“Violence against women threatens the lives of more young women than cancer, malaria or war. It affects one in three women worldwide. It leaves women mentally scarred for life — and it is usually inflicted by a family member.”
With these words, Annie Lennox, the British singer and social activist, presents a new global series of investigative television documentaries called Women on the Frontline that begins on the global satellite TV channel BBC World today, 18 April 2008.
The seven half-hour films shine a light on violence against women and girls in different parts of the world – East and West, North and South. The series takes the front to homes, villages and cities of our world where a largely unreported war against females is being waged.
The films cover Nepal, where thousands of women are trafficked each year; Turkey, where killing in the name of honour continues; Morocco, where women political activists who have survived torture and imprisonment testify before a government truth and reconciliation commission; the DRC, where women bear the brunt of a 10-year war in the eastern provinces; Colombia, where women have been tortured in the shadow of a guerilla war; Mauritania, where women who have been raped may go to prison; and Austria, where, under a new law, perpetrators of domestic violence are forced to leave home.
Here’s the line up of depressing reports in this series, produced by Geneva-based dev tv and London-based One Planet Pictures – both international partners of TVE Asia Pacific.
On the Frontline… is a ‘vehicle’ for independent producers to tell compelling stories about the people who uphold civil society where it is most at threat. The strand started with the 2006 pilot series Doctors on the Frontline, a profile of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) field doctors made by Dev TV film-makers.
Since then, the series has covered villages battling desertification and land degradation, nurses and para-medics on humanitarian missions in hot spots of the world, and children living with social and environmental disintegration.
“On the Frontline has gone behind the lines with rebels and filmed among violent street gangs but this time we’ve taken the frontline mostly into the home, where even after 20 years in production, I’m still shocked to see how many obstacles lie between women and equality, and the violence they must still endure,” said Robert Lamb, Executive Director of the series.
A number of UN agencies, including UNFPA and UNIFEM, donor countries such as Austria, non-governmental organizations and other partners provided information and support for the latest series of Women on the Frontline.
Soon after its initial run on BBC World, the series will be distributed in the Asia Pacific region by TVE Asia Pacific.
Dith, who died on March 30 in New Jersey, USA, had both the talent and tenacity for his chosen profession. His experience as an interpreter for The New York Times, for which he later worked as a photographer after migrating to the US, and his ordeal surviving the Khmer Rouge became the basis of the Hollywood movie The Killing Fields (1984).
Watch the trailer for The Killing Fields here:
Here’s Dith’s story as summed up in his Wikipedia entry:
In 1975, Pran and New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg stayed behind in Cambodia to cover the fall of the capital Phnom Penh to the communist Khmer Rouge forces. Schanberg and other foreign reporters were allowed to leave, but Pran was not permitted to leave the country. When Cambodians were forced to work in forced labor camps, Pran had to endure four years of starvation and torture before finally escaping to Thailand in 1979. He coined the phrase “killing fields” to refer to the clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered during his 40-mile escape. His three brothers were killed back in Cambodia.
“I’m a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother,” Schanberg was quoted in the New York Times tribute to Dith Pran. “His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him.”
In another tribute to Dith, the executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, said: “To all of us who have worked as foreign reporters in frightening places, Pran reminds us of a special category of journalistic heroism — the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer, who knows the ropes, who makes your work possible, who often becomes your friend, who may save your life, who shares little of the glory, and who risks so much more than you do.”
This is a highly significant statement, coming from a major media house of the western world. Acknowledging – let alone celebrating – the contributions of unsung local counterparts is not yet a routine practice among many western media professionals covering the global South. More often then not, the fixers are used, paid and dismissed. They are lucky to get proper credit. And if things go wrong, the western media companies would bring in top lawyers and diplomatic pressures to get their own out of trouble; never mind what happens to the locals who are part of that same team.
Even after being released, Saleem Samad was hounded and harassed in his native country that he went into exile in Canada. Read his profile here, and connect to his blog.
