Still a man’s world, politically

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday February 27, 2008
Still a man’s world, politically
Comment: By MARINA MAHATHIR.


THE election season is upon us in full force, and since the day Parliament was dissolved, nomination lists have been scrutinised and re-scrutinised, with several dramatic drop-outs and resurrections. It’s a soap opera almost worth prolonging.

But nomination day finally arrived and microscopes were out, poring over each and every candidate to see who’s who.

So far the most remarked on fact seems to be the numbers of sons, daughters, sons- and daughters-in-law, nephews, brothers (but not sisters) that have been fielded.

Which rather makes you wonder if we are becoming like some countries where electoral seats are passed down within families.

My interest is, of course, in how many women candidates have been fielded this time. A rough count has yielded me at least 85 names that I recognise as female (the difficulty is that there are some names whose gender is difficult to ascertain), which is an impressive number.

Most of them are in state seats, and my impression is that the Opposition has fielded more women candidates than the Barisan Nasional. Which is rather interesting, given that at least one of the Opposition parties has always seemed rather women-unfriendly.

I would certainly like to know why political parties have fielded more women this time. Did they heed the call of various women’s NGOs and the Women’s Ministry to have more female candidates?

If so, their response is far from universal, since Perlis has fielded no women candidates at all. To add insult to injury, they had picked one woman candidate for a parliamentary seat only to take it away from her after a few hours.

Another woman, an incumbent, lost her seat to her own brother, which leads you to wonder why they couldn’t have just found him another seat instead of taking hers away?

Three women won their seats uncontested. At least one of them won due to the incompetence of her potential rival; but it would have been good to know what the mettle of the other women actually are, gauged through an actual election battle.

Several women candidates are pitted against other women candidates, leading us to wonder if the sex of the candidate is a factor at all. In any case, we should celebrate anyway since, win or lose, we will have a woman representative in.

Some people have asked why it is necessary to be concerned about the numbers of women elected representatives. Why, they ask, can’t we just choose people based on ability, rather than sex?

The thing is, politics by and large is a man’s game. It is stacked against women in every way, from the finances needed to run for office, to the long hours, to the types of issues that are promoted.

When women come in, they are pressured to not push for any women’s issues because these are seen as “discriminatory” against men. They are supposed to be “gender-neutral” instead.

But gender-neutrality is not the same as gender equality when the playing field between men and women is not level.

When the head of the state-level Wanita branch can be denied a seat because someone’s brother wants it, it makes for a strong argument to have seats reserved for women.

Otherwise everybody’s brother, son, son-in-law or nephew will elbow out every single woman candidate available, especially when the one who has the final say is a man.

Still, having more women representatives does not necessarily mean better representation. But the higher numbers are more likely to yield more quality representatives than low numbers of women.

Besides, women are less likely to make quips about leaks and tunnels, already a bonus in itself.

We are supposed to be aiming for 30% female representation in elected bodies. That’s below the actual proportion of women in the population. Yet, there are people who think this is too much.

Worse still, there are women who are in the position to make this happen who think that we should go slowly on this. As if waiting 50 years isn’t slow enough.

There are going to be women representatives who will make blunders because of lack of experience. They will be judged far more harshly than male representatives of similar ilk. It will be seen as a far greater weakness than male incompetence.

Sexism prevails, unless the women themselves want to change it and will unite, regardless of party affiliation. For that too, they need the numbers in order to be strong.

If more women win seats this time, they will gain the confidence to stand up for their rights, or at least for greater respect in the House.

Meantime, we need to decide whom to vote for, and get out there and vote. No excuses this time. It’s too important.

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Nasi tumpeng for all occasions

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.

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Wednesday February 13, 2008
Nasi tumpeng for all occasions
Comment: MARINA MAHATHIR


MAY I take this opportunity to wish all Malaysians, Gong Xi Fa Cai! It might be funny not to be race-specific wishing people that, but thus far every non-Chinese I’ve wished has automatically wished me back. So maybe, being the only non-religious festival we have here, Chinese New Year is the only Malaysian holiday we have.

I have just returned from a holiday in Indonesia, exploring the cities and countryside of Central and East Java and Bali. Most people who don’t know much about Indonesia – or at least Indonesia as it currently is – may think that Chinese New Year is not celebrated at all there.

After all, during the Suharto years, the Chinese minority were discouraged from having Chinese names (although not everybody complied) and nothing written in Chinese was allowed.

This translated across the water over here as absolute discrimination towards the Chinese minority, underscored by the terrible witch-hunts and rapes that occurred during the economic crisis that led to the downfall of Suharto.

In fact, there has always been a thriving Chinese community in Indonesia. Chinese-Indonesians founded some of the largest corporations, such as the Lippo Group.

Ong Hock Ham, who recently died, was a prominent historian. Josephine Komara, the batik designer and promoter, is also Chinese, as are many others in the textile and fashion industries.

In Indonesia, Chinese New Year is called Imlek, a word I have not been able to find the origin of. Although there aren’t as many decorations as we have here, you do now find shops selling red lanterns and other festive decorative items.

What was even more surprising for me was that on TV, there were Imlek specials to celebrate the occasion.

We visited the home of a Chinese friend who is also an antique dealer in Malang, East Java.

In so many ways, our friend and his wife are exactly like our friends back home with one exception; their very strong Javanese accent.

I guess to us, it’s a bit like listening to a Chinese person with an American, British or Australian accent, except that when they’re in Asia, you expect them to sound more familiar.

But the Javanese accent can be very thick and not always easy to understand. It does make you realise the folly of ignoring diversity within communities.

One thing that is common among the Indonesians, regardless of ethnicity, is the inherent courtesy that everyone seems to have. Unlike in many countries where you feel constantly hassled because you’re a tourist, in Java we never did.

People tried to sell us their crafts, but never so aggressively that it was off-putting. If we asked to see something, people smiled and said “monggo” which means “silakan” or “please do”.

Whenever we stopped to ask for directions, which was often, since signage in Indonesia is no better than in Malaysia, people always tried to be helpful. In the hotels we stayed in, the staff members were unfailingly polite and went out of their way to assist us whenever we needed it.

What became clear to us on this trip was that Indonesians have an abiding awareness of their culture and their history. There are historical monuments everywhere and streets named after heroes that people actually know about.

In the smaller towns, not everything has been torn down to make way for shiny new towers.

As a result you still get to see beautiful houses built in the style of a bygone era, even if some of them are no longer residences but used for commercial purposes.

As always, food is a unifying factor. Food stalls and simple restaurants abound, and all are delicious. Traditional music groups sing at nasi liwet stalls, dressed in sarong kebaya. You can still hire kerongcong groups to come and sing at home when you have dinner guests.

Visits to the keratons or palaces in Jogjakarta or Solo are true cultural experiences because the people who work there have done so for generations, and the rituals and dances are practiced as part of palace life, and not just for tourists.

It’s amazing that a country so much more culturally rich than ours can be so poor at marketing itself.

Our holiday wound up in Bali on the eve of Chinese New Year so we didn’t experience what it was like to celebrate the arrival of the Year of the Rat in Muslim Indonesia.

But on the front page of the largest newspaper Kompas, there was a photograph of Chinese-Indonesians praying at a Jakarta temple on New Year’s day.

What was interesting to me was the offering they made at the temple; nasi tumpeng, yellow rice shaped into a cone, surrounded and decorated by all sorts of accompaniments.

It’s a Javanese dish that is typically presented at every festive occasion regardless of religion or community.

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The bogeyman’s to blame

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine. Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.

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Wednesday January 30, 2008


The bogeyman’s to blame

By MARINA MAHATHIR

We see the constant blaming of foreign workers for all our ills, but none of it can really stand up to scrutiny.

IT’S a tried and true political strategy that when things aren’t quite rosy, one should distract the people by focusing on something else or coming up with a bogeyman.

The former diverts attention from what is really on peoples’ minds, while the latter seeks someone or something else to blame. Sometimes politicians even attempt a combination of both.

A recent survey by the Merdeka Centre for Opinion Research polled people on several issues, including what they deemed most currently important. At the top of the list was price increases and inflation.

Second, they are concerned about ethnic inequalities; and third, about crime and public safety. Everything else, including politics, corruption, drug abuse and illegal immigrants rank much further down the list.

What we think people should be concerned with, and what they actually are, can sometimes be very different. But anyone with a modicum of insight will already know that the issues highlighted in the survey are what people talk about all the time.

People are concerned about how they may go about their daily lives at a reasonable level of comfort and safety.

Can their lives carry on as before, or even improve? And can they and their families walk about without fear for their personal safety?

They obviously also see ethnic inequalities as a contributing threat to the peaceful environment in which they can earn a living, work and play securely.

But are these what matters to those up there? Instead, we have old stories regurgitated to distract from what is new.

For instance, the old story that in an opposition-held state supermarket lines are gender-segregated came immediately after an uproar over similarly-segregated schools in government-held states.

At least, in the first instance, this was a policy that was announced by the government in power, but in the second it was happening in defiance of regulations.

Both cases are of course “Band-Aid policies”, where male bad behaviour is accepted as normal while females are inconvenienced, rather than (shock, horror) empowered to deal with it.

The bogeyman tactic is rather like Margaret Thatcher starting a war over some distant islands in order to distract the populace from local economic issues.

Here, we see the constant blaming of foreign workers for everything, from lack of jobs, to crime and violence, and to the spread of diseases. None of it can really stand up to scrutiny.

It may be politically correct to complain about foreign workers taking jobs from locals, but these are not jobs that locals want.

Who exactly wants to work in plantations, clean toilets or care for other people’s babies?

If it were true that locals want these jobs, then we should set up job agencies specialising in filling up these vacancies with only locals.

It is disingenuous to say that foreigners keep “pouring in” to take up employment here when we know that many of these foreigners are being duped into selling everything they have to pay unscrupulous agents, and then finding that no jobs await them here.

If these jobs do not exist for them, then obviously they don’t exist for locals either.

Neither is it honest to say that foreigners are contributing to the rise in crime in this country. The police statistics themselves dispute these.

According to a fascinating paper by the Royal Malaysian Police, in 2004, the proportion of crimes committed by foreigners was only 2% of the total crime index, and on a per capita basis Malaysians commit more crimes than foreigners.

Incidentally, the police statistics do not really support the perception that there is a huge rise in violent crime. Most crimes in the country are in fact property crimes such as car theft.

But it serves political purposes to fuel this negative perception of foreigners with racist and stereotyped “facts”. For instance, it is not true that foreigners are running around full of disease and infecting locals.

Malaysians still make up the vast majority of people infected with HIV, and they are certainly infecting each other and not foreigners.

To imply that we should bar foreigners from coming in because of their alleged criminal intent and diseases is actually not going to contribute much to any sustainable solution.

Incidentally, the same police paper puts the blame on economic inequalities and unemployment as the reasons for crime, a situation not unlike many countries in the world.

Ahead of elections, we need to keep focused on the real issues, even while politicians try to distract us with fairytales. Like former US president Bill Clinton used to say, “it’s the economy, stupid”.

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Facets of Malaysian voices

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com Please.
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Wednesday December 19, 2007


Facets of Malaysian voices

MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

The events of the past few weeks have thrown up a myriad of Malaysian types – from the I’m-OK-I-don’t-care-what’s-happening to the voice of the public and the sanctimonious.

WITH all the recent events going on the country, as well as past events, any astute observer will have noticed some common traits in our countrymen and women in the way we respond to what is happening around us. Many of us can be grouped into several different categories.

There’s the I-Don’t-Care-What’s-Happening-As-Long-As-I’m-OK crowd which prefers to remain oblivious to everything in the belief that as long as they keep their heads down, they will be able to carry on with their lives in much the same way as they always have done.

These are the types who complain because they were delayed two hours to their Sunday football match because they got caught in a roadblock several miles away from the events that the police decided required monitoring.

They are not even remotely interested in why there were these events in the first place.

Then there’s the lot that believes that everything should be done strictly by the book and that people who don’t follow rules are basically thugs and anarchists.

No doubt these are also the types of people who would never dream of “pulling any cables” or “persuading” a tester not to penalise their kid too much in their driving test or a cop for catching them talking on their handphone while driving.

It’s only when other people don’t play by the rules, or use “proper channels”, that they are wrong, not when they themselves do it.

These are similar to the lot that fervently believes that Other People are always capable of Extremely Bad Behaviour, even when they don’t know the Other People at all.

For instance, if Other People are allowed to demonstrate on any issue, They are bound to get emotional and turn to violence in the blink of an eye, unprovoked by anything as trivial as a water cannon of course.

Whereas, this lot, if given the chance to demonstrate, would always be nice, polite and smiling. Hence the reason why only They, and never Other People, should ever be given permits to hold any sort of march or rally. Or present memoranda.

Then there’s the bunch that thinks that we really should never whine or complain because, really, things are not that bad.

That really depends on who’s talking of course.

Those who have nice homes and cars, send their kids to good schools and go on holiday a couple of times a year probably should just keep quiet.

But anyone who has some awareness cannot help but see that not everybody enjoys such good fortune, and if they have a conscience at all, surely cannot rest easy with such inequalities.

Since many of those who aren’t so lucky cannot voice out their problems to those who can help, then it behoves those who can get themselves listened to to say something. They may come out sounding like they are whining but they aren’t complaining about their own situations but that of their fellow citizens.

I am pretty tolerant of most of these types except for the ones who always believe that everyone else is naturally bound to behave badly. Usually the word “sanctimonious” is used for them.

These types truly believe that they will never commit sins whereas other people will do so at the slightest opportunity.

It’s the type that believes that everyone else’s child is a potential drug addict while theirs will never be. Or that any three people in a group are bound to start throwing rocks while they themselves wouldn’t dream of it.

I don’t know how we got to a situation where we trusted our fellow citizens so little.

Perhaps it is because we now live in an environment where we trust so few people at all, least of all those in charge of our lives.

We look appalled at some of our parliamentarians and ministers and wonder how did we trust them with our vote.

We are aghast at how our own police cannot be trusted to care for our safety and go after those who rob our homes and murder our children.

Sometimes we find our doctors can’t be trusted to treat us properly, nor our teachers to teach our kids the right things. How then can we be blamed for not trusting our neighbours?

Couple that with an environment of impunity where all sorts of wrongdoers seem to get away with everything, from building homes they should not be able to afford to insulting half the population with sexist jokes. When so-called leaders behave badly, what can we expect from regular people?

My resolution for 2008 is to continue going against the grain and believe in the best in people and that people are inherently good. That includes believing them when they say they will behave peacefully.

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Women the forgotten victims of AIDS

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com Please.
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Wednesday December 5, 2007


Women the forgotten victims of AIDS

Musings: By MARINA MAHATHIR

WORLD AIDS Day this year brought good news and bad news. The good news was that the numbers of people getting infected every year in Malaysia dropped a little. (Not that anybody can really explain why.)

The bad news was that among the people who did get infected, more of them were women.

There is a tendency to ignore the fact that women have been getting infected. About 10 years ago, there was a national conference on women and AIDS that expressed concern over women’s vulnerability, and made many recommendations about what to do. Nothing came of it.

The recommendation to have women represented on the National Coordinating Committee on AIDS was met with “If we have a women problem, we’ll ask you to come.” Now, according to government statistics, we do have a “women problem”.

Ten years ago, barely 1% of total reported infections was among women. Now it’s 10%. Last year, 15% of new infections were women.

But it’s important to remember that this is a national average. Local figures may be hugely different.

In Sabah where heterosexual sex is the main mode of transmission, a delegate at the First National AIDS Conference last weekend reported that one woman was infected for every three men. That’s more than double the national average.

I have to grind my teeth in frustration. Nobody takes the issue of women and HIV seriously, I suspect, simply because they are women.

A few months ago, when this newspaper highlighted a study I had presented, that HIV-negative men who married HIV-positive women still refused to use condoms consistently, a political leader from the state the study was done in blamed women for trying to infect their husbands!

When asked for an explanation why women are increasingly becoming infected, another politician said that since women wanted so much to be equal to men, this is what happens! Implying, presumably, that women equal men in loose morals.

But women are becoming infected precisely because they are not equal. Forty per cent of women who have become infected are housewives. Their husbands are almost all injecting drug users who have AIDS.

Most of these women had no idea what AIDS was and, even if they did, there was nothing they could do to protect themselves when protection essentially means either asking their husbands to use condoms or simply refusing to have sex with them.

How many married women can even consider refusing to have sex with their husbands?

That’s why it’s ridiculous to make unqualified recommendations to abstain from sex. Abstaining is not in the vocabulary of married people, especially women. Nor is simply saying “use a condom” as easy as all that when it is not women who have to use them.

Over the weekend, I sat in a time-wasting meeting called to impress on various Ministries the importance of the gender perspective in dealing with the issue of women and AIDS.

For one thing, few people beyond the usual suspects bothered to attend. Secondly, those who did come had no idea what ‘a gender perspective’ meant, not even the ones you would expect should know.

People tended to think that if things were put down on paper that meant that something had been done.

Follow-ups to see that words translated into action were non-existent.

Actions that were taken were evaluated only in terms of how many people were reached by a project, not whether the project actually achieved its objectives.

The much-touted National Strategic Plan on HIV/AIDS mentions women only once, and even then only in a section title and not in the content of that section.

If you don’t want to understand, you never will. Fifteen years ago, I had no idea what ‘gender’ was but now, because I wanted to understand, I do.

I see people in positions of responsibility who don’t think they need to learn anything who are given to flippant comments, who trivialise everything, as if people’s lives are unimportant.

But if some VIP decides it is important, suddenly they are rushing all over the place trying to spend money to please their bosses. It would be nice if their understanding of an issue were commensurate with the money they are prepared to spend on it.

One of the things I have never understood is why is it that there is such a gulf between government departments and NGOs in terms of a critical understanding of issues.

Why is it that NGOs routinely provide analytical reports while their government counterparts simply report facts and figures without attempting to understand what they are reporting?

Doesn’t anyone even want to know why women are getting infected?

Allowing women to become infected is symptomatic of a larger mindset: women don’t matter.

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