I thank the Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Ambassador K. Kesavapany, for inviting me to contribute the Foreword to this volume which contains the papers submitted to the symposium “Revisiting the Singapore Women's Charter”. The symposium was organized by Dr Theresa W. Devasahayam, the coordinator of the gender studies programme at ISEAS.

First, I am very pleased that ISEAS has a programme on gender policies and issues in Southeast Asia. I consider the emancipation of women and the recognition that women are entitled to equal rights with men as one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century. The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), of which Singapore is a party, is one of the most important treaties in public international law. It seeks to put an end to a shameful period in human history, lasting thousands of years, during which women were treated as chattels and having no rights or as inferior human beings and discriminated against in a myriad of ways. It is, of course, true that CEDAW has not been fully implemented by all the state parties or by all the member states of the UN. However, those who invoke culture or religion to justify discrimination against women know that theirs is a losing battle. They are on the wrong side of history. I am convinced that one day, in this century, the dream that women will enjoy the same rights as men will come true for all womenkind.

Second, in Singapore the enactment of the Women's Charter in 1961 was a revolutionary act. It put an end to polygamy for all Singaporeans, except for Muslims. Section 46 of the Charter, inter alia, gives the wife the right to use her surname and name; to have equal rights with her husband in running the matrimonial household; and the right to engage in any trade or profession or social activities. Compared to the situation prior to 1961, these were transformative propositions.

Introduction

Divorce has increasingly become an inevitable consequence of marriage in many parts of the world. That the incidence of divorce is on the increase worldwide is related to a number of factors. Romantic love — which was commonly thought to dictate the formation of marital unions — is on the demise and has been touted as one reason for the rise in divorce. In this case, once love subsides, divorce is unavoidable (cf. Abbott, Wallace and Tyler 2005). The value placed on individualism, shaping choice, control, and equality is another factor (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). Other arguments put forward for the increasing rate of divorce include the erosion of the “man as breadwinner” model, owing to cultural changes, and the breaking down of a moral code around marriage, divorce, and cohabitation (Lewis 2001). The erosion of marital commitment owing to dissatisfaction in the relationship has also been found to be a factor leading to divorce, rather than women's economic independence (Sayer and Bianchi 2000).

In almost every country, family laws have incorporated provisions to enable estranged couples to end their unions. In Singapore, the Women's Charter, Chapter 353, is the law that governs divorce of non-Muslims. According to the Women's Charter, “that the marriage has irretrievably broken down”, based on any one of the following five “facts” is the sole cause for divorce (Chan 2008):

1. (a) That the defendant has committed adultery and the plaintiff finds it intolerable to continue living with the defendant;

2. (b) That the defendant has behaved unreasonably and the plaintiff cannot be reasonably expected to live with the defendant;

3. (c) That the plaintiff has been deserted for a continuous period of at least two years prior to filing the writ for divorce;

4. (d) That the parties have lived apart for a continuous period of at least three years immediately before the filing of the writ for divorce and the defendant consents to the divorce been granted; and,

5. (e) That the parties have lived apart for a continuous period of at least four years immediately before the filing of the writ for divorce.

Women's rights in countries the world over are protected by a gamut of laws. There are pieces of legislation enabling women's participation in the public sphere or civil society and the arenas of education, mass media, market economy, and politics. There are also laws protecting women's rights in the private sphere of the family. Family practices on the role and authority of the father in the family, obligations and duties of both husband and wife, divorce, inheritance rules, child custody, and other related issues are all governed by laws. Civil family and marriage legislation found in the different countries in Southeast Asia are about correcting the asymmetrical relationship between men and women in their personal lives — an arena where intervention is evidently problematic because it involves interfering in people's private lives.

The Singapore Women's Charter is no different from numerous other marriage and family legislation found in countries in the region. The Charter is about women and men — their roles, responsibilities, and rights — in the context of family and marriage. Since its promulgation, the Women's Charter has been a landmark legislation, safeguarding women's rights in matters related to marriage, divorce, matrimonial assets, maintenance, and custody of children. Although called the Women's Charter and commonly perceived to be pro-woman, the legislation is gender-neutral, protecting as it does the rights of both women and men in a marital relationship.

In spite of its efficacy, the Women's Charter is not without imperfections. While it protects a spouse, former spouse, child, stepchild, adopted child, parents, parents-in-law, and any other relative or incapacitated individual who is regarded by the court as a member of the family, couples in de facto or “informal marriages” are excluded. Another limitation of the Charter is that only the victim of family violence can apply for a protection order; it has been found that in many instances, however, the victim often believes she cannot help herself and, as a result, does not take the necessary action to end the abusive relationship.

