The strength of a woman
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By Gagani Weerakoon-2017-10-29
Feminism has come a long way since its decades old bra-burning-men bashing activism. Sunila along with her soul-mates in South Asia and around the world played an integral role in converting the movement into one that spreads love and speaks about friendship from its initial aggressive moves. This, in return opened up feminism for moderate men and resulted in having male colleagues who fight for women's fair share, especially in South Asian countries like Bangladesh and India.
Since feminism in Sri Lanka or South Asia cannot be spoken without speaking about Sunila, a group of feminists and human rights activists gathered recently at the office of the Women and Media Collective in Colombo – an organization founded by Sunila – to speak about her presence in their lives and how she became a pillar of strength in many successful movements across borders.
"We stand in the land of Lord Buddha today and we know, as was told by the Buddha, the only certain thing in life is death. We must remember the only way to escape death is being loved by people. There are so many who left us yet remain in our heart and mind. Sunila also left us in body but entered our hearts and that's where she lives," Kamla Bhasin, Indian gender activist and trainer on gender and patriarchy said.
Sunila's four-decade long activism began in the mid-1970s with her becoming part of Sri Lanka's first independent human rights organization – the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) – that was set up to protect the rights of young men and women who led the 1971 youth movement. Since then she was a key member of numerous civil society groups as a feminist leader, an advocate, a resource person and a trainer.
She was a founder of Sri Lanka's Pacific and Asia Women's Forum and also mobilized in support of the Mothers' Front to stand against State repression while helping to build Women for Peace to advocate for a political solution to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.
According to Kamla, Sunila played a critical role in shaping feminist thinking in South Asia while at the same time strengthening solidarity and mobilizing feminist activism in a wide range of struggles, be it garment workers,
under-priviledged or tea-estate workers in Sri Lanka or elsewhere.
Sunila took over the leadership in 1990 of INFORM Human Rights Documentation Centre, a leading institution committed to monitoring and documenting human rights violations perpetrated by both State and non-State entities, which she assisted in establishing in 1989. This probably was the beginning of her being hated or misunderstood locally and which eventually led her to station herself in Netherlands at the Institute for Social Studies as a recipient of a 'Scholars at Risk' award. This was also where she was diagnosed with late stage cancer.
Sunila became a global citizen by making friendships and building solidarities with feminists and human rights struggles across borders from Peru to Indonesia, from India to the USA, and from Mexico to Nairobi.
The solidarity was such that her fellow feminists Charlotte Bunch (USA), Roxanna Carrillo, Roshmi Goswami and Nighat Said Khan flew down to Sri Lanka to share their merry memories of Sunila.
In the Asia-Pacific region, she was closely associated with APWLD (Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development), SANGAT (South Asian Network of Gender Activists and Trainers), Forum Asia (Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development) and served as Executive Director of International Women's Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW-AP) from 2008 to 2010.
They spoke about Sunila gaining international recognition while working with CWGL (Centre for Women's Global Leadership) in the global feminist campaign that led to the recognition that women's rights are human rights at the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, at other UN World Conferences in the 1990s and especially the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995. She engaged in debates around the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to ensure inclusion of gender perspectives and worked on implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on women's participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction). She was a member of the Global Civil Society Advisory Board to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and of the Women, Peace and Security Expert Group convened by UN Women in South Asia.
Sunila's invaluable contributions as one of South Asia's pre-eminent human rights activists have been recognized internationally. In 1998, she received the UN Secretary General's Award for Human Rights from Kofi Annan. She was honoured by Human Rights Watch, with its Human Rights Defender Award in 2007. She was also nominated in 2005 as one of the One Thousand Women for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Roshmi who is originally from war-torn Assam recalled how Sunila played a major role in strategically preparing them to present their cases in international forums and how to tackle counter criticism without letting the real issues slip off their hands.
"She was actively engaged in getting Maoist women in Nepal to document violence and violations apart from helping us. I remember hesitating to go to an international forum and face it without having her by our side because she was the strategist amongst us. This was a time where there were no mobile phones or WhatsApp and other facilities where you could instantly seek advice. But she sat me down and briefed me on how to act if Situation A arose and how to tackle Situation B. She's so good at pumping confidence so much so that finally, I had the courage to criticize the UN for its hypocrisy while working in the organization. It gave me the courage to not think twice to step out and here I am today functioning as a donor to worthy causes," Roshmi added.
Nighat, a renowned Pakistani feminist who was familiar with Sri Lanka as a result of backing the JVP in the early 1970s had many anecdotes of Sunila as well as her daughter Subha to be shared.
"Among many memories, I have this particular one where Sunila, I and Kamla were in Bangalore in 1991. This was during the one month course on understanding gender and feminism which we all underwent earlier and Kamla came up with a proper one month course in 1986 and formed a South Asian Feminist mafia. Sunila was with her four-year-old daughter Subha and the little one was just roaming around while we spoke about concepts of gender, feminism and many others. So we spent days and hours in dismantling and rebuilding concepts and by the third week there was little lull until we heard a little voice screaming under the table; "Feminism, feminism, feminism...What is to be done!"