This scenario keeps repeating with different names and in different southern locations all the time. In such a harsh, selfish world, Dith Pran was certainly fortunate to have worked with Sydney Schanberg who stood by and for his local colleague. When Schanberg returned to the US and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia, he accepted it on behalf of Dith as well.
Schanberg continued to search for, and write about Dith in newspaper articles – one was in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran., which later became a book by the same title in 1985. Dith’s story became the basis of The Killing Fields.
Haing Ngor, the Cambodian-American doctor who played Dith Pran in the movie, worked with Dith in real life to promote human rights in their native Cambodia and to prevent genocide everywhere. Ngor was shot dead in 1996 in Los Angeles.
As the New York Times noted, Dith’s greatest hope was to see leaders of the Khmer Rouge tried for war crimes against his native country; preparations for these trials are finally under way.
A 1974 photo by Mr. Dith of the wife and mother of a government soldier as they learned of the soldier’s death in combat southwest of Phnom Penh. (Photo: Dith Pran/The New York Times)
In 1979, Mr. Dith escaped over the Thai border. He returned to Cambodia in the summer of 1989, at the invitation of Prime Minister Hun Sen. At left, Mr. Dith visited an old army outpost in Siem Riep where skulls of Khmer Rouge victims were kept. (Photo: Steve McCurry/Magnum)
Mr. Dith joined The Times in 1980 as a staff photographer. He photographed people rallying in Newark in support of the rights of immigrants on Sept. 4, 2006. (Photo: Michael Nagle/Getty Images)
A colleague who read my piece reminded me about a series of five short films on working women in Sri Lanka that I had executive produced in 1999-2000. Produced originally in Sinhala for a national audience, the series was titled Oba Nodutu Eya (The Unseen Woman). In fact, it featured not one but several women workers in two different sectors in the country’s informal economy: the coconut husk (coir) industry in the south and agricultural settlements in the Dry Zone in the north-central areas of the island.
The following is adapted from a story I wrote about this series for a book that TVE Asia Pacific published in 2002. I have not gone back to my sources to check how much – or how little – has changed in the past several years.
This is Yasawathie. She has suffered physical and mental abuse most of her adult life. Her alcoholic husband beat her regularly for years, but she dared not complain for fear of reprisal.
“He injured my head, stabbed me and once fractured my arm” she says, showing a scar of a healed wound.
As if this suffering was not enough, she lost sight in one eye a few years ago in a bizarre hospital accident. She had gone to the government hospital seeking treatment for a chest ailment. There were more patients than beds, so she was forced to sleep on the floor. While sleeping, a nurse carelessly dropped a saline stand on to Yasawathie’s face.
The entire incident was hushed up, and the poor woman was intimidated into silence. “Sometimes patients even die at our hands,” the nurse told her threateningly.
Injured by the healthcare system, battered by her own husband and pressurised by her family circles to keep quiet about, this middle aged Sri Lankan woman has run out of options. She was not aware she could claim damages for the accidental loss of her eye. She does not realise there is legal redress for domestic violence – her family and in laws wouldn’t allow it in any case.
Sadly, Yasawathie is not alone. There are tens of thousands of women like her who live on the margins of society, and whose suffering goes largely unnoticed. The island nation is often cited as a South Asian success story: its women were the first in Asia to vote; female literacy is nearly universal; and a higher percentage of girls and young women are in school than boys.
But hidden beneath these national accomplishments, there are huge gender-based disparities and gaps, especially in economic, labour, family and property related matters. Studies have found that many women, particularly the poorer ones, don’t know their human and legal rights.
And even women who do know their civil and political rights often do not assert their right to safeguard themselves from domestic violence or gender-based discrimination in family and society.
The series used a mixture of short drama segments, interviews and background commentary. “These films don’t offer comprehensive surveys of the situation, but they provide useful glimpses of how economic and legal rights apply at the grassroots for women,” said accomplished fim-maker Inoka Satyangani, who directed the series. “We raise broader concerns, and point out changes that society needs to make to ensure that women can assert their rights.”
Violence against women is both a public and private matter in Sri Lanka, says the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a body of global experts which monitors whether governments are honouring their commitments to the 1981 United Nations’ Women’s Convention. Although violence affects women of every class and ethnicity, it is seldom reported.
