Where Are the Women? Negotiations for Peace in Burma

Women in Burma are effectively excluded from participating in the negotiations for peace. Less than a handful of women have been part of the official talks held between the State and the armed groups, and none of the 12 preliminary ceasefire agreements reviewed for this report includes any references to gender or women. The expertise of local women’s groups in peacemaking and trust building efforts has gone unnoticed, and concerns raised by women are being sidelined. The interest by the dominant funders of the Burmese peace building initiatives, the international community, in advocating for the increased participation of women or for the mainstreaming of gender responsiveness has been, at best, inadequate. This is a worrisome development which requires action from both international and local actors as the continued exclusion of women risks undermining the legitimacy of the entire process […]

Human Rights Council Must Address Sexual Violence in Burma

British government receiving; ‘disturbing reports of the use of sexual violence by the military in Burma.’ On International Women’s Day, Burma Campaign UK is calling on members of the United Nations Human Rights Council to ensure that the Council continues to investigate serious human rights abuses in Burma […]

Statement from the Women’s Workshop on Peace-Building and Conflict Transformation

Forty-six women representatives from 31 ethnic women’s organizations from various regions and states of Myanmar held a workshop on peace-building and conflict transformation in Yangon during January 30 – February 1, 2013.

Participating representatives issued the following position statement on the final day of the workshop […]

Responding to Karen Women Participation as Provided in UNSCR 1325

The first Karen Women Seminar was successfully held from 24th to 26th of November 2012. The meeting was attended by more than 40 Karen women who are working in a wide variety of fields including education, health, social work, emergency assistance, environment, human rights and women rights […]

Burma’s Reform Process Must Include Ending Violence Against Women

Yesterday, as on every 25 November, women and men around the world celebrated the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Violence against women takes many forms, physical, sexual, psychological and economic and occurs all around the world and in every culture. Burma is no exception to that rule.

Women in Burma, and in particular in ethnic nationality areas, are the victims of sexual violence, sexual exploitation, human trafficking and discrimination. In addition, in situations of armed conflict and extreme poverty, they are often amongst the most vulnerable population and they bear the burden of war and displacement.

Rape has been used as a weapon of war by the Burma Army in ethnic areas for decades. In Kachin State where fighting has been ongoing for more than one year, the Kachin Women’s Association – Thailand (KWAT) has documented that Burma Army troops have committed sexual violence against at least 61 women and children, about half of whom were killed […]

Just Saying Peace is Not Enough, It Needs All of Us to Take Action

Karen Women Organization celebrates the 2012 International Day of Peace with great hope. The UN declared that this International Day of Peace’s theme would be “Sustainable Peace for a Sustainable Future”. We celebrate the recent negotiations for ceasefires and peace in Burma. We hope this beginning will bring sustainable peace someday soon […]

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္ ျဖစ္ေပၚေနသည့္ အၾကမ္းဖက္သတ္ျဖတ္မႈမ်ား ရပ္တန္႔ရန္ႏွင့္ တရားဥပေဒအရ အျပည့္အ၀ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေပးရန္ တိုက္တြန္းေတာင္းဆိုျခင္း

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ ေနရာတခ်ဳိ႕တြင္ လက္တေလာ ျဖစ္ပြားေနသည့္ အၾကမ္းဖက္ တိုက္ခိုက္မႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ အခင္းျဖစ္ပြားရာေနရာရွိ အျပစ္မဲ့ျပည္သူမ်ားစြာမွာ ေၾကာက္ရြံ႕စိုးရိမ္ဖြယ္ရာ အသက္ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္ဆိုးမ်ားႏွင့္ ၾကံဳေတြ႕ေနၾကရသည္။ အၾကမ္းဖက္ တိုက္ခိုက္မႈမ်ားမွာ ယခုအခ်ိန္ထိ […]

Women’s League of Burma Calls for Greater Women’s Participation in Peace Process

The Women’s League of Burma welcomes the inclusion of two women parliamentarians in the newly formed union level Peace Committee. However, the WLB urges U Thein Sein’s government to consider a much greater increase in women’s participation as a start towards […]

The Use of Rape as a Weapon of War in Burma’s Ethnic Areas

With a population of over 50 million people, Burma is comprised of eight major ethnic nationalities: Burman, Shan, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Chin, Kachin and Arakan. Burma’s ethnic groups demand equality, autonomy […]

Report on the Use of Rape as a Weapon of War in Burma

On the occasion of the International Women’s Day, the Burma support groups Info Birmanie (France) and the Swedish Burma Committee (Sweden) release a report on the Use of Rape as a Weapon of War in Burma […]