to Geneva, five months after the U.N. passed a United States-backed resolution urging Sri Lanka to address alleged human rights abuses.

The March U.N. motion had called on Colombo to address violations of international humanitarian law; implement the recommendations of a local commission that probed the conflict; and encourage the U.N. Human Rights office to offer Sri Lanka advice and assistance and the government to accept such advice.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has repeatedly denied claims of large-scale civilian casualties during the last stages of the battle against Tamil separatist rebels that ended in May 2009.

Strained relations with the West have forced the government to rely on allies in the neighbourhood like China, Iran, Libya and India for war-related and development aid.

Constant international pressure and the March U.N. resolution – which was backed by India, a long-time Sri Lanka supporter – has  forced Sri Lanka to make conciliatory gestures to the West.

The respected Sunday Times newspaper said on Aug. 5 that the government’s decision to implement the full U.N. resolution and allow a U.N. team to visit the country would pave the way for a long-standing visit by U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, considered a vocal critic.

Weliamuna said issues in which the international community is concerned – human rights, declining rule of law, growing impunity and corruption – are relevant. “The government knows it cannot continue in this manner and is trying to convince the world that it has changed,” he said.

Abeykoon says the devaluation of the Sri Lankan rupee against the US dollar,  which has pushed the  rupee down to 132 per dollar, against 110 in February, has helped the garment industry. “If not, our exports (to the EU) would have worsened.”

For Savage, the GSP + is a “closed chapter”, using a phrase borrowed  from Sri Lanka’s external affairs minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris. “The fact is GSP+ was withdrawn and Sri Lanka has not reapplied. We need to move on,” Savage said.

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jul 23 2012 (IPS)

A spate of child rape cases in Sri Lanka has angered child rights activists and moved the government to consider tightening the relevant laws and making the offence punishable with the death sentence.

A government statement released in parliament in May said that of the 1,450 female rape cases reported in 2011, child rape accounted for 1,169, alerting authorities and activists to a rising trend.

Earlier this month, police said in a statement that over 700 complaints of rape or abuse of children were filed in the first half of the year, and that, on average, at least four cases were  being reported daily.

But, according to the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA), the situation is far worse than what is being reported to the police and the authority estimates that over 20,000 cases of child abuse may  have occurred in the first half of this year.

Among the reasons for such abuse, as reported in the NCPA statement, are insecurity of children, popularity of mobile phones with internet facilities among the youth, access to pornography, increasing substance abuse and lack of sex education.

An October 2011 study of child abuse in Sri Lanka’s north-central region – where unsettled conditions prevail following the end of three decades of armed separatist militancy in 2009 –  showed that 30 percent of the cases were of female minors (below 15 years) having consensual sex with a male partner.

The rest of the cases were attributed to the “strength, power and dominance of perpetrators who could be relatives, teachers or religious dignitaries,” a senior prosecutor at the attorney general’s office told IPS asking not to be named. “While we do our part, society also needs to take a serious look at this issue,” he said.

The trend of powerful people preying on minor girls is not confined to the north and east of the island country. Recently, a 13-year-old girl identified four men, including a local   politician belonging to the ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), of  gang raping her.

Another UPFA politician, the head of the local council in the southern town of Akuressa, is presently in custody for the alleged abuse of a 14-year-old girl.

The Women and Media Collective (WMC), a campaign group, has denounced these alleged crimes, saying Sri Lanka has become a society where “perpetrators of heinous crimes against women and children can live with little fear of the law.”

Responding to such allegations, Tissa Karaliyadda, child development and women’s affairs minister, told reporters earlier this month that he has drawn up plans to tighten the laws that deal with child abuse, including making it punishable with the death sentence.

Authorities are also trying to sharply reduce the time taken – six years on average – to complete a prosecution, and thereby reduce impunity to offenders who often get easy bail.

Dr. Hemamal Jayawardena, child protection specialist from UNICEF, Colombo, said the number of cases appear to have risen due to an increase in reporting centres, particularly in the former war-torn northern region. People are also more sensitive to this issue and coming forward with information, he said.

“But I think there are many runaways (under-age couples eloping) cases and sex with consent which appear in the first complaint (to the police) as suspected rape and provide somewhat misleading data,” he told IPS.

Under Sri Lankan laws, those under 16 years are defined as minors and sex with a minor is considered rape, with or without consent.

A maximum jail term of 10 years is imposed on offenders while the authorities are examining proposals to enforce the death penalty and make it a non-bailable offence.

Under a project assisted by the United Nations Children’s Fund, law enforcement authorities are experimenting with a rapid three-month process involving selected courts across the island to reduce the time taken to dispose cases of child abuse or rape.

Menaca Calyaneratne, director of advocacy at Save the Children’s Colombo office, warns about a new breed of abusers called ‘professional perpetrators’ who are “professionals in their own fields but carefully choose an area of work that gives them unhindered access to children in order to abuse them.”

Fields such as education, sports, childcare organisations and children’s institutions harbour predators such as principals, teachers and sports coaches who are known to abuse their positions, she said,  adding that about 90 percent of child abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the victim.

“We used to tell children to be careful of strangers, but that does not seem to be valid anymore,” Calyaneratne told IPS.

Lack of awareness of sexual and reproductive health among teenagers in villages is a serious problem. At a village, some 75 km north of Colombo, a social worker said there have been at least five cases reported this month of 13-15 year-old girls striking up affairs with 22-year-olds, mostly soldiers, and eloping.

“When there is a problem, the girls come back and the parents file a complaint, it becomes a case of suspected rape,” the worker said asking not to be identified for fear of repercussions.

Sri Lanka which had about 120,000 soldiers in 2008 more than tripled its troop strength in order to defeat separatist militancy and also ensure that there is no resurgence.

Police blame parents for lack of supervision of their children while also citing women working abroad as domestics and leaving the children under the care of a relative as some of the reasons that lead to child abuse.

Sumithra Fernando, director at Women in Need, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that works with battered women, says parents are often indifferent. “They are busy with their jobs and often unaware of what their children are up to,” she told IPS.

Women’s groups say it is important for fathers to take an interest in the welfare of their daughters.

“It’s a social obligation for the father to share responsibilities,” argues Sepali Kottegoda, director at the WMC. “When a girl is abused it is the mother who is blamed – rarely the father,” she said.

“Sri Lankan society has also become very violent and the situation is such that women and children have become very vulnerable,” Kottegoda told IPS.

Prof. Siripala Hettige from Colombo University, an eminant sociologist,  has a different perspective and links child abuse to young people steadily migrating from the villages to Colombo and other urban centres.

“The vast majority of school-leavers don’t have proper jobs. They come to the city but can’t hold down stable employment. And with the average age of marriage steadily going up from 22 to 28, there are a lot of very frustrated people around,” Hettige told IPS.

This group of young people keeps moving around, looking for sexual opportunities, Hettige explained.

Cricket star Kumar Sangakkara promoting HIV/AIDS awareness. Credit: UNFPA

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jul 16 2012 (IPS)

Sri Lanka has long enjoyed a low 0.1 percent HIV prevalence but, as the number of fresh infections rises steadily, experts are calling for a change in the country’s archaic laws that make sex work illegal and criminalises homosexual activity. 

David Bridger, country coordinator for UNAIDS in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, is among those who believe that stigma and discrimination combined with insensitive laws are fueling a slow but steady increase in the number new HIV infections.

“We have one part of government trying to reach people at high risk with targeted prevention efforts and another part of the government arresting people and driving them away from those very services,” Bridger tells IPS.

Bridger said the contradicting approach “does not make sense from a public health point of view and makes prevention more costly and less effective.”

Harischandra Yakandawala, programme manager at Sarvodaya, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that works with the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM), says Sri Lankan society still refuses to acknowledge HIV/AIDS as an issue.

“It is a culturally taboo subject (sexual issues) to speak about and we have serious difficulties in a situation where high-risk behaviour is widespread,” he said.  

Sarah Soysa from Y-Peer, an international youth network promoted by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), notes: “Boys  simply refuse to wear condoms during sexual intercourse and are more concerned about their partners taking ‘the morning after pill’ to avoid pregnancies.”

Citing official figures, she said Sri Lanka now has some 40,000 teenage pregnancies and 1,000 abortions a day, mostly involving young women.

In the first quarter of the current year there were 40 new cases of HIV compared to 32 and 27 in the first quarters of 2011 and 2010 respectively, according to the National STD/AIDS Control Programme (NSACP).

At the end of 2011, 20.2 percent of HIV cases were in the 20-29 age group, while 37.6 percent of the cases were from the 30-39 age group.

There are an estimated 41,000 commercial sex workers (CSWs) and 30,000 men who have sex with men MSMs) in Sri Lanka, a country of 22 million people.  

“In the past two years new infections are seen to be rising among those below 24 years, and 50 percent of them are MSMs,” says NSACP director Nimal Edirisinghe.

His department plans to purchase 50,000 sachets of lubricants and distribute it among MSMs because anal sex tends to leave injuries that can increase the risk of infections.

But, the biggest hurdle for groups working in HIV/AIDS prevention is the laws against homosexuality and prostitution framed during British colonial times, criminalising ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ and ‘gross indecency’ respectively.

Last month ‘Equal Ground’, a rights group that campaigns for equal rights for people with different sexual orientations and gender identities, petitioned the government to repeal sections 365 and 365A of the penal code, relevant to homosexuality and prostitution and dating back to 1883.

“The criminalisation of same sex relationships and the resultant cultural and social stigmas attached to homosexuality,” said the petition, leads to “all forms of discrimination, marginalisation and violence, resulting in mental health issues, low self-esteem and internalised homophobia.”

“Consensual sex between adults should not be policed by the state nor should it be grounds for criminalisation,” the petition said.

“We work a lot with female sex workers and have many problems with the police and law enforcement authorities,” says H. A. Lakshman, executive director of Community Strength Development Foundation (CSDF), an NGO.

Lakshman, who has been working for the past 19 years with CSWs and employs some of them, said: “We try to provide sex workers with alternate livelihood avenues in the hope that they would eventually move away from sex work.”

For CSDF the biggest challenge is that 20 percent of CSWs who are also injectible drug users pay for their fixes – about Sri Lankan rupees 2,000 (15 dollars) a day – from their earnings.  

“They are careless about the use of condoms,” said Lakshman whose organisation is currently in touch with 6,000 sex workers and distributes 125,000 condoms a month as partner to GFATM and UNFPA. 

“Over the years we have distributed millions of condoms,” he said. The CSDF maintains a drop-in centre at its Colombo office where the women can avail of counselling, help, and even stay overnight.

“Our work has seen a reduction in drug use, pregnancies and abortions while condom use has increased,” he said. “We now also find fewer infections among this group.”

Sarvodaya’s Yakandawala says that lately CSWs have moved from working in brothels to visiting homes and hotels, contacting clients over mobile phones.

Between 100,000 to 150,000 people are estimated to use the services of sex workers – both women and men – per day.

Bridger at UNAIDS says there is an urgent need for policy debate and discussion on reproductive rights and sexual health. “Bad laws should not be allowed to stand in the way of effective HIV responses,” he said.

On May 18, some 800 women in Sri Lanka’s northern region will hold Hindu religious ceremonies for the welfare of thier husbands who disappeared or surrendered to the military as it moved in to mop up nearly three decades of armed Tamil separatism.

“These women continue to live in hope even though many of those Tamil men may have died in the last days of the fighting,” says Shreen Abdul Saroor, a prominent rights activist working with conflict-affected women in northern Sri Lanka.

“On the other hand, even if they do acknowledge that their men have died, they don’t want to be known as widows as that could result in them being seen in a negative light in the community,” Saroor explained to IPS. “They prefer to be known as single women or as women heading households.”

Traditionally, Hindus consider widows to be inauspicious and the religion does not favour remarriage. Tamils, who form 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s 20 million population, mostly follow Hinduism while Sinhalese, who make up 74 percent of the population, are predominantly Buddhist.

According to government estimates, the ethnic conflict has widowed 59,000 women, the bulk of them in the Tamil-dominated north and east.

With rehabilitation tardy and options to earn money few, many women have been compelled to resort to sex work to earn a livelihood and provide for their families.

“We try to wean them away from sex work but they say they have no choice,” says an activist asking not to be named for fear of reprisal. “We provide the women with condoms and give advice on contraception as protection.”

The government is selective about permitting non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to work in the north. Only NGOs involved in development work – housing, livelihood development and infrastructure – are allowed in, while those that raise awareness on issues like peace, trauma or women’s rights are discouraged.

“The moment you say you are from an NGO, there are issues,” says Saroor who is founder of the Northern Mannar Women’s Development Federation and the Mannar Women for Human Rights and Democracy.

Saroor, one of four winners of the first ‘N-PEACE’ award, instituted by the United Nations Development Programme last year, says abuse of girl children is now a major problem in the north and with 26 cases recorded in the last three months alone. Many more cases go unreported.

The N-PEACE (Engage for Peace, Equality, Access, Community and Empowerment) strategy supports women in leading community recovery and peace building in the networked countries of Nepal, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste.

There is concern that the atmosphere of uncertainty, caused by lack of resources, broken families and the absence of responsible males, has impacted the security of young girls.

“In one case, a nine-year-old was abused. Women say they are scared to leave their homes fearing for the safety of their children. So how do we provide them a livelihood?” Saroor asked.

The problems of women in northern Sri Lanka are enormous with their inability to speak out a major hurdle in the post-conflict healing process.

“They have no opportunity to tell their stories,” says Shanthi Sachithanandam, executive director of the Viluthu Centre for Human Resource Development that works with conflict-affected women. “There is an urgent need for counselling.”

The government has repeatedly denied charges by Western countries and international human rights groups that large numbers of civilians were killed in crossfire and aerial bombing in the months leading to May 2009.

Journalists were not permitted into the war zone and NGOs and humanitarian agencies asked to leave, with the result that there are no independent versions of what may have happened in the killing fields of the north.

In March, the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council passed a United States-proposed resolution calling for implementation of recommendations made by Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) as a measure of accountability.

The LLRC, appointed by the government to look into issues relating to the conflict from February 2002 to May 2009, called for a probe into allegations of deliberate attacks on civilians and the prosecution of those responsible.

Rights groups working with war widows and mothers who lost their loved ones, fear repercussions if they dare to speak out publicly on sensitive issues.

When Seela (not her real name) spoke to reporters some weeks ago about a northern village where women have turned to sex work en masse, she and other members of her organisation received threats.

“These women are very vulnerable. We are very concerned about their plight and want to help them liberate themselves from this trap but there is not much we can do without support from the state,” she told IPS.

Seela said the lack of awareness of birth control methods has led to illegitimate babies being born and reports of spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Visaka Dharmadasa, founder and chair of the association of war affected women and parents of soldiers missing in action, said a clearer picture would emerge when a survey being conducted by her organisation is completed in June.

“No comprehensive study has been done on the software issues (fate of the missing and trauma) in the north and the east. Only the hardware (infrastructure and development) is being addressed,” she said.

“Widows of (government) soldiers are better off economically than widows in the north and the east, but in both cases social and psychosocial issues have not been tackled. These are major challenges,” Dharmadasa said.

According to Sachithanandam rehabilitation in the north has been difficult with loans for livelihood development and empowerment failing to reach the intended beneficiaries.

