Nepali Women-No war Please.
Added : ( May 2005 )
Nepali Women-No war Please.
-Kamala Sarup
Tara Khatri hoped for nine months that she would be able to go back to Nepal where peace had returned after eight years of fighting. That was before the Maoists broke the truce. Maoists called off the truce after negotiations with the government came to a deadlock. She had thought that some kind of a way out will be found out and the violence would not return.
She says, "My father was killed by the Maoists some 2 months ago. I cannot go to Nepal because traveling and communication is also more difficult as the infrastructure, schools, health centers and minor irrigation projects, suspension bridges have been destroyed by the Maoist".
The Maoists have murdered hundred of people and destroyed the physical infrastructure in many places despite the public statement issued by chairman of the Maoists Prachand stating that the killing of individual and destruction of public property would not be carried out.
She further says, "We want constitutional monarchy and responsible democracy. Murdering sisters and brothers in the country doesn't bring peace and prosperity. Conflict should be ended and the rights of women and children protected". She is not alone to wish for peace.
The Maoists come to the village secretly at night. Villagers, including women, are systematically selected from each home to carry their rations and luggage to feed them. Each family is forced to pay tax. Women and girls are targeted for special forms of attack as they are raped, forced into marriages, abducted by them.
Tara further said "This time in Nepal, women bear the greatest responsibility to ensure survival of the family. Traditional gender roles that oblige women to care for the sick and provide for the welfare of the family have further increased women's vulnerability in this time.
Centuries of oppression have made Nepalese women adopt a victim mentality. Even women and girls are threatened with rape, sexual exploitation, violence, humiliation and other forms of abuse".
Past humanitarian interventions in war and conflict situation, as well as in peace efforts, have not taken into consideration the fact that women and men are affected differently
Nepal's present situation is a pressing and a complex one. For a true peace in Nepal, security is essential. Restoration of women's rights, peace and democracy are possible only through effective measures of security. Since the start of the Maoist conflict women's trafficking is on the rise in Nepal.
The goals of peace and disarmament, democracy, human rights, economic justice, have been more elusive and unattainable than before. During the violent armed conflicts in Nepal, most of the women who could not stand the harassment, and the economic hardships, moved towards big cities such as Kathmandu, Pokhara, Janakpur, Dhangadhi and Biratnagar, etc. from remote villages. Increased insecurity and fear of attack often caused women to flee their villages.
In Nepal, the opportunities for women to exchange views and forge a common policy against violent is minimal. Women must have a right to be involved in all peace processes and conflict prevention at all levels. Nepalese women are historically associated with non-violence and they know that they have to deal with the roots of conflict. Displaced women are the real problem in Nepal.
If Nepalese women are to play an equal part for maintaining security and peace, they must be empowered politically and economically. They must be empowered at all levels of decision-making, both at the pre-conflict stage as well as at the point of peacekeeping, peace-building, reconciliation and reconstruction. All of these are fundamentals to the whole approach when it comes to conflict prevention and conflict resolution. Women should be central to peacemaking, where they can bring their experience in conflict resolution.
Women can understand the cost of the war in the real sense. While Nepalese women's organizations can play key roles in information gathering, peace building, and can help the government and the civil society to move from simply responding to crises to preventing their occurrence. Nepalese women have been targets of particular types of criminal violence. There are a number of kinds of violence where women are more likely to be victims because they are women.
Women are often the main victims in situations of conflict, suffering human rights abuses such as rape, forced pregnancy and abortion. How can one be secure when women, constituting more than half of the world's population, are marginalized, violated and abused? How can anyone feel secure when Kathmandu, Pokhara and major cities are bombarded, when medicines and food are blocked from reaching hospitals and dispensaries'? Women in Nepal always have to bear a disproportionate burden of poverty and they have painful experience arising from the uncontrolled flows of arms. When there is lawlessness in society, women's lives are torn apart.
Women's roles in and contributions to conflict resolution are ignored in Nepal. Socially, there is significant poverty, broken homes and families, displacement and insecurity, psychological effects included depression, disorders. Economic empowerment of women is important but economic stability requires peace.
Nepalese women generally prefer collaboration and consensus but poverty, lack of employment opportunities, lack of consciousness, social discrimination, and lack of political commitment for seeking problem solution are the root causes for the continuation and increment of conflicts. Conflict affects women's economic security.
We are all aware that many conflicts lead to violence and women and girls in Nepal are affected by armed conflict in various ways. Peace and security must be considered in the truest sense of the word: access to education, security and employment to live life because women are often strategic targets in conflict.
Women and girls are facing discrimination in access to health, education, employment, and other areas. They know that they have to deal with development issues, economic issues, conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction. Women and children account for the most number of civilian casualties in war.
One of the most important consequences is the cost of the war endured by everyone because of the reduction in the nation's wealth. There are two economic costs resulting from this Maoists conflict. The direct cost is the money that the government and Nepalese spend on the conflict, such as arms, security systems, etc. The indirect cost is the money that Nepalese loses through a reduction in foreign investment, job opportunities. This is sad, unacceptable, and a terrible loss.
The conflict has caused major economic disruption. Affected populations have suffered the loss of means of production, household assets and other investments. They have been unable to develop their livelihoods because they have been unable to invest in education and have lost productive members of the household. They have had to divert household expenditure to non-productive expenses such as additional health care, food purchase and replacement of lost assets. The Nepali economy has suffered through reduced ability to attract external investments and inability to take advantage of opportunities such as expansion of the tourism sector.
Nepalese women know how their sons and husbands are taken as combatants, many do not return, leaving women to care for the remaining children and elderly populations. They know how they themselves are often targeted? They know how households are unable to farm, how malnutrition, especially among children and women, is increasing, how children are out of school, how adolescents and adults alike are under-employed or unemployed? How rates of sexually transmitted infections and HIV are said to be the highest in the country? How access by humanitarian agencies is highly restricted due to insecurity - despite the crisis, most people are not receiving any significant assistance at all? How disruption and displacement are familiar to the people of the affected areas?
It is the women of Nepal who have felt the impact most severely. Yet not much is being written about their response to the conflict.
Social groups - small ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples and so on - are the others who are also affected the most. Increasingly, internal conflict, rooted in ideas of human identity and often expressed with frightening intensity, is the major threat to stability and peace, at the individual, local and international levels.
We Nepalese women do not want war and do not want another Maoist confrontation.
Nepalese women cannot remember villages burned, the children made fatherless and motherless, the villagers forced from their homes, the millions of rupees squandered by weapons and destruction.
"The present crisis cannot be managed just by an agreement between the Maoist and the government without showing genuine political honesty". The Peace Media e-magazine'e reporter Puja Budhathoki said.
She further said "All the political parties must play a stronger role in maintaining peace by addressing issues left over the years. They should know conflict usually results from multiple causal factors economic, political, religious, and sociological factors, among other"
(Writer cum Journalist Kamala Sarup was born in Dharan, Nepal,is editor of Peace Media e-magazine)
Nepali Women-No war Please.
Submitted by:
Kamala Sarup
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