In recent years, human rights abuses in Sri Lanka’s conflict ridden north and the east have received international scrutiny; both the government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels have committed atrocities. But violence against women is not confined to the war or the conflict-affected areas: as one rights activist has remarked, “everyone becomes part of the larger system of brutality”.
CEDAW has stressed that Sri Lanka needs specific legislation to address violence behind closed doors.
The TV series also found how women get paid less than men for agricultural manual labour, and how government-driven land development schemes favour men to inherit state land distributed among the landless. Government agricultural extension programmes help male farmers to obtain skills training, credit and subsidies while women farmers are constantly ignored. Women interviewed had stories that shattered the myth of women’s liberation and equality in Sri Lanka.
What’s one of the biggest reasons for suffering from violence?
Is it War? Racism? Extremism?
Or simply being born a woman?
One in 3 women is a victim of violence.
This is the powerful message in this one-minute-long public service announcement (PSA), which can be viewed here:
It was produced by the London-based advertising agency Leo Burnett for UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women. With a striking series of images, it reveals that violence against women is one of the most common forms of violence in the world.
As UNIFEM says: “Violence against women and girls is a problem of pandemic proportions. At least one out of every three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime — with the abuser usually someone known to her. Perhaps the most pervasive human rights violation that we know today, it devastates lives, fractures communities, and stalls development.”
The campaign has elements on awareness raising as well as a call to action. The latter includes an online signature campaign that seeks to collect at least 100,000 signatures from those who oppose violence against women.
The online ‘signature book’ opened for signatures on 26 November 2007 with an appeal from actress and UNIFEM Goodwill Ambassador Nicole Kidman. She called the violence many women worldwide face “an appalling human rights violation that can be stopped”, and asked everyone to add their names to a growing number of supporters saying “NO” to violence against women at http://www.saynotoviolence.org.
She added: “The more names we collect, the stronger our case to make ending violence against women a top priority for governments everywhere.”
I have just signed up, on this leap day 29 February 2008. Three months since the campaign was launched in New York, it has so far gathered a little over 58,500 signatures.
It’s certainly commendable – but not nearly enough, and still more than 40,000 needed to reach the modest target of 100,000.
Not that it’s just a numbers game, of course. The quality and sincerity of commitment matter a great deal. At the same time, UNIFEM and other UN agencies trying to engage the public through online interactive methods should study how successful activist groups do the same — with much better and faster results.
Avaaz.org is a leader among these. It is a new global web movement with a simple democratic mission: to close the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want. Set up in early 2007, it has quickly evolved into online community through which hundreds of thousands of concerned people are taking action together on urgent issues like climate change, poverty, human rights and the crises in the Middle East and Burma.
The Burmese junta may not care for millions of people protesting or donating online, but the leaders of the democratic world – pondering their response to the atrocities in Burma – would find it hard to ignore this surge of public concern.
But it’s a long leap from Burma to the bed room or backyard. A major difficulty faced by those campaigning to focus on violence against women: they are countering actions that are widely distributed, pervasive and sustained over time. Much of it happens at personal and family level, necessarily beyond the public and media’s glare. Incidents flare up only occasionally to spill over to the public space to become news events or talking points.
So, as in many similar instances, out of sight often means out of mind.
The campaign needs more than just star power or the UN’s clout to galvanize mass action. For a start, UN agencies need to get out of their fondness for coining and using endless acronyms. Even with my regular forays into the development community’s acronym jungle (read my post on the alphabet soup), I was recently puzzled when a film-maker colleague referred to GBV in an email without explaining it. It took me full five minutes to realise that she meant gender-based violence.
And some imaginative ways of raising the public profile would also help. Browsing on YouTube, I came across this video from Ireland. As one article described it:
“The ghosts and spirits of the millions of women who have been murdered, violated, oppressed, excluded, driven into exile, denied freedom of speech, denied participation in any decisions concerning their lives, because of war, religion, race, culture, age, disability, sexuality, poverty, bonded slavery, domestic violence or bureaucracy, glided in and out of the shoppers of Galway on 7 December 2007.”