“Multilateral agencies say women are key to post-war reconstruction. But the women are confined to the house because of young children,” said Sachithanandam. “Small loans given for goat-rearing or poultry-raising vanish when the animals die and the women are back to square one.”

That, says Saroor, is the point when women look at sex work as an option.

The LLRC report drew attention to the plight of Tamil widows. “Their lives are often lonely and insecure, and they are treated as a symbol of bad omen in their own social circles.”

Problems start with the definition of widowhood. While widows elsewhere in the country have marriage certificates to prove marital status, women in the north are unable to produce documents because of the destruction of official records during the war.

Military spokesman Brig. Ruwan Wanigasooriya told IPS that of 11,995 suspected rebel cadres who surrendered in May 2009, with 10,874 have been rehabilitated and reintegrated into civilian life.

Another 852 are in detention with investigations continuing or undergoing rehabilitation ahead of release while 13 had died of natural causes, the spokesman said.

Maldivian women brave water cannon at a protest rally. Credit:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Apr 3 2012 (IPS)

Maldivian women, long used to taking a backseat in the Muslim-dominated Indian Ocean country, say they are determined to ensure that they are not deprived of their rights under the new regime of President Mohammed Waheed Hassan.

Television footage of women battling police, soon after the Feb. 7 resignation of president Mohammed Nasheed, showed the new assertiveness of Maldivian women, even while wearing the ‘hijab’ or head-cover traditionally worn by Muslim women. Nasheed later claimed it was a coup against his elected government.

“Yes, life is changing in the Maldives with women asserting their rights more aggressively than before,” Mauroof Zakir, a young trade union activist, told IPS over telephone. “This is a new and exciting development.”

Zakir said Nasheed’s policy of providing free health insurance and allowances for single mothers was not lost on the women who have been taking to the streets in large numbers, confronting police and demanding reinstatement of his government.

“After the coup women want to express their views. They are very angry and disappointed at the sudden removal of an elected president and his government,” said Aishath Aniya, a prominent female activist and former secretary-general of Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP).

“Women never took part in rallies or came onto the streets before, but now they readily attend rallies or speak in public to demand change,” said Aniya, who was among a group of female protestors who were arrested and stripped naked by a group of policewomen after one protest.

“We were able to muster as many as 8,000 women at some of the rallies,” Aniya told IPS in a telephone interview.

Females account for slightly less than half of the estimated 350,000-strong Maldivian population.

Nasheed, a former journalist educated in Britain, led the MDP during a massive campaign for democracy in the Maldives before winning the elections held in November 2008 and defeating Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, 74, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years.

Nasheed’s ouster is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Gayoom and his allies, though the former president has repeatedly denied involvement.

Waheed’s cabinet is packed with Gayoom supporters. The former dictator’s youngest son, Ghassan Maumoon, is minister of state for human resources, and his daughter, Dhunya Maumoon, is junior minister for foreign affairs in Waheed’s cabinet.

Also, Abdul Samad Abdulla, Maldivian envoy to Bangladesh during Gayoom’s rule, is foreign minister while the finance minister is Abdulla Jihad, who held the same portfolio under Gayoom.

Shifa Mohamed, a frontline women’s leader of the MDP, says quite a few women work in the country’s civil service but not at policy or decision-making levels. “Men have traditionally dominated these positions,” she said.

Shifa told IPS that Nasheed understood the issues facing women and tried to address their concerns by coming up with schemes like health insurance and improving transportation to schools and health clinics.

Aniya believes women became more empowered under Nasheed’s governance and points to how he improved transportation, an important issue on the islands. “Earlier when someone fell ill residents were forced to plead with boat owners for a ride to the nearest clinic or hospital – and often refused.”

Today under a state-subsidised system, there are regular ferries between the islands, she said. “Women being the main caregivers felt the difference in approach.”

Shifa said women are anxious that there is no return to the past. “During Gayoom’s rule, even if women voted massively against him, the results would show 100 percent support.

“That was the kind of repression felt not just by women but by everyone and that is why women feel compelled to stand up for their rights and for the benefit of the next generation of Maldivians.”

Nasheed, while in power, had openly advocated a moderate brand of Islam and spoken up against such practices as female genital mutilation, child marriage and the public flogging of women for adultery.

Nasheed had also backed a controversial domestic violence bill aimed at providing female victims emergency protection and easing a woman’s ability to resort to divorce. The bill has remained in the Majlis or parliament for over a year.

A government spokesman contacted by IPS disputed the claim of large numbers of women turning out for protests against the Waheed regime, saying they consist mostly of relatives or friends of Nasheed.

“Their (MDP) claims are all nonsense. I would reckon the numbers taking part are around 200 to 300 or less. The problem is that the capital has many small alleys and even a small number of women looks like a large crowd and provides nice video,” said Imad Mazood, spokesman for President Waheed. “Male is like a studio.”

Foreign media began converging on Male a few days before Nasheed resigned and, as tensions rose, footage unflattering to the new regime was carried on social media networks like YouTube and by international TV channels.

Mazood said with Male’s population comprising a sizable number of foreigners, mostly Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Indians, it is impossible to muster 8,000 women for a rally. “You won’t get even half that number.”

There are over 100,000 foreign workers in the Maldives, the majority employed in the country’s main industry of international tourism.

Mohamed Latheef, a founder of the MDP and widely seen as Nasheed’s mentor, admits that it is difficult to accurately estimate the number of women involved in protests and rallies.

“Society in Male is so polarised that it is an ‘us versus them’ situation,” he said, speaking to IPS in Colombo where he lives in exile.

Amnesty International (AI), the London-based rights group, has voiced concern over attacks against women protestors, referring in particular to a Feb. 26 march.

AI said a group of peaceful women protestors was “charged by soldiers who wielded batons and used pepper spray, pushed them around, and kicked them on their legs and ribs,” as they moved towards a public meeting on Addu island, addressed by President Waheed.

Aniya said, after a protest march on Mar. 19, she and 12 other women were body-searched and stripped naked. “They took urine samples and wanted to pin charges of drugs use on us, similar to the kind of false charges earlier used against opponents of the Gayoom regime.”

But, Aniya said, such tactics are not going to deter the women from joining the rallies against the new regime. “Many of them are determined to protest for 24 hours, even daily, till president Nasheed is reinstated.”

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jul 13 2011 (IPS)

The Sri Lanka government is considering a further tightening of age restrictions on women leaving the country to become domestic workers. But some analysts say this is a quick-fix solution to the problem of women running afoul of the law abroad.

Sri Lankan authorities have been grappling with ways of restricting the flow of migrant women abroad due to complaints of non-payment or delayed wages, sexual abuse, and long working hours – issues faced by most domestic workers abroad. Often these issues remain unresolved.

But the latest case to stir Sri Lankans’ conscience is that of Rizana Nafeek, who is awaiting execution in Saudi Arabia. Nafeek was found guilty of killing a baby who had choked to death while in her care. She was sentenced in 2007.

The argument that Nafeek was duped by a local agent and travelled to Saudi Arabia as an underaged worker (below 18 years old) failed to move Saudi authorities. Nafeek’s execution has been delayed, however, due to appeals from Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Protests have been held in front of the Saudi embassy in Colombo pleading for Nafeek’s release. The protests were prompted by fears she would be secretly executed, after an Indonesian maid was beheaded last month for murdering her Saudi employer’s wife. Indonesian officials said they were not informed of the execution.

But advocates say imposing age restrictions is not the right approach. “These age barriers are not going to solve the problem,” said J.C. Weliamuna, a human rights lawyer and director of the Sri Lanka branch of the global rights watchdog Transparency International.

Last week, Minister of Foreign Employment Dilan Perera told Parliament the government was planning to raise the minimum age for a domestic worker going abroad to 30 years. Since January 2011, the minimum age has been 21 years and before that, 18 years. Perera also said the maximum age for overseas-bound domestic workers will also be changed to 42 years from the current age limit of 50.

Remittances from workers abroad are Sri Lanka’s second largest foreign exchange-earner after commodity exports. More than 1.6 million Sri Lankans are contract workers in the Gulf, Asia and Europe. Close to half this number are women working as domestics, mostly in the Gulf.

Most migrant worker activists like Viola Perera, coordinator of Sri Lanka’s ACTFORM (Action Network for Migrant Workers) believe that the best option would be for women to work in their home country but the option of being employed abroad is their right and “as long as that happens we need to ensure their protection overseas.”

Perera said Sri Lankans must handle problems of women in the workplace delicately. “We can’t be blaming those governments; otherwise we’ll be placed in a situation similar to the beheading of the Indonesian maid (without the Indonesian authorities being informed). Our priority is ensuring Rizana’s freedom. That’s paramount in this particular case,” she said in reference to the protests blasting the Saudi government for Nafeek’s sentence.

Advocates admit a lack of skills and basic understanding by domestic workers is also a problem. “We need to teach migrant workers rights with responsibilities,” said K. Velayutham, president of Sri Lanka’s National Trade Union Federation. “If workers are not responsible and don’t do the job they are assigned to, how can they claim rights? They need to perform the work they have been paid for.

“We need to teach them languages – English or Arabic; we need to make them aware of the environment they work in; we need to teach them the law so that they know if they violate it they would be taken to task,” Velayutham added.

But advocates expressed concern over the treatment of domestic workers in the Middle East. William Gois, regional coordinator of the Manila-based Migrant Forum for Asia (MFA), says the “kafala” (sponsorship) system, where the worker is not permitted to leave the house, is like a form of slavery. Migrant groups have been calling for the system to be stopped or reformed, as in Bahrain, where some mobility of movement is now allowed based on guidelines or consent between the sponsor and the worker.

At a two-day consultation in Colombo on migrant issues in Asia, Gois said his group was working on a reference wage rather than a minimum wage structure, relaxing the kafala system. The MFA has also launched a campaign to carry forward last month’s passage of the International Labour Organisation’s Convention on Domestic Workers, which applies to both domestic workers in their home countries and migrant workers employed as domestics.

At the meeting, Filipino officials pointed out that in an effort to minimise abuse and harassment, they are observing a rule that only countries with bilateral agreements with the Philippines can recruit workers. These countries must also have ratified key U.N. conventions connected to human rights and migrant workers.

“If we cannot ensure protection of rights for our workers in a particular country, we should not send them to that country,” said one Filipino official.

Both migrant support groups and employment agents blamed authorities for the multitude of problems workers face. Wijaya Udupitiya, who runs an employment agency, said the state-run Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Bureau doesn’t share its data with all stakeholders.

“For example how many people are unregistered (with the bureau), how many Sri Lankans are in safe houses in Sri Lankan missions overseas, how many of these are runaways after working two to three weeks in a house?” he asked, saying that about half of all migrant workers go abroad on their own and not through local agents.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
MALÉ, Jun 15 2011 (IPS)

Most visitors to the Maldives – a string of islands southwest of Sri Lanka – won’t miss the so-called “smoking mountain” made from local residents’ trash as well as the garbage tourists leave behind in resorts nearby.

Thilafushi Island, also known as “Rubbish Island” located a few kilometres off the capital of Malé, is an eyesore that emits toxic fumes from tonnes of garbage dumped there every day. But in late May the government found a way to make something out of the trash, and signed an agreement with an Indo- German company to manage the waste and reuse it as energy.

The project, backed by the World Bank affiliate International Finance Corporation (IFC), will generate power from recycling waste in two years.

“That will not only get rid of the toxicity but also generate renewable energy at a time when we need projects like this,” says Maldivian environmentalist Ali Rizwan, whose nongovernment organisation Blue Peace has dubbed the garbage island the “toxic bomb in the Indian Ocean.”

Waste management in the more than 200 populated islands in the Maldives – an archipelago of 1,200 islands – is a serious problem, like in many island states.

In 1992, the government built Thilafushi as an artificial island to serve as a landfill for Malé’s refuse, but dozens of tourist resorts began sending their rubbish to the island as well. Soon the site became a mountain of garbage easily recognisable by the smoke billowing out.

The rubbish includes used batteries, asbestos, lead and other potentially hazardous waste, and mixed with the municipal solid waste, it is becoming an increasingly serious ecological and health problem, Blue Peace said.

Close to 800,000 tourists visited the Maldives last year, slightly more than neighbouring Sri Lanka, which has a much larger population of 20 million compared to the Maldives’ 370,000. According to current estimates, a tourist on a resort generates 7.5 kg of waste per day, double what a Malé resident produces.

“The resorts are not helping at all. There is little waste management done except in a few places,” Rizwan said in a telephone interview, citing his own experience on Saturday visiting a far-away island inhabited by local people.

There, he said, he found loads of empty plastic cans and coca cola bottles swept ashore from resorts. “This is a common occurrence in the Maldives. Tourism promoters and resorts must seriously take note of this issue and help the government sort out this problem,” he said. “You can’t expect the government to do everything. The private sector should also help.”

Two years ago, the government wanted to introduce a “green tax” to help reduce tourism’s adverse environmental impact. But plans changed in January after a series of new taxes were introduced on resorts and business to raise much needed revenue for the cash-strapped government.

The IFC-backed private-public partnership project on waste management will “introduce best practices and standards in waste management to improve waste disposal at Thilafushi and other islands in Greater Malé,” according to an IFC statement.

Signed by the government and the Indo-German Tatva Global Renewable Energy (Maldives) Private Limited, the project will mobilise up to 50 million dollars in private investments, and help reduce greenhouse gases by nearly 12,000 tonnes annually, the IFC added.

The Maldives has been pushing for a greener economy and has been leading efforts to minimise global warming, as it faces the threat of rising sea levels. Some 80 percent of its islands are just about a metre above sea level, except for Malé, which is surrounded by a three-metre high wall. The islands, experts say, could go under in 100 years.

For Environment Minister Mohamed Aslam, the rising sea level is a major challenge but currently not the biggest one. “The shifting of the islands when the sea level rises is a more complex issue,” he said in a recent interview with IPS in Malé.

Meanwhile, Tourism Minister Mariyam Zulfa said the government recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the non-profit Swiss group myclimate, to help prepare a strategy for voluntary carbon offsetting measures.

“We will be looking at things like developing a model eco-island as a resort of the future,” she said. “We are working on the carbon footprint. While the airlines will look after themselves, the resorts are also looking at renewable energy for most of their needs.”

But the biggest challenge, she pointed out, is the diesel that goes into generators that are used by all resorts, since solar power as an alternative would involve a large investment. Finding an alternative to fossil fuel for sea transport is also a dilemma as the next option, rechargeable batteries, is costly.

The government has put in place a plan to be carbon neutral by 2020 and is urging industry, mainly tourism, to resort to low-carbon refrigerators and air conditioners through ozone- and climate-friendly technology. A two-day road show in Malé last month showcased such technologies by American, Chinese, Japanese and Western European companies.

The government is also working with India-based Suzilon, one of the world’s largest windmill turbine producers, to use wind power technology in state utilities across the islands.

A young environmentalist who declined to be named told IPS that she didn’t see significant changes towards a greener economy. “Maybe they are doing something and the public is not well informed. Most of us do think government efforts are all for good public relations. But I still feel this government is doing more about it than the previous one,” she added.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jun 2 2011 (IPS)

Sri Lanka plans to host the Commonwealth Games seven years from now and spend two billion dollars, in what politicians and economists slam as another extravagant adventure aimed at boosting President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Sri Lanka is bidding against Australia to stage the 21st edition of the Games in 2018. Both countries presented their bids during the meeting of the Commonwealth Games Federation executive committee in Kuala Lumpur on May 11. The vote by 70 countries on the venue of the Games will take place at the Federation’s general assembly in St. Kitts and Nevis on Nov. 11.

