Nairobi: Women debate their liberation 'WOMEN SHOULD not be discussing politics but only the issues specifically related to women'! This was the slogan of the US delegates and their allies in the run up to and during the third and final UN Decade for Women Conference and Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) Forum held in Nairobi, Kenya this summer. The theme of the Decade was 'Equality, Development and Peace' - but it was 'development issues' that the US was particularly enthusiastic to promote. While government representatives (women and men) met in the prestigious Kenyatta Conference Centre to reach agreement on the final decade document entitled 'Forward Looking Strategies, the alternative Forum at the Nairobi University was an enormous gathering of 14,000 women (and some men) from all over the world.
town or in the countryside to be killed like that without anyone claiming responsibility.
Q. What was the attitude of the PRT with regard to the rest of the Mexican left?
A. The PRT proposed a common front for the elections to the rest of the left. This front would have included the PRT, the PSUM and the PMT and all the left which was not legalised. We believe that the realisation of such a united front could fundamentally change Mexican political life because it would put an end to the traditional reaction of an important section of workers who, in order to vote against the PRI, vote for the other large bourgeois party, the PAN.
But the two other parties of the left were not in agreement with our proposal. They preferred to go it alone in the elections. Despite this, the left got a lot of votes. For example in Mexico City, which has 18 million inhabitants, the PSUM, the PRT and the PMT together got almost 18% in some areas and 21% to 29% in others. In several areas of the town the PRT got 5.5% of the votes, the PMT 6.5% and the PSUM, 9%. On average the PRT got 3.5% of the notes in Mexico City, that is nearly 100,000 votes. The significance of his success, which occurred despite he divisions, has now been recognised the three parties and the leading bodies of each have declared that if they get members elected to parliament they will form a joint arliamentary group.
The author of the following article the London-based SWAPO Women's ROS YOUNG
The participants in the Forum came from national liberation organisations such as SWAPO, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the African National Congress (ANC), the Front for the National and Socialist Liberation of the Kanaks (FLNKS), Eritrea and East Timor; from Black women's groups, refugee and migrant groups, indigenous peoples organisations, aid and development agencies, peace movements, lesbian groups and Christian organisations. This was a forum for meeting together, discussing, exchanging ideas, learning and making contacts for future work. It was not a formal conference and had no official relationship with the nearby UN meeting, nor any influence on the final documents that government delegates were laboriously plodding through. Nevertheless, the Forum was the most important of the two in that many of the women there were representing grass roots organisations and were the people who were fighting for their rights as women, as Black people, as the working class and oppressed. And by meeting people who were in struggle, you could really find out what was happening internationally.
Attempts had been made to avoid holding such a forum as the US feared (quite rightly as it turned out) that it could become a platform for was part of the delegation from Solidarity Campaign. attacking US policies. Having failed to stop it going ahead, organisational sabotage became the order of the day to ensure that minimum numbers of women were able to find their way through the bureaucracy to register and raise funds to get to Kenya. The US had instructed the Kenyan government to use hotel space allocations to keep the number of potential troublemakers down and to exercise strict controls on entry visas. SWAPO delegates did have quite a bit of trouble getting into the country. Other women were stopped from leaving their own countries, such as Palestinian women from the Israeli occupied territories who were refused travel permits and are now under house arrest. Despite this, women mobilised to get to Kenya in the last few months, having heard that the US was trying to hijack the Forum. For example, SWAPO Women's Council in Angola urged their supporters to attend because the US was planning to send around 2,000 delegates and participants to stop important political issues such as the struggle for Namibian independence being discussed. At the opening ceremony, the organisers admitted that they were shocked at the response. Up to the official closing date for registration in April, only 2,000 women had officially registered! Other
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International Viewpoint 16 September 1985
organisational methods were employed to limit and isolate the debates on apartheid in Namibia and South Africa and Zionism in particular. Africa and Zionism in parucular. Over 1,000 workshops took place and it would be interesting to know what priorities were in operation in the allocation of rooms and times -many important workshops were given tiny rooms...
Without a doubt, the main focus of the Forum was whether you saw 'women's issues' as separate from the struggles against US and western imperialism, against apartheid and racism, against colonialism and neocolonialism, that is "polities'. . Women from the Pacific talked about the years of nuclear war that have been inflicted on their people by western governments testing the latest bombs; the Kanak people are fighting for independence from French colonialism, the Abonginal peoples or Australld the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand for self-determination, basic human rights and for their land rights in the face of gross exploitation. Indigenous Indian women from Nicaragua spoke of their support and defence of the revolution but that due to their marginalisation in the revolution and the specific discrimination they face not being recognised sooner by the Sandinistas the US has been able to cynically recruit their people over to the side of the counter-revolutionary forces. The Guatemalan Junta, with technical aid and expertise from Israel, are practising wholesale genocide on the indigenous Indians (who are 80% of the population!) in an attempt to expropriate the land for use by the multinational companies.
Women face additional oppression throughout the "Third World' in the attacks on their fundamental right to control their own bodies. Wide- to control their own bodies Wide. spread drug experimentation, in particular contraceptive drugs, and mass forced sterilisations are taking place under the cover of medical research and population control.