Hollywood’s attempts to support progressive causes in movies continue with Rambo 4, starring Sylvester Stallone.
In the fourth and latest installment of the violent adventures of John Rambo, the Vietnam veteran takes on the Burmese junta who have held the Southeast Asian country in its crushing, ruthless grip since 1962.
“In his latest caper, a bored-looking Rambo ekes out a living catching cobras in the jungles of Mae Sot in Thailand, near the border with Burma. But the arrival of a group of Christian missionaries, whose idealism and naivete literally led them to a slaughterhouse, changes Rambo’s zombie-like existence and brings back the days of gore and bloodbath.
“The film is unapologetic in its use of cliches. It’s the same tired story: Everything is black and white, good and evil, with lots of do-or-die moments thrown in for good measure.
“‘Rambo IV’ – which started showing in Asian cinemas in January and is due to open in mid-March in Thailand — is replete with stereotypes, especially when it comes to pointing out differences between the east and the west, symbolically played out in the kindness, idealism and determination of the Caucasian missionaries and the uncouth, barbaric bad guys in the form of the Burmese pirates and military.”
She says that while reports of the cruelty of the Burmese junta have been well-documented, the depiction of these stereotypes glosses over much more complex issues too deep to dig up in a 90-minute action movie.
Her article quotes freelance Burmese journalist Phyo Win Latt as saying: “The Burmese army in the movie is different from real-life. The film is filled with exaggeration and inaccuracies. Army officers, for example, don’t wear sunglasses while engaged in battle and although there are rape cases in remote ethnic villages, I’ve never heard of such things like ethnic women being forced to dance in front of the soldiers.”
Exiled Burmese appear to have given it some positive feedback. According to a report by the Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), about 600 Burmese who watched the film in Singapore became very emotional, chanted slogans and distributed political leaflets at the screening.
The crowd “clapped non-stop for 80 seconds to show respect to the movie audience gathered there and to show unity” in their fight for democracy, DVB reported.
I’ll just take Lynette’s word for all this, because I’m not going to see this film – I can’t take a killing every few seconds.
Watch Rambo 4 official trailer on YouTube: Caution: Extreme violence – but then, what else do you expect in Rambo?
Rambo may have discovered Burma’s long-drawn suffering only recently, but activist film-makers have been using moving images for many years to sustain international attention on Burma’s human rights and humanitarian issues.
Almost five years ago, in May 2003, TVE Asia Pacific website ran a feature titled ‘Documentaries keep Burma issues alive‘. It was written by Indian film-maker and journalist Teena Amrit Gill, who at that time was based in Chiang Mai, Thailand — where many Burma activists are concentrated.
Excerpts:
“Long drawn internal conflicts are often overlooked or completely ignored by the global media that often chase the latest stories as they unfold. It often takes a few dedicated activists and committed film-makers to sustain focus on conflicts that no longer grab headlines – but continue to affect hundreds of thousands of people.
“As Burma and the struggle of its people, especially its ethnic minorities, against four decades of military dictatorship begin to fade from international attention, a number of new television documentaries are attempting to keep the issue alive.
“Some have been made by television professionals for international broadcast. Others have used amateur or activist footage and aim at mobilising public concern and supporting campaigns to maintain pressure on the regime.”
Teena reviewed three new films that had been produced in 2001-2002 about the plight of minority groups like the Karen, Shan and Karenni who live along Burma’s borders with Thailand, China and Laos. These minorities are the target of repressive policies of the ruling military junta in Rangoon.
Photojournalists usually bear witness to unfolding events, and then share it with the rest of us. It’s not everyday that they make the news themselves.
This photojournalist, Gemunu Amarasinghe working for Associated Press in Sri Lanka, just did. Earlier this week, he was detained, questioned and released by police — all for taking photographs near a well-known Colombo school.
According to news reports, Gemunu was apprehended by a group of parents who formed the school’s civil defence committee. They had handed him over to soldiers on duty near by, and he was briefly detained by the Narahenpita police. Sri Lanka’s Free Media Movement has already protested to the police chief on this – the latest in a series of worrying incidents.