“This spending is a total waste of money as this is not a priority,” said Kusal Perera, a civil society activist and political columnist for the Colombo-based weekly newspaper, Sunday Leader. “This money could be used for a better planned development of Sri Lanka, especially in rural economic development in the agriculture business, if the planners really have such priorities worked out. But they don’t.”

“This is just another ego trip for Mahinda Rajapaksa. Furthermore the government has overrun costs for all its previous grandiose projects and this will be the same,” said Harsha de Silva, an economist and opposition parliamentarian.

The event is to be staged in Rajapaksa’s hometown of Hambantota, 240 kms south of Colombo, where a showpiece international airport, harbour and international conference hall are being added to a growing number of infrastructure projects in the once poverty-stricken district.

Opposition parties have criticised the government for favouring the president’s hometown, pumping in millions of rupees on infrastructure and other facilities while other towns get less.

Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal, also co-chairman of the local Games Committee, said the model Sri Lanka wants to follow is Malaysia, which former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad transformed into a huge economic success using leverage from hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games.

“We are confident we have the resources and facilities to host an event of this magnitude,” Cabraal told IPS. “What propelled Malaysia? It was the hosting of the Commonwealth Games. We feel the same thing will happen here – increase development, attract more foreign investment and profile Sri Lanka in a different light and not as a country that was at war.”

He said Sri Lanka’s bid presentation in Kuala Lumpur drew a lot of international interest from the media and other participants. The government, he said, plans to spend two billion dollars to construct new facilities and venues at Hambantota and turn it into a venue for hosting international events such as conferences.

“Even if we don’t win the bid, a lot of money will still be spent on developing infrastructure in the southern city (of Hambantota) to host the South Asian Games in 2016 and other events,” he said.

Cabraal, a political appointee and close supporter of the president, is confident Colombo will beat Australia’s Gold Coast and win the vote in November. But it’s not going to be an easy ride given the bad press Sri Lanka has picked up over allegations the government committed war crimes.

In November 2009, Sri Lanka lost the vote to Australia in an attempt to host the 2011 meeting of Commonwealth leaders, with London and Canberra blocking Colombo’s bid, newspapers said at the time.

This was a few months after Sri Lankan troops defeated Tamil separatist rebels, ending nearly three decades of conflict that cost thousands of lives.

Rajapaksa has repeatedly denied allegations that many civilians died at the hands of soldiers during the final stages of the war and is resisting demands from the U.N., U.S. and the U.K., among others, to investigate war crimes. India has also voiced concern over civilian casualties in the conflict.

A senior economist, who declined to be named, told IPS that the Games would be a big investment with no real economic return. “We are not sure enough of winning the bid because India and the U.K. are unlikely to support our application.”

De Silva feels the timing is just not right to host an event of this magnitude. “There is no doubt an event of this nature will boost the country but we have a lot more priorities after the war and we just cannot afford this kind of spending,” he said, adding that the government needs to spend more money on the war-ravaged northern and eastern regions.

Political columnist Perera said infrastructure alone would not bring in foreign investment because there is a high level of corruption in Sri Lanka. “Foreign investors would not run a double risk in doing business in wholly corrupt societies where they have to grease everyone at every level,” he said.

Among other issues, recent land deals where the government has sold prime land in Colombo to an international hotel chain and a Chinese infrastructure company to set up hotels and malls has raised many questions about the actual value and the amount paid. De Silva believes India will oppose Sri Lanka’s bid or extract more concessions in return for its support. India, to please its powerful southern Tamil population who share close cultural, trade and other ties with the Sri Lankan minority, is pushing Colombo to devolve more power to the regions where Tamils live.

“We can’t even pay our university lecturers, how can we spend so much money on a project like this?” the economist asked. With the cost of living rising sharply, Rajapaksa has been under pressure from public sector workers and university teachers to increase salaries.

The government however says it doesn’t have the cash to increase wages substantially. This week, it was forced to suspend a controversial pension scheme for private workers after a week of protests against the plan.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Mar 15 2011 (IPS)

Lack of donor funding, state phobia against western NGOs, and restrictive work permits for foreign aid workers have together hit the operations of several dozen Sri Lankan NGOs and their foreign counterparts.

British-government funded agencies and AusAid, an Australian government agency, have reportedly reduced their funding of local NGOs. U.S.-based Care International is also cutting its local staff in Colombo. Officials at these agencies could not be reached for comment.

“The government wants a hands-off policy from donors, and thus prefers countries like China which provides assistance without being too concerned [about other issues],” said Harim Peiris, a Colombo-based political analyst and a one-time spokesperson for former President Chandrika Kumaratunga. China is second to Japan as Sri Lanka’s largest lender of development assistance.

“There is a lot of downsizing [of staff],” a veteran aid worker here who declined to be identified told IPS. “I don’t have numbers but I can tell you that any NGO involved in governance, post-conflict peace or post-war trauma related work will have a problem with the authorities,” who “not only track the work of such NGOs but also often visit their offices.”

The most affected agencies are involved in governance, peace building, conflict-resolution and post-war trauma counselling.

“Anything that is considered political or empowering people to establish their rights is anathema to the establishment,” the aid worker said, adding that he is afraid to get exposed, as any NGO worker critical of the establishment will be “in trouble.”

Nearly two years after the ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) ended the bloody insurgency by Tamil rebels demanding regional autonomy for their community, the government is still cagey about western-funded NGOs – particularly following criticism by human rights groups and civil society organisations regarding conduct of government forces during the last stages of the conflict.

Dozens of civilians were reported to have died in crossfire during the last stages of the conflict in May 2009, and rights groups say better government planning could have averted this. President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his ministers have repeatedly rejected claims of large-scale civilian casualties.

A meeting conducted in secret on Feb. 23 between a government team and a U.N. Panel advising Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on the Sri Lankan human rights situation illustrates Rajapaksa’s worry over alleged human rights violations. The meeting, which was held in New York and revealed by the influential Colombo-based Sunday Times newspaper, so far hasn’t been denied by the government.

J. Weliamuna, a well-known human rights lawyer and former director of Transparency International’s Colombo office, told IPS that the situation concerning NGOs is worsening. “The government sees everybody as a challenge and has a phobia against NGOs,” he said, adding that the government views civil society as its only challenge since the opposition is weak.

“More and more, space is limited for civil society,” Weliamuna said. “People are dead scared of challenging the government and the war-time fear psychosis still prevails.”

On Monday, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged more than 50 countries to boycott a Sri Lankan conference in May, which aims to share the country’s war experiences.

The government has invited specialists from several countries to a conference titled ‘Defeating Terrorism – The Sri Lankan Experience’ on May 31 to Jun. 2 in Colombo, which HRW says should be skipped.

“We are telling countries that they should not attend a meeting to celebrate a military policy that involves killing so many civilians,” HRW Executive Director Brad Adams was quoted as telling the BBC’s Sinhala service, Sandeshaya.

Statements like this and a constant barrage of criticism from human rights groups is what the government is up against in the international arena and at U.N. meetings, and this is its main reason for being suspicious of NGOs.

The human rights question came up once again in Geneva during the U.N.’s annual human rights discourse, but the Sri Lanka issue was overshadowed by the earthquake and tsunami crisis in Japan.

“The Japan crisis was a bigger issue at the meetings,” Pakiasothy Saravanamuttu, a respected human rights campaigner, who attended the Geneva meetings, told IPS.

Saravanamuttu, head of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) here, and one of the few campaigners to be openly critical of government policies, has faced threats in the past.

“This is particularly the case of agencies that are involved in capacity building, post-war trauma counselling, governance and democracy,” Saravanamuttu said, adding that infrastructure and other work not perceived as political are not affected.

“In the case of foreign NGOs the government uses the visa as a weapon and restricts access to the island,” he said.

Aid workers say that foreign workers are normally allowed only a 3-month visa, which is then extended.

“The hassle and documentation to get the visa is so difficult that often foreign workers have to [immediately] start the process for the next three months after getting the first three-month visa,” one worker said, adding that in his organisation there was one local officer recruited just for visa-related work.

Lakshman Hullugalle, a government official who heads the state-run NGO Secretariat, denied these claims. “We give visas sometimes for one year at a time. It’s not correct to say we issue only short-term visas. The process is very streamlined,” he said.

Peiris says the issue facing NGOs is a combination of the drying up of funds and government policy.

“There is no humanitarian crisis anyone, except for humanitarian need which is long-term. Furthermore Sri Lanka has moved to the middle-income bracket of countries while development assistance is mostly for low-income countries,” Peiris explained.

But he stressed that the government has been inhospitable and worried about western agencies that seek to influence local development policy.

Peiris said that if there had been a period of reconciliation after the war and the rights of the minorities were secured, world focus on war crimes would have subsided.

“However this issue keeps cropping up again and again because there hasn’t been any proper peace and reconciliation [with the Tamil community] after the war ended.”

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Feb 25 2011 (IPS)

Suggestions are pouring in from all corners of the world on how the world’s rich could reduce climate-damaging consumption habits, called Millennium Consumption Goals (MCGs), envisioned to be the flipside of the eight-point Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set for the poor.

These suggestions range from reduced working hours to increased use of bicycles and more walking, and from wearing second-hand clothes to reduced meat and dairy consumption.

Prof. Mohan Munasinghe, a Sri Lankan expert on global sustainable development and climate change, proposed the MCGs for the world’s rich in an interview with IPS in Colombo three weeks ago. Since then, the suggestion has triggered a lot of discussion, debate and suggestions.

Some want an eight-point MCG drawn up and then submitted to the United Nations, where it could get the attention and commitment of member-states. Others prefer setting personal goals in helping reduce lifestyle habits that damage the environment.

Erik Assadourian, Transforming Cultures Project Director and Senior Researcher at Worldwatch Institute, listed five suggestions.

First, to cut obesity and overweight rates by half by 2020 to reduce mortality, morbidity and economic costs, as well as ecological pressures driven by overconsumption of food.

Second, Assadourian said, could be to slash the workweek by half to distribute jobs and wealth, promote healthier living, and reduce economic activity. Third, raise taxes on the wealthiest members of society. Fourth, double the use of non-motorized transport such as bikes, and fifth, guarantee health care for all.

“Help me add three more to the list to get it to eight and then we can see about getting this submitted to the United Nations,” Assadourian wrote. “After all, if those in overdeveloped countries can set goals for those in developing countries, the UN should show the same concern to those living poorly in industrial countries.”

Writer Matthew McDermott from www.treehugger.com, a media outlet on sustainability, suggested doubling the amount of organically-produced food which would reduce fossil fuel, chemical fertilizer and pesticide usage, and cutting household electricity use.

“If your electricity comes from fossil fuels this would reduce pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and indirectly increase energy independence. If your electricity is generated from renewable energy, it reduces the amount of energy that needs to be generated and the amount of land needed for wind farms, solar power plants, hydropower, biofuels,” he wrote.

In an email posted on Munasinghe’s website, Philip Vergragt proposed reducing per capita living space by 25 percent. He also suggested cooking more meals at home with fresh and possibly local ingredients. Other proposals include reducing shopping for new products, reduce waste through composting, recycling, and buying less.

Jeremy Williams, a freelance writer from the UK, on his website ‘Make Wealth History’, suggested a reduction in air travel, eliminating food waste and creating a stable banking system.

Several websites and blogs have taken forward the idea of MCGs for the rich.

In one such comment, one Dr Kishor Mistry said he was setting some personal goals for himself. Part of his list reads, “I will not buy new cloths/shoes until my old cloths/shoes have worn out; I will use the stairs instead of the elevator; I will not buy new car/other gadget if my old car/gadget is functioning; I will not accept or give gifts to the economically well off friends/relatives, but will restrict giving it to the children and poor/needy people; I will teach my children the habits of preventing wasteful use of papers, toys, cloth, etc.”

Another writer going by the initials “CH” urged people to focus on their eating habits. “I vote for a 90 percent reduction in meat and 70 percent in eggs and dairy products. Consequently, when meat eating becomes less frequent, it wouldn’t matter if prices went up, so we could abolish industrial livestock farming at the same time,” the writer says.

Commenting on the proposal for a shorter working week, Thomas Colley says this means individuals would have more time for voluntary missions, among other benefits.

“Time is a critical factor in enabling people to be part of transition efforts. Without such time, people are stuck in the industrial treadmill. With it, they become agents of change,” he says.

The proposal for reducing meat consumption found favour with many commentators. Anders Strandberg says in addition to cutting meat consumption, the amount of recycled, reused and reduced articles should be doubled.

Comments were also made on the MDGs adopted in 2000, which are targeted for completion by 2015. The MDGs seek to reduce world poverty through eight goals that cover education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

For his part, Munasinghe is setting his own goals. “Personally I have my own carbon emission goals. I have planted a tree to reduce my carbon footprint. I have also made a conscious effort to reduce air travel and rely on video conferencing,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Feb 5 2011 (IPS)

Sri Lanka has raised the age requirement for women wanting to leave the country to work as domestics abroad, but recruitment agents say this won’t prevent younger women from joining the exodus.

And not even the fate that befell Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan domestic facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, is enough of a deterrent.

Last week, the government announced it was revising the rule to allow only women over 21 years of age to work abroad as domestics. The limit was previously 18 years. Officials say lack of experience is likely to get younger women into trouble.

“When we send young women, often just out of school, they have many problems and run away after three months to the Sri Lankan embassy unable to cope with the situation,” said R.K. Ruhunuge, additional general manager at the state-owned Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLFBE).

“This (new age bar) will reduce the number of runaways,” he added.

But the new rule doesn’t prevent 18-year-olds from seeking other employment overseas as either skilled or semi-skilled workers. Domestic work is considered an unskilled profession.

Recruitment agents, however, say young girls – whose only prospects abroad are jobs as maids – will merely resort to falsifying papers showing they are much older than they really are.

Newspapers have persistently blamed recruitment agents for securing passports with bogus information on behalf of their clients, a charge agents have repeatedly rejected.

“It is the individual who brings such a passport and presents it to the agent. For all purposes it is a genuine and legal passport, as it’s issued by the Immigration and Emigration Department, but on bogus documents like birth certificates. So how can we be blamed for this?” asked Faizer Mackeen, secretary of the Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agents (ALFEA).

Mackeen believes young women like Rizana Nafeek will continue to lie about their age and provide bogus documents to get a passport.

In June 2007, Nafeek was sentenced to death by a Saudi court after she was found guilty of murdering a four-month-old infant in her care.

Nafeek confessed to the crime but later said she was forced to do so by the police and that the infant had accidentally choked. Nafeek was 17 when she first entered Saudi Arabia but her passport showed she was six years older.

In December, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suspended the death sentence following a request for amnesty by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The appeal against the verdict continues in court.

At least 1.8 million Sri Lankans work abroad, more than half of them women employed as domestics in the Middle East, quite a few aged around 18, or just older.

SLFBE’s Ruhunuge says the government is encouraging the migration of professional and skilled workers, rather than unskilled workers like domestics. “Professional and skilled workers earn more and the foreign exchange component to the country is also much higher,” he said.

Foreign exchange earnings from migrant workers are expected to reach 4 billion dollars for 2010 from 3.3 billion in 2009. The migrant workers sector is Sri Lanka’s highest foreign exchange earner, followed by garments.

