THE HONOR OF A WOMAN
by Alistair Lyon
Peering at the world through a bluecloth mesh is a new experience for educated Kabul women, but few venture out without wrapping themselves in a burqua for fear of offending their new rulers.
Many women once strolled Kabul streets in bright dresses or jeans, with a loose headscarf their only concession to modesty, but now if they fail to cover up completely they risk abuse or even a public beating from young, black turbaned Taliban warriors moving around the city in pickup trucks.
The Taliban moved swiftly to stamp their puritan interpretation of Islam on Kabul, ordering men to grow beards and stopping traffic five times daily for prayers. They have banned television, cinema and music and decreed that sexes should be segregated outside the home.
Women government employees have been told to stay at home, with a promise that they will be kept on full pay until Taliban leaders figure out how they can return to work without coming into contact with men.
The edict has hit hardest at Kabul's estimated 25,000 war widows, many of whom were employed in government jobs or involved in food-for-work programmes run by relief agencies. They are now left with virtually no means of support for themselves or their children, short of begging on the street.
Source: Dawn 4, October 1996
BRITAIN BANS CHILD-SEX TOURS
Britain has decided to ban organizers of child-sex tours through a bill which makes it illegal for Britons to organise pedophile holidays abroad, with convicted offenders looking at life imprisonment. The bill also makes it an offense to conspire with or incite people to have sex with children abroad. This move comes after much persuasion from human rights campaigners who were rightly worried about sex tourists from the richer countries preying on children in the Third World.
Australia and Germany already have laws under which their nationals can be prosecuted for offenses committed abroad. The British government also hopes to soon pass laws to prosecute sex tourists when they return home. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that there are at least one million child prostitutes in Asia alone, with the greatest numbers in India, Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines.
The first such offender to be indicted was a travel agent who was sentenced to 16 years in prison for having organized child-sex tours in the Philippines. Judge Fatima Asdala also ordered that he be deported after having served his sentence and that he be banned from the Philippines. "This act," she said in her decision, "promising sex with the young...in the guise of promoting tourism is considered in this court to be debasing of Filipino women and children."
But the most alarming case of child prostitution and abuse was uncovered with the crackdown on a pedophile ring operating from an orphanage in South Goa headed by Freddy Albert Peat. He is currently serving a life term for sexually abusing, and trafficking in, young boys kept in his charge. In July 1996, the CBI chargesheeted an Australian, a Swede and a New Zealander for being a part of this notorious pedophile ring. However, no arrests have been made so far, and all these known pedophiles continue to visit Goa, indicating a high level of laxity on the part of the local authorities.
Source: Contours, Vol.7, No.8, December 1996
DISCRIMINATORY BILL PROPOSED AGAINST MARRIED WOMEN
Women rights groups in The Ivory Coast have begun a campaign against a proposed bill on adultery that sets different penalties for women and men. The bill, proposed by Justice Minister Faustian Kouame, states a woman who has an extramarital relation will be liable to up to one year imprisonment or a fine of the U.S.$630 to U.S.$2,100. However, "men shall be allowed to have sexual relations with other women provided they have the consent of their spouses and pay them compensation of one million CFA Francs (U.S.$2,100).''
Furthermore, the bill would grant a man the right to divorce on grounds of adultery with little more provocation than finding his wife engaged in seemingly intimate conversation with another man. For women to obtain divorce on grounds of adultery, their husbands would have to be caught in a sexual act at the couple's home with the same woman more than once.
According to Ms. Tomama Yai, a member of the Ivorian Association for the Defense of Women's Rights, such a legal change would further push women into vulnerable position in a society where the common practice of polygamy continues to perpetuate the sexual privileges of men.
Source: Women's Watch, June 1996
NUN CLOSES HOPE AFTER WORKERS STRIKE
A project meant to educate and empower women was shut down after its workers, demanding better compensation and job security, staged a hunger strike and joined a labor union.
The Human Organisation for Pioneering in Education (HOPE) in Pune, western India, closed down its handicraft production center on 29 July after its 49 workers went on strike following an attempt to make one worker leave.
The trouble began when worker Teresa Pillai was asked to retire by Chavanod sister Noeline Pinto, the Roman Catholic nun who founded HOPE in 1974 to promote women's advancement through self-development. Pillai, 61, had worked with HOPE for the past 22 years.
"This incident brought a sense of insecurity among the women and they joined the Pune Industrial Employees Union (PIEU)," said Jesuit Father Walter Saldhana, president of the Labour Research and Consultancy Bureau in Pune.
Mahila Sangharasha Sanghatana (Forum to Fight for Women's Rights) and the PIEU supported the strikers, saying HOPE was running a small industry and demanding the minimum wage, gratuities and provident fund for employees.
Forum president Shilpa Umbrajakar said that it was "ironic that an agency that professed to empower women and to bring hope to the hopeless was not heeding their demand for minimum wages."
Yamuna Mufe, 43, who worked with HOPE for the past 18 years, said that all of a sudden the workers received a notice saying the center would be closed permanently and payment due would be sent by post.
According to Sister Pinto, however, "these women were not employees of HOPE in the real sense of the term. They were women in distress who were trained to be self-reliant." "Our center is not a small-scale industry or profit-making firm but an infrastructure for women to use skills they acquired through HOPE," the social activist nun added.