In an op ed essay published today on the citizen journalism website Groundviews, I have discussed the far reaching implications of this latest trend – when misguided citizens turn on professional or citizen journalists simply taking photos in public places. That’s still not illegal in Sri Lanka, where many liberties have been curtailed in the name of anti-terrorism.
As I write: “Gemunu’s experience is highly significant for two reasons. Firstly, it is depressing that some members of the public have resorted to challenging and apprehending journalists lawfully practising their profession which responds to the public’s right to know. Battered and traumatised by a quarter century of conflict, Sri Lankan society has become paranoid. Everything seems to be ‘high S’: practically every city corner a high security place; every unknown person deemed highly suspicious; and everybody, highly strung.
Cartoon from Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka
“Secondly, far from being an isolated incident, this seems to be part of a disturbing new trend. Anyone with a still or video camera in a public place is suspected – and presumed guilty until proven otherwise. This endangers everyone’s basic right to click for personal or professional purposes.”
I mention some examples of this cameraphobia. In recent months, pedestrians who filmed public bomb attacks on their mobile phones have been confronted by the police. One citizen who passed on such footage to an independent TV channel was later vilified as a ‘traitor’. Overly suspicious (or jealous?) neighbours called the police about a friend who was running his video editing business from home in suburban Colombo.
None of these individuals had broken any known law. Yet each one had to protest their innocence.
It may not be illegal, but it sure has become difficult and hazardous to use a camera in public in Sri Lanka today. Forget political demonstrations or bomb attacks that attract media attention. Covering even the most innocuous, mundane aspects of daily life can be misconstrued as a ‘security threat’.
I stress the point that, unlike journalists working in the mainstream media, citizen journalists lack trade unions or pressure groups to safeguard their interests. The citizen journalist in Sri Lanka is very much a loner — and very vulnerable.
And it’s not just in war-torn Sri Lanka that the right to take photos or film video is under siege. I cite a recent example from what is supposed to be a more liberal democracy: in the US, where New York city officials last year proposed new regulations that could have forced tourists taking snapshots in Times Square and filmmakers capturing street scenes to obtain permits and $1 million in liability insurance. The plans were shelved only in the face of strong public protests, spearheaded by an Internet campaign that included an online petition signed by over 31,000 and a rap video that mocked the new rules. Photographers, film-makers and the New York Civil Liberties Union played a lead role in this campaign, which asked people to ‘picture New York without pictures of New York’.
“One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic,” said Joseph Stalin — and he knew what he was talking about.
These words came to my mind as I followed the news coverage and commentary about the death on 27 January 2008 of Suharto, the former Indonesian military leader, and the second President of Indonesia, who was in office from 1967 to 1998.
Many western and globalised media reports touched on Suharto regime’s alleged mass-scale corruption, and the dizzy heights that crony capitalism reached under his watch.
But few talked about the genocide of unarmed, innocent civilians that took place in the years that brought him to power, 1965-67. Another blood bath took place in 1975 when Indonesian forces invaded and took over East Timor. Even those that touched on the subject used varying estimates of how many perished.
In all probability, no one really knows the real number of Indonesians were slaughtered as the army – cheered by anti-communist west – cracked down on members and supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia, at that time a legal political party. Genocidists don’t like to keep detailed records.
NYT added: “His rule was not without accomplishment; he led Indonesia to stability and nurtured economic growth. But these successes were ultimately overshadowed by pervasive and large-scale corruption; repressive, militarized rule; and a convulsion of mass bloodletting when he seized power in the late 1960s that took at least 500,000 lives.”
On the whole, however, the mainstream media has been far more preoccupied with the (admittedly important) issue of how much Suharto and family stole than how many people were killed extra-judicially during his regime.
