Discrimination darken Women's Day in Asia

Chairperson of UPA government and Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi (L) is watched by participants as she lights a lamp during a ceremony to celebrate International Women's Day in New Delhi yesterday. PHOTO: AFP

Asia marked International Women's Day yesterday with rallies and protests against a wide range of gender inequalities and acts of violence, although there were some celebrations for hard-won victories.

In Bangladesh, where hundreds of women continue to be disfigured each year from acid attacks, victims were due to converge on the capital of Dhaka to call for greater government efforts to stop the brutal practice.

Nearly 2,000 women in Bangladesh have had acid thrown on them since 1999, according to the Acid Survivors' Foundation, with their attackers most often men who have had their advances rejected.

"On Women's Day, our slogan is law, justice and good governance will help fight acid attacks," one of the rally's organisers, Rahman, said.

The United Nations-mandated Women's Day was being marked in Pakistan by a similar battle to end "honour crimes".

In the central city of Multan, high-profile gang rape victim Mukhtiar Mai led a rally of several hundred women on the eve of Women's Day, less than a week after a court controversially acquitted her alleged attackers.

"I shall continue my struggle for the rights of women 'til the last breath of my life and I will not bow before tyranny, exploitation, tradition or customs," Mai told the march.

The 30-year-old was raped for more than an hour in a village in Punjab province in 2002 as punishment for her brother's alleged affair with a woman of a powerful rival clan.

A Pakistani court last week freed five men earlier sentenced to death for the attack, while a sixth man's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

In the Philippines, the decades-old campaign for justice by women who were forced into sexual slavery at the hands of Japanese World War II occupation forces, was again a rallying cry on Women's Day.

Twenty elderly women who say they were sex slaves staged a protest at the Japanese embassy because they were "still bereft of justice and recognition by the Japanese and Philippine governments," women's group Kaisa Ka said.

In China, women's rights were one of the "hot topics" among lawmakers gathered in Beijing for the annual meeting of the National People's Congress (NPC), according to the state-run China Daily newspaper.

The All-China Women's Federation is campaigning at the NPC for a law to protect women in the workplace, following a recent survey in Beijing that showed 86 percent of women had been victims of sexual harassment.