By Lynette Dumble
KUALA LUMPUR — On the eve of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum here, two courageous women, feminist activist Irene Fernandez and eye surgeon Wan Azizah Ismail, occupied centre stage at the Asia Pacific People's Assembly. Both received a standing ovation from the 700 delegates from 29 countries who had come to reclaim the rights of ordinary people which have been eroded by APEC's push for trade liberalisation.
Over previous weeks, Fernandez and Ismail have shared another scene, in the docks of adjoining court rooms in suburban Kuala Lumpur; Fernandez charged with "maliciously publishing false news", and Ismail in solidarity with her husband, Anwar Ibrahim, who has been charged with corruption.
While news of the Ibrahim proceedings is instantaneously transmitted to every corner of the globe, in contrast, the Fernandez trial attracts sparse media attention.
Arrested at her home in March 1996, Fernandez is now at the centre of the longest trial in Malaysian legal history. With no end in sight, she has already appeared in court for 160 days.
Why? Because she dared to make public the abuse, torture, and dehumanising conditions of Malaysia's migrant detention camps.
Director of Tenaganita, a women's rights non-government organisation based in Kuala Lumpur, Fernandez's "blasphemy", which described the horrific conditions imposed on 300 HIV-infected women and men held in Malaysia's migrant detention camps, was scheduled to appear in the Kuala Lumpur daily The Sun in mid-June 1995. The article was withheld.
In turn, Tenaganita released a memorandum to appropriate officials and the media in August 1995. Highlighted were the all too familiar details of sexually abused women migrants, detained because of illegal entry or disputes with their employers, and the exposure of both men and women migrant detainees to malnutrition, dehydration, beatings and sickness in the absence of medical care.
Denying any allegation of human rights violations, authorities admitted that more than 70 migrant detainees had died in custody between 1992-95. A "visitors panel" was then appointed to study conditions in the detention camps, but neither the Malaysian public nor international human rights observers have any idea what the panel discovered.
Subsequently, the head of the police field force responsible for migrant detention camps countered with charges of criminal defamation against Fernandez, leading to her arrest under the Printing Presses and Publications Act of 1984.
Released on bail, Fernandez maintains her vigil for the rights of migrants. These Indonesians, Filipinos, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis — as objects of sexual abuse, the exploited in pesticide-riddled plantations and the denigrated who clean lavatories and sidewalks — have played a crucial role in Malaysia's transition from a so-called developing nation into one that boasts its "development".
Migrants were the ancestors of most present-day Malaysians. Today they are an expanding underclass sentenced to 4D-type employment; that is, for the dirty, demanding, degrading and dangerous jobs.
In the past year, some 140,000 illegal migrants were deported from Malaysia. A further 700,000 newly arrived migrants were legalised, and destined for 4D employment.
With the collapse of the Asian economies, Fernandez argues that the additional expense of deporting illegals and retraining new migrants will further subordinate migrant workers, who already contend with "terrible living conditions that no ordinary Malay could bear to face".
Thirty one months after her arrest, Fernandez has good reason to expect that she will be convicted. Migrant witnesses to the truth of Fernandez's allegations have either been deported or may even be dead as a direct consequence of their atrocious ill-treatment. Nonetheless, Fernandez believes that "truth will prevail and will set us free".
This sentiment was echoed throughout the courthouse packed with feminists as Fernandez defends her freedom, under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, to argue the rights of Malaysia's politically voiceless underclass.
The lessons of World War II which prompted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights are long forgotten amidst today's spawning political corruption, military and police brutality, discrimination against indigenous and ethnic communities, bio-piracy and profiteering by transnational companies, and violence of every nature against women.
Fraught with human wrongs which degrade and impoverish women, indigenous people, migrants, the landless, the hungry, the unemployed, the disabled and countless other minorities, APEC's agenda of free trade and investment by 2010 for developed economies, and 2020 for developing economies, reflects an insatiable thirst for profit.
In the quest for universal freedom and justice, 300 foreign and Malaysian rights activists rallied behind Fernandez and Ismail on November 15 in Kuala Lumpur to denounce both APEC's latest chapter of imperialist economics and Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's oppression.
[Dr Lynette Dumble is coordinator of Global Sisterhood Network.]