Women: invisible in Asean
A MILITARY coup in Zimbabwe may have finally ended the misrule of Robert Mugabe. The 93-year-old president was reported to be under house arrest after the army sent troops into the streets of Harare in an apparent move to prevent him from installing his wife as his putative successor. Will his removal pull a once-prospering country from the ditch into which Mugabe drove it. Prospects don’t look good.
Mugabe was a hero of Zimbabwe’s independence struggle and took power in 1980. But he wrecked his legacy with bloody campaigns of repression against opponents and the expropriation of white-owned farms, destroying the country’s export business. Zimbabwe’s economy nearly halved from 1998 to 2008, and shortages of food and basic goods haunt a population of about 14 million.
That horrific record, however, was not the reason for the coup. Rather, it was Mugabe’s firing last week of Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was vying for control of the ruling party with Grace Mugabe, the president’s wife. Mugabe has a reputation for lavish spending and erratic behaviour, and the 75-year-old Mnangagwa has the support of army commander Constantino Chiwenga. Both Mnangagwa and Chiwenga have a history of brutal behaviour: Mnangagwa is blamed for the killing of some 20,000 civilians in the 1980s, while Chiwenga oversaw the bloody crackdown that followed Mugabe’s loss in the first round of the 2008 election.
Many Zimbabweans and some in Western governments may welcome any change after 37 years of Mugabe. Some reports suggest that Mnangagwa, if put in power, could reverse some of the regime’s worst mistakes. A Reuters article in September, sourced to reports by the state intelligence agency, said he was contemplating forming a unity government with opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and reaching out to dispossessed white farmers in a bid to revive the agricultural economy.
Mnangagwa is not, however, committed to competing in an election, according to the Reuters report. Given his notoriety and the dire state of the economy, he could easily lose a fair vote to Tsvangirai. Yet without an election that provides a popular mandate, the chance for reforms that could revive the economy looks small.
That’s why Western governments should insist on a prompt restoration of constitutional order and a firm commitment by the military to holding internationally supervised elections next year. The outside world has leverage, including potential help with Zimbabwe’s defaulted international debts. The end of Mugabe’s rule offers a fragile opportunity to rescue an African country – but only if it does not lead to the installation of another strongman.
THE heads of the 10 Asean states and partner countries met early this week to discuss issues that bedevil the Asia-Pacific: the threat of terrorism from extremist groups, North Korea’s nuclear missile tests, trade barriers and foreign investments, climate change and environmental disasters, and transnational crimes, among others.
Sidelined in the hectic runup to the customary rightover-left handclasp and “class picture” were issues that affect half of the population in these states: the women.
To be sure, a labour accord has been signed that would guarantee fair treatment of and protection for migrant workers – including at least 212,000 overseas Filipino workers in the region, most of them women.
But so many pressing issues have been virtually ignored by Asean, as if the past 50 years did not see more women pushed onto perilous paths as they struggle to make a living under increasingly difficult circumstances.
As the Women’s Legal and Human Rights Bureau said in a letter to the editor on Tuesday, “what is there to celebrate when sexual violence has persisted with impunity in Southeast Asia over [the past] 50 years?”
According to the Weaving Women’s Voices in Southeast Asia ( Weave) network in its report Coming out of the dark: Pursuing access to justice in cases of sexual violence against girls in Asean, it is as if sexual violence in the region were being made invisible.
As authoritarian regimes emerge, the culture of impunity and misogyny has intensified, making access to justice more elusive – especially in cases of sexual violence in many Asean countries.
But what could one have expected? Recall how Presi- dent Duterte – host of this year’s Asean Summit – once made a joke of the rape-murder of an Australian missionary, or how US President Donald Trump, one of the most prominent leaders in the Asean Summit, once boasted how he could get away with anything – even with grabbing a woman’s privates. Such shocking examples of leadership partly explain why women’s issues are of low priority in this high-voltage gathering.
Poverty is the biggest reason that trafficking in girls remains a grim reality in many Asean countries. Poverty breeds desperation – and easy pickings for devious job recruiters. In fact, some 23 million, or two-thirds, of the world’s 36 million victims of human trafficking come from Asia, according to the 2014 Global Slavery Index.
The United Nations estimates that at least 64 percent of victims of human trafficking in Asia wind up in forced labour, servitude and slavery, while 26 percent become sex- ually exploited. Worse, 36 percent of trafficked victims in Asia are children.
Such dire figures are the result of certain conditions shared by many Asean countries: the weak rule of law, corruption, high levels of poverty, highly mobile but unskilled labour forces, and, lately, availability of and easy access to social media, which has been used to recruit women and children into jobs connected to the sex trade.
Military conflicts, as in Myanmar, also expose women and girls to sexual violence, as they become spoils of war for the victors, as well as tools of intimidation and pawns for negotiation between warring parties.
With Asean countries turning a blind eye to the abuses of fellow members under the bloc’s policy of noninterference, the politically sensitive case of the Rohingya of Myanmar merited scant attention in the summit.
As wire reports noted, Asean’s culture of silence has benefited spineless leaders, among them Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi who in 1999 slammed the Asean policy of noninterference as “just an excuse for not helping”.
Today, the Nobel laureate who used to lead her country’s pro-democracy movement has defended the Myanmar military’s violent crackdown on the Rohingya, suggesting that the ethnic minority group was partly responsible for the crisis that has driven them to neighbouring Bangladesh by the hundreds of thousands.
Asean’s reticence on the issue might as well be a stamp of approval for such abuses, just as its silence on the sexual violence on women in the region might well seal the doom of these victims.
As the Weave network suggests, Asean must make access to justice among victims of trafficking part of the bloc’s central agenda. Condemning sexual violence among women and girls in its statement can be a good start.