She said that the handicrafts activities were discontinued after the PIEU began to disrupt the peaceful and smooth functioning of the center.
The workers were encouraged to help themselves by forming a cooperative, "but they preferred to lean on the benevolence of the center," she said.
Source: Sunday Examiner, Hong Kong, 20 September, 1996
WORLD BANK IMPLICATED IN MASSACRE
According to a report released earlier this year by Witness for Peace and the International Rivers Network, 376 people from the Guatemalan village of Rio Negro— about 10 percent of the 3,500 people in the region who were to be resettled for the dam—were killed in a series of massacres. The World Bank said that it was not aware of the 1982 massacre. But in 1985, it gave a second loan for the Chixoy Dam. The Witness for Peace report says: If the World Bank did know about the massacres, giving an additional loan to the project was at best a calculated cover-up, and at worst an act of complicity in the violence. If the bank did not know about the slaughter, then it was guilty of gross negligence. Either way, the bank is implicated in the horrors perpetrated against the village of Rio Negro in 1982. After an internal investigation prompted by the Witness for Peace study, a spokesman for the Bank denied any link between the resettlement for the Chixoy project and the murders, although he did mention that the staff were generally aware of violence in the area in 1982. He said that the civil disorder in the project area was considered to have been part of the widespread insurgency and counter-insurgency actions carried out in Guatemala in the 1980s. But villagers told Witness for Peace that the Guatemalan military went after the residents for resisting the project and refusing to be evicted. In one instance, in February 1982, 73 men and women from Rio Negro were ordered by the local military commander to report to Xococ, a village upstream from the reservoir zone which had a history of land conflicts and hostility with Rio Negro. Only one woman returned. According to the report, the rest were raped, tortured and then murdered by the civil defence patrol, one of the most notorious paramilitary units used by the state as death squads. "The World Bank was involved with resettling 3,500 people from the area" a spokesman for International Rivers Network said. "Why didn't they notice that 376 people were murdered?"
Source: Corporate Crime Reporter, U.S.A., 30 September 1996
A MATTER OF RAPE
by Ms. Maureen N. Devi (Fiji)
There are many legal practices in Fiji which discriminate against women but which cannot be challenged. For example, marital rape is not a crime in Fiji, even when the parties are separated. By refusing to protect wives from rape by their husbands, the legal system entrenches its control over women's bodies within the confines of marriage. The notion that a husband should be prosecuted for rape is unthinkable because the law protects the husbands' interests not those of the wives.
Currently, the law holds it against a woman if she waits more than 24 hours to report a rape. Many women are often ashamed to report a rape because of the social stigma it attracts. Given the level of police sympathy and legal responses to the crime of rape, it is not surprising that women need the benefit of advice before deciding whether to report and face the discrimination, inconsistencies and inefficiencies of the legal system. Questioning of the victim's past sexual experiences during a rape trial is permissible, and evidence of her moral character may be admitted as evidence against her. A woman's past sexual experience is rendered as evidence against her to show that she has consented to the act of sex. The implication is that if a woman is not a virgin it is quite likely that she would have consented to sex with the accused.
Although rape is a felony for which the maximum sentence is life imprisonment, eighteen months to two year sentences are more common with suspended sentences increasingly being awarded. A common traditional practice of bulubulu or an apology is also accepted by the courts as an excuse for not being charged or in lieu of a custodial sentence. The bulubulu is also accepted in lieu of punishment in sexual offenses against children. In 1988, Fiji Women's Rights Movement (FWRM) officially launched its Anti-Rape campaign. The project included researching the socio-cultural and legal aspects of violence, a nationwide outreach program, the publishing of mass media articles in newspapers and radio, the production of pamphlets and posters, street drama and educational workshops with schools, medical personnel, police officers and judicial personnel. The FWRM also conducted workshops and seminars for rural women's groups in an attempt to educate women about rape and to obtain their support for its legal reforms.
Organizations such as these are helping to make a difference today in the Fiji society. We can only hope that they will increase in number not only for the sake of women in Fiji but for women worldwide.
Source: Asian Breeze, No. 18, October 1996
ENFORCED CHASTITY IN LOMBOK, INDONESIA?
District officials on the eastern Indonesian island of Lombok are using contraceptives as a modern-day chastity belt for local housewives, said press reports from Jakarta in October 1996.
According to the daily Jakarta Post, district spokesman Lalu Zakaria said women would not be allowed to buy birth control devices, such as lUDs, while their husbands were working overseas. Written consent from their husbands would be required for women to buy contraceptives, he added.
Officials here fear women might "misuse" the devices while their husbands were working in places like Malaysia. "It is meant as a precaution, so lonely housewives won't be tempted to do negative things while their husbands are away," Mr. Zakaria said.
He said the policy was introduced after migrant workers complained that their wives were using contraceptives while they were away. The newspaper report stated that up to 25,000 men from East Lombok work in neighboring Malaysia, mainly in the plantation and construction sectors.
Local officials were also quoted as saying that many women demanded to have their lUDs removed to demonstrate their faithfulness while their husbands were away.
Source; Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights Newsletter 57No. 1, 1997