But migrant workers’ rights groups are calling for better safeguards and protection of workers abroad rather than depriving them a chance to earn a living. “Our position is that you can’t stop women from traveling abroad on the job. That’s a human right. But we have for many years urged the government to provide better training and have bilateral agreements with labour-receiving countries to ensure better working standards,” said Viola Perera, convener of Sri Lanka’s Action Network for Migrant Workers (ACTFORM).

Common problems domestic workers face abroad include non-payment of contracted wages, and physical and sexual harassment.

She said they were hoping to persuade the authorities to enforce the Sri Lanka Labour Migration Policy introduced in October 2008. This policy, prepared by all stakeholders, says the state is responsible for protecting migrant workers and their families under the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families.

“This is a policy with good intentions but there is no legal obligation on the government to enforce it,” Perera said, adding that if such a policy has legal authority, cases like Nafeek’s would not have happened.

Rights groups have repeatedly blamed recruitment agents for helping migrant workers prepare bogus birth certificates to secure a passport. But recruitment agents say they are often blamed whenever workers have problems, when victims themselves must accept responsibility.

Wijeya Undupitiya, a former computer systems analyst who set up a recruiting office 20 years ago, says he often sees women coming into his office saying “happily” that they had gotten their passports using forged papers.

“They don’t think it is wrong and illegal,” he said.

Undupitiya cited the recent case of an 18-year-old boy who was arrested for possessing a forged passport. It was the boy’s mother who got him a job at a garments factory in Mauritius where she had worked for many years. But since the recruitment age was 20 years, the boy resorted to bribing an officer at the Immigration Department to falsify his date of birth, getting the job processing done through Undupitiya’s agency.

“I didn’t know it was a passport obtained under false pretences. In fact I have written to the Immigration Commissioner-General to clarify what a forged passport is because the passport is genuine as it’s issued by the department,” he said. “There are many cases where migrant workers produce passports which are legally valid but secured by bribing someone at the department to insert a false date of birth.”

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jan 24 2011 (IPS)

A Sri Lankan scientist is calling for the drafting of “Millennium Consumption Goals” to force rich countries to curb their climate-damaging consumption habits, in the same way the poor have Millennium Development Goals to get them out of poverty.

Prof. Mohan Munasinghe, expert on sustainable development and climate change, says, “We now have Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for the poor. We should extend that to the rich and make sure they consume more sustainably.”

He said this is needed because 85 percent of all consumption in world is done by the top 20 percent of the world’s rich.

“If they can be more sustainable in consumption, it can reduce the environmental burden by a tremendous amount,” said Munasinghe in an interview with IPS in Colombo, where he is based.

Munasinghe is vice-chair of the Geneva-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore.

He noted the severe changes in the weather pattern due to El Niño and La Niña happening one after the other in December. El Niño is a regional phenomenon that heats up parts of the Pacific region, affects South America and the rest of world, while La Niña, which also starts in the Pacific, sets off a cold spell.

In Sri Lanka, recent flash floods and an extremely cold spell killed more than 40 people and affected over a million others. Hundreds of acres of rice fields and other crops were destroyed by raging floodwaters, resulting in high prices of vegetables and other essentials.

Munasinghe said his country’s main priority now is to reduce the vulnerability of the poor to climate change impacts.

“Our carbon emissions are low,” Munasinghe said. “While we may need to reduce it in the future, that’s not the main issue. Our main problem is reducing vulnerability as it affects the poor most. It is very unfair, because it is the CO2 emissions of the rich countries which have caused the problem.”

Meteorologist Sarath Premadasa said what’s happening now in Sri Lanka and the world is the growing intensity of extreme weather. “If it’s a drought, it’s worse than before, or rains are at a high intensity.”

Prof Champa Navaratne, Head of Agriculture Engineering at Sri Lanka’s southern-based Ruhunu University, said the erratic weather patterns would create serious food shortages and a food security problem this year.

“We do a lot of research to develop better cropping patterns for our farmers based on the weather but this is near impossible now,” she said. Sri Lanka has two rice cropping seasons but in the past six months, she said farmers in the southern district of Matara alone have had to sow the fields three times, and not just once, because of erratic flash floods. “We’ll have a food crisis in mid- 2011, that’s for sure,” she added.

Some of the main areas of concern in Sri Lanka, Munasinghe said, are its vulnerability to droughts and high temperatures in the dry zone, and the impact on agriculture and rice where a drop of up to 20 percent in yields could happen by 2050.

And then there are the floods and earth-slips in the wet zone due to excessive rain, the sea level rising, and storms that would affect fisheries and coastal dwellers. Water-borne and mosquito-borne diseases, already prevalent in the country due to unsustainable development, are likely to worsen.

“We need to climate-proof Sri Lanka by making our development path more sustainable,” he said.

Last month, Munasinghe was one of three specialists who spoke on climate change before a packed session of the United Nations in New York. The two others were Achim Steiner, Executive Director of United Nations Environmental Programme, and Martin Koh, Executive Director of the South Centre.

Munasinghe has been advising not only governments but also multinational corporations like Tesco and Unilever on sustainable development vis-à-vis climate change.

Two days after the U.N. session, Munasinghe briefed senior World Bank officials at its headquarters in Washington on climate and development and the need for an integrated approach to these issues.

Munasinghe was also in China in December for three separate high-level meetings with government officials, civil society and business, with each sector concerned about the environment and seeking to change the way things are done.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jan 3 2011 (IPS)

At a marketplace near Colombo, consumers scramble for coconuts being sold from a state-owned truck. Sri Lanka is the world’s fourth largest coconut producer and a major exporter; but a crop shortfall and a drought have forced the country to import coconuts.

Sarath Fernando, farmers’ rights activist and convener of a farmers and peasants group, attributes the coconut crisis to lopsided government policies and short-term solutions.

“Now the government is banning the felling of coconut trees when it should have been done long time ago,” he said, adding: “This is like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.”

Fernando says the country’s poor food security policies have resulted in this need to import essential commodities.

Coconut prices have doubled due to the shortage.

“We have decided to import coconuts but the first stock is yet to come,” said Sunil Sirisena, Secretary at the Ministry of Internal Trade.

Responding to opposition claims that under plant protection laws coconut can be imported only for research purposes and not for trade, Sirisena said the law would be amended to meet the requirement.

Sri Lanka is also importing eggs and chicken meat. The government released two million eggs to the market Monday, along with large quantities of chicken – all imported from neighbouring India.

While this is not the first time eggs or chicken have been imported to meet a shortage, it is the first time coconuts are coming into a country that has exported coconut and nut products for decades.

Fernando says local food production needs to be strengthened, noting that a programme launched by President Mahinda Rajapaksa some years back titled ‘Build the country by growing more food’ was a good start but lost its momentum.

Four million home gardens were to have been created under this programme to create a food surplus in the country. “However there were no facilities and structures to back this campaign and now we are importing food,” Fernando explains.

Nimal Sanderatne, an agricultural economist, says rice productivity is high in Sri Lanka and the third highest in the world after Japan and Indonesia. “But we can improve current production to 5-6 metric tonnes per hectare from 4.5 metric tones now,” he said.

But, production costs in all key food sectors like rice, coconut and chicken remain very high mainly due to the high cost of imported fertilizer and chicken feed. Wage rates are also the highest in the region.

Local producers say coconut being imported from Kerala, India, could bring in foreign disease and fungus that may affect local plants. The coconuts in Kerala are much smaller than the Sri Lankan nut and any benefit in price is nullified by the size of the imported product, local farmers argue.

As it becomes harder for local landowners to earn a living farming the crop in Sri Lanka, many have been selling their lands for development and other purposes – mostly housing. Arable land has remained at 362,000 hectares in the past two years, from over 400,000 previously.

Some economists argue that despite this, new coconut land has come into the picture particularly in the former war-torn Northern and Eastern parts of the country.

Grated coconut is used widely in Sri Lankan curries while companies like the multinational Nestle spray-dry the milk to create coconut powder for cooking purposes.

Coconut oil is also used for cooking. There are other household and industrial users of coconut – for instance shells are used as firewood and ornamentation.

Coconut producers are demanding a subsidy from the government – currently subsidies are given to the rice, tea and rubber sectors.

But, Fernando says that even if subsidies are given, the cost of production won’t fall. “Labour costs are high and you also find the middleman who buys cheap from the farmer and sells it at a high price to the consumer,” he said.

He also blames institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for encouraging a policy of food imports.

“We can produce our own food without costly fertilizer and through ecological farming. We can create home gardens but the policies should be right,” Fernando said.

In the past few years, there has been an ongoing debate over food production – whether Sri Lanka should import cheaper food rather than producing it locally at a higher cost. Rice – the country’s staple food – eggs, chicken and a range of vegetables and lentils are cheaper to import than produce locally.

Harsha de Silva, an economist and opposition parliamentarian, believes stable prices will help farmers and for that he suggests the creation of an agricultural exchange. “Farmers need to have information on prices and demand, three to six months ahead so that they can prepare,” de Silva says.

He says Sri Lanka should move away from what he calls a ‘command and control’ economy where commodities are grown at high cost. “China and India are moving away from this model,” he said.

Sri Lanka farmers are held back despite receiving government subsidies because other productions inputs are costly, de Silva says. Also agriculture markets are inefficient and land is not a marketable commodity – with the government controlling or managing over 80 percent of the land in Sri Lanka.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Sep 2 2010 (IPS)

The ordeal of a Sri Lankan domestic worker whose Saudi Arabian employer allegedly drove nails and metal wires into her body has sent alarm bells ringing among government officials and activists, but how such abuses can be stopped remain far from clear.

“This is a bit of a problem. Maybe we need to look at some new protective measures,” said Mangala Randeniya, deputy general manager at the state-owned Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), which looks after the overseas deployment of this South Asian island nation’s workers.

The widely reported case of 50-year-old L P D Ariyawathi, who returned to Sri Lanka on Aug. 21 with 20 nails and metal wires in her body, has triggered protests outside the Saudi Arabian embassy here.

After President Mahinda Rajapaksa ordered a full investigation into the Ariyawathi case, SLBFE officials flew to Riyadh on Aug. 30 to persuade Saudi authorities to take action against the employer and discuss issues facing migrant workers.

This latest case may be the most bizarre thus far, but it is not the first and will not be last, given that this South Asian island nation has 1.5 million overseas workers, of whom 1.2 million work in Saudi Arabia. Majority of them are women working in private homes as domestic workers.

But Lakshan Dias, a lawyer who is chairman of the Colombo- based South Asian Network for Refugees, IDPs and Migrant Workers, says Ariyawathi’s plight provides a opportunity for the Sri Lankan government to step up pressure on labour- receiving countries to fulfill international conventions against torture and others respecting the rights of migrant workers.

Saudi Arabia has signed the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention against Torture but with some reservations, he says.

“Putting pressure on governments won’t necessarily mean we will lose markets,” he said, arguing that recently the SLBFE banned the deployment of Sri Lankan domestic workers in Jordan because agents there were paying less than the prescribed minimum wage of 200 U.S. dollars per month.

But while Sri Lanka has bilateral agreements on migrant labour with Kuwait and Jordan, it does not have one with Saudi Arabia.

Likewise, Sri Lanka, like many other labour-exporting countries, has signed the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families. But many labour-receiving nations, like Saudi Arabia, have not signed it.

With little certainty over how justice can be obtained in Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka’s bureau of foreign employment has taken the responsibility of compensating Ariyawathi with a house and cash. It says it plans to fly her to Saudi Arabia in case her presence is required for an investigation there.

Nimalka Fernando, a women’s rights activist and spokeswoman for the Colombo-based Women’s Alliance for Peace and Democracy, says the government drags its feet over the protection of domestic workers, which the country has been exporting for three decades.

“Sri Lankan domestic workers are getting harassed almost daily in some part of the world but our officials are slow in responding,” she said. “It was horrifying that the Foreign Minister G L Peiris met the Saudi ambassador in Colombo to register a complaint in the Ariyawathi case only on Tuesday (Aug. 31), almost 10 days after the victim returned and the storywas splashed all over the newspapers.”

She said rights groups plan to file a complaint with the U.N. Expert Group on Migrant Workers in Geneva on the torture of Ariyawathi. “We are also canvassing for all labour- receiving countries where Sri Lankans work to ratify the ILO Convention Against Torture and enforce it,” she added.

But Dias says that what happens to efforts to seek legal address in Saudi Arabia, where this is first case of abuse of this kind for Sri Lanka, is up in the air. If the courts move and issue a ruling in favour of the migrant worker, it could be precedent case for the future.

He adds that judicial intervention – getting a ruling and policy from the courts – might be more effective than working through existing laws.

For instance, Dias has filed a fundamental rights petition in Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court on behalf of a Sri Lankan worker who was duped into signing a second contract with a job agent, one where the job designation was changed from the original contract and the salary reduced. This worker returned to Sri Lanka a few months after arriving in Qatar, where he had been forced to work as a labourer although he was a skilled plumber, and then fell ill.

The victim is demanding not only compensation but a ruling from the court that the government should have a compensation formula for all workers in distress.

Ariyawathi’s case has drawn as much attention as much as what happened to Rizana Nafeek, the underage domestic worker who was trafficked into Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death on Jun. 16, 2007 for the alleged murder of an infant in her care. In jail since May 2005, Nafeek’s sentence has been suspended in view of an appeal.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jul 15 2010 (IPS)

Tourists taking in the sun and sand in the idyllic Maldives may be forgiven if they are unaware of the political developments in this country, even when President Mohamed Nasheed’s government teetered on the brink of collapse recently.

After all, tourism, which is the country’s biggest revenue earner, is virtually isolated on some 80 of the country’s 1,100 islands. Access to many of its resorts – most of the Maldives’ islands are uninhabited – takes travel of anything between 30 minutes to several hours by boat.

“The resorts are so far away from the capital (Male), that tourists and staff in the resorts know little that is happening or what is going on. On the resort islands, it’s a world of its own and absolute relaxation,” explained Malin Hapugoda, managing director of Sri Lanka’s Aitken Spence Hotels Group, which has six tourism properties in the Indian Ocean country.

But behind the veneer of leisure and recreation in this tropical paradise lies the fact that the Maldives, which lies next to its closest friends and allies Sri Lanka and India, is finding its transition to democracy quite a bumpy one since a November 2008 poll ousted President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and ended his 30-year iron-fisted rule. That first multi-party democratic poll was won by Nasheed, a former political prisoner who promised democratisation and a campaign against corruption in this country of 309,000 people.

But on top of problems like the global economic slowdown and the impact of climate change, domestic political squabbles have been preoccupying Nasheed. The main opposition parties, which have control of Parliament, had been blocking important bills on privatisation and loans, making it virtually impossible for the government led by Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party to function, government officials say.

This came to a head on Jun. 29, when the Cabinet resigned en masse and complained to the President that it was impossible to function with a hostile Parliament, dominated by the opposition Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party and its allies that include supporters of the former president.

As it is, the ruling party can muster just 30 votes against the opposition’s 35, while the balance of 12 independents generally swing in favour of the opposition when voting on bills.

Some of the government’s biggest projects like as the public-private partnership to develop the airport had been stalled by the deadlock in parliament. Amid this deadlock, which raised questions about where governance was headed in the tiny country, Sri Lanka – itself facing a number of challenges after the end of its military defeat of Tamil separatists last year – mediated in the crisis in its neighbouring country.

