BY LAURA GARZA AND MAGGIE TROWE
HUAIROU, China - Amid an attempt to portray the massive forum on women taking place here as an event plagued with repressive interference by the Chinese government, more than 20,000 women have proceeded apace in holding discussions, workshops, marches, processions, debates, and distributing and selling literature on the fight for women's rights. Banners, posters, and notices of workshops drape the walls, fences, and building entrances.
Daily protest actions have occurred on the conference grounds of the forum of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on women, from numerous marches against nuclear weapons testing led by Japanese and Pacific Island activists, to a demonstration protesting discrimination against lesbians, and another demanding an end to the U.S. government's economic blockade of Cuba.
A large number of women at the NGO forum are from Asian countries. Prior to the conference about 6,000 registered from Japan, 2,000 from the Philippines, and hundreds from other countries in the region, including 600 from South Korea and a few dozen from North Korea.
"This has done away with the myth of the meek Asian woman," said one participant in a spirited march demanding justice for former "comfort women." A number of other protests and workshops were organized by Japanese and Korean women on the issue of the comfort women - those pressed into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.
Among the several workshops organized on this topic was a meeting organized by women from North and South Korea. This was a historic event, since the government in Seoul bars visits and contact with North Korea.
Many of the Japanese women made a point of condemning Tokyo's role as a colonizer of other Asian peoples. At a workshop on the impact of occupation on Palestinian women, Miki Iwakuni, a lawyer who works on the case of the comfort women explained that the Japanese government justified its occupation of Korea and China in the 1930s and 1940s by saying that the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese were fellow Asians who could live in harmony together.
The truth, however, Iwakuni added, was that the Japanese rulers colonized Korea and China by military force. "No country has the right to occupy another people's land," she said to the applause of the Palestinian women and others in the workshop.
Women from the Philippines led a number of workshops on the situation of migrant workers. In a workshop called "Garment Workers Worldwide: the Global Assembly Line," women from the Philippines, Bangladesh, the United States, and Thailand compared the experiences of garment and textile workers in those countries. Seatin Wilaiwan, a member of the Textile Workers Federation in Thailand, said fires in the sweatshops are common, like the one that killed 188 women in the Kitatoy factory in 1993. Employers ignore labor laws and try to fire militants, she said, but the federation members in different factories compare experiences and work to build solidarity and confidence among workers to fight back.
No to nuclear testing in the Pacific
At a plenary session on the opening day of the forum,
Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist from the White
Earth reservation in Minnesota, condemned the planned
testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific by the French
government. Women from Asia and Pacific took the lead in
organizing protests and workshops against the tests at
Mururoa in French Polynesia.
Susanna Ounei-Small, an activist from the French colony of New Caledonia, spoke at another conference plenary session and called for an end to the testing and to colonial domination. "If we were not a colony of the French, they would not be able to conduct nuclear tests in our area. The only way to put an end to nuclear testing in the Pacific is to decolonize the Pacific," she said. In an interview she explained that the French government had prevented a woman from Tahiti and a woman from New Caledonia from attending the conference.
Cuban women led a workshop on the impact of the world economic crisis that also involved participants from Mozambique, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Guatemala, China, and the United States. Women cited high unemployment and low wages, the employers' increasing use of part-time work, and the growing number of women and men forced to work as street vendors with no job security or benefits as some of the major problems they confront.
Cuban women also sponsored workshops on the situation in their country. Organizations from the Philippines, Canada, and elsewhere joined in sponsoring meetings against Washington's embargo of Cuba. On September 5 a march of several hundred against U.S. policy on Cuba wound its way through the grounds of the nongovernmental forum. Demonstrators chanted "Cuba Sí, Yanqui No."
Chinese women joined in all the workshops. The thousands of Chinese volunteers also perused the exhibits, goods for sale, and freely discussed with other participants the status of women in their countries.
The story of a Chilean woman who suffered a botched abortion, lost her arm from a gangrenous infection, and was then jailed for having the abortion was featured at the tribunal on human rights. While the topic of abortion rights was discussed in many workshops it has not been a prominent theme here.
Muslim women
A discussion on Muslim women, Islamic fundamentalism,
and the source of the rise in rightist attacks on women has
also run throughout the conference. A number of workshops
focused on the situation facing women in countries with
large Muslim populations. A group of women from Iran spoke
out against secularism and defended the policies of the
Iranian government, which restricts some of the rights of
women. They also helped lead a small march against abortion
and homosexuality.
While U.S. bombs were being dropped over Serb-held positions in Bosnia at the time, there were only a few organized discussions of the war in that region. At a workshop on Bosnian Women and Their Families sponsored by the Iranian-Bosnia Friendship Association, Hadzic Munira- Beba from Bosnia-Herzegovina said, "We are being killed because we want to live together in a society where it doesn't matter what nationality you are, what religion you are, where it only matters if you are human." She appealed for help "to stop the fascists in Bosnia and to help us find our families."
Later in the workshop another view was expressed by a woman who said the fighting in Bosnia was a problem going back centuries, and was part of an attempt to liquidate Muslims in Europe. After the meeting concluded a march to support the people of Bosnia was held.
U.S. government delegation
With the arrival of Hillary Clinton in China, the
leadership of the U.S. delegation widened its no-holds-
barred attack on China. At the main, United Nations
conference in Beijing, Clinton charged that Chinese
authorities had harrassed large numbers of forum
participants.
Many women at the NGO forum, which Clinton spoke at the next day, saw her appearance as a victory over conservative opposition to the conference.
But after days of news coverage in which factual reporting of events at the forum was mostly absent, conference participants were less inclined to follow the lead of Hillary Clinton, Geraldine Ferrarro, and other members of the U.S. government delegation who have spearheaded the attack on China as a major violator of human rights in the world, while portraying the U.S. government as a great defender of women's rights.
At a discussion with Betty Friedan, a figure in the women's rights movement who is closely allied with the views of the U.S. government delegation, dozens of women raised criticisms of the way the U.S. press was reporting on events, and cheered when someone said the Chinese hosts should be congratulated for their efforts.
Friedan said she agreed that more should be said about the actual proceedings and discussions at the forum. She also repeated her charge that the Chinese government had insulted women by holding the conference at a site outside Beijing, that China is a police state, and that officials had tried to limit the rights of conference participants.