This International Women’s Day, we, Women’s Peace Network, reaffirm our solidarity with our fellow women in Myanmar and across the world, and call for comprehensive support to our global movement.
Sudden funding cuts on Myanmar have devastated the lives of women, including refugees as reported by Reuters on the preventable death of Pe Kha Lau.
In Myanmar, women continue to be targeted with unprecedented levels of atrocities. Over four years since its 2021 attempted coup, the Burmese military has arbitrarily arrested and detained over 5,900 women in squalid conditions rife with torture and sexual violence. The military has also intensified its airstrikes and ground attacks in civilian areas, disproportionately injuring women and killing 1,400 of them. There have also been reports of violence being committed against women by actors other than the Burmese military.
All such crimes – on top of the military’s unlawful, forced recruitment – have since forcibly displaced millions of women from their homes in Myanmar. None of these women have proper access to protection or livelihoods – including food, clean water, shelter, employment and education. In Bangladesh, a growing number of Rohingya refugee women are being left with no choice but to rely on human trafficking and deadly boat crossings for their survival.
Therefore, the international community must take all measures to actively protect all women who call Myanmar home. We need the world’s political will to end the country’s deteriorating human rights and humanitarian crisis, including by ending its decades-long cycle of impunity.
United Nations bodies, governments, and international humanitarian actors must ensure adequate and flexible funding to local women-led groups and women human rights defenders, so that they can continue their critical work for human rights documentation, aid relief, and protection. In Myanmar, women civil society remain the pioneers of the country’s efforts for peacebuilding, transitional justice, ethnic reconciliation, and victim and survivor-centered justice.
Thirty years after the Beijing Declaration, the time is now for the world to genuinely act in line with the values of this important day.
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