‘South Asia should have a common disaster management system’

Women in South Asia need to actively campaign to find solutions to common challenges.

Women in South Asia face largely common challenges like discrimination, violence, financial dependence and lack of education. They need to actively campaign to find solutions to these problems through a common platform, participants at the South Asian Women Conference titled Role of Women in Building Movements in South Asia said on Tuesday.

Women Workers Help Line (WWHL) organised the one-day conference in which women rights’ and peace activists from Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh participated. The participants also urged the South Asian countries to seek each other’s help when they were faced with some natural disaster or calamity like Pakistan’s current floods.

Sita Kumari Paudel, a Nepalese parliamentarian, said that the women’s movement in Nepal was very strong.  She said that all Nepal Women Association (ANWA) was working for women’s rights for sixty years.

Expressing solidarity with the flood victims in Pakistan, she said that the government should give special priority to women and children during the relief campaign.

Faisal bin Majid from the Nari Progati Sangha, a Bangladeshi women’s rights organisation, said that Bangladesh faced many natural disasters every year. He offered the services of the natural disaster management from Bangladesh and said that many experts wanted to come to Pakistan to voluntarily help the flood victims but faced visa issue. He said that South Asia should be made a visa-free region. He said that Bangladeshi women held major posts in the labour, agriculture and foreign affairs ministries. “Garments industry has the key role in Bangladesh’s economy and majority of women workers are working in this industry,” he added.

Nalini Rathnaraja, women rights and peace activist from Sri Lanka said that countries of South Asia faced many common challenges. She said that the Sri Lankan women started the struggle for their rights almost 100 years ago. “Our women got the right to vote before Europe. Literacy rate in Sri Lanka is high but women have only 5 per cent representation in the assemblies. The politicians divide the people on the basis of religion, language and ethnicity,” she said. She said that patriarchy, poverty and violation of human rights was common in all South Asian countries and that collective efforts were needed to solve these issues.

WWHL general secretary Bushra Khaliq said that all South Asian countries needed to decide what kind of states they wanted to become. She said that it was the government’s responsibility to provide education, health, justice and employment opportunities to the people. She said, “South Asia must develop a natural disaster management system to protect the lives of billions of people.”

There was a need to evolve a common strategy from the platform of South Asian Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE), she added.

World March of Women international committee member Saleha Athar,  WWHL chairperson Azra Shad, Labour Party Pakistan spokesperson Farooq Tariq, WWHL president Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Fahmida Zafar, Badrun Nisa of the Anjuman Mazaraeen Punjab and Shamim Qayyum of the Labour Qaumi Movement also spoke on the occasion.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 25^th, 2010.