Working for Malaysia's
workers By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR - Volunteers at Tenaganita, a
leading Malaysian-based rights group that works
with migrant workers, cheer when grim-looking
authorities pay them a visit. They see harassment
by officials as an unmistakable sign that they are
on the job.
This week though, Tenaganita
volunteers were cheering for a different reason -
the non-governmental organization's (NGO's)
founder and director, Irene Fernandez, had just
won the 2005 Right Livelihood Award that is also
called the alternative Nobel Prize.
For
Tenaganita (Women's Force) volunteers, the award
that honors pioneers of "justice, fair trade and
cultural renewal", was
the best recognition yet
of their work - protecting migrant workers and
changing attitudes in this affluent country.
"The award recognizes our work and brings
into focus the plight of hundreds and thousands of
migrant workers who suffer constant abuse,
harassment and exploitation," an elated Fernandez
told IPS. "The recognition will spur us to work
even harder."
Fernandez founded Tenaganita
in 1991 and turned it into a premier NGO that
helps battered maids, women with HIV/AIDS and
Malaysia's plantation workers, sidelined by
mainstream development. Though recognized abroad
for its work, it is a different matter at home,
and Fernandez and her volunteers often find
themselves maligned for their commitment to giving
a voice to the voiceless.
A one-year jail
sentence hangs over Fernandez for publishing
"false news". Her passport has been seized, and
she needs to apply for temporary release of the
document from authorities each time she travels
abroad.
It was a report she published in
1995, detailing horrific living conditions,
beatings and harassment meted out to migrant
workers at detention camps, that landed her in
trouble. She was charged with maliciously
publishing false news and sentenced in 2003 to one
year in jail. She has appealed the sentence, but
strangely, no date has been fixed for a hearing.
Malaysia's government-controlled media
malign her and Tenaganita as "traitors and
anti-nationals", but to the many migrant workers,
whose cause she untiringly champions, she is a
hero.
The prize of two million Swedish
kronor (US$257,000) will be shared with Canadian
anti free-trade and rights activists Maude Barlow
and Tony Clarke as well as Roy Sesana, an advocate
for the rights of the Kalahari indigenous people
of Botswana, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation
said in a statement.
More than 70
candidates from 39 countries were nominated for
the award this year. The award, established in
1980, was announced in Stockholm on Thursday by
its founder Jacob von Uexkull, a former member of
the European parliament. The prizes will be
awarded at the Swedish parliament December 9.
Jacob said in an e-mailed statement that
Fernandez was honored for her "outstanding and
courageous work to stop violence against women, to
stop abuses of migrants and poor workers in
Malaysia".
"For many people this is no
longer an alternative [to the Nobel Prize], this
is the new mainstream," he said emphasizing that
the laureates do not just offer "hope and
inspiration, but actual practical support and
solutions".
"She is a very brave woman who
has continued to work for poor workers even after
she was sentenced to one year in prison," he said.
Fernandez has a three-decade record as a
grassroots campaigner, which reads like the
history of the NGO movement in Malaysia. She was
in on every issue - consumerism, women's rights,
education, freedom, democracy, migrant workers and
HIV/AIDS. She is also a senior member of the
National Justice Party of opposition icon, Anwar
Ibrahim.
A visit to her 14th-floor office
tells a lot about her ideals. Portraits of Ibrahim
and Che Guevara adorn the walls as does a quote
from the South American Marxist revolutionary that
says: "To Resist is to Win".
"We only live
once," she told IPS. "That is why life is precious
for each one of us. Life is nurtured, protected,
secured but for more and more people, life is
being threatened. As globalization grips us,
inequalities sharpen, and the divide between the
north and south increases. Poverty is one major
factor that threatens life.
"In Asia more
than 600 million people go to bed hungry. Workers
are treated as commodities and not human beings."
Over the past 14 years, Tenaganita has
championed the causes of lowly migrant workers,
young women trafficked into prostitution,
undocumented workers arrested and held for months
without trial in detention camps and domestic
workers violently abused and raped. It has also
brought out the horrors of working women in
Malaysia's infamous rubber and oil palm
plantations where working hours are long and life
dangerous.
"I started as a teacher where I
saw the effects of poverty on poor urban students
- it was terrible," said Fernandez, mother of
three grown children. "The students were hungry,
lost, neglected and very depressed."
In
1976, she joined the Consumer Association of
Penang (CAP), which then was the leading advocate
of consumer issues and growing to be an
influential grassroots organization.
"At
CAP I had a well-rounded experience forming
consumer clubs, organizing workers and farmers,
and fighting big multinationals like the giants
making infant food formula," she said.
From CAP she moved to another consumer
association in 1985 and took up feminist causes,
researched and organized women workers, opposed
violence against women and raised issues such as
domestic violence, exploitation of women in the
media and gender bias.
The year 1987 was a
turning point for Fernandez and many other
activists in Malaysia. This was a time when the
government came down hard on a democracy movement,
arresting more than 100 opposition politicians,
activists and reformists.
Although
Fernandez was not arrested, her work was badly
affected and fear gripped activists in grassroots
organizations. The government-controlled media
also portrayed NGOs as enemies of the people.
After a break of a few years, spent
reading and soul-searching, she was back in the
fray, founding Tenaganita in 1991 as her vehicle
for change.
The 1990s was a time of
sustained economic boom that saw some three
million undocumented workers pouring into Malaysia
to work in the factories, construction sites and
plantations.
With abuse, maltreatment and
exploitation at a high, Tenaganita set up
telephone counseling and research and services
providing legal aid and representations to the
government on behalf of migrant workers.
When she was found guilty of publishing
false news by saying that migrant workers'
detention centers were overcrowded, food
substandard and medical care negligible, activists
and others were certain it was a case of the state
getting back at her.
"To me, the trial and
the conviction are a symbol of our victory and
their defeat because it shows we have achieved
success in our work and that is why the oppressor
is angry and wielding the axe," Fernandez said.
"We have to press on."