His opening para: “Coverage of the fall of Suharto reveals with startling clarity the ideological biases and propaganda role of the mainstream media. Suharto was a ruthless dictator, a grand larcenist and a mass killer with as many victims as Cambodia’s Pol Pot. But he served U.S. economic and geopolitical interests, was helped into power by Washington, and his dictatorial rule was warmly supported for 32 years by the U.S. economic and political establishment. The U.S. was still training the most repressive elements of Indonesia’s security forces as Suharto’s rule was collapsing in 1998, and the Clinton administration had established especially close relations with the dictator (“our kind of guy,” according to a senior administration official quoted in the New York Times, 10/31/95).”
Suharto’s demise reminded me of a powerful short documentary I saw a few years ago. Titled Mass Grave Indonesia, it was directed by courageous young Indonesian journalist Lexy Junior Rambadeta (photos below).
He works as a freelance TV journalist for international news agencies, and is a key member of the Jakarta-based media collective Off-Stream. It was started Off Stream in 2001 by journalists, filmmakers, photographers and multimedia artists “who have strong commitments and creativities on catering, promoting, covering, documenting and producing multiculturalism documentary video/film, photography and multimedia products”.
OffStream lists as its mission: To give a voice to “survivors of horror”; To tear down walls of “silence”; and To denounce “injustice” and “barbarism”.
One of their first productions was Mass Grave Indonesia, whose synopsis reads:
“Approximate between from 500 000 to 3 million of people in Indonesia have been killed by Soeharto’s regimes and buried somewhere in the wood distributed. A full and frank account of what happened in the reburial of 26 victims of horror in the 1965 mass killings. This documentary film weaves its story against the tide by presenting evidence of cruelties sponsored by the military in two regions of Central Java.”
I have just tracked down the 19-minute film on YouTube, presented in two parts:
Mass Grave – Indonesia: Part 1 of 2
Mass Grave – Indonesia: Part 2 of 2
This is no western film, filmed by visiting foreign journalists who might be accused of having one agenda or another. This is a film made by Indonesia’s own journalists who found their voice and freedom after the Suharto regime ended in 1998.
I have emailed Lexy this week asking how this film – and agitation by many human rights and democracy activists – have helped bring about belated justice to his own people. I await his reply, which will be published when received.
As I wrote:
Joey used his personal video camera to assert indigenous land rights, and to investigate corruption and environmental degradation in his native Philippines. Joey was an independent human rights activist and also one of the country’s leading investigative reporters.
He freelanced for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, covering Indigenous peoples’ rights and the environment, considered the two most dangerous beats in the Philippines. But years earlier, he had moved out of the capital Manila, and committed his life and career to stories and issues at the grassroots that many of his city-based colleagues had no time or patience in covering on an on-going basis.
Trained as a print journalist, Joey mastered new media and technologies whose potential he quickly realised. He moved into television and video media with ease, and later became an active blogger.
I have just tracked down on YouTube one of his documentaries, Rule of the Gun in Sugarland (2001; 9 minutes; English). It’s a powerful documentary that tells the story of Manobo villagers’ efforts to claim their ancestral land in the Philippines, and the abuse they endured because of their claim. It contains both graphic and heart wrenching scenes.
Here’s some background on indigenous people’s rights in the Philippines, as compiled by Witness – the human rights activist group with which Joey worked closely.
The history of the Philippines is a history of colonization, resettlement and battles over who will rule the land.
First the Spanish, then the Americans, then the Japanese, and now multinational corporations have at one time or another dominated the Filipino landscape. Each wave of colonization has forced people off more land, creating a domino effect across the 7,000 islands. Resettlement in turn, has created even more pressure on successive islands as settlers move in, pushing even more people out.
Today, despite continued widespread poverty across the Philippines, Indigenous tribe members remain the most marginalized sector of Philippine society.
In a country of 76.5 million people, almost 20 per cent are Indigenous peoples. They belong to at least 32 different ethnolinguistic groups. More than half are on Mindanao, the largest southern island.
Over the last century, Indigenous peoples have lost their traditional lands, as the logging industry, ranchers and large plantations have forcibly taken over lands, piece by piece.
Much like in other parts of the world, the land was won parcel by parcel. Original verbal agreements were made and often respected between individual ranchers and Tribe leaders to “borrow” land from the Tribe. But the agreements were quickly forgotten when the rancher died. Over the years, the land was then resold without the Tribes’ consent.