On Jul. 7, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa visited the Maldives at Nasheed’s request and met all conflicting parties, after which a committee of six members of Parliament was appointed to resolve the dispute. On Jul. 8, Nasheed reappointed his 13-member Cabinet.

But more challenges lie ahead, including Maldives’ economic woes that the government will to work on with the opposition, even as people expect the democratic transition to deliver more benefits.

Nasheed’s pro-democracy government is grappling with a high budget deficit and a bloated civil service, both remnants of the previous regime.

The government is constrained by limits in commercial borrowings set up by the International Monetary Fund, which has stepped in with a 92 million U.S. dollar bailout package. In addition, plans to privatise services in transportation, health care and airports, in a bid to cut spending, have been stalled by the opposition.

“It’s hard getting used to this for most people, and civil-service pay cuts, plus a rise in power rates, are unpleasant measures to the people,” a woman activist who declined to be named said of the transition in the years after Gayoom.

Workers in the Maldives’ civil service are the highest paid workers in South Asia, earning more than three times than their Sri Lankan counterparts, for instance.

“We try not to take political revenge against corrupt politicians of the former regime because that’s what you don’t do in a democracy. But the government is being blamed for that,” said Mohamed Zuhair, a former journalist and now spokesman for President Nasheed’s office.

Locals were not too happy when, around the time of the recent crisis, the Nasheed government arrested two powerful parliamentary opposition leaders on charges of bribing members of Parliament in a cash-for-vote scandal.

“Change and democracy are not easy to enforce in the Maldives,” an environmentalist remarked in a telephone interview, but requested anonymity.

Still, the country of just 298 square kilometres is rated as the number one business environment in South Asia by World Bank’s ‘Doing Business Indicators’.

Officials say that political difficulties or not, tourists will keep coming to the Maldives. Tourism accounts for a third of its Gross Domestic Product, bringing in more than 500 million dollars annually. More than 655,000 tourists come to the Maldives each year.

“We have a massive plan to develop harbours, roads, infrastructure, in addition to inviting investment on renewable energy projects,” said Mifzal Ahmed, investment advisor at the Maldives Ministry of Economic Development. “In the next 10 years, the Maldives is working toward being a middle-income country where the basic needs of society are provided for.”

He added: “We want to provide value for money to income earners and create a prosperous liberal Muslim country where human rights are protected, there is good gender balance and women’s rights are ensured. That’s the vision of this government.”

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Jul 4 2010 (IPS)

When garment factory workers outside Colombo once organised a noisy protest over a bonus issue, police threatened to file charges – of hostage taking — against them.

The Sri Lankan authorities zeroed in on hostage taking because the workers’ senior managers were inside the factory premises during the protest.

Hostage taking is worlds away from labour-related action, but rights advocates say this example, which occurred five years ago, shows the state’s approach to workers’ rights.

Amid international pressure, the government last year changed plans to use the hostage-taking law against the workers involved in this case. Instead, indictments were filed under regular laws around intimidation and threat against 35 former employees, 33 of whom are women.

“This is the kind of pressure we face in ensuring the rights of workers. Can you believe that these young women were to be charged for hostage taking?” asked Anton Marcus, convenor of the Free Trade Zone and General Services Employees Union.

Trade unions have long complained about the government’s refusal to accede to International Labour Organisation (ILO) rules on the Right of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining in the Workplace.

On Jun. 30, the U.S. government said it had accepted a petition from trade unions, filed by the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) on behalf of Sri Lankan trade unions, to review workers’ rights in the country.

The U.S. action is linked to its annual review of the U.S. Generalised System of Preferences (GSP), in which Sri Lanka and other countries receive trade concessions on exports to the United States. The current 12-month GSP agreement runs until December 2010.

This adds to the pressure the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa is already under. It comes on the heels of human rights concerns expressed by the European Union, which has linked these to its trade concessions for the South Asian island nation.

In fact, a Jul. 1 deadline set by the EU, asking the government to give a written undertaking that it will improve rights concerns, passed without a response from Colombo.

According to Marcus, one of the main complaints in the trade unions’ petition to the U.S. government is the difficulty in forming unions and having collective bargaining agreements between workers and employers in the country.

For instance, he says, there are only four such agreements among the 300- odd factories in the garment sector, a key source of export revenue. Three of them are from one company, he adds. “What about the rest of the garment sector?” Marcus asked.

The lack of space for organising also means that workers can get fired for protesting employers’ actions such as the suspension of trade union activists. This happened in the case of 255 garment workers who protested a colleague’s dismissal some years ago.

“There are clear rules about not sacking workers taking part in a strike but this is not observed,” Marcus said.

Under the U.S. government review of workers’ rights, a public hearing would begin in Washington in August.

The government has been invited to take part. Labour Minister Gamini Lokuge told IPS that he has not received a copy of the AFL-CIO petition, but rejected claims of major violations of workers’ rights.

Ravi Peiris, secretary-general of the Employers’ Federation of Ceylon that represents the bulk of Sri Lankan business, agreed, saying the U.S. review was baseless and unnecessary.

“Most (local) trade unions were politically affiliated and some misuse their bargaining power for incorrect reasons,” Peiris told the ‘Daily Mirror’ newspaper. “Sri Lanka’s labour rights are the best protected in South Asia. I can say with certainty that our labour standards are the best in South Asia.”

U.S. statements have said that the government’s acceptance of the AFL-CIO petition is not a decision to revoke GSP.

“It is the beginning of a formal, collaborative process to work with the Sri Lankan government to address the concerns in the petition and work to improve support of and adherence to workers’ rights,” said Jeff Anderson, U.S. embassy spokesman in Colombo. “GSP privileges will continue throughout the process.”

U.S. officials took pains to say that the labour review was about workers’ rights and not about human rights linked to political issues, although it is clear that Sri Lanka’s overall rights record is under scrutiny. Washington has also raised human rights issues in the past.

“It’s an issue about workers’ rights and not human rights,” Anderson said.

For its part, the EU has made clear that it is tying trade privileges with measures that it believes Sri Lanka needs to put in place to improve its rights record since its military defeat of the Tamil Tigers in May 2009.

It has said that in return for a six-month extension of GSP concessions to the European market, it wants to see Colombo undertake steps such as the re-instatement of independent commissions, removal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the release of political prisoners.

The Rajapaksa government had rejected these earlier.

On Jul.1, the EU said it supported a new U.N. panel to review the human rights situation in the country.

The defeat of the Tigers ended a near 30-year campaign for an independent homeland for minority Tamils in this majority Sinhalese nation. Since then, Rajapaksa has come under intense international pressure over human rights violations, especially relating to the last stages of the war. He has repeatedly denied these accusations.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
MALÉ, Jun 30 2010 (IPS)

When students walk into the Majeediya Boys School in this capital of the Maldives every morning, they are invariably drawn to the digital notice board in the courtyard that carries important announcements.

Similar facilities inside the classrooms have sparked increased interest in learning among the students.

“Attention and interest (in their studies) has increased since we began digital learning,” notes Zushan Kamaldeen, the school’s deputy principal.

Since March the island nation on the Indian Ocean has gone a step further to improve the education system by experimenting with digital classrooms.

Majeediya, the country’s oldest school at 83 years, is the first digitalised or information technology (IT)-structured learning facility in the country. The Ministry of Education says it plans to replicate this pilot project in other schools.

Lessons are taught through multimedia in every classroom inside the 1,100- strong school, which has classes from Grades 8 to 10 (the General Certificate of Education-Ordinary Level or GCE OL).

“All attention is on the I-Board or Smart-Board, as the ‘white’ board in the classroom is called during lessons. Students are more interested (to learn) now,” says Kamaldeen.

Information that needs to be conveyed to the students’ parents is sent using IT such as through SMS (short message service) and sometimes e-mail as the school moves to becoming a complete IT zone of education. The entire school is a WIFI-enabled zone, where teachers often use laptops.

State minister of education Ahamed Ali Malik says the Maldives has done well in the sphere of education since it has achieved universal primary enrollment.

The Maldives, far ahead of its bigger neighbours – Sri Lanka and India – in achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the scheduled year of 2015, has reached universal access to primary education.

According to the ‘MDG Report’ of the U.N. Development Programme, the universal primary education “has been achieved with high enrolment rates for boys and girls. A net enrolment ratio of 100 percent has been achieved for both girls and boys in the Maldives.”

Malik says all children at the secondary level are going to school as well, which means “children have 10 years of education in the Maldives without any difficulty,” he tells IPS.

“Historically, the love for education (in the Maldives) is very great. People want their children to be educated. The national education budget has been high for a long time,” Malik says.

Deputy education minister Abdulla Nazeer says the government’s main focus now is on improving the quality of education across the country.

In fact, he says, the government has adopted the use of quality assurance indicators in teaching as part of measures to upgrade the standard of education in the country. “The new framework is to maintain and control teacher standards,” he says.

The government is also vigorously enhancing teacher training programmes and recruiting more local teachers, he adds.

Another ambitious target is to steadily improve the pass rate at the GCE OL examination, which was pegged at 27 percent of some 8,000 students who took the test in 2008. It then rose to 32 percent in 2009 and is expected to hover around 40 percent this year.

The target is a 60 percent pass rate to be achieved over five years to 2013, which coincides with the term of President Mohamed Nasheed.

Plans are also afoot to increase the entry of students into the GCE Advanced Level (AL) – an entry requirement to university degree courses – to 60 percent from 20 percent of those who pass the OL examination. Another plan is to provide students who pass the OL but do not advance into the GCE (AL) with two years of vocational training and gradually build an educated and skilled workforce.

Yet, for all its achievements within the education sector, government is still looking for an effective solution to the incidence of school dropouts, especially among Maldivian youth who have completed the GCE (OL).

Deputy minister Nazeer says some 27,000 to 30,000 young people are idling in society without jobs, some of who have resorted to crime and drugs. These comprise around 1 percent of the Maldivian population of 300,000.

“We want to create an environment where we could keep back students who drop out after the OLs in vocational training courses, which would eventually help them to get jobs that expats have at the moment,” he adds.

There are around 80,000 expatriates in the Maldives working in the education, tourism, health and construction sectors, says Malik.

He admits some major education reforms have met with resistance from certain groups, particularly from the opposition parties, citing, for instance, the costs involved.

“We are going through new social change and some of the reforms are radical,” he says. “It would take some time for people to realize the benefits and advantages.”

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
MALÉ, Jun 24 2010 (IPS)

Authorities in the Maldives view women’s issues as a core human rights problem and are keen to tackle them head on, but cultural and religious issues often stand in the way.

“No doubt the government of President Mohamed Nasheed recognises many problems and is willing to tackle them, but there’s limited ability to do so because of deep-rooted cultural and religious issues,” according to a Maldivian journalist, who declined to be named.

Member of parliament Eva Abdulla, who belongs to Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) – which won power in May 2009, thus ending the 30- year-old reign of dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom – said the government firmly believes in affirmative action policies benefiting women.

“The President has called for gender mainstreaming in both formulating and implementing government policies,” she said. She stressed, however, that lack of staff and resources are undermining Nasheed’s good intentions.

Particularly worrying, she said, is the growing religious extremism in the Maldives and its impact on the lives of Maldivian women, who comprise around 48 percent of the country’s population of around 340,000.

“Religion is all too often used as an excuse to limit women,” she added.

Originally Buddhists, Maldivians were converted to Sunni Islam in the mid- 12th century.

Abdulla believes the government and civil society as well as the media need to proactively engage in dealing with the rise in extremism and take tangible steps toward tackling “the adverse affect this will have on the lives of women in the country.”

While women have equal opportunities and there are some very strong females at leadership levels, they are rarely at the top, according to local journalists who spoke to IPS.

Workplace issues such as sexual harassment persist. Recently, the chief executive officer of the state-owned Bank of Maldives fled the country following allegations of this nature, they added.

Still another issue confronting women is domestic violence. Spousal rape is not a crime, and reporting of rape is rare, according to women’s rights advocates in the Maldives.

Maldives has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, with 10.97 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants, according to the United Nations. Little wonder it is common for women in this small island nation on the Indian Ocean to be married four to five times, since Islam permits divorce and marriages are not considered as a family affair but an individual choice, according to female activists.

But the biggest worry in recent months, they said, is that religious extremism is taking root and having a serious impact on women.

“Religious lectures are growing and there’s some government support for these foreign preachers (who speak in such events),” said a female journalist and activist.

The journalist, who declined to be named for fear of incurring the wrath of extremist groups, said that in one of these gatherings, Jamaican-born Canadian Muslim preacher Bilal Phillips proposed that Sharia laws be the foundation of governance, and cited the need to increase religious education, for women to cover themselves fully, and promote polygamy.

“These extremists want women to be restricted to the home,” said a female judicial activist as she puffed on a cigarette while garbed in denim pants – looking and sounding every inch the epitome of liberalism – while three other women, who shared her views, looked on in agreement.

The activist added that she and her colleagues were deeply concerned that the government’s inability to tackle extremism could eventually subjugate women.

She and her group told IPS that while the Maldives is a 100 percent Muslim country, it did not mean “we must have 100 percent Sharia laws here.” They also expressed fear that extremism from some Islamic fundamentalist countries has begun to spread to small nations like the Maldives.

They claimed the Adaalath Party, a member of Nasheed’s MDP coalition and the main, stridently religious party in the government, has been supportive of extremist views being propagated in the Maldives.

President Nasheed conceded that religious extremism is an issue but said that since the country has been fed on a diet of religion for more than 30 years, it is not easy to turn it overnight into a liberal Muslim society.

He told IPS that his government hopes to anchor itself to a religious-oriented middle ground. “Let the country go along with (the prevailing view) for awhile and at the same time strengthen civil society and other liberal ideas and by and large make society freer,” he said.

In the meantime, said Abdulla, women continue to be under-represented at the decision-making level, with only one female Cabinet minister while only 6 percent of parliamentarians are women.

The MDP led the campaign for pro-democracy reforms some years, which saw many campaigners, including Nasheed, being jailed for many months during Gayoom’s presidency. The end of the Gayoom era generated a lot of reform expectations, especially on human rights, among the people, including women. But the road ahead is not all that easy, he said.

“The kind of expectations that were raised is beyond the reach of anyone within a short period of time. The last year, in particular, has been a non- starter. It took us about eight months to get a good grip on government,” the President said.

Yet, he said, his administration is already making major strides toward change, including the grant of a health insurance scheme to single mothers.

“If we fast-forward to the future, then we could see that we have achieved something,” said Nasheed.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
MALÉ, Jun 14 2010 (IPS)

The Maldives Islands, fast gaining a reputation for ‘walking the talk’ as it raises its tiny island voice in the climate change discourse, has launched an action plan to phase out hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) by 2020, or 10 years ahead of other countries and the target set by an international agreement known as the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

The government said work has begun on measures needed to effect this change, which includes bringing in legislation for a course of action that would reduce, minimise and eventually end the use of greenhouse gases in air conditioners.

The Maldives – an archipelago of more than 1,000 islands in the Indian Ocean – has also announced that it would be carbon neutral by 2020, again years ahead of other countries.

Minister of Transport, Housing and Environment Mohamed Aslam said some of the steps being taken to begin the phase-out process includes providing directions to government agencies and preparing a database on HCFC equipment.

“We are also targeting small industry and preparing guidelines for enforcement,” he told reporters here last week. “All these measures would be included in a detailed programme of work to ensure targets are met by 2020,” he said.

Industry has confirmed its support for this government initiative. Representatives of companies, attending a recent conference here on the phase-out process, said they were working alongside the government in phasing out the use of HCFCs in air conditioners (ACs). “Already we have imported a few HCFC-free ACs, and the response is good,” said one executive.

Used mostly in air conditioners, HCFCs depletes the ozone layer and contributes to global warming, experts say. In 2007 the international community took an important step towards phasing out these refrigerant gases.

President Mohamed Nasheed, who won power in November 2008 and ousted Maumoom Abdul Gayoom, who ruled over this island nation with an iron fist for 30 years, is the man behind the Maldives’s success on the world stage as a campaigner for environmental change – while making that change happen at home.

“Foreign governments are now listening to me fairly intensely and also inviting me to speak more often on the environment,” the President told IPS in an interview at his modest home in this capital. “Europe is supportive of our environment efforts, but we have a long way to go with the U.S.”

The Maldives is the first country to receive United Nations funding – a one million U.S. dollar grant – under the Montreal Protocol to implement the phase-out of HCFCs.

The lowest country on the planet, with islands just seven feet above water, is leading the way in climate change, with Nasheed campaigning on behalf of all small island states, saying this is a “human rights and a right to live” issue. “Going green is not only ecologically sound but also economically beneficial.”

Across the Maldives, everyone is clued into global warming and sea level rise. Fathimah Reema, assistant director at the Environmental Protection Agency, cited a survey conducted by the agency showed sea erosion topped the list of public awareness of environmental issues, followed by waste, the ozone depletion and climate change.

“Regular reporting of these issues by the media has helped make people aware of these concerns,” she said.

Mifzal Ahmed, an advisor on investments at the Ministry of Economic Development, said the government is promoting only sustainable development projects. “The government policy is that that all investments should be sustainable. We don’t want someone to come and put up a coal power plant for example,” he told IPS.

“We want to give a positive message on climate change. We don’t want to be all doom and gloom. We want to say the technology exists to solve these problems; it’s just a matter of investing in these technologies.”

He said the Maldives wants to showcase these technologies, and any company can come and invest in these environment-friendly technologies. “If you want to make the Maldives your poster chart, by all means do so,” he added.

Nasheed, dubbed the ‘rock star’ of climate change, said that during his trip to Australia earlier this month, he visited the Australian National University, which has been developing cheaper solar power technology since 1971.

“This university has been preparing a prototype to produce solar power at 10 Australian cents (less than one U.S. cent) per minute since the energy crisis. They have finished everything – all the scientific research has been done,” he said. “However, no one is touching it because all the money is with coal producers and fossil fuel companies.”

According to Atul Bagai, regional network coordinator of the U.N. Environmetal Programme based in Bangkok, Maldives is the first country to achieve so much out of the 145 countries that have agreed to the HCFC phase-out programme.

“It shows the efficiency of the government and the public-private partnerships in industry,” he said, adding that by the time Maldives phases out its HCFC usage, the other countries would still be using these destructive gases.

“We can’t go on forever with small steps,” argued Minister Aslam, referring to his country’s urgency and speed in dealing with climate change and its adverse effects on the environment.

“(The Maldives) is where we have lived for generations and where we will continue to be. You can’t think of relocating (to other countries). No one wants to leave,” he noted.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, May 26 2010 (IPS)

Relations between Sri Lanka and European Union (EU), which turned frosty around six months back, appear to be thawing as the government makes a last ditch stand to regain a crucial trade concession that has been suspended over human rights issues hounding the south Asian island state.

A high-powered government delegation led by Sri Lanka’s Attorney General Mohan Peiris and including Finance Secretary Dr P.B. Jayasundera and Foreign Secretary Romesh Jayasinghe returned home over the weekend following talks last week with EU officials in Brussels, considered the regional bloc’s de facto capital.

The meeting was the second in two months over the possible resumption of a tax free trade pact between Sri Lanka and the EU.

“The discussions have been cordial and held in a constructive atmosphere,” said Bernard Savage, Head of Delegation to Sri Lanka and the Maldives from the European Commission, declining to give details of the talks.

However, in what western diplomats, who declined to be named, see as a “refreshing attitude from Sri Lanka,” the Sri Lankan official team, during their Brussels meeting, invited the EU to be partners in a three-year post-war development project costing 3 billion U.S. dollars that is to be launched soon, according to a foreign ministry statement released to the media after the talks.

The statement added that Jayasundera made the offer during a meeting of the delegation with Dr Kristalina Georgiva, European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response.

In January, the EU suspended Sri Lanka’s tax free exports to Europe for a range of products, including garments, over Colombo’s refusal to cooperate with an EU probe team organised in mid-2009 to ascertain whether the country had implemented 27 international conventions on human and labour rights, environment and good governance. The government said such a probe was a violation of the country’s sovereignty.

The concessions will continue until mid-July under a six-month grace period which the EU granted in the hope that the dispute would be sorted out.

Rohan Masakorala, secretary general of the Joint Association of Apparel Forum, an umbrella group representing hundreds of garment exporters, said European buyers have been pinning down Sri Lankan manufacturers on the trade concessions, which remain uncertain. “Buyers are repeatedly asking us whether tax free imports would be allowed,” Masakorala said.

Relations between Sri Lanka and Europe have never been as bitter as they are now, essentially over allegations by human rights groups and the West that hundreds of civilians were killed or wounded during the fighting between government troops and the secessionist Tamil rebels in the final stages of the conflict.

More than 80,000 combatants and civilians died throughout the decades- long war while thousands more were wounded or maimed. The rebels were finally defeated in May 2009, ending a near 30-year-long bruising battle for some autonomy for minority Tamils.

The Sri Lankan government said the EU was leveraging on these human rights accusations to withdraw the trade benefits, which benefit the garment industry the most. The EU denied the charge, saying the suspension was purely based on the rules of the Generalised System of Preferences Plus, which sets out the criteria by which a country could enjoy such benefits.

Garments are Sri Lanka’s biggest export, of which 60 percent goes to the EU and the balance to the United States. The sector stands to lose the most if the concessions finally end in July.

But optimism over the ongoing talks and that they would end positively with a resumption of the trade benefits has been growing in recent weeks.

“I think there is a good chance we can get these concessions but the government should also be realistic and give clear assurances that ILO (International Labor Organization) conventions would be implemented,” noted Anton Marcus, general secretary of a trade union representing workers in the country’s free trade zones, where many garment factories are located.

Earlier this month the government announced steps to bring about national reconciliation and healing in the aftermath of the war. These include relaxing some emergency regulations that have remained in place even after the war ended and appointing a Reconciliation Commission on the lines of South Africa’s Truth Commission to give voice to the war victims and facilitate a healing process for the nation.

According to the foreign ministry, these measures were explained by the Sri Lankan delegation to EU officials during last week’s talks in the Belgian capital.

Most garment industrialists, though worried about a possible end to the concessions, are confident that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

“I don’t think the EU would want to jeopardise the jobs of over 300,000 people who depend on this industry,” said the chief executive officer of one of Sri Lanka’s largest garment firms, who declined to be named.

“I am sure these concessions would be won back. Recent efforts by the government have been aimed at wooing back the EU,” said another apparel exporter, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Apr 29 2010 (IPS)

Though the global economic crisis has eased in most of Asia, latest reports about falling demand for garments in markets like Europe and the United States have become a new source of concern to Sri Lanka’s troubled garment labour force.

Garments, the island state’s biggest industrial export, are suffering a double whammy: the economic recession and uncertainty over tax-free trade to Europe. The sector employs close to 300,000 people with another 200,000 dependent on it.

According to T.M.R. Raseedeen, general-secretary of the National Association for Trade Union Research and Education (NATURE), more than 50,000 workers lost their jobs in the 2008-09 period as some 50 mostly garment factories closed due to loss of orders.

“These are official figures. I think the situation is much worse,” he said, adding that the plight of the garment workers would be one of the many slogans of unions at May Day rallies across Sri Lanka.

Rohan Masakorala, secretary-general of the Joint Apparel Association Forum, an umbrella group representing associations involved in the garment industry, says that what is worrying is that garment exports fell by 20 percent in February 2010 and by a similar percentage in January.

“We are watching March figures and hope there is some pick-up, or we will have a crisis on our hands,” he said, adding that retail markets, particularly in Europe and the United States have not recovered from the crisis and consumer buying has not picked up as anticipated.

With a trade pact providing tax-free imports into the European Union (EU) suspended over the failure of Sri Lanka to adhere to the United Nations conventions on labour and human rights, buyers are putting pricing pressure on suppliers in Sri Lanka.

“Pressure is mounting on pricing (and for local companies to slash margins) as buyers are uncertain whether the tax breaks would continue,” Masakorala says, adding that if this continues, labour will face the brunt of the impact.

Sri Lanka has for many years enjoyed tax-free imports to the EU for a number of items, which are mostly garments. The EU and the United States account for the bulk of Sri Lanka’s garment exports.

Over the past year authorities from both sides have had disagreements over an EU regulation to implement a number of conventions ensuring adherence to labour and human rights, a condition that countries entitled to these benefited must observe. In December, the EU said it would withdraw the concessions from July 2010 if Sri Lanka failed to present a roadmap to implement these conventions.

Masakorala says it is mostly small and medium-scale factories that have suffered the brunt of the economic crisis. Last year the number of garment factories fell to 250 from 300 in 2008.

The crisis in the garment sector is one of the biggest labour issues today. A leading trade union on Thursday said the challenges faced by workers were enormous owing to the “ramifications of the global economic crisis and the anti-worker measures of the authorities to bail out capitalist employers”.

The leftist Ceylon Federation of Labour in a statement said Sri Lankan authorities were placating business interests and capitalist employers by implementing a series of measures to create a flexible labour market. “Labour flexibility in essence means turning workers into dispensable commodities,” it said.

Last year, the government said it planned to introduce a five-day week, nine- hour work day, with Saturday off, as employers said they were struggling to keep loss-making factories open due to falling orders. Unions protested over the move but had no objection if workers agreed to such a move.

Another step was to allow failed companies to close under an Unemployment Benefits Insurance Scheme. Yet both steps are yet to be enforced due to disagreements between unions, employers and government authorities.

In the bigger firms, though not as badly affected as the smaller factories, top-level staff have been offered voluntary retirement packages and in some cases workers have also been retrenched, says Ravi Peiris, secretary-general of the Employers Federation, which represents a number of employers.

NATURE’S Raseedeen says that while the May Day was born as a result of workers succeeding in demands for an eight-hour working day, which became the very first International Labour Organization convention adopted in 1919, Sri Lankan authorities are working against these fundamentals.

“The other danger is that if the nine-hour working day is enforced, it could be a permanent feature rather than a temporary measure to tide over a crisis,” he says.

Unions say if workers are to work an extra hour a day, they should be paid overtime or adequately compensated.

Workers are also furious with the government for failing to fulfill a promise made during the January 2010 presidential poll to increase wages.

“The cost of living is rising sharply and workers are struggling. We are yet to see this promise being implemented and we intend to raise this issue vociferously during May Day rallies,” said Anton Marcus, leader of another prominent union in the garment industry

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Apr 26 2010 (IPS)

Two cyclists from the minority Tamil community are shooed away by government soldiers as they approach this northern Sri Lankan city’s only Buddhist temple while President Mahinda Rajapaksa is paying a visit.

But when a family from the majority Sinhalese family ambles toward the guards, they are treated more amiably.

These twin incidents during Rajapaksa’s rare visit to Jaffna on Apr. 1 illustrate the contrasting ways in which soldiers from an army made up largely of Sinhalese treat the majority and minority ethnic groups.

Right through the late 1970s, Tamils claimed discrimination from the majority community. In 1977 Tamil parties swept the polls in the northern capital of Jaffna on the call for a separate homeland. A few years later, Tamil militancy emerged and led to almost three decades of civil war.

Many fear the government still has a long way to go in winning the hearts and minds of the Tamil community, which dominates Jaffna.

“There is nothing we can do,” explained a veteran Anglican priest, who declined to be named, when asked whether the government was bending backwards to win the support of the Tamils.

Tamils are the largest minority group in Sri Lanka, representing about 13 percent of the country’s total population of 20 million. Many of them live in Jaffna, considered the seat of Tamil nationalism and the second most important city of Sri Lanka, next to Colombo.

The end in May 2009 of a bitter conflict in which Tamil rebels sought to carve out a separate state for their minority community triggered huge business interest in Jaffna, virtually untouched by the economic liberalisation that Sri Lanka pursued in 1977.

Nearly a year after the war ended, burnt out, shell-shocked buildings can be seen lying side by side with spanking new ones for banks or financial services as Colombo firms rush to grab a share of the new business opportunities in Jaffna.

But youngsters and city elders clamor for a different kind of development. “We need to be able to own rather than be bystanders (to development),” said a city businessman, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal.

The government has set up a task force headed by Basil Rajapaksa, brother of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Minister for Economic Development, to oversee development in the north.

Nirmala (not her real name), a high school student, said banks and financial services are not helpful to the Jaffna Tamils.

“A lot of banks setting up branches here are employing people from Colombo. We don’t have jobs. On the other hand, the banks take our deposits, but getting a loan is difficult because the banks want collateral, which we don’t have because our properties have been destroyed or have been taken over by the army for military purposes,” she said.

But Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal told IPS that quite a few Jaffna youngsters were being employed in new bank branches that were being opened in Jaffna.

Nirmala was one of a group of 30 16- to 17-year-old high school students who met with IPS recently to discuss their future in an environment where livelihood and employment opportunities are scant. They were unanimous in saying that the people of Jaffna are not part of the development that the government is carving out for the north.

Most of them want to go abroad for studies and live there permanently. “There is no future here. We will always be second-class citizens,” said Arul. Perceptions of widespread insensitivity of the Colombo establishment to the city residents became more pronounced when a group of businessmen and bankers flew into the city in late March to lay the foundation stone for a new 80-room hotel being built by a Colombo bank.

Few Tamils from Jaffna were invited to the event and all the speeches were delivered in English even if the majority of the 700,000 people speak only Tamil. Furthermore, local residents questioned the location of the hotel as it is close to a sacred Hindu temple, visited by millions of Tamils every year.

“How can you sell alcohol or meat in a sacred location?” asked Arudpragasam Sivathamby, a taxi driver. Outside the same temple premises, dozens of Sinhala traders are doing business, in some cases displacing the Tamil merchants, causing resentment among the minority ethnic group.

“This is causing a huge problem,” said Tamil parliamentarian Suresh Premachandran.

Development is only seen in the form of banks, finance companies and consumer firms opening up in Jaffna while job-creating industries or factories are still inexistent. Some roads are being developed while an old railway line from the Sinhalese-dominated south is being repaired.

Tamils are hoping for a greater role in power sharing. However, Dr. S. I. Keethaponcalan, a political scientist from the University of Colombo, said that is not a priority for the government at the moment. “The government won a commanding majority at the recent parliamentary polls, and trying to appease the Tamils is not the biggest priority at the moment,” he declared.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Apr 20 2010 (IPS)

Whenever Sri Lankan rights activist Shereen Xavier attends a meeting related to her work in this war-battered northern capital, she makes sure to be dressed in a sari, a traditional gown worn by South Asian women.

