Events are moving so fast in Nepal that Lily Thapa decided to
leave London early. With a Code of Conduct being drawn up between
the new government coalition and the Maoist insurgents, as she says,
"If they need me and my experience, I will be there!" So far the
Maoist negotiators have one woman on their team: the government,
none. She is not convinced this will change. But she is campaigning
for a seat at the peace table nevertheless, on behalf of the widows
and wives of the missing, who make up many of the surviving victims
of a conflict which has claimed over thirteen thousand lives in the
last decade.
Lily was in the UK for last week's Wilton Park conference on
implementing United Nations Resolution 1325 for the equal
participation of women in conflict resolution and peace-building.
Her account of the experience of young widows in Nepal was a good
test case for the assembled dignitaries and policy gurus. It is a
story that began long before there was any glimmer of a peace
process on the Nepalese horizon.
Lily was a young mother when her husband was killed while serving
as a UN peacekeeper in the 1991 Gulf war. She found herself a victim
of the 'social death' to which many bereaved women are subjected in
regions of south and south-east Asia and Africa. Religious and
cultural proscriptions have sprung up to replace outlawed practices
like sati where the wife must be burned alive on her
husband's funeral pyre, or buried alive in his grave treating the
widow figure as a bringer of bad luck and a danger to the community.
As a sexual being no longer under the control of a father or
husband, she is constrained by measures such as diet codes and
colour codes. She must sleep on the floor. She is banned from public
ceremonies and from talking to men. She must only eat vegetarian
food, and she must not wear colourful clothes or jewellery. After
being attacked by a local group armed with a hammer for failing to
remove the nose-ring her parents had given her as a child, Lily
resolved to build a movement for widows. In Nepal it is called the
Single Women's Group because the word for widow still invokes
stigma and shame.
Such widows often find that their fate and the fate of the
children for whom they are now solely responsible lies in the hands
of male members of their husband's families. Many lose their
inheritance, land or property and fall victim to violence or sexual
abuse. The insecurity that accompanies conflict only worsens this
situation: they are now at the mercy of the hostile forces, and
suffer rejection by their families, internal displacement, rape and
sex-trafficking to India, if they are not left for dead. Lily has
struggled for thirty years to highlight their deepening plight and
enable them to begin rebuilding their lives. In the last two years,
her widows' movement has launched a defiant new initiative wearing
red dresses.
In 1994 she established the Women for Human Rights-Single Women's
Group (WHR-SWG) as a campaigning base and training centre for
widows. With over one hundred and five branches and fourteen
thousand members, it is the only women's NGO in the country that
educates and informs women about UN Resolution 1325, translating it
into all the local languages. And interestingly, it is the only
Nepali NGO to work with Maoists as well as army and police widows on
the other side.
"Women from all sides of the conflict work together in our
groups. We don't discriminate on the basis of who their husbands
were or what their politics are. Once they join they are only 'the
widows'. That is how we could operate quite effectively while there
was a Maoist insurgency. So this is a kind of peace process in
itself. But there is nothing easy about this it is a challenge."
Training ensures that such encounters have a better chance of
working from the start.
The Maoists see how the group helps their widows. Lily thinks
these seeds of reconciliation have a vital contribution to make to
Nepal's changing political culture. "These changes were not brought
about just by the political parties but by the whole of civil
society. This makes us far more hopeful than in the past. There is a
huge women's movement trying to bring democracy to Nepal. Our groups
joined many other women's groups in the streets, demonstrating and
demanding change."
Lily's organisation has already impacted on the political
process. She gathers data on the situation in which her widows find
themselves, filling in large information gaps. This mapping has
attracted the attention of the UN, which finds a similar dearth of
reliable data in Iraq and Afghanistan too. With the Opportunity
Fund, she set up a centre for internally displaced women and
children. Her campaigning has altered the laws on inheritance,
pensions, custody and citizenship in Nepal: the poverty of widowhood
even figures in the tenth Nepalese five-year plan.
After wrestling with her conscience and discussing with
colleagues the possibility of seeming to have 'joined the King's
party', Lily accepted an invitation to join the five-member Women's
Commission appointed by the Ministry of Women in March, after two
years of frustrating inactivity and delay. But the King changed his
mind too late within weeks he and the Women's Commission were both
part of history.
Last week, the restored House of Representatives declared that a
child's citizenship can be registered in the name of the
mother or the father; pledged to reserve thirty-three percent of
places in the civil service for women; and agreed to revise all the
139 other laws that treat women as lesser than men. Nevertheless,
Lily is aware how far there is to go before enough key people in
Nepal understand the implications of Resolution 1325.
"We are calling for the presence of women on the forthcoming
peace committee but so far our advocacy has been ignored. I don't
think there is much chance but I am trying my best! It is vital
that the peacekeepers and the military and security forces
understand the role that women play in conflict resolution."
So did the Wilton Park conference give cause for hope? Her
response reveals a familiar impatience with the contrast
between the rhetoric and the implementation of 1325. "There was a
real lack of people who work on the ground as I do. Most of the
participants work on policy, and are unaware of the real grassroots
problems people face. I and one or two others tried to clarify the
practical obstacles. So they learnt a great deal from us!"
Nor is she convinced that the international community realises
how urgently humanitarian assistance is needed to help turn her
war-torn country around. But she has achieved something remarkable
in Wilton Park: she did not go back to Nepal entirely
empty-handed.
"I was talking to my colleagues about women's exclusion from
negotiations in Nepal. They said, why don't you ask all the
important people here to add their voice to yours? Everyone was so
positive. People who never sign petitioning letters wanted to sign
this time, recognising that women must be fully involved in
rebuilding Nepal. People were happy to send this message to the UN
Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, urging him to put pressure on the new
government to ensure that women participate fully in the peace
process. As soon as I get back I will give this letter to the press,
to the UNDP Residents' Representative in Nepal, to our Prime
Minister, and put it on the website
too
"