And then, under the Marcos regime, Indigenous people suffered along with farmers, as massive tracts of land were appropriated for the dictator and his cronies. When Marcos was finally thrown out by a people’s revolt, and flown out on a U.S. helicopter, successive democratic governments introduced multiple land reforms intended to redistribute the land justly, but none of these reforms ever really worked.
On the ground level, corruption and misuse of power prevented the land from being rationed and made accessible to the people the reforms were intended to help.
Meanwhile, the land reforms were intended to help the peasants and the fact that many of the lands in question were Indigenous Ancestral domains was never addressed.
Mindanao is rich in natural resources – some of the world’s last ancient rainforests, fertile soils, underground treasures of gold, an abundancy of fish — all now under the threat of overdevelopment.
In 1997, the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act was signed into law. The law is explicit on the Indigenous peoples’ right to ancestral lands. But this has not become operational to date. This fact is exacerbated by the present government’s industrialization thrust and commitment to globalization. Tribal lands, thus, are being continually opened for extractive business.
Seen but never noticed?It’s so clichéd to say that behind every successful man stands a woman. With so many women being successful in so many spheres of activity on their own terms, this assertion is not particularly relevant or sensitive any longer.
But who stands behind some of these successful women? Writing in her regular Sunday column in The Hindu newspaper, my friend Kalpana Sharma suggests an answer: the unsung, unappreciated and often poorly paid housemaids or domestic workers.
Here’s how Kalpana opens her column, aptly titled ‘Invisible women’:
“They flit in and out of our homes like ghosts in the night. They sweep and swab, wash and cook, look after our children, care for the elderly. Yet we know little about them. Most of us just about know their first names. We don’t know where they ’re from, where they live, whether they are married, how many children they have, how many other homes they work in, what they earn — how they survive. They are virtually invisible.
“We usually wake up to their existence when they don’t turn up for work. And the first response is annoyance, because of the inconvenience caused to us. Many professional women don the title of being superwomen because they manage jobs and homes — work life balance. But in fact the real superwomen are these silent workers, without whom few professional women in India would be able to function. Yet, while those in formal employment get sick leave, casual leave, privileged leave and weekends, our domestic help is not entitled to any of this. If she rests too long, she’s lazy. If she doesn’t turn up for work, she’s a shirker. It would appear that these women don’t have the right to relax, to fall sick, to have some fun. And of course, no one acknowledges that when they’re done with our homes, they still have their own homes where they have to do the very same jobs, sweep and swab, wash clothes, cook and take care of children and elderly.”
With this, Kalpana introduces a recently made Indian documentary, Lakshmi and Me (Nishtha Jain 59′, India, USA, Finland, Denmark, 2007), where the middle class film maker turns her camera on her 21-year-old part-time maid Lakshmi.
Superwoman at work...but who can see her?As Kalpana says: “Nishtha Jain, a Mumbai-based documentary filmmaker has done what all of us need to do. She has not just acknowledged that this silent worker in her home has a name, but she’s followed her life so that we see the person behind the name — a person just like any of us. And instead of viewing the woman from a distance, the filmmaker has bravely placed herself in the frame, honestly dissecting her own relationship as an employer. “Lakshmi and Me” is a remarkably honest documentary about 21-year-old Lakshmi and the filmmaker, Nishtha.”
I haven’t yet seen the film, and after reading Kalpana’s review, I quite look forward to catching it. I hope it goes beyond the clichéd approach of offering glimpses of how the other half lives, which afflicts many documentaries of this kind made by well-meaning middle class film-makers who can’t quite break free from their own social framework.
This bubbly, happy-go-lucky intern returns to her native Maldives this week after working with us for over a year as a programme assistant. She plans to spend more time with her family, and explore work opportunities in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of 370,000 people.
Niuma, in her early 20s, applied for a staff position in late 2006. Among other things, she came with skill and dexterity in graphic design, web research and English proficiency — always useful for a regional communication organisation like ourselves.
