Mongolian Women Typify a New Global Activism

By ROBIN WRIGHT

Feb. 22, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia —

Oidov Enhtuya never intended to go into politics. A tiny woman with a confident saunter and soft freckles across her round face, Enhtuya was front office manager at the Genghis Khan Hotel until the winds of political change swept across Mongolia in 1990, abruptly ending nearly seven decades of communism.

To fill the political vacuum, Enhtuya hastily mobilized her friends to launch the Liberal Women’s Brain Pool. At workshops in this sleepy capital of dilapidated, Stalinesque buildings and at rural meetings conducted by candlelight in nomads’ white felt tents, the female volunteers explained freedom, recruited candidates and taught voters about political campaigns and government lobbying.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Feb. 25, 2000 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Friday February 25, 2000 Home Edition Part A Page 3 Metro Desk 2 inches; 46 words Type of Material: Correction
Women’s suffrage--A graphic Tuesday included U.N. figures for the year women received the right to vote in selected countries. The figures used referred to suffrage for all women in those countries. For example, non-aboriginal women in Australia won the right to vote six decades before universal suffrage was recognized there.

The groundbreaking group with the quirky name could help East Asia’s most dynamic new democracy survive the steep odds against it.

“We learned by doing,” Enhtuya recalled. “Even the name was an accident. We didn’t know what ‘liberal’ meant. We had to run out to find literature, and there wasn’t much available here. We didn’t want to use ‘democratic’ because that’s what Communists used. And we wanted to be a think tank, but we didn’t know the translation. So when we had to register a name in 1993, we became the Brain Pool.”

Enhtuya and her Brain Pool symbolize one of the most aggressive ways women worldwide are evening the distribution of power: They are building “civil society,” a richly diverse network of independent citizens groups that are perhaps less visible than women in government but are often able to set the public agenda with greater impact and originality than male activists or even elected officials.

“Before, women wanted space for themselves. Now they’re capturing a big part of the space that belongs to broader society. Once they defined their own agenda. Now they’re establishing an ethical framework shaping all society,” said Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the U.N. Development Fund for Women.

Since 1993, the Brain Pool has opened 187 branches in Mongolia, launched an Internet site and inspired dozens of other women’s groups, which so dominate Mongolian society that men are joining up for lack of alternatives.

“Over the past decade, women’s groups have played the most impressive role in developing political and social issues that are critical in stabilizing a young democracy,” said Louisa Caan of the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. “Mongolia wouldn’t be the most promising democratic star in East Asia without them.”

Women in one of the world’s poorest and most isolated countries have been so enterprising in part because some traditions haven’t changed since the days of Genghis Khan, the 13th century Mongol warlord who united rival clans and created an empire stretching from Hungary to Korea--and whose face is still on the national currency.

“In a nomadic culture, women are managers and decision-makers in the family and community, while men go off for long periods to herd and hunt,” said Enhtuya, who became so engrossed in explaining democracy to others that she ran for parliament in 1996--and won.

Since half the population is still nomadic, Mongolia’s women account for 84% of university graduates, 80% of doctorates, 67% of vocational school students, 77% of doctors and 60% of lawyers, according to the Women’s Information and Research Center, a new Mongolian citizens group.

“Most dropouts are males who quit to work, while girls stay in school. So women have always been independent thinkers. Plus, we’re not influenced by Islamic or Confucian traditions, which give more power to men,” said Mongolian Foreign Minister Nyam-Osorin Tuyaa, the country’s only female Cabinet member. “It’s not surprising that so many initiatives originate with women.”

Many countries now recognize both genders as equal under the law, but women worldwide are still far more likely than men to be poor, hungry and illiterate. They have less access to jobs, health care, property ownership, credit and training, according to the United Nations.

Still Underrepresented in Elected Offices

And while they now make up the majority of voters virtually everywhere, women are still significantly underrepresented in elected offices, particularly at the top.

Currently, women hold the position of president or prime minister in only seven of the world’s more than 190 countries--Bangladesh, Ireland, Latvia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Panama and Switzerland--although a woman will take office as Finland’s president March 1. New Zealand was the first state to grant women the vote, in 1893, and in November elections, both contenders for prime minister were female.

In 1999, women accounted for only 13% of the members of the world’s 179 legislatures--barely more than the 11% of two decades ago, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a Geneva-based organization of parliaments.

Civil society not only provides a fast track for women searching for different routes to power; it can also transform politics by holding government accountable between elections.

