Photo : Collected
As the world celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8, nearly 4,000 women languished in junta-controlled prisons, police detention facilities, and military interrogation centres across Myanmar for their political activism.
Days after the military coup in February 2021, Myanmar witnessed the eruption of a nationwide anti-regime movement in which people from all walks of life joined the demonstrations to reject the coup.
At the forefront of the protests calling for the restoration of democracy in the country were women from various occupations and professions, including students, housewives, teachers, doctors, and others.
Soon, the military junta brutally suppressed the protests. The protesters were fired upon with live bullets and subjected to arbitrary detention and extrajudicial killings. Women, along with their male counterparts, were tortured during custody.
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners – Burma (AAPP), a local human rights watchdog working to document and secure the release of political prisoners in Myanmar, of the 26,225 people arrested since the coup, 5,427 were women, as reported by The Irrawaddy, a pro-resistance news media outlet.
The AAPP statement said that as of Friday, 3,908 women were detained—nearly 21 percent of the 20,101 political prisoners currently held in the regime’s prisons and detention centres nationwide.
The most high-profile and oldest person detained for her political beliefs is the country’s popular leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, 78, who has been detained since the first day of the coup and remains in solitary confinement.
She is currently serving a combined 27-year sentence after being convicted of a string of criminal charges that her supporters and independent analysts say were concocted to discredit her and legitimize the military’s seizure of power.
According to the AAPP’s data, as of Thursday, the junta had killed a total of 4,650 people since the coup, including 822 women.
Eight were killed in prisons, four during interrogation, and 111 in other forms of detention. The rest were killed during the regime’s crackdowns on protests and in airstrikes and artillery attacks on civilian residential areas across the country.
A representative of the watchdog said that she had observed an acceleration in the number of women killed by the junta every year since the coup. In 2021, there were 95 killed, but the number rose to 212 in 2022 and 395 in 2023.
“Based on our observations, we have to say the number of women killed every year is on the rise—killed for their anti-junta activism or killed in attacks like airstrikes or shelling. The number of men killed is on the rise, too,” she explained.
Ko Bo Kyi, the co-founder and joint secretary of the AAPP, said the numbers of women killed and detained suggest that Myanmar women’s participation in the anti-regime movement since 2021 is unprecedented in the country’s history.
“It indicates that the regime is targeting people more than before, regardless of their gender,” she added.
While tragic, the trend does at least have one positive implication, he said, as it points to the fact that today there are many politically active women at the leadership level of the anti-regime movement, as well as in the armed resistance, fighting against junta troops on the front lines.
At least 3,909 women political prisoners interned in squalid prisons are currently being exposed to the military’s sexual violence, torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, denial of proper legal support, denial of medical treatment, denial of essential commodities, including food and sanitary napkins, and other heinous acts.
“But putting nearly 4,000 women in jail and killing many others is a disgrace and very shameful for the country. The junta must be held accountable for its crimes against humanity,” she added.
The Women’s Peace Network of Myanmar, in an urgent statement, made a call to mark International Women’s Day and said that beyond the prison walls, women are also being targeted for rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, and other forms of sexual violence as they flee the junta’s aerial bombings and scorched-earth campaign, pushing them into even more vulnerable conditions, reports Mizzima News.
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