The triumph of the Forum was that at last at an international women's meeting, the liberation movements, Black women, women from all over the Third World were in the majority and were the stronger. In many workshops women were told not to speak about politics, but they couldn't be silenced. One SWAPO woman reported that in a workshop on prisons they wouldn't let her talk about her experiences in South African prisons - the American women running the workshop wanted a discussion on social work within prisons, rather than confronting why prisons exist in the first place and who Is being imprisoned - Black people, the working class, political prisoners.
As the Forum progressed, it was 26
Some of the delegates at the Nairobi Forum (DR)
around the question of Palestine that the most heated debates took place. To gain credibility, the Zionists (from Israel, the US and Europe) continually insisted that *Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jews' and that any criticism of Israel (in relation to Palestine and Israel's counter-revolutionary activities internationally) was tantamount to anti-semitism. They enlisted Black women from the US to say that the oppression of Jews was the same as the oppression against Blacks, and while some of the left' zionists did have dialogues with Palestinian women, others refused to acknowledge the existence of Palestinians. It was clear that the terms of the debate had not moved forward since the last Forum in 1975, but support for the Palestinians and Lebanese had increased since the 1982 Israeli invasion. Heavy security presence
An important aspect of the Forum was the heavy presence of security forces. Armed uniformed police patrolled the campus and dormitories where Forum delegates were staying; outside every hotel and Forum venue security checks were made and police hung around outside many of the workshops. Plain clothes security police were always present inside the 'political' workshops looking very conspicuous in suits with small triangle badges attached. After women gave contributions in open debates in the Peace Tent for example, they would be pounced on and asked 'what's your name, that was an interesting speech, do you have it written down, and where are you from! In the West Papuan workshop Indonesian security police got inside and photographed everyone. An Iranian male tried to physically attack an Iranian woman who was speaking out against Khomeini's regime ...
All of this gave sufficient cause for alarm and although it did not silence women about their own struggles, it made many very reluctant to speak out about what was happening in Kenya itself. Informed sources told us that students who were acting as officials in the Forum were told to sit in workshops, listen in to conversations, take notes and report back. There was a lot of Kenyan government interference in the Forum, from evicting participants from their hotels to make way for official UN delegates, to trying to close the Peace Tent down (as women were discussing armed struggle) and seizing all the films for the Filmforum, insisting that they had to pass through the censor and completely ruining the censor and completely ruining the whole programme as a result. They • also refused permission for a march from the Forum to the UN Conference, but then that is not surprising since demonstrations are banned in Kenya anyway.
The police and security presence did have an illuminating effect -it alerted many women to the fact that things were not quite as they seemed and that Kenya was not the 'democratic' country many had been told about. Word spread through the campus, albeit quietly, about what was going on outside the Forum. Prostitutes and the dispossessed poor had been bused out of Nairobi in a big clean up of the city before we arrived, to give a good impression ot what US and western money could do for Africa. We were told, however, of the rural poverty and starvation; the conditions of workers in the multi-national companies and the squatters towns around Nairobi;
International Viewpoint 16 September 1985 a se of p the heav to
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of Langata women's prison, said to be worse than any of them men's prisons; the forced sterilisations of women in the rural areas and the widespread use of depo-provera; the murders of prostitutes by US servicemen from the US naval base in Mombassa. The heavy political repression has led to vicious attacks on students at the university in recent months (17 died and over one hundred injured as a result of police attacks in February). There is the continuing imprisonment of university students and the lecturer Maina wa Kinyatti and while the Forum was in progress, 12 of the detained 1982 Coup leaders were hanged in prison...
The main lesson learnt in Nairobi is that our struggle for women's liberation cannot be separated nor seen in isolation from the class and race struggle. A longer version of this article is also due for publication in the journal Race and Class. in Asia and women are the worst victims of the same. They have not victims of the same. They have not only resulted in merciless massacres and mass rape but general curbing of women's access to education, employment and movement. Orgies of violence against Tamil women in Sri Lanka, Dalit-Muslim-Sikh-tribal women in India and women Pakistan bear witness to this process insecurity of minorities commun make them even more conseratine about women.
The decade has sensitised women's groups to the fight against some of the worst forms of violence against women. Issues like rape and wide beating are taken up by the women's groups all over Asia. The Womem Forums' fight against lynching anc other brutal punishment to women rakistan, Indian women's struggle against "bride-burning" are some of them. In India, the old practice of female infanticide is replaced by the modern technique of female foeticide - Amniocentesis. It has posed a threat to survival of women, as it is, women are a declining sex in India.
State sponsored population polices have snatched away the basic reproductive rights of Asian women who are used as guinea-pigs for contraceptive researches. The drugs that are banned in the imperialist countries are dumped in the Asian countries. The Malaysian state wants women to produce five children to meet the projected 70 million population in 115 years time so that a large labour force can be provided for a heavy industrialisation. The state in Singapore wants its educated women to breed more babies so that a superior race is generated. In South Asia, the rulers want women to produce not more than two children. Contraceptive measures like sterilisation and abortion are not seen as means for women to have greater control over their bodies, but rather for the reshaping of the demographic policy.
The only force that can counter attacks and violation of the democratic rights of Asian women is a grassroots movement of women working hand in hand with other movements of the toiling masses, because it is the interplay of state interference, patriarchy and class that creates the present situation.
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