Operating from three small rooms in the back of the National History Museum in the Mongolian capital, Women for Social Progress has set up a television link to monitor the parliament’s activities, prompting Ratnaa Burmaa, the energetic executive director, to dub the movement “the CSPAN of Mongolia.” It demanded the release of state telephone numbers, which had been classified secrets, and published them in a Citizen’s Guide to Government. It pressured three presidential candidates into the country’s first public debate in 1997. It is currently working on campaign finance reform.

“Women are also adding a sense of morality, putting big issues like corruption on the table. Only women can do that with credibility because we’re seen as not corrupt,” said Sanjaasurengin Oyun, a female member of parliament with a doctorate in geology and a black belt in karate.

For its efforts, Women for Social Progress was one of 50 organizations worldwide that in 1998 received the Democracy and Civil Society Award from the United States and the European Union to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. The group’s success is also the reason that 30% of its trainers and 6,000 volunteers are male.

There is no reliable estimate of the number of women worldwide who are pursuing empowerment by participating in citizens groups. But the pattern is reflected in participation in three women’s conferences sponsored by the United Nations. The 1975 summit in Mexico City attracted about 1,000 women. The 1985 Nairobi, Kenya, conference brought together 10,000. By 1995, 50,000 women assembled in Beijing.

Experts contend that citizens groups have brought millions of women into the system over the past decade, many from grass-roots sectors never before involved in politics.

In Mexico, women’s activism did not make serious gains until a movement known as Diversa was launched in 1996, challenging the mainstream political culture.

“Diversa is forcing the public to debate and embrace issues that wouldn’t otherwise be on the agenda--on indigenous people and minorities, the environment, women’s rights, gay rights,” said Rachel Kyte, a Washington-based activist who trains women in Latin America and Asia. “But most of all, Diversa is proving that you can’t build a modern state without including women.”

In South Africa, several women’s organizations assembled an alternative “women’s budget” in 1995 that assessed state spending on females; assigned monetary values to housework, care-giving and mothering; and calculated the cost of gender discrimination. The results were so startling that the government began its own gender analysis a year later. The “women’s budget” has since been widely discussed at the United Nations, and several countries, from tiny Barbados to giant India, now have similar projects.

Some female activists are mobilizing over emotional issues. In Russia, the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee was one of the first independent groups formed in 1989, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating and Moscow withdrew from a bloody decade in Afghanistan. During the 1994-96 war in the southern republic of Chechnya, the mothers exposed the use of raw recruits as cannon fodder. Some even went to the battlefront to reclaim sons from Russian commanders or negotiate their release by Chechen captors.

Almost single-handedly, the committee transformed public opinion against the conflict. It was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and has since become the largest citizens group in Russia. In November, committee chief Natalya Zhukova won the release of 650 conscripts from the latest Chechen war.

In Japan, the Kanagawa Network Movement was founded by housewives in the mid-1980s as a consumer cooperative. It first lobbied local governments to ban the use of synthetic detergents in favor of natural soaps.

When the network failed to convince city councils, the housewives formed a grass-roots political party to field candidates for office. Since then, 39 of its members, both men and women, have been elected to local councils, where they push for clean air, safer foods, campaign finance reform and decentralization of power.

Women’s Participation Seen as Democratic Key

The new tapestry of civil society transcends borders. In 1997, the world’s legislatures issued a declaration saying that “the achievement of democracy presupposes a genuine partnership between men and women in the conduct of the affairs of society.”

“No one, 20 years ago, would have dared define women’s political participation as one of the keys to democracy. Now it’s a cornerstone,” said Christine Pintat, assistant secretary-general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

Women’s forums have spun off from two trade blocs--the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group and South America’s Mercosur--to increase the presence of females at the economic negotiating table.

To ensure that gender equality is mandatory in crafting a united Europe, the European Women’s Lobby--more than 2,700 groups from 15 countries--has launched a Talent Bank to promote female experts, created a regional database on gender issues and devised strategies to better integrate minorities and migrants in Europe.

And across Asia, women are turning to one of the region’s poorest countries, where per capita income is less than $400 a year, for ideas. From industrialized Japan to the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Mongolian women are coaching their counterparts to mobilize females, identify candidates and raise campaign funds. They’ve even visited isolated North Korea.

Said Burmaa of Women for Social Progress: “We take credit for making this democratically elected government behave democratically.”

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Grass-Roots Empowerment

Grass-roots citizens groups are providing new routes to power for women, who remain largely outside the halls of government. This century, only 28 women have been elected heads of state or government. Currently, women in seven nations hold those positions:

Bangladesh

Ireland

Latvia

New Zealand

Sri Lanka

Panama

Switzerland

The first country to grant women the right to vote was New Zealand in 1893. When selected others followed suit:

Finland 1906

Norway 1913

Iceland 1915

United States 1920