Conflict in Fragile States

Baroness Flather Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Flather (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for obtaining this debate. By now all noble Lords probably know that my main interest is women, all kinds of women, but especially those who are deprived and mistreated. There are an awful lot of them in an awful lot of countries, whether they are fragile or in a good state. Women are not where they should be. It is frightening because I wonder whether they ever will be. We keep saying that it will be all right when they get educated, but how are we going to get them educated? It is not an easy task to educate grown women—it is easier to educate girls. Let us make sure that we at least start on the road to educating girls because even now in many countries the boys get to school and the girls do not.

Let us remind ourselves that the rape, torture and degradation of women is used as a weapon of war. It does not just happen; it is made to happen. Degrading, torturing and raping women helps invaders or groups of people who are trying to put down other groups of people. How is it possible that in this day and age we do not focus on it enough? We do focus on it, but clearly not enough. We have forgotten that this has been going on for ever, throughout the history of humanity. We have reached the 21st century, when we are supposed to be civilised and caring and to think about other people, and it is going on even more.

We talk about fragile states. Their number increases almost every week—this country is not doing well, that country is not doing well. So many countries are not doing well and are not controlled by those who rule them. The noble Lord, Lord Hussain, said that democracy does not mean the protection of everyone. He is quite right. There are all kinds of so-called democracies where there is no protection for anybody, whether they are men, women or children.

The plight of widows is particularly severe because they are treated so very badly. In India, even widows with families are thrown out and sent to places where people gather to pray. They sit there as beggars. They have children and brothers and sisters but nobody takes care of them.

In Africa, they take everything a widow has, and quite often they throw her out of her home. I have a very close friend—actually I have adopted her unofficially and treat her as my daughter. She is from Nigeria. Her father died suddenly when she was six years old. He had no siblings, but he had cousins. They came and took everything saleable in the household, every single thing. There was not that much, but there were a few things. He had a motorbike, for example, and that was the first thing to go.

Her father had three wives, and they took the two younger wives as well. They did not take my friend’s mother, because she was older. They left my friend’s mother with 13 children—the children of all the women. This is not made up; this is my closest friend. Her mother had 13 children and nothing to feed them with: no work, and no money anywhere. I asked her what her mother did, and she said she gave a child to whoever would have one. They went to neighbours, friends or relatives; my friend went to her uncle. She then got a job cleaning toilets in a hospital and took all the children back. Women are so amazing—I am going to cry in a minute—and suffer so much, but still come out of it shining. I do not know why that is. Then there is religion. Women do more religious praying than the men do, and yet no religion has ever supported women. Sometimes religions do verbally, but not in practice. No religion has supported women, which I do not understand, as they are supposed to be there for everyone.

We all know that widows are like pariahs. If an old man dies, that is one thing, but in India, if a younger man dies, they are sure his wife has killed him. She is a very bad omen for the family and they want to see the back of her as soon as possible. These things are not of today; they are of the day before yesterday. We all have to fight them in whatever way we can. If a widow has female children, it is worse. If she has a son, sometimes the family will let her stay, because they want the boy. Once again, they do not want the girls; they want the boys. Then we have something new happening today—Daesh. What is it doing to girls? Can we believe what it is doing to them? I am sure your Lordships have all read or seen something about those two girls who managed to escape from Daesh. What treatment; what a life. I do not think I would live like that. I would try every way to kill myself.

Talking about killing oneself, I want to just remind noble Lords about Bangladesh. When Bangladesh, which was then part of Pakistan, rebelled, and wanted Sheikh Mujibur to become Prime Minister, western Pakistan attacked what became Bangladesh. When the war ended, 2,000 women who had been kept as what they now call comfort women were freed. They did not have any clothes, because if they had given them clothes, they knew they would have hanged themselves. These 2,000 women had no clothes, and were locked up for the use of the soldiers. When they got clothes, a lot of them did hang themselves. We should also remember that they had nowhere to go, as their families would not have accepted them. The families would not have said, “You poor thing, you have suffered so much, we’ll see what we can do for you”. Not a bit of it. They would have said, “Oh my god, what are we going to do with this? Go away”. They could have begged or they could have killed themselves—and a lot of them did.

This is not like today, yesterday or tomorrow; this is all the time. This is one of the most awful stories, and the other interesting thing is that no Pakistanis know about it, because it was never mentioned in Pakistan—I am sorry, I am not attacking the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, personally. Indeed, I am not in disagreement with a lot of what he has said about Kashmir. However, what I am saying is how it happened, and it is horrible to think that it did.

In sub-Saharan Africa the worst conditions are faced by women, who are evicted and not allowed to have any kind of life. Widows are regularly accused of killing their husbands. There is no limit. A widow probably suffers more than a married woman, but married women suffer too. They are regularly beaten. Look at Mumbai, a big city. A lot of the women there work in the informal sector; they learn some skills and do cleaning, cooking and small-duty processes like doing massage and nails, so they get money. What happens to it? The husband takes that money and drinks it. The woman still does not get to keep that money, and if she cannot keep it then it cannot improve her life. If she keeps her money, what does she do with it? She does not drink, fight or gamble; she uses it for her family. Yet we treat these women as if they are worth nothing and not worthy of being cared for.

As I get older, I see that the situation in the world is getting worse, not better, and that begins to hurt very badly. For the last 10 years, all that I have cared about is how to change women’s lives. I wish I had the power to do so but I do not, although I do what I can to get people to take an interest. I have set up a charity to see if we can get women into work in India and Africa, and to get British companies to employ poor women. Culturally, companies do not employ women. They will employ an educated woman, but they do not employ women in industry. Factories just do not give employment to women. I am sure that a lot of that goes for Pakistan too, although there they also have other constraints. In India, however, we have no constraints, nor are there any in Africa, except in what we completely incorrectly call “culture”. It is not culture but social practice, and usually bad practice at that. We should stop using the term because people hide behind it: “Oh, it is their culture”. Does it make it all right that you beat your wife every weekend because it is your culture? No. We have to start thinking about the person, not about so-called culture. Culture is usually something good, not something as appalling as what happens to women.

DfID has always said that it supports women and girls, never that it supports widows, women and girls. In a way that is right because widows are women, but in another way they have more to bear than other women. Perhaps one day DfID will be able to separate out groups of women. There are so many groups: for example, there are the girls who are taken to temples in southern India. They are there for the use of the people who come to pray and the priests. What kind of world is it for that to happen in a place of worship? It is not possible to take these things in. The girls are called devdases, the acolytes of the gods—well, some gods.

We need to be thinking all the time about women. At conferences they talk and talk but sometimes they never even mention the “w” word; they do not say anything about women. It is an uncomfortable subject and they just talk around it. I am so pleased that today there are so many men speaking. Quite often in a debate like this, you have one or two men and all the other speakers are women. So thank you, gentlemen, noble Lords, for speaking in this debate, and again I thank the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for tabling it.