“I want to learn as much as I can how a non-profit organisation works,” she told as at the recruitment interview. She had plans of taking the knowledge and skills back to her home atoll, hoping to make life better for her people.
I hope she found what she was looking for. We found in her an energetic young person with good attitude – one who could be challenged to work on tough (and sometimes tedious) tasks on a regular basis.
“The last year has been a very challenging and fulfilling year for me, and being at TVEAP helped a lot,” she wrote in an email on her last day at work. “I will miss you all and being a part of you and will always remember the good times and everything I have learnt here both professionally and personally.”
Some months into her internship, Niuma gave us a presentation on her home country, home atoll and life at home. To many outsiders, Maldives evokes images of palm-fringed sandy beaches, shallow seas of an exquisitely azure blue, high end resorts, crystal clear blue waters for diving…and plenty of sunshine all the year round. (Image shows Kurumba resort, Maldives.)
Well, all that’s true as widely advertised. But Maldives is a whole lot more – a history going back to at least 1,500 BC, distinctive island culture, and a nation that is struggling to reconcile tradition with modernity. Divehi, the Maldivian language, contributed the word “atoll” (a ring-shaped coral reef) to the English language.
The former British protectorate, which became independent in 1965 and a republic in 1968, has a pro-democracy movement sustained over the past few years. If such political turbulences create a sense of uncertainty in the minds of Maldivians about their future, it’s only one source of concern.
They also have to worry about whether their nation would have a collective future. That’s because of climate change that scientists now confirm are underway, aggravated by human action.
Most of the 1,200 islands in the Maldives are no more than 1m (3 feet) above sea level. Even a modest rise in sea levels could inundate these lands. Within 100 years the Maldives could become uninhabitable.
Time is indeed running out for Niuma and her country — as this poster produced by The Body Shop reminds us.
Time is running out...and not just for the Maldives
In 1987 and 1991 storm surges flooded a large number of islands, including one-third of the capital where one-quarter of the country’s population lives. Unusually high waves forced the international airport to be closed, causing great damage to tourism and constraining emergency relief operations. On 26 December 2004, the Asian tsunami battered the Maldives, forcing the evacuation of 13 of its 200 inhabited islands. These incidents indicate how vulnerable the islands are to wave action.
Maldives was among the first countries in the world to raise climate change as a serious issue at the United Nations. President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom raised the alarm back in 1987, when most people had not even realised the problem and scientific evidence was just beginning to come in.
The conference issued the Malé Declaration on Global Warming and Sea Level Rise, which urged for inter-governmental action on the issue. The small island states played a key role in negotiations that led to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted in 1992. This is the precursor to Kyoto, Bali and other processes that are now very much in the news.
Just a few weeks ago, in mid November 2007, the Maldives once again hosted representatives from small island states to discuss climate change. Eighteen years after the original meeting, the subject is no longer a fringe concern; it’s now on everybody’s agenda.
Maldives from the air: tiny specs in the oceanThe meeting urged the the human dimension of global climate change to be included in the agenda of UN Climate Change Summit in Bali (December 2007), and sought the international community’s commitment “to protect people, planet and prosperity by taking urgent action to stabilize the global climate change”.
This time, the Male’ Declaration on the Human Dimension of Global Climate Change called for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to assess the human rights implications of climate change and “to conduct a study into the effects of climate change on the full enjoyment of human rights”. It requested the UN Human Rights Council to convene in March 2009 a debate on human rights and climate change.
I wasn’t at the November 2007 Male meeting, but was glad that the meeting stressed the need for adding a human face to the complex, nuanced challenge of climate change. This resonates very much with my own experience.
Mariyam Niuma takes me a bit closer to the realities of what climate change means to communities living on the frontline. Unlike Niuma, who is web savvy and connected with the wider world, many are blissfully unaware of the problem.
Our challenge is to bring their voices, stories and aspirations to the global news agenda and the myriad discussions now underway searching for solutions.
I hope someday we can work with Niuma again — perhaps amplifying her story in moving images.
Cartoon from Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka
Open Minds! 