January 30, 2003	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 26,1423

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ISLAMABAD, Jan 29: Women parliamentarians at an orientation workshop resolved here on Wednesday to work for the supremacy of the parliament which was the supreme organ of legislation as well as accountability for all state structures and institutions.

They stressed the need for strengthening judiciary and expressed the hope that it would remain impartial in all matters.

For better networking in all these matters the women parliamentarians decided to form the Parliamentary Organization for Women Empowerment and Rights (POWER) which will also concentrate on women related issues and bring in its fold women members of the Senate, when elected.

The women parliamentarians, who were busy networking with each other for the last four days, also decided to organize a similar workshop for women members of provincial assemblies.

The orientation workshop, which was organized by the Jinnah Institute, ended with adoption of various resolutions on Wednesday.

Through a resolution they pledged that woman legislators belonging to different parties would work in concert with each other on their issues and push their programme by seeking the help of politicians of their respective parties in the House.

To develop and implement successful programmes beneficial to rural women the parliamentarians, through yet another resolution resolved to work like NGOs, and get help from their field experiences.

Networking was the basic theme reflected by a number of speakers in all sessions of the four-day orientation workshop. However the issues which received focus in the presentation made in the last session by acting secretary-general of PPP, Raza Rabbani, were defence, budget, expenditure and woman issues. Mr Rabbani drove home the necessity of consensus building among the members, particularly the 74 women MNAs, on these issues.

He said, not only that women legislators should get together on these issues but they should increase their outreach to other parliamentarians so as to broaden their outlook and profit from the experiences of outstanding parliamentarians elsewhere in the world and seek guidance from their view point on critical approaches to global issues.

“There are a number of training academies for civil and military bureaucracy but none for parliamentarians”, Mr Rabbani said and advocated the need for one for legislators.

The former ambassador to US, Abida Hussain, spoke on domestic problems and foreign policy in the morning session. She said, with 67 per cent of the budget going for military spending and 12 per cent for bureaucracy with meagre amount for public welfare.

It was important to keep the economic perspective focussed when many of us were swept with a desire to change our country for better, she maintained. “You can’t do much within the limitation because the military would be breathing down your neck for more guns and better arms and one must remember that better domestic and foreign policy can be shaped only when we have economic sinews.”

As she put it, women parliamentarians must work to change the guns and butter equation in favour of butter.

She also opposed the Legal Framework Order (LFO) saying “the smaller provinces regard LFO as symbol of Punjab hegemony and in the Punjab it is considered as the symbol of military rule.”

Ms Hussain made a passionate plea to the women MNAs, who represented both the opposition as well as the majority party, to throw out the LFO, which she said was against the interest of the country. The country will never achieve consensus on any issue if the LFO remained in force, she said.

Farida Shaheed of the Shirkatgah presented a survey on rural women’s opinion during the third session. The survey stated that women belonging to Sindh province were more politically conscious.

In her concluding remarks the Jinnah Institute chairperson and PPP MNA, Sherry Rahman said, the workshop was an inspiring one and welcome in the current atmosphere of political parity and stalemate in the country.

The discussion and lectures were found to be informative and useful by all participants and women politicians were educated on the institutional value of the parliament and sensitised to the use of parliamentary procedure as a tool for change and accountability, said the Institute chairperson.—Junaid Iqbal