Introduction

I feel very privileged to be given this honour as I see so many distinguished people in the audience who are more qualified than me to fill this role. Nevertheless, I must confess that I readily accepted the invitation when I was asked as this sort of an opportunity seldom comes my way. Now that I am standing here, I am shamelessly going to take advantage of my position. Instead of an overview as might be expected of me, I am only going to speak on issues that I have some knowledge of and am passionate about. This means that I am going to leave the field wide open to the other speakers whom I think are really the substantive part of the forum and whom I salute as the real experts.

Enactment of the Charter — 1961

The PAP government enacted the Women's Charter as part of an election promise in 1959. At the second reading of the Women's Charter Bill in 1960, Minister K.M. Byrne revealed that the statute really proposed to regulate the formation of marriage and family life, but had been given the grandiose name of the “Women's Charter” because the bill was making a very great change in the personal lives of many women. We must remember that at that time polygamy was the order of the day and the bill was primarily aimed at legislating monogamy for all non-Muslims. The Women's Charter took effect on 15 September 1961. It ensured equal rights for married women vis-à-vis their husbands. In the early 1960s, this legislation was ahead of its time in promulgating the idea of marriage as an “equal cooperative partnership of different efforts”.

Shortcomings — The Need For A Family Charter

In 2011, the Women's Charter will see its golden anniversary, an age when some things need a makeover. At present, many people think that the Women's Charter is not an appropriate name for this legislation as it does not reflect the spirit of the legislation.

In almost every capital around the globe, piracy, terrorism, poaching, illegal immigration, pollution, and trafficking of every kind are slowly climbing in priority as government security experts become increasingly concerned with threats of a transnational nature. In areas affected by the Sulu Arms Market, ongoing territorial disputes, shifting political alignments, and an extremely dynamic social fabric make multilateral initiatives slow to form and difficult to implement. For this reason, the trend in cooperative countertrafficking policy clearly favours bilateral agreements, although regional and global politics lend growing impetus to multilateralism. Since the end of World War II, there have been eight bilateral agreements between Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines that affect the Sulu Arms Market in some way. By contrast, there are only five similar multilateral agreements and of those, only two include concrete measures that can make a direct impact on traffickers.

The regional politics that confound multilateralism in Southeast Asia suggest that making progress will require strong leadership. Regional bodies like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and powerful neighbours Australia and the United States, can influence initiatives against transnational threats in the region but within ASEAN there is no single, paternalistic national power that can assume this role. Instead, member states share responsibility in a uniquely Southeast Asian system of rotating leadership. The “ASEAN way” as it is commonly known, is slow and patient and demonstrates a preference for letting states come to consensus over time rather than subjecting them to direct persuasion by others. There is little doubt that the ASEAN way has been very positive for the region up to this point but it has not yet been tested by conflict between member states. In the eyes of most external observers, transnational crime has a tremendous head start on the plodding Southeast Asian policy machine; ASEAN, they say, must take action now to avoid pain in the future.

Firearms are tied to the security and identity of governments, communities, and non-state actors in a way that few other commodities are. Within the anarchy of the international state system (and even within the borders of some countries), lifestyles are ultimately made and maintained by men with guns. Unfortunately, lifestyles guaranteed by men with guns can also be destroyed by tougher men with bigger guns. Reflecting this reality, almost every country in the world exerts some degree of control over the supply of firearms, yet small arms proliferation remains a problem of disputed importance. While some may differ on the reasons and the degree to which arms are necessary to maintain the international state system, none actually question their necessity.

The Importance of the Sulu Arms Market

There are an estimated 875 million firearms in existence today. This number, while not disputed, seems to be the only thing nations agree on in the counter-proliferation debate. With strong differences of opinion about every aspect of small arms policy, the world's governments have shown themselves to be incapable of making progress towards any viable control measures. Over 600 arms manufacturers in ninety-five countries around the world pump their products into world markets at a steady rate. Without international consensus on controlling the supply, it is a virtual certainty that stockpiles will continue to grow. Most countries that have arms manufacturing industries consider them strategic assets, meaning few are willing to close them down. Indeed, some states take extra steps to guarantee the profitability of these enterprises.

Meanwhile, the impact of small arms availability continues to undermine security in much of the world. An estimated half million people die each year from gunshot wounds; sixty per cent of whom are victims of armed conflicts in the developing world while the other forty per cent die as a result of homicide or suicide in industrialized countries.

