Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9412270021
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MOLLY MOORE THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: COLOMBO, SRI LANKA LENGTH: Long
They were propelled into politics by executions and assassinations. Many endured imprisonment, exile and death threats. Together, they have become the most powerful female political leaders in the world.
South Asia, where the status of women is often ranked among the worst in the world, now has more female heads of state than any other region of the globe.
In Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, an expanding widows' and daughters' club has taken charge of national governments and in some cases, opposition parties as well.
Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, 49, whose husband and father were victims of political violence, was elected Sri Lanka's first woman president recently and is expected to make international political history by appointing her 78-year-old mother prime minister.
The daughter-mother leadership team would mark the return of Sirimavo Bandaranaike to the position she held 34 years ago when, after her husband's assassination, she became the first woman to be elected prime minister of a country.
The Sri Lankan women join Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, 41, and Bangladeshi Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, 49, at the pinnacle of power during a critical moment in South Asian history: Each of their countries is struggling to bolster fledgling democracies and open stagnant, socialist-based economies to the outside world.
And in neighboring India, meanwhile, the legacy of slain prime minister Indira Gandhi - one the best-known female leaders in modern history - continues, with the women of the Gandhi family remaining prominent in national politics.
Sonia Gandhi, the widow of Indira's son Rajiv - who also served as prime minister and was later assassinated - is considered one of the most influential behind-the-scenes politicians in the country, though she holds no elective office.
Although their ascents were occasioned by violence and buttressed by family political dynasties, these women are all the more extraordinary because they have succeeded in one of the most chauvinistic, male-dominated regions of the world by demonstrating enough grit to emerge as potent political forces.
``They are not here by virtue of their names alone,'' said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, a Colombo-based political analyst. ``They have earned it by standing up to insurgencies and coups.''
Indeed, Bhutto and Zia are engaged in bitter fights against opposition parties and are being accused of having far more interest in furthering their political power than in solving the law and order and economic problems facing their nations.
In Zia's case, her rival is a woman: Sheik Hasina, head of Bangladesh's leftist opposition party and daughter of the country's assassinated founder, Sheik Mujibur Rahman.
South Asia's female leaders are products of political systems and societies so dominated by violence that bullets and bombs often decide more elections than do voters and ballots.
Kumaratunga was 14 when her father, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike, was gunned down by a radical Buddhist monk in 1959. Her husband, Vijaya Kumaratunga, who was a popular movie star and political figure but never held an elected national office, was shot dead by a right-wing extremist in the driveway of his home only seconds after he spotted the gunman and managed to shove their two young children out of the line of fire. Chandrika Kumaratunga raced out of the house to find her husband crumpled in a pool of blood.
After a campaign in which her chief opponent was assassinated by a presumed suicide bomber two weeks before election day - and replaced on the ballot by his wife - Kumaratunga said in an interview, ``I am aware that I can be killed at any moment. Every time I leave the house, I don't know if I will come back to it.''
She said her children, now 12 and 14, ``are terrified,'' adding, ``They beg me all the time to give up politics.''
Bhutto's life story is just as chilling. She was 25 when her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto - who had been overthrown as prime minister in a military coup - was hanged while she and her mother huddled in a cell in the same jail.
Benazir Bhutto spent five years in jail and under house arrest, sometimes in solitary confinement in barren cells.
South Asia's three female leaders all proved their political stamina as opposition-party leaders during insurrections, military rule or civil unrest before coming to power, but all have faced harsh criticism as officeholders.
And, because they are women, they have been particularly condemned by many critics for all but ignoring the plight of women in their countries. Throughout the region, the presence of women in the highest elective offices has not trickled down to the middle and lower levels of government, and female prime ministers have not had any measurable impact on the low education and literacy rates, poor health and economic status of women.
``I haven't seen any correlation between the rise of women to top positions with any change on the part of the masses of women in South Asia,'' said Howard Schaffer, a former U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh who also served in the American embassies in Pakistan and India. ``Thirty-four years after Bandaranaike was the first woman prime minister in the world, only a handful of women are in prominent political positions in Sri Lanka.''
If South Asia's women leaders did try to implement policies designed to specially benefit women, said Pran Chopra of New Delhi's Center for Policy Research, they would be taking a major political risk. ``Women per se are not sufficiently politically mobilized in these countries, and it does not pay to focus the benefits for women in a male-dominated society,'' he said.
Bhutto, a Harvard- and Oxford-educated woman who leads the most religiously conservative of all the South Asian nations, has received the most vocal criticism from women's organizations, who say she has done little to lessen the repression of women in Pakistan. But she has had to reckon with formidable obstacles as a woman leading a Muslim nation.
When the Pakistani parliament voted her prime minister last year, five conservative Muslim clerics who were members of the chamber refused to participate in the vote; one later declared it improper for a woman to head the Islamic state.
At the same time, a female editor of one of the country's top monthly news magazines sat in the balcony, giving her Pakistani journalistic colleagues a catty critique of Bhutto's clothing and sandals.
by CNB