Security

Politics

World

Letters

Sports

Obituaries

Archives

Women for peace

It used to be the name of an organisation of Sri Lankan women who had banded together to call for peace and an end to the ethnic war. They were an off-shoot of the yet small but dynamic Sri Lankan women's liberation movement.

That was in the mid-1980s and the war was yet a slowly growing insurgency and counter-insurgency accompanied by atrocities, human rights violations and growing ethnic hatreds. The group was small and, like its related organisations of similarly small groups campaigning for peace and ethnic equality, was regarded with suspicion, even derision by those in society's mainstream at the time.

That is all in the past, though. Today, peace and ethnic equality, cultural plurality and reform are all popular slogans endorsed by a majority of Sri Lankans yearning for an end to the death, destruction and socio-economic dislocation that the war has brought upon all Sri Lankans collectively.

On Friday, literally thousands of women activists, from all walks of life, gathered in Colombo to campaign for peace and justice. They marched the streets to mark International Women's Day which falls on March 8.

Women's organisations held public functions and demonstrations throughout the country in a nationwide celebration of the Sri Lankan women's struggle for equality and recognition that was unprecedented in scale.

Even the mass media seemed to have caught on, with special TV programmes on women of Sri Lanka, past and present, and newspaper supplements and articles. And so too has the political establishment with messages by the national leadership, ministers, bureaucrats and activities by various political parties.

The call of peace has already been taken up by a majority of Sri Lankans. If this year's March 8 activities is any indication, at last, after nearly a century of activism by single personalities and then small groups of women, the call of Sri Lankan women for their right to equality and recognition, has also entered society's mainstream.

This gathering momentum will surely be the foundation for action in society for changes to existing gender inequities in social life, political institutions, in business, in the workplace, in the home; for an end to sexual exploitation, of gender and sexual exclusion and sexual harassment. That is the hope of our now matured women's movment.

Sri Lanka is famous as the first country in Asia to grant universal franchise - in 1931 with the right to vote being simultaneously won by men and women. Sri Lankans were also proud to elect the world's first elected female head of government in modern democracy. The late Premier Sirimavo Bandaranaike's daughter, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga then became South Asia's first female executive head of state.

And it is now, in our first joint administration between Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's United National Front Government and People's Alliance leader Chandrika Kumaratunga's Presidency, that the voice of women for peace is being heard loudest.

Perhaps because the crisis of our society has visited its tragic aspects most on women, it is they who have been among the first to press for peace and an end to aggressive contests for power and ethnic supremacy. Does the fact that the call of women has now entered society's mainstream mean that the other sex, men, who dominate that mainstream, have heard the call?

The Theri Gaatha remind us of that first movement of liberated women inspired by the Teaching of the Buddha. Then, in those hallowed days, women listened to an enlightened man. Today, will men listen to women? Will our Dhamma Deepa show the way forward again, in this part of the world?

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security 
 Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager