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Asia Pacific Research Network ISBN 978-971-9941-10-1 CONTENTS Copyright Introduction ©ASIA PACIFIC RESEARCH NETWORK 2012 Antonio Tujan, Jr. All rights reserved. Chairperson, APRN . 3 Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN) holds the Conference Summary and Highlights . rights to this publication. The publication may be 9 cited in part as long as APRN is properly acknowledged as the source and APRN is furnished copies of the final Conference Declaration. 31 work where the quotation or citation appears. CRISIS AND WAR Comments and inquiries may be forwarded to: Studies and Stories of Women Resisting Crisis and War ASIA PACIFIC RESEARCH NETWORK Liza Maza Secretariat International Women’s Alliance . 39 Climate Change – and the “Other” Footprint 3rd floor, IBON Center, 114 Timog Avenue Ariel Salleh Quezon City, Philippines 1103 Tels. (632) 9277060 to 62 Aidwatch, Australia . 43 Fax: (632) 9276981 War and Militarization: Imperialism as War Email: <[email protected]> Shoma Sen Website: www.aprnet.org Committee Against Violence on Women, India . 55 Cover Photos: Asia Pacific Research Network Layout and Cover Design: Randy Evangelista IMPACTS ON WOMEN AND GIRLS Published by: Asia Pacific Research Network Impacts of the Economic Crisis on Women Migrants In partnership with: Eni Lestari International Migrants Alliance . 65 Because I am a Girl: The Impact of Global Economic Shocks Innabuyog on Girls and Young Women Sarah Hendriks PLAN Philippines . 71 ii iii The Indigenous Women’s Experience in Cordillera Vernie Yocogan-Diano Cordillera Women’s Education Action Research Center, Philippines . 79 SURVIVAL AND RESISTANCE Women in Asia: Surviving and Resisting the Crisis Mary Joan Guan Center for Women’s Resources, Philippines . 89 As War and Militarism Escalate: The Long Road to Women’s Empowerment Mary Joan Guan Center for Women’s Resources, Philippines . 109 From Parliament to the Streets: Challenges to Women in Parliament Rep. Luz Ilagan Gabriela Women’s Party Representative . 131 Organizing and Mobilizing against Victimization and Neo-liberal Globalization towards Freedom and Democracy Judy Taguiwalo Department of Women and Development Studies, University of the Philippines . 137 Timorese Women in the Resistance Movement: A Young Woman’s Story Herminia de Deus East Timor Development Agency. 143 List of Tables.. 148 List of Graphs and Figures . 149 Photo and Image Credits . 149 iv INTRODUCTION 1 Introduction Antonio Tujan Jr. The research theme women oppression and empowerment has an important place in the 14 years of collaborative work by members of the Asia Pacific Research Network. Among these were the coordinated research on globalization and women labor that explored the combination of gender and class oppression and exploitation as it is intensified in neoliberal forms of policy and practice in booming Asia and the issue of women in situations of war. Late into the first decade of the twenty-first century, multiple crises and wars have become the defining phenomena not only for Asia but for the world as well. In the current context of a deep, lingering global crisis, Asia stands out as an exceptional self-contradiction – a high growth region in a world of recession and anemic recovery but also a region with severe poverty and where more than half the world’s poor continue to persist. And to top it all, Asia is where most of the wars of the past decades and up to the present are located. Economic crisis and wars provide the conditions for women to suffer more extreme forms of gender discrimination ending up more abused, exploited, repressed, victimized than they normally already are. The combination of class and gender oppression result in greater exploitation for women toiling masses – women workers who are made ineligible for equal wages because they supposedly work less, of low quality or only a second breadwinner or rural Antonio Tujan, Jr. is a writer, political women who lack entitlement in the feudal order. Women are most affected by analyst,and a social activist working on the crisis as it destroys the sources of livelihood of communities and results in Philippine and international issues. He was lower or loss of incomes for many, especially the poor. Thanks to systematic a political detainee during the Marcos age-old gender discrimination, women suffer from joblessness or make do dictatorship. He is currently the director of with lower paying, low quality jobs lacking in security, and as a result women IBON International and the chairperson of then suffer the brunt of crisis - lay-offs, loss of benefits, loss of social services the Asia Pacific Research Network. and so on. Not only do women comprise a disproportionately large share of the poor in countries all over the world who are more vulnerable to economic crisis, they are also more vulnerable to the myriad disasters and other effects of climate crisis – hurricanes, floods, drought, landslides, pestilence and the like. 2 Women Resisting Crisis and War INTRODUCTION 3 The women’s role in reproduction also means