“To be accepted by society here, you need to be seen in a sari,” says Xavier, executive director of the Home for Human Rights (HHR). But back in the confines of her office, the Western-educated Xavier feels comfortable enough to wear trousers.

That she is able to do even that is considered a step forward for women here in Jaffna, Sri Lanka’s most conservative city.

It is among the indications that, thanks to the efforts of the Tamil Tiger rebels who were defeated by the government last year after nearly three decades of armed conflict, women here are slowly being freed from the strict roles and ways imposed on them by tradition.

Although the Tigers failed in their military conflict to create a separate state for minority Tamils – a conflict that took the lives of more than 70,000 soldiers, rebels and civilians – they helped women here take a closer look at themselves and take on roles and ways other than those dictated by society.

For sure, many women had been forced to step up simply because of personal tragedy. Among them are the war widows, estimated to be in the thousands. There are also households where the husband survived the conflict, but in which the wife became the de facto head.

“They had to take the lead role,” says Xavier of many women here and elsewhere at the height of the Tigers’ uprising. “Even women whose husbands were alive had an extended role. For example, if someone came looking for a male in the house or if there was a commotion outside their home, the men stayed indoors while the females ventured out.”

At the time, many young men were dragged from their homes and forced into the rebel movement or arrested by the military on suspicion of being a rebel supporter or part of the Tigers.

One homemaker here echoes Jaffna elders in describing how the women coped. “They had a double burden: running a family and taking decisions. Most women were comfortable with only the first, traditional task.”

But eventually, even the rest of society began to give women more space. In many homes these days, women have moved to making decisions in matters such as health and education of family members, which used to be the men’s preserve.

Xavier stresses how the caste structure collapsed under the writ of the rebels, most of who came from lower-caste families – including their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Many high-caste Tamils were forced to rethink caste divisions, as young Tiger rebels, many of whom were low-caste and used to be treated with disdain, were now affectionately called ‘thambi’ (our boys) as the struggle gathered momentum and support.

The rebels, moreover, romanticised the insurgency as a chance for the youth to free themselves from societal obligations and parental pressure. Even females were welcomed into the Tiger fold; young, shy village girls turned into spirited young women, dressed in trousers and shirts, and carrying guns with authority.

Comments Xavier: “Women had this romantic notion of freedom from emancipation and were looking for a taste of equality, which the rebels were providing. It was an illusion of equality.”

“At one time (too),” she recalls, “we had role models in (rebel) women like Adele Balasingham who could sit alongside her husband, Anton, and speak out as an equal, which was unheard of in Jaffna society.”

Balasingham was the Tigers’ head strategist while his wife Adele, an Australian, was the de facto chief of the group’s women’s wing. Anton Balasingham died some years back due to health complications; Adele, a nurse by profession, now lives in Britain.

Xavier herself returned to Jaffna in 2007, two years before the defeat of the Tigers, to carry on her father’s work as a civil rights lawyer. The organisation she is now with campaigns for the rights of Tamils and provides them free legal help.

She says this country’s women are gradually trying to carve out more space for themselves. “However,” she says, “it will take a long time for women to be as free as the rest of Sri Lanka.”

No woman here wears jeans or trousers except for a few Western-educated Tamils who work here or visit from abroad, non-Tamil non-government workers, and hundreds of Sinhalese, Sri Lanka’s ethnic majority, who have been visiting the north in droves since the end of the war.

But at the same time, a few women can be seen riding scooters, a sight quite familiar some 30 years ago.

At a girl’s hostel in the city, young women wear shorts – but only within the perimetres of the boarding house. Says a teacher at the hostel who declines to be named: “Sometime back, women unable to afford saris wore skirts and that created a huge row among elders. This is still a patriarchal society though some liberation of women is taking place.”

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Apr 13 2010 (IPS)

About eight months back, delivery boys for this northern city’s main newspaper were accompanied on their rounds by government soldiers – the first time a Sri Lankan broadsheet was being delivered under armed guard.

Today, almost a year since the war against the Tamil secessionists ended in May 2009, life for Jaffna journalists is slowly changing for the better.

“We were facing threats from some armed groups and we had to seek protection,” recalled M V Kanamylenathan, chief editor of the Tamil-language ‘Uthayan’ newspaper. Ironically, its protector – the army – was also accused – alongside other sectors – of intimidating this newspaper group in the once war-battered northern capital.

“We have gone through hell,” said the newspaper’s deputy editor, G Kuganathan. “Things are slightly improving now,” he confirmed. These days the military is polite and even apologetic when seeking to publish a press release, he added.

In the past, “they would demand publication [of a press statement] and issue veiled threats if it didn’t appear in the newspapers the next day,” Kuganathan told IPS. The military still controls Jaffna, though.

Described as having the most vibrant newspaper industry outside the island capital of Colombo, Jaffna also faced the most serious threat to journalists in this South Asian country, particularly at the height of the 25-year battle against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The ‘Uthayan’ and two other newspapers in the northern city that has an estimated population of 750,000 had faced the worst forms of intimidation and threats to the media. Journalists and media workers were killed and newspaper offices bombed.

During the bloody conflict with the LTTE, journalists across Sri Lanka were under pressure from all sides, including the government and the rebels.

At least 15 journalists and media industry workers across the island state were killed beginning in 2006, when one journalist working for an online newspaper disappeared. Another 15 were either abducted or arrested by police based on trumped-up charges.

Yet no one was arrested despite so-called ‘extensive investigations’ by state agencies.

According to Lakshman Gunesekera, a former newspaper editor, Jaffna’s press suffered tremendous pressure from various forces. “They withstood unbelievable pressure,” he said in a phone interview from Colombo.

Pressure on Jaffna’s newspapers, all published in Tamil – the language of the Tamil minority, which is mainly found in northern Sri Lanka – came from government agencies, LTTE militants that controlled the city at different times and Indian peace-keeping forces.

Indian troops came to Sri Lanka in 1987 to help enforce a peace pact between the Sri Lankan government and the rebels. When the pact failed, the foreign force turned their guns on the rebels. Even members of the press were not spared.

“Once a senior Indian officer threatened us with death if we didn’t toe the line,” said Kanamylenathan in his modest newspaper office in Jaffna.

The pressure on all fronts was such that at one point, according to N Parameswaram, a Jaffna freelance journalist who works for the Reuters news agency and some Colombo-based newspapers, four militant groups wanted their stories published as lead articles at the same time. “The editor had to tell them that that would be the first time in the world that a newspaper had four lead stories,” he said.

Two other Jaffna newspapers, though less popular than the ‘Uthayan’, are ‘Valampuri’ and ‘Thinakural’. ‘Valampuri’ is the mouthpiece of the pro- government Eelam People’s Democratic Front.

‘Thinakkural’ is a Colombo-based newspaper with a Jaffna edition. It toes the line of whoever is in charge in Jaffna unlike the ‘Uthayan’, which voices dissent, albeit with some restraint.

Both newspapers suffered threats and intimidation, though to a lesser extent compared to the ‘Uthayan’.

Gunasekera said newspapers have thrived in Jaffna because, next to Colombo, it is a strong socio-cultural centre. “This northern town has the most educated elite (after Colombo) and high literacy, and many want to write or express their views,” he said.

Many of the ‘Uthayan’ journalists left the newspaper following death threats while at least six workers, including two reporters, have been killed since 1985 when the paper started publication. Until tensions eased, the newspaper’s office was bombed at least twice by government jets and Indian peacekeeping forces.

Just before the August 2009 municipal council poll in Jaffna, an unknown group threatened to kill the ‘Uthayan’ workers, including freelance correspondents, if they did not cease publication. The newspaper appealed to the President, who immediately ordered the army to protect the daily.

This led to the unusual situation of armed soldiers on motorbikes accompanying newspaper distributors on their early morning rounds in the city.

“I don’t think anyone has faced the kind of intimidation and threats Jaffna’s journalists have suffered,” noted Chulawansa SriLal, convenor of Sri Lanka’s Free Media Movement, the country’s most powerful media watchdog.

On at least two occasions, the ‘Uthayan’ has won bravery awards from a group of local media organisations. These are no doubt well deserved.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Apr 8 2010 (IPS)

Issues of religious tolerance, the rule of law and freedom of expression in this mainly Buddhist country are being thrown into debate by the detention of a Sri Lankan Buddhist woman who converted to Islam and was writing a book on her conversion.

Sarah Malathi Perera, a 38-year old migrant worker who has lived in Bahrain for 20 years, was detained by police in Colombo under emergency regulations on Mar. 20, ostensibly over a book she had written and published on her conversion to Islam.

But police have since given different versions of the reasons for her detention, saying that the book was offensive to Buddhism or that she was being probed for links to Tamil militants and Musim extremist groups.

On Tuesday, police spokesman Prishantha Jayakody was even more vague. “She has been detained under emergency regulations but I don’t have details as to why she is in detention. Let me check and let you know,” he told IPS. He was the same official who earlier gave different reasons for Perera’s detention.

The incident reflects a cultural and social intolerance that Sri Lankan society has never previously experienced, argues Dayan Jayatillaka, former vice president of the U.N. Human Rights Council and former chairman of the intergovernmental working group on the implementation of the Durban declaration against racism.

“How (else) should we begin to define a country in which an unarmed young woman, a woman who has not harmed anyone, is detained in a police station under emergency laws or anti-terrorism laws, for writing a book, and a book which does not call for violence against anyone?” Jayatillaka said in an interview.

Lakshman Gunasekera, president of the Sri Lanka chapter of the South Asia Free Media Association, says that as journalists, they are concerned that Perera has been arrested under emergency regulations. “Although I have not read her book, this is an issue that concerns freedom of expression,” he said.

He added that this kind of reaction is more often seen in situations of serious religious fundamentalism and extremism like Pakistan, Iran or Afghanistan, where writers have been accused of blasphemy against Islam and subjected to verbal and physical attacks.

“This is a country where all religions are respected and tolerated. So why this intolerance?” said a women’s rights activist who declined to be named. Perera returned to Sri Lanka three months back to settle a land dispute concerning her elderly mother in Colombo. She has said she has analysed the spiritual substance of Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity, and published a book entitled ‘From Darkness to Light: Questions and Answer’.

Sri Lanka’s 20 million people comprises 73.7 percent Buddhists, 10.9 percent Hindus, 7.6 percent Muslims and 6.2 percent Christians, and the rest from smaller ethnic groups. Non-Buddhists have the constitutional right to freely practise their religion.

But in recent years, the Jathika Hela Urumaya or JHU (National Heritage Party), a extreme racist party with little support in the country but with huge influence on President Mahinda Rajapaksa, has along with allied or similar groups been suspected of being behind attacks against largely Christian places of worship.

Perera, who wears a ‘hijab’ (dress that covers the body from head to toe), alleges that her arrest came after the courier company she was planning to use to send her books to Bahrain, tipped off the JHU, which in turn informed the police. JHU officials were not immediately available for comment.

Lakshan Dias, Perera’s lawyer, says his client has been informed that she is being detained on charges of offending Buddhism and possible links to Tamil militants and overseas Muslim militant groups. “She has been told that she has been detained under a 30-day detention order under emergency regulations. She has not been informed when she would be produced before a magistrate,” he said.

Perera’s case points to a breakdown in law and order more than religious intolerance, some say. “People get arrested over some ideosyncratic issue and then once that happens, the system takes over and you can’t get out,” said Jehan Perera, a columnist in the ‘Daily Mirror’ newspaper.

Under the Sri Lankan Penal Code, offences relating to religion include acts such as damaging or defiling a place of worship, uttering words or sounds or making gestures with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings and trespassing in places of worship.

Jayatillake said the response to Perera’s book could have been a critical review of it, not an arrest. “Isn’t this against both Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on freedom of expression as well as the rights and freedoms recognised by the Sri Lankan Constitution? Who decides on arrests like this and what is the law transgressed?” Equally worrisome to some is the government’s use of emergency laws almost a year after its defeat of the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels.

“The Sri Lankan emergency means that people enjoy any personal or legal rights solely at executive convenience and discretion,” said an activist who requested anonymity. “Accordingly, Ms Perera has been detained without trial, charge, bail or much access to family or lawyers and any legal or procedural safeguards.”

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Mar 25 2010 (IPS)

Political manifestos are often met with cynicism and even ridicule, but Sri Lanka’s first such manifesto for women is proving an exception to the rule as rights activists laud its recent launch.

Put forth by the United National Front (UNF), Sri Lanka’s largest opposition group, the manifesto was released on Mar. 15, ahead of the April parliamentary poll.

It is the first time a political party in this South Asian island nation has presented a comprehensive document on women, and many activists say it is one that promises to restore dignity to a group on whom the country depends on but largely ignores.

“This is a huge step forward and what is interesting is that some of the women in the opposition party are those who are active in women’s issues and are concerned,” said Women & Media Collective (WMC) director Kumudini Samuel.

“They have seen and know our demands,” Samuel said of the manifesto’s creators. “In preparing this document, they have looked closely at these issues, which are in many ways a lot of what the women’s movement has been saying over the years.”

“It is something that can be done and is doable,” said Nimalka Fernando, a women’s rights campaigner. “These are issues we have been pushing for a while and I’m impressed by the document and the research that has gone into it.”

At the very least, activists say, the manifesto reflects the depth of contribution women make to Sri Lanka. Noting that more than half of Sri Lanka’s 20.5 million people are women, the document goes on to reel off relevant statistics, including the fact that 54 percent of the country’s professionals are female, as are 58 percent of the university population, and 95 percent of garment industry workers.

About 65 percent of Sri Lankan workers in the Middle East are also women, while the tea sector also comprises a majority of women, the document points out. Sri Lanka’s economy is dependent largely on garments and tea exports, as well as on remittances from migrant workers.

“Women are the backbone of the economy but we are a long way from securing equal rights for them,” said Fernando, who is president of the Tokyo-based International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism and the Women’s Forum for Peace in Sri Lanka.

But changes have been underway, and the manifesto is only one of the results of a seeming rethink going on among political parties regarding women’s rights.

The manifesto of defeated presidential candidate Gen Sarath Fonseka, for instance, promised equal rights to people of different genders.

Commented an activist at Equal Ground, a Colombo-based nongoverment group that respresents lesbians, gays and groups with other sexual preferences: “While the UNF manifesto does have any reference to the rights of minority groups (including lesbians ands gays), in terms of overall women’s rights it’s a good document. We are willing to work with anyone who furthers our rights.”

The UNF women’s manifesto promises the setting up of a women’s bank with an initial capital of five billion rupees (44 million U.S. dollars) for microcredit, micro insurance and housing. Shelters are to be set up for abused women, and daycare centres built to help working mothers.

Some 20 percent of Sri Lankan households are headed by women, who will have access to livelihood grants, the UNF says. Pregnant women will also be entitled to flexible working hours, while female migrant workers will enjoy social protection.

Women workers will be entitled to both equal wage for equal work and equal wage for equal value of work, the manifesto says as well.

Rights groups could not help but compare the UNF’s move with the attempts of the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to address women’s rights. Although it has not prepared a separate manifesto on women, the SLFP has a general one that it presented for the January presidential poll, won by incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

That SLFP document has a section on women that speaks of giving “pride of place to the mother”.

Fernando described the SLFP as patriarchal and feudal in its thinking: “This is not good enough. The SLFP has always looked at women in a role of the traditional family where the mother should be venerated. No one talks of sharing the family burden while the UNF focuses on empowering women.”

