A refreshing meeting

The Association of Women Affected by War (AWAW) launched the AWAW-FOKUS advocacy road map “What the Women Say – ACTIONS- not Words Count”  - at Earls Court, Cinnamon Lakeside Colombo, this evening.

None of the sophistication of most Colombo book launches, but extremely well put together, and an occasion to catch up with some key people working with women – Shyamala Gomez, Nimalka Fernando, Kamini Vitharana,  Mrs Sumana Sumanasekera formerly Women’s Bureau and newly appointed as Chairperson of the National Committee for Women (NCW, or as my aunt, Manel Abeysekera,  would have said during her tenure as chair, NATCOW), as well as Rajiva Wijesinha, Jehan Perera,  and (not in my league)the British High Commissioner, the Norwegian Ambassador and other MPs.

We learned from the Chief Guest , the Hon Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaranatunga (confirmed later by others) that  1325 advocate and co-founder of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) Sanam Anderlini   was prohibited to speak, and that the organisers were prohibited from having press coverage at the event. 

The Hon CBK gave an interesting, what was in her words  a  ‘non-political’, political speech!!!!  Some memorable quotes from my notes (not verbatim, unfortunately).

  •  Patriarchy, male domination and the concept of exclusion (introduced in 1956) reason for women’s oppression and the oppression of ‘others’ who are different. 
  •           Refusal to accept women in decision making positions is an integral part of this exclusion
  • Hate speech is influencing moderates, who are now beginning to sway to the extreme
  • Those of us who love freedom and respect democracy need to advocate for different order
  •  We have defeated terrorism, but we haven’t begun to find peace


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