that in these situations From Survival to Resistance of economic and physical dislocation, women face even more difficult circumstances to fulfill their responsibility of foraging for food and water and Just as economic crises and war present situations that result in extreme other needs of survival. oppression, abuse and exploitation of women, they also provide situation that challenge the agenda for women’s equality and empowerment just as extremely. With shrinking means of subsistence and material returns from livelihood, In a proactive approach for women empowerment, the issue of crisis and war women’s displacement has included physical dislocation ranging from rural-to- is better addressed in the spirit of survival and resistance, and not just the spirit rural, rural-to-urban and forced migration. This physical dislocation hides within of resistance, but in the framework of resistance. yet many other contours of dispossession, emotional distress, physical and sexual abuse, and violence. There has also been particular erosion of women’s intangible This was the conclusion at the APRN Bali conference, on the occasion spaces such as the solidarity and community support, leaving the basic survival of the Annual General Meeting of the Asian Development Bank where the weave of women’s lives being torn apart under the push of individualistic value women concluded in their workshop on the economic crisis, that we must systems generated by market-based consumption patterns and policies. resist the crisis. In the plenary report a question was raised regarding the appropriateness of the call of resistance when crisis is an objective reality. They Wars should not be simply approached in their impact to peoples and explained that the crisis is the result of the totality of oppression and exploitation their communities as passive victims caught in the crossfire. Wars are often the of imperialism against the people, which in the end the women suffer. The act of elites in the extreme political framework of physical elimination where people must respond by resisting the crisis and the efforts by imperialism to the people are the principal victims. Rather, the people are also subjects in pass on the burden of the crisis and intensify its effects on the people, especially asserting their interests, whether in wars of liberation or armed resistance or in the women. peaceful resistance to oppression and to war itself. In Asia, most of the wars are being fought as imperialist aggression mostly by the United States such as Although women have mostly been at the receiving end of the negative the wars in Iraq the Korean peninsula, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Armed conflict impacts of neoliberal globalization and war, the reality is that women have continues to rage in resistance to oppressive states such as in India, Burma, faced these challenges in active survival - through time have been going through Nepal, the Philippines and so on. various cycles of coping and adapting to the onslaught of the multiple crises. They have used the largely exploitative spaces opening up for them to find As in economic and social crises, wars severely impact women because means of survival and support for themselves and their families. They have of the multiple vulnerabilities created by gender discrimination – the miserable reached out to embrace new means of livelihood and formed new bonds to conditions that displacement due to militarization and war inflict on women evade, as well as to confront patriarchal norms. Ranging from the precarious and children especially girls, war abuse of women and children including such livelihood mechanisms to migrant domestic labor in urban and international abominations as systematic rape as acts of war and suppression. settings; women have used their existing skills to survive in new spaces, at the Women’s empowerment is probably a more fundamental responsibility same time learning new skills despite many being alien and difficult to overcome as a continuation of the effort to achieve gender equality as an approach to given the limitations in education available to women. achieving equal rights, because one cannot achieve gender equality without the Women have utilized various mechanisms for taking control over their empowerment of those who are marginalized, those who are oppressed. We lives, ranging from simple coping mechanisms – such as finding new spaces for know that women empowerment is about self-organization, women’s social and economic survival- to true liberation. Some have been carried out as affirmative action. The fact that it’s not simply about effacing inequality, that lone individual survival mechanisms, others as community organizations and one has to be pro-woman. If one is truly for equality, one has to be feminist. even more so as political organizations joining hands with other progressive forces. Women’s organized resistance has ranged from peace-building efforts 4 Women Resisting Crisis and War INTRODUCTION 5 to civil disobedience to joining hands with organized armed resistance.