She expressed confidence that “the UNF will have more women in parliament. And even if the party loses, it will be actively pushing these issues in the legislature”.

The UNF and SLFP, along with their respective allies, have ruled the country on separate occasions since 1948. Historically, the UNF has done more for women than SLFP, including establishing the women’s bureau and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, as well as pushing for a Women’s Charter.

“The Women’s Charter was an excellent document,” said the WMC’s Samuel. “But just when legislation through a Women’s Rights Bill was being brought in to legalise the structure, the party lost the elections.”

Samuel, though, said that like the ruling party’s section on women in its manifesto, the UNF document on women fails to say how all its proposals would be brought to fruition. “We hope they will find enough sufficient resources to implement these issues,” she said.

Queried on this, a member of the panel that drafted the UNF women’s manifesto said: “While there is some investment, most of it is a re-orientation of policies already there and for which resources have already been allocated. It’s a case of some adjustments in focus and resources.”

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Mar 22 2010 (IPS)

Pressured by the west and international groups over its human right record, the Sri Lankan government is close to finalising a roadmap on safeguarding civil and political liberties.

But the plan has drawn scepticism from human rights activists, who say that this South Asian country has a serious credibility issue in enforcing such a mechanism.

“This will be another document that will be merely on paper and intended to appease the international community and show that Sri Lanka has conformed to U.N. conventions on civil and political rights,” says an activist, who declined to be named,

Non-government organisations (NGOs) say that while they were involved in initial discussions over the formulation of a National Plan on Human Rights, they were excluded in the crafting of the draft plan and are unaware of its contents.

“NGOs were enthusiastic in these discussions and many showed interest despite some cynicism because the government has a credibility issue,” says Jehan Perera, executive director of the National Peace Council (NPC). “The challenge to the government is to make sure these rules are implemented and not merely on paper to fulfill, maybe, a need for funding from the west.”

Earlier last week, Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told reporters here that the National Plan of Action for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights would be announced soon and presented to the international community. But he did not give details, saying only, “This action plan would show our commitment and our determination to minimise, prevent, or even eradicate torture and disappearances.”

Rajeeva Wijesinha, former secretary of the Ministry of Human Rights, also says a draft plan was prepared last November and is being finalised by a committee headed by Attorney General Mohan Peiris. “This is part of an effort which began two years ago with a pledge to the international community to draft a Human Rights Plan on civil and political rights,” says Wijesinha, who resigned from his position a few weeks ago to run in April’s parliamentary poll as a ruling party candidate.

He says the plan now covers a whole range of rights issues including women and children, labour, and Sri Lankan migrant workers.

Since last year, Sri Lanka has been hit by allegations of human rights abuses, particularly those said to have taken place during the last stages of fighting between government troops and Tamils rebels in early 2009, as well as the targeting of human rights activists and journalists.

More than two dozen journalists have fled abroad, fearing repercussions over their reporting. Some rights activists have been named in a ‘hit list’ allegedly prepared by Sri Lankan intelligence agencies.

The government has repeatedly denied these allegations, even as it refused entry last year to European Union (EU) investigators in a probe into Sri Lanka’s implementation of U.N. conventions on human and labour rights.

In the absence of submissions by the government, the investigators concluded that Sri Lanka has failed to conform to U.N. conventions on human rights and labour standards. It recommended that the country not be eligible for a new round of duty-free imports into Europe.

Last month, the EU said Sri Lanka will cease to receive these concessions beginning this August unless there is a firm commitment given to implement these conventions.

Last week, a government delegation, including the Attorney General, met EU officials in Brussels to plead for the restoration of the concessions and assured that the new human rights framework would be announced soon.

The latest furore in this human rights debate is U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s decision to appoint a special panel to advise him on the human rights situation in Sri Lanka, a move that Colombo says is unnecessary.

But at the same time, the government has accused unnamed human rights groups of overstepping their boundaries and being involved in political activities. The government’s NGO Secretariat has sent out letters to some NGOs in the last few weeks, asking them to submit details of their bank accounts.

“This is an illegal request. Only the Central Bank can make such a request,” says one NGO worker whose organisation received such a letter. “Some officials at the secretariat are also believed to have threatened to cancel the visas of expatriate workers if these bank details are not submitted,” he says.

For sure, this was long after NGOs ceased participation in the forming of the rights plan.

Wijesinha himself says that “there was a lot of consultation with civil society and NGOs for several months”, with several committees formed in the run-up to the draft plan.

One NGO worker remarks, though, that most of the government officials who chaired these committees were bureaucrats who were not conversant with rights issues. Comments the worker: “There was a doubt as to the effectiveness of these committees. Nevertheless, NGOs who took part were keen to make representations.”

Some consultants who took part in the making of the human rights plan, however, confirm that the plan now covers many areas.

Says retired United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) official Hiranthi Wijemanna, who is a government consultant on children’s issues: “In terms of children, we have done reasonably well in reducing infant mortality and providing education to all as a right, and also on nutrition. But there may be a need to ensure quality services which this plan will tackle.”

Wijemanna, who was on one of committees that looked at children’s concerns, also says that protection is covered by the plan. She notes, “It’s not merely integrating child combatants (child soldiers recruited by the rebels), but also children who lost one parent or both parents in the conflict and are now housed in state institutions.”

Wijemanna adds that the government next month will set up a special Children’s Court in Colombo to try juvenile cases, which are now handled by the normal courts.

The plan will also have a segment on protecting Sri Lanka’s more than a million citizens – most of them women – who work overseas, according to Sunil Siresena, secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Employment Promotion, and Welfare. He adds: “If migrants register themselves with the government and subscribe to the state-sponsored insurance policy before going abroad, we would provide them protection.”

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Mar 15 2010 (IPS)

The extent of Sri Lanka’s dependence on its one million citizens who work abroad can be gauged from officials who gleefully count the dollars that come in to sustain the country’s economy.

“Last year Sri Lankan workers remitted 3.3 billion (U.S.) dollars, up from 2.9 billion dollars in 2008 and this was despite the global financial crisis,” a palpably pleased L K Ruhunuge, additional general manager at the state- owned Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), told IPS.

“Even though the employment market in the United Arab Emirates has shrunk up (owing to the financial crisis),” he added, “we are lucky because the demand in Saudi Arabia has increased.”

Rights groups, however, are less upbeat over this development. As the government happily monitors the growing remittances from Sri Lankans working overseas, rights advocates say it continues to ignore the persistent abuses endured by its citizens abroad, especially in the Middle East.

The plight of migrant workers is a touchy issue in this South Asian island nation as workers and human rights groups complain that the government is not doing enough to protect its nationals overseas.

Remittances now account for more than 35 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange needs. With an unemployment rate hovering between five percent and six percent in the last five years, the government has been compelled to encourage work migration despite the risks to which its exposes its citizens – especially the women.

Each year, more than 200,000 Sri Lankans venture overseas to work, most of them heading for the Middle East. Official statistics show that 53 percent of this number are women, the majority of them unskilled workers.

Rights advocates say female domestic workers are the most victimised among Sri Lanka’s overseas labourers, suffering abuses ranging from non- payment of wages to rape. They also say that most of such abuses occur in Middle Eastern countries, where facilities for domestic workers are also poor or practically non-existent.

Battered by accusations of neglecting the overseas workers’ rights, the government has argued that private employment agents are to blame, primarily for ‘irregular’ recruitment where workers are at the mercy of their employer due to a lack of a proper work contract.

It has also said that less than 10 percent of the Sri Lankan workforce overseas has filed complaints.

Recently, however, the government appeared to heed the activists’ complaints by saying it was considering a ban on the deployment of workers particularly to the Middle East. It also announced the start of a pilot project in Libya, with the support of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

Sunil Sirisena, secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Employment Promotion and Welfare, said that the government had selected some 500 workers to work for a Brazilian company that is constructing an international airport in Tripoli.

According to Shantha Kulasekara, migration management head of the IOM in Sri Lanka, the project aims to ensure quality and prepared labour overseas. He also said that Libya was selected because it is a “non-traditional labour- receiving country”.

“We are helping the government to provide quality labour, and if Libya is satisfied there would be many more jobs,” Kulasekera said. He added that if this scheme works, women need not go abroad as domestics for jobs that fetch around 150 dollars per month because their husbands can earn more than three times that amount.

Wages for unskilled workers at the Tripoli project is 58,000 rupees (a little over 500 dollars) per month, while skilled workers could receive up to 100,000 rupees (876 dollars) with food, medical services and accommodation provided by the company.

The Brazilian firm, which the IOM itself chose for the project, has also agreed to hire a Sri Lankan cook and a Sri Lankan coordinator to liaise between the workers and employer. Earlier this month, a company representative was even in Colombo to personally supervise the selection of skilled and unskilled workers for the project.

Ministry secretary Sirisena said that if the project works, the government would consider extending it to Israel, Cyprus, Italy, and France. He admitted, “Trying to enforce it in the Middle East is difficult because salaries are not as high as these countries and facilities (there) are poor.”

The government has said that it can only do so much about the absence of safeguards in labour-receiving countries. It has also said that the SLBFE has measures in place to protect Sri Lankan workers’ rights abroad, including compulsory registration of outbound workers with the agency, as well as the stipulation of minimum wages in contracts.

Lakshan Dias, chairman of the Colombo-based South Asian Network for Refugees, IDPs (internally displaced people) and Migrants (SANRIM), acknowledged that the migration of workers has been going on for many decades and cannot be stopped.

He said, however, that it is incumbent upon the sending country to protect the rights of its workers.

Dias also said that the government should not rely on the number of complaints it receives from workers themselves to help craft its policies. A lawyer who worked for many years in a Hong Kong-based migrant support group, Dias pointed out, “The complaint process is cumbersome and complicated. I have seen many times where workers at airports have problems and they don’t complain.”

He cited instances where Sri Lanka workers, many coming from impoverished rural villages, slept inside or near toilets or kitchens or sometimes on top of a deep freezer but did not complain because these facilities were better than what they endured back home.

“Nevertheless these are not acceptable facilities,” said Dias. “Only countries like Hong Kong have decent conditions for workers where a separate room for the domestic (worker) is compulsory.”

He said, though, that countries like Jordan and Kuwait have improved significantly in terms of worker facilities and conditions. Yet while they have bilateral agreements with Sri Lanka, Dias said the “marked improvement in the conditions for workers” is “mainly because protective regulations in these countries have improved on their own”.

If the government finds it difficult to ensure that Sri Lankan workers have their rights in other countries, Dias said, it may want to try this method: Transform welfare societies set up by its overseas workers into groups with Sri Lankan government backing that can protect migrant labourers.

“The Philippines is the best example in such organisations,” he said. “Now these Sri Lankan societies are organising entertainment events and other welfare, but the government can fund them to turn them into a group that could mediate on behalf of the workers.”

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Mar 8 2010 (IPS)

As a wife of a rice farmer and mother of two children aged nine and two, Sanjeevani Bandara’s days are packed with chores. Yet while she used to be able to keep up with all she has to do in a day, this Sri Lankan mother now finds herself struggling to accomplish even the most basic tasks.

Blame it on the weather, which has been causing water shortages that force Bandara to spend more and more time fetching water for her family, farther away from home.

While the volume of annual rainfall in Sri Lanka has not changed, agriculture specialist Champa Navaratna says that weather patterns are changing to high-intensity rain for short periods, causing floods, landslides and long periods of drought – which in turn result in water problems.

A water crisis has a grim impact on this South Asian country’s women, whose long list of household chores includes securing and managing the family’s water supply. In rural areas, that can include ensuring a steady source for the family’s crops.

Water expert Kusum Athukorala, chairwoman of the Colombo-based Network of Women Water Professionals (NetWater), even says that the impact of scarce water resources on women is at the heart of the water issue. A shortage, she says, “makes their life harder and more so because they are not part of the decision-making process”.

Bandara, for instance, says that wells in her village in Kurunegala, in Sri Lanka’s north central region, have been running dry far too often. She has thus been forced to cycle more than two kilometres for water, carrying it gingerly back in an earthen pot each time.

“I have to go about six times a day to collect water for the family,” she says, adding that she leaves her two-year-old with her husband or a friend whenever she has to fetch more water.

Activists say Bandara can still consider herself lucky because at least she can load her pots of water onto a bicycle. Many other women walk the distance from home to water source and back. By comparison, says Lanka Rainwater Harvesting Forum director Thanuja Ariyananda, “men transport it in trucks or motorcycles”.

Just about 35 percent of Sri Lanka’s 20 million people receive pipe-borne water provided by a state agency. The rest get their supply from wells, rivers or streams. Water for agriculture, mainly rice farming, is provided through a system of canals channeled from rivers and streams.

Securing a steady supply of water has thus been a perennial problem for most Sri Lankan households, but the situation has become more desperate of late. Many Sri Lankans now sound like Jeevani Fernando, a grassroots environmentalist from Negombo, about 30 km north of Colombo on the west coast, who says there is a shortage of water in several areas in her locality.

“Rivers are running dry and pipe-borne water to most homes is reduced to two to three hours a day,” she says. “As a result of this there are many problems for women owing to the impact on school-going children, their food and education, and washing of clothes.”

Part of the problem, say experts, is that the storage capacity of reservoirs that provide much of the pipe-borne water is limited and cannot take the full complement of high-intensity rains. This results in a run-off into the ocean, which also occurs due to floods.

“There is also a problem of siltation in the reservoir, which then further reduces its capacity,” adds Navaratna.

It has not helped that the country’s planners have been slow to respond to the crisis. For some time now, they have being discussing enhancing rain- harvesting schemes, but that is as far as they have gone.

At the same time, Athukorala notes that discussions on water issues by local authorities or other agencies barely include women and their concerns. “Everyone takes water for granted, even female parliamentarians,” she says. “Their response to access to water is to provide pipe-borne water without realising that water resources are gradually getting scarce.”

The task of picking up the slack in policy and action has been taken up by non-government organisations. The Lanka Rainwater Harvesting Forum, for instance, has tried to ease the women’s water burden by donating to selected areas pumpkin-type ferro-cement tanks that are placed above or below the ground.

The rainwater filters into these 5,000-litre tanks from the roof during the rainy season and can be used sparingly for about 50 days during the dry season. So far, groups like the Forum have donated a total of 35,000 rainwater tanks.

These, however, are mere stopgap solutions that serve a very limited population at best. In the meantime, the water crisis seems to be getting more complex.

Forum director Thanuja Ariyananda, for one, says that the quality of water has become an issue as well.

She cites the high mineral content in water in northern-central and eastern parts of Sri Lanka, which she says causes “the teeth of children get discoloured and over a prolonged process the bones get brittle”.

Farmer’s wife Bandara, in fact, says that is also why she has had to go farther to fetch water – the water in their well has a high fluoride content.

Fernando in Magombo, for her part, complains of brackish water in the wells in her district. “That’s puts a tremendous responsibility on the women in the household to ensure clean drinking water and hygiene,” she says.

Then there is the dumping of solid waste and garbage in rivers, streams, lakes and waterways. So is depleting groundwater resources in cities as the few existing wells are contaminated and polluted due to their close proximity to septic tanks.

Says Athukorala: “There is an urgent need to protect wells and recharge wells in the city – even for other uses like washing and toilets, because pipe- borne water resources would be a problem in the future. Here, hygiene and health becomes a more serious issue and that load again is handled by women.”

Excerpt: