The following is a WiPC special action for International Women’s Day 2000, highlighting the cases of women writers and journalists who have faced persecution and who were especially active in campaigning for women’s rights: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY 8 MARCH 2000 International Women’s Day is a time when the Writers in Prison of Committee highlights the […]
The following is a WiPC special action for International Women’s Day 2000, highlighting the cases of women writers and journalists who have faced persecution and who were especially active in campaigning for women’s rights:
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
8 MARCH 2000
International Women’s Day is a time when the Writers in Prison of Committee highlights the cases of women writers and journalists who have faced persecution and who would benefit from publicity on their cases. The three cases highlighted this year are of women who were especially active in campaigning for women’s rights in their own communities or beyond. They are:
Flora Brovina of Kosovo, currently detained in Serbia;
Irene Fernandez of Malaysia, currently on trial;
Konca Kuris of Turkey, whose body was recently found in a mass Hezbollah grave.
Readers are invited to send appeals on behalf of the women profiled below and to promote their cases in their own national media on and around 8 March 2000.
Women Writers in the Year 2000: increasingly under attack
In the last two decades of the Twentieth Century, women around the world increasingly demanded their rights. In all continents, but perhaps most remarkably in the developing world, they formed associations and coalitions aimed at bringing to an end the many practices which have historically led to women being treated as second-class citizens (and sometimes not even that) in most cultures. Women called for proper health care, equal access to education, equal pay for their work. They successfully campaigned for rape in times of conflict by soldiers to be regarded by the United Nations as a war crime; many campaigned for an end to genital mutilation, sexual exploitation of girls, enforced dress codes. One result of all this activity was the agreement made by Nation-States meeting in Beijing to scrutinize their own laws with the aim of eliminating discrimination against women. Another was the appointment of a Special Rapporteur for Women’s Rights. In general there is greater acknowledgment than ever before among international bodies that women’s rights, in the context of today’s world, need special protection.
Despite these positive achievements, women are still among the most vulnerable members of their local populations; many are illiterate or poorly educated. Because of this, few manage to gain the stature of a professional writer – which is why, in a case list of some 700 writers in prison, the writers’ organization PEN typically only has about 50 women writers on its books at any one time. This does not mean that women are less likely to be persecuted for their writing than men – if anything the contrary is true, when one considers that for every male writer or journalist in most developing countries, there are very few women. When women do emerge as articulate and eloquent writers, they quite often use their talents to champion human rights; and the result is often that they are threatened, banned, jailed, prosecuted – or even murdered.
Some Examples of Women Under Threat
Arguably the most famous case of a woman under threat is Burma’s opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, whose every movement is watched and who is not free to move about freely in her own country. The military government there has consistently ignored the results of her landslide victory in a past election. However, lesser known is the case of Aung San Suu Kyi’s colleague, the woman writer Daw San San Nweh. One of Burma’s most prominent journalists, short story writers, and novelists, Daw San San Nweh is serving ten years’ imprisonment for her staunch criticism of the military government. Her daughter, Mo Mo Tun is in jail with her on similar charges.
Another celebrated woman journalist, the Turkish writer Nadire Mater, is facing a hearing of her trial on Women’s Day, 8 March, itself. She has been charged with insulting the military for her book Mehmet’s Book, which has also been banned. In the book, Mater presented moving testimony from Turkish soldiers who had served in the country’s troubled southeastern region, which is mainly populated by Kurdish inhabitants. Some of the soldiers’ testimonies were critical of the kinds of measures they were ordered to adopt against the local civilian population.
Another woman in Turkey whose case PEN is investigating is that of Asiye Güzel Zeybek. While PEN does not yet have enough information to determine the real reasons for her imprisonment, there is strong evidence that she was brutally raped while in custody. A journalist for the journal Atilim and Isçinin Yolu (Worker’s Path), she is accused of connections with the far-left Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. During her trial hearing of 8 October 1997, she claimed that she was raped while under interrogation at the Istanbul Security Directorate Political Department, and later eight policemen were officially accused of the crime.
These women and some fifty others are currently on PEN’s list of writers imprisoned, charged, threatened, attacked, tortured, disappeared or killed. What follows are three profiles of three women who have shown particular courage in fighting for women’s human rights in their communities. One, Konca Kuris, has been made to pay the ultimate price for her efforts:
death. Another, Flora Brovina, is imprisoned, and the third, Irene Fernandez, has been dogged for years by an endless trial that may soon end in her detention also.
Turkey: Found Murdered
Konca Kuris
The body of Konca Kuris was found in February 2000, one of two females found in a mass grave discovered on Hezbollah premises in Konya, Turkey. She had been kidnapped by Hezbollah militants on 16 July 1998 in the Mediterranean town of Mersin, and it was widely believed that her criticism of fundamentalist Muslim circles was directly responsible for her abduction and murder. There was evidence that she had been brutally tortured before being killed.
Konca Kuris was, according to her fellow woman writer Ayse Onal, a “great influence on Turkish women” who “showed that it’s possible to be completely modern and still be faithful to Islam.” She was born in 1960, married at the age of 17 and was the mother of five children. According to The New York Times, she became interested in Islam at a young age, but left the first group she joined on being asked to wash its leaders’ clothes. She then joined Hezbollah briefly: Hezbollah (“Party of God”) is a radical group that aims to overthrow the secular Turkish state and replace it with an Islamic state (it is not thought to be connected to the Hezbollah fighting Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon). She disassociated herself with it rapidly, however, declaring that it was imposing an interpretation of Islam that encouraged the subjugation of women. She then undertook her own investigation into Islam, reading the Koran, related texts and works of modern analysis. Her conclusion was that head-covering, the separation of the sexes in schooling, and other aspects of many of today’s Islamic practices were not a requirement of Islamic faith; rather they were hallmarks of a patriarchal system. A devout woman, with a firm belief in God, she believed that prayers in Turkey should be undertaken in the vernacular – not the traditional Arabic. Moreover, in her many writings – books and articles – and in her TV appearances and lectures she continually argued that true Islam was a religion that honored, not curtailed, women’s rights.
Her teachings were anathema to the Turkish Hezbollah, and she was kidnapped in front of her home on 17 July 1998. After that, no trace of her was found until February 2000. It is now thought that she was killed some two weeks after her abduction. There are unconfirmed reports in the Turkish press that a videotape of her torture was found by the police in the mass grave. The Turkish authorities are actively investigating her murder and have stated their determination to apprehend and punish those responsible. While President Suleyman Demirel has acknowledged that some government agents may have had some past connections to Hezbollah, in this instance, the WiPC believes that Konca Kuris’s death cannot be laid at their door. However, it is urging the Turkish government to do everything possible not only to bring Kuris’s murderers to justice, but also to protect other writers who are threatened by extremist groups. The WiPC also calls on the government to set a better example to such groups by ceasing all its own attempts to intimidate writers into silence – by, for example, dismissing the case against Nadire Mater who faces a hearing of her trial on Women’s Day itself, 8 March.
Recommended Action
Send appeals to:
Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit
Office of the Prime Minister
Basbaklanlik, 06573
Ankara, Turkey
Fax: +90 312 417 04 76
Serbia: Imprisoned after an Unfair Trial
Flora Brovina
Flora Brovina, an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, is a poet, writer, pediatrician and human rights activist who is currently serving a 12-year prison term in Pozorevac Prison in Serbia. Aged 48, she is accused of “terrorism” by “supporting illegal societies” and aiding and abetting the Kosovo Liberation Army. The charges are based on such actions as her supplying KLA members with food and clothing. Her case is currently undergoing an appeal.
Brovina, aged about 50, was declared a “woman of the year” in 1988 by the U.S. magazine Marie Claire. Her poetry is extremely popular in the region and she has written four books. She is an Honorary Member of nine PEN centres and her imprisonment is widely believed to be in retribution for her vociferous criticisms of Serbian aggression in the province of Kosovo, as expressed through both her writings and her work.
After the Serb army first marched into Kosovo to counter the emerging revolutionaries, she was among many key intellectuals summarily dismissed from their posts – in her case her job as a doctor at a Pristina hospital. Throughout 1998 and 1999, however, she founded and acted as President of the Albanian Women’s League and was a key organiser of peaceful demonstrations protesting the Serb authorities’ abuses of human rights. In March 1998, she and 20,000 other ethnic Albanian women gathered near the U.S. Center for Information in Pristina waving sheets of blank, white paper – to indicate, as she explained, that “all options were still open”: there was still time to broker a peace. As fighting intensified, however, she ran a clinic distributing health care information and a shelter for orphaned children. She continued to run these, even during the height of the NATO bombardment.
She was arrested on 21 April 1999 by Serb paramilitaries who took her from the house where she was staying and drove her away. At first she was held in a prison near Pristina, but as the Serb troops withdrew, she was among hundreds of detainees transferred to Pozarevac in Serbia.
Rajko Danilovic, a defence lawyer retained by the Humanitarian Law Center, has filed an appeal against Brovina’s sentence on the grounds that there were serious violations of due process in her case and that the facts had not been determined. Brovina has stated that the truth was so distorted during her trial that she was reminded of a metaphor where an “elephant admitted to being a giraffe”. Acts such as being active in the Women’s League are being seen as “hostile”, even where the groups advocated no violence, and on the contrary, called for peace. The Supreme Court could reexamine Brovina’s case at any time and there have been many calls, in the region and beyond, for her 12-year sentence to be quashed.
Recommended Action
Please send appeals to the president:
– calling for Flora Brovina’s release
Appeals To
APPEALS TO:
Slobodan Milosevic>
President
Fax: +381 11 636 775
Malaysia: Writer hounded
Irene Fernandez
In June 1996, the Malaysian authorities launched a trial against one of the country’s most effective human rights activists: Irene Fernandez. The trial has turned out to be the longest in Malaysian history. Fernandez, aged 52, is Director of Tenaganita (Women’s Force), a women’s human rights group, and as such is publisher (and in many cases author) of many investigative reports on such issues as migrant workers and the exploitation of women in domestic service. She is charged with “false reporting” under Section 8a of the 1984 Printing Presses and Publications Act and faces a three-year prison term if convicted.
The article which gave rise to the charge was entitled “Abuse, Torture, and Dehumanised Treatment of Migrant Workers in Detention Camps”. The document examines the huge influx of migrant workers into Malaysia and graphically describes their fate as being tantamount to modern slavery. Those still in the camps are among the most abused, it said. Some inmates, it alleges, have actually died of beri beri and other curable illnesses. At a recent hearing of her trial, a witness in her defence described the appalling treatment he had received in one such camp. A Bangladeshi, he had been crammed into a room with 350 others, beaten repeatedly when he was unable to sleep, fed inadequately and not given any change of clothes or proper washing facilities.
Her defence aims to show that the contents of the report are true, and the net result is that no Tenaganita reports has ever, probably, had so much exposure. While the Deputy Home Minister, on publication of the report in 1995, acknowledged that some detention camp inmates had died, and that there was room for improvement, the Malaysian police nevertheless filed a criminal defamation report against Fernandez. They interrogated her intensively over a ten-day period, and ordered the surrender of all the documents, interview transcripts and other materials that pertained to the report. She at first refused to comply, as she was concerned for the safety of her interviewees. In March 1996, she was then arrested, charged, and had her passport impounded. The trial began three months later.
The prosecution has threatened to bring in 200 witnesses, but in many cases, the witnesses’ testimony has not reflected well at all on Malaysia’s detention camps. One witness from the kitchens claimed that the prisoners were fed if anything too much food, not too little; but under
cross-questioning it emerged that not only had he no proof of this statement, but that the amount of food in the deliveries he described was an inadequate amount for the detention camp inmates.
As the trial continues, Fernandez is free on bail, still active in Tenaganita, but can only travel abroad by applying to the Magistrate to release her passport, which remains impounded. In early 2000, there has been an escalation in the number of journalists being prosecuted under the 1984 Act, leading to fears that at some point soon, Fernandez’s trial might be brought to an unfavourable conclusion.
Recommended Action
Send appeals to the prime minister:
– urging for the case against Fernandez to be dropped
– and for the 1984 Act to be revised so that its scope to eliminate freedom of expression is eliminated
Appeals To
APPEALS TO:
His Excellence Dato’ Seri Dr. Mahatir Mohamad
Prime Minister
Jabatan Perdana Menteri
Kuala Lumpur 50502, Malaysia
Fax: + 60 3 238 3784
Please copy appeals to the source if possible.
