By LIZ GOOCH
KUALA LUMPUR — Irene Fernandez has no shortage of shocking tales of the abuse and exploitation of foreign domestic workers in Malaysian homes.
One Cambodian woman, who said she was forced to cook, clean and care for
children from 5 a.m. until past midnight, told Ms. Fernandez that her
employer once tied her hands behind her back and ordered her to leap
down a flight of stairs, leaving her with a permanent limp.
Another domestic helper, also from Cambodia, reported that she used to
suck the fish bones left on her employer’s dinner plate, because she was
only given leftovers to eat.
“It’s so dehumanizing,” Ms. Fernandez said. “To me, it’s just slavery days coming back — and that’s just frightening.”
Such cases have come to dominate the life of Ms. Fernandez, whose
grandmotherly appearance masks seemingly bottomless reserves of energy
to speak up for the millions of foreign workers who toil in Malaysian
homes, palm oil plantations, construction sites and other jobs often
shunned by Malaysians.
A leading figure in civil society and a longtime member of the political
opposition, Ms. Fernandez’s habit of not mincing her words has often
landed her in trouble with the authorities.
She gained international attention as the face of one of the country’s
longest-running criminal trials after she was charged in 1996 with
publishing falsehoods in a report on the abuse of migrants in government
detention centers. More recently, she has come under investigation over
possible sedition after she declared that Malaysia was not safe for foreign workers.
Now 66 and with osteoarthritis often forcing her to use a wheelchair,
Ms. Fernandez appears to have lost little of the vigor that has driven
her to seek justice for migrant workers, insisting that she will
continue providing a voice for the vulnerable as long as she is able.
The executive director of Tenaganita
, a nongovernmental group she established more than two decades ago to
help foreign workers, Ms. Fernandez’s connection to migrants can be
traced back to her familial roots. Her parents were Indians who came to
Malaysia to work on a rubber plantation when the country was under
British rule.
Ms. Fernandez learned early on that not everyone was treated equally,
recalling how, as the daughter of a supervisor, she was not supposed to
play with the laborers’ children.
“I always found that a big conflict in me,” she said.
Ms. Fernandez’s first job was as a teacher, but at the age of 23, she
left the security of a government job for the uncertain life of an
activist. Stints at various labor and rights groups followed, including
the Young Christian Workers Movement and later the women’s rights
movement.
“After two to three years I felt that the whole advocacy was taken over
by middle-class women and there was a gap for me where women workers
were concerned, and that’s how, in 1991, I formed Tenaganita,” she said
in an interview at the organization’s office in a Kuala Lumpur suburb.
Tenaganita — “women’s force” in Malay — runs shelters for migrants and
victims of human trafficking who have been abused or exploited and helps
them seek legal recourse. It initially focused on women but has
expanded to include male migrants.
Rights groups estimate that Malaysia is home to about four million
foreign workers, about half of whom are undocumented, making them
particularly vulnerable to abuse. Most are from Indonesia, the
Philippines, Nepal, India and Bangladesh.
The accounts of abuse she has heard led Ms. Fernandez to conclude that
Malaysia does not do enough to protect migrant workers, she told The
Jakarta Post, an Indonesian newspaper, in May.
Her allegations were not new. It was only last year that Indonesia
lifted a ban on women going to Malaysia as domestic workers that had
been imposed in 2009 after a string of abuse cases. But Ms. Fernandez’s
comments prompted a police investigation into whether she had
contravened the country’s Sedition Act.
Maznah Mazlan, the deputy human resources minister, criticized Ms.
Fernandez’s remarks as unethical, inaccurate and unpatriotic.
“While there may not be specific laws for migrant workers, Malaysia has
sufficient laws to protect all workers, including foreign workers,” Ms.
Maznah was quoted as saying in The Star, a Malaysian newspaper.
A police spokesman said Monday that the investigation was still under
way and it had not yet been decided whether to charge Ms. Fernandez.
Charges may be less likely given that Prime Minister Najib Razak
recently announced that he intends to repeal the Sedition Act.
Ms. Fernandez, who is married to the former chairman of Amnesty
International’s Malaysia chapter and has three children, two of whom
work with her, has refused to back down from her comments, displaying a
tenacity evident during an earlier, 13-year legal battle.
She was arrested in 1995 and charged the following year with
“maliciously publishing false news” over her report on the treatment of
migrants in detention centers. Convicted in 2003 and sentenced to one
year in jail, she was released on bail while her appeal was heard. She
was not acquitted until 2008, by which time she had spent almost 1.5
million ringgit, or about $475,600, fighting the charges.
“It was a classic case of a government more interested in harassing a
human rights defender than taking concrete action to address the issues
that she was raising,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at
Human Rights Watch.
Mr. Robertson described Ms. Fernandez as “the pioneer of protection for migrant workers who everyone else has followed.”
“She’s brave and committed, and ready to battle daily for what she
believes is right,” he said in an e-mail. “She was one of the first
persons who recognized the dire human rights situation migrant workers
face in Malaysia.”
Kamal Malhotra, the U.N. resident coordinator for Malaysia, said the
United Nations is monitoring the current police investigation and that
the official reaction to Ms. Fernandez’s comments had been “unfortunate
and somewhat excessive.”
“We hope the case will not be prolonged this time and that the outcome
will be different from the 2003 one,” he said in an e-mail.
Mr. Malhotra noted that Tenaganita, which has worked with various U.N.
organizations, has also worked with government agencies to help address
issues like trafficking. “So their role has not only been one of critic
of the government but also constructive advocate,” he said. “This is too
often forgotten.”
Ms. Fernandez’s activism led her to politics. She is a founding member
of the opposition People’s Justice Party, serving on the party’s
leadership committee for 12 years.
Because she had been convicted of a crime, she was barred from running
for office in the 2004 and 2008 elections. While her acquittal means
that she could run in the next election, which must be held by April
2013, Ms. Fernandez said she had decided not to run.
“My health is not too good, and you need a lot of energy to manage your
constituency,” she said. “You also need a certain amount of finances
and, being a human rights activist, your finances are always low.”
Ms. Fernandez rejects any suggestion that being aligned with the
opposition leaves her vulnerable to claims of bias against the
government in her work as an activist.
“The criticism comes from our work with the people,” she said. “The
government must recognize that. We speak from evidence. We speak from
the experiences lived by the people, by women, by migrants, by
refugees.”
Her political ambitions may not have been realized, but she has no plans
to pull back from her work with Tenaganita. There, she continues to
encounter the stories that inspire her to keep fighting, like a
15-year-old girl from Uzbekistan who was forced into prostitution after
arriving in Malaysia.
“Before she left, she said, ‘Thank you for giving me life again,”’ Ms.
Fernandez said. “That was so wonderful for me — that we could help
people to have the hope of life again.”
Source : http://www.nytimes.com
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