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Ibu Titi Sumbung, executive director of the Indonesian Center for Women in Politics (ICWIP) is a formidable woman. Blessed with an unstoppable energy and a disarming charm, she is a well-known and popular figure in Indonesian civil society. Ibu Titi, who has spent the last four decades of her life as a women’s rights activist, is also a lawyer and a Masters graduate in public policy from Harvard. She spent several years being a mother and housewife she says, and then “went back to school after 20 years.”
After returning from Harvard, she and other fellow activists set up ICWIP in 1999 to address the lack of female representation in politics and in the decision-making processes that formulate public policies in Indonesia.
“We have the 1945 Constitution, the Human Rights Law, and then CEDAW – all of these provide legal guarantees for men and women to enjoy their civil and political rights. I firmly believe that one of the root causes of persistent discrimination against women, despite all these legal guarantees, is that women continue to be excluded from politics and decision-making. And this has had a negative impact on the entire process of democratization in this country,” she says.
ICWIP stresses education, advocacy and research in its efforts, reaching out to women not only at national, but at local levels as well. With their partners, they spearhead activities that advocate for affirmative action or temporary special measures, such as quotas, to make the electoral and representative processes more equitable. They conduct gender-responsive governance training for government ministries, offer citizenship education programmes for women activists at the provincial and district levels on how to effectively participate in public life, and they build the capacity of female electoral candidates to become ‘professional politicians’.
In 2006, ICWIP led an NGO effort to conduct a review of five laws related to women’s political participation, to identify discriminatory provisions within these laws that were inconsistent with CEDAW principles. “We found language that definitely needed to be amended,” said Ibu Titi, “for example, the Law on Political Parties included language like ‘forming a board of a political party should include gender equality’ – but there’s no clear definition of this ‘gender equality’. How helpful is the law then when many people don’t even know what gender equality is!”
The legal review, which took a year and was supported by UNIFEM, was followed by a strong advocacy campaign with the government and the public at large to propose amendments to these laws.
At every step of the way Ibu Titi says the NGOs involved the government. “During the review process, every time we had new results, we shared them with the Minister of Women Empowerment, and the eight major political parties. We even went to the provinces to get their understanding and support for amendments to the laws.”
The Ministry of Women Empowerment (MOWE) went further to approach other government agencies, including the Ministry of Home Affairs, to get support for the recommendations of the review. They also jointly organized with ICWIP a public forum, and expert meetings in Jakarta with the main political parties to get their endorsement for the proposed amendments.
In 2007, a bill was submitted to parliament to amend two of the five laws – the Law on Political Parties and the Law on General Elections. Advocacy efforts were stepped up at the end of 2007 while parliament was deliberating, including a text message campaign telling people to ‘sms if they support the 30 per cent quota amendment’, and a mass public rally on the streets of Jakarta.
Says Ibu Titi, despite all the advocacy and the support of MOWE, she realized some senior government officials still didn’t know anything about the review, or what was being recommended based on CEDAW. This hit her she says when she received a text message from a senior official at the height of the campaigning asking ‘What is CEDAW’? This prompted her to churn out a booklet in just 3 days on affirmative action and why this was needed in Indonesia, and distribute it as widely as possible to government officials and parliamentarians.
At the end of the year, parliament passed the amended law on political parties, providing that the 30 per cent quota for women candidates is now mandatory for electoral registration. In addition, women must represent at least 30 per cent of management and political appointments within parties.
“Although the amendment only applies right now to new political parties and not the older ones, still it is an acceptable gradual process. The bigger challenge is how to ensure that women are put at the top of the candidate list when we have the general elections in 2009. Its one thing to have 30 per cent women in the party list, but another thing to have them stuck at the bottom, where they will never get elected! We also need to ensure that the amended laws are widely disseminated at the provincial and district levels, so people know about them.”
In February 2008, the Law on General Elections was amended, providing for a new ‘zipper’ system that requires that for every three candidates on the party list, at least one must be female – this is intended to help prevent women candidates from being left at the bottom of these lists.
Ibu Titi says that validation for all these efforts to include more women in the political process is best summed up not by her, but by a prominent philosophy lecturer from the University of Indonesia, who wrote in a newspaper column that the 30 per cent quota was not a ‘compensation’, but rather a ‘debt’ to be paid to women. “We are not doing this for women but for the nation, because women are half of the population. If half of the nation is left behind, the nation will collapse,” he wrote.
(February 2008)
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CEDAW Champion – Ibu Titi Sumbung, Executive