The Sulu Sea region, long a remote buffer zone between competing political entities, exhibits all the characteristics of the kind of “ungoverned territory” in which trafficking thrives. The Sulu Arms Market's unique longevity stretches back to colonial times, but like most other illicit arms markets, it is both a source and a destination for grey and black market arms. Like most black arms pipelines around the world, the Sulu Arms Market is intertwined with piracy, terrorism, and the traffic of other illicit commodities. Moro independence groups, communists, Islamic militants, and criminal gangs are all major players in the market. Four bilateral anti-smuggling agreements between Malaysia and the Philippines, and a number of regional multilateral initiatives since the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 reflect the fact that the Sulu Arms Market is a potential security problem for Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore.

Colonial History

The Sulu archipelago connects the Philippine island of Mindanao to Borneo, both culturally and geographically. Traders have plied its warm waters for centuries, moving goods back and forth using familial networks in what was once a borderless society. The Spanish were the first to draw an administrative line between Mindanao and Borneo, a delineation they enforced only intermittently depending on their political and military fortunes in the rest of the Philippines. The ebb and flow of Spanish sovereignty in the area inevitably invited the attention of other colonial powers.

Caught between the competing interests of the Spanish, Germans, and British, the leaders of Sulu depended upon intrigue to protect its sovereignty from rival tribes and the Europeans. The sultans of Sulu struck a delicate balance between the heavy-handed Spanish and their European rivals based in Sabah. Spanish failure to come to an understanding with Sulu led to intermittent warfare that severely affected English and German trade in the area.

Illegal arms pipelines around the world tend to be dualdirectional, meaning they are both a source and a destination for guns from other markets. The Sulu Arms Market is no different. Its ratio of exports to imports ebbs and flows with political events in conflict zones like Mindanao, but while the balance of trade is traditionally (and currently) in favour of imports, it is not immutable. During several years of relative peace between Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the early part of this decade for instance, exports actually gained ground on imports. Exports from the Sulu market to other parts of Southeast Asia as well as to niche markets in Northeast Asia went up as increasing numbers of Moro fighters occupied themselves with more peaceful pursuits.

The Demand Side: Routes

On the whole, the Sulu Arms Market is a net importer and always has been. Illicit commodities of every variety flow into its dark markets through countless clandestine supply lines. Its rugged and remote coastlines, hidden coves, mangrove swamps, and coastal shanty towns provide endless shelters for rogues of every ilk: pirates, terrorists, drug smugglers, slave traders, kidnappers, bird's nest poachers, and of course gun-runners. Sulu is a remote area; it does not lend itself easily to the large scale, organized smuggling operations common in places like Hong Kong or Miami. In Sulu, one finds a more diffuse and therefore intractable form of trafficking enabled by centuries of entrenched smuggling “culture”.

The word “smuggling” implies movement of goods across a boundary in contravention of laws or established norms. In the Western mind, and that of the recognized governments in the region, the very existence of the state is dependent on the inviolability of these lines on the map. Most Sulu traffickers, ant traders mostly, have never fully recognized the boundaries imposed upon them by outsiders nor do they see any moral argument for or against their activities.

Small arms, and the global trade in them, have greater political implications than perhaps any other commodity. The black market in guns is the lifeblood of modern piracy, terrorism, insurgency, and the violent forms of organized crime. Aside from the direct impact of these destructive social ills, the trade has a more subtle but perhaps more dangerous secondary effect — the corruption inherent in gunrunning erodes the integrity of the state. As one of its practitioners put it, “gunrunning rolls on the ball bearings of bribery”. There can be few things more damaging to the security of a state than the loss of effective control of such a politically dangerous commodity, yet states flirt with this very thing every day through grey market arms transfers that so often end up supplying the black market. Whether they conduct these transfers actively through their intelligence agencies, or passively by allowing licensed dealers or manufacturers to do it, governments are ultimately involved. They must weigh the costs and benefits of these activities against the stability of the international state system which all governments support and depend upon to some degree. This system demands that states have a monopoly on the use of force within their sovereign borders. For this they require firearms, yet not all governments have the capacity to produce these weapons. This is the raison d'être of the white market and why it is absolutely vital to the state system. It is also the reason states cannot reach consensus on how to regulate arms transfers of any shade of grey.

The Current State of the Sulu Arms Market

The three-year period following the 11 September terrorist attacks on the United States marked a watershed for the Sulu Arms Market. Aside from the obvious global repercussions of that horrible event, there was a convergence of regional developments, some related to 11 September, some not, that also affected the trade. These events had two principal effects on the Sulu Arms Market as a destination for guns.