Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has
prioritized resolving ethnic armed conflicts, but has overlooked the role women
must play for genuine and lasting peace
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| A Myanmar woman stands at the door of her bamboo shack on November 4, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Jorge Silva |
By FIONA MACGREGOR YANGON,
APRIL 29, 2017
When Myanmar’s government announced the dates for the
next round of major peace talks since State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi came to
power last year as de facto head of a civilian government, discussions focused
on which of the ethnic armed groups would be in attendance.
But as military leaders and political representatives
discuss which of the country’s ethnic armed groups will be willing to show up
and which could be barred because of their reluctance to sign the country’s
so-called Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), one thing is certain: women
representatives will be largely excluded from the event.
After almost seven decades, Myanmar’s ethnic conflicts
are some of the longest-running in the world. For generations soldiers on all
sides have made and broken ceasefire deals while countless civilians have been
killed, tortured and raped. War has ruined communities and emptied villages as
hundreds of thousands have been displaced by the violence.
Throughout it all the voices of women and girls, who in
Myanmar account for just over 50% of the population, have been marginalized and
ignored by male leaders who purport to be defending their communities and
seeking peace and progress.
Myanmar is a signatory to the United Nations’ Convention
on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
Experts, including UN special rapporteur on human rights Yanghee Lee, have
recommended a 30% quota for women representatives in the peace process, advice
that so far has been roundly ignored.
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| Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi smiles as she visits an IDP camp outside of Myitkyina, Kachin state, Myanmar March 28, 2017. Photo: Reuters |
When Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy Party (NLD)
swept to victory in November 2015, giving the country its first civilian
government after decades of military and quasi-military rule, peace was on top
of her agenda.
What was clear from the start, though, was that gender
equality and recognition of the vital role women play in politics and peace was
not.
Only 15% of candidates fielded by the NLD in the 2015
elections were female. Speaking shortly after the NLD’s election victory, party
spokesman and close Suu Kyi advisor U Win Htein said this was because “most
women are not naturally confident in political situations.”
When the non-elected bloc of military appointees is
counted, barely 10% of Myanmar’s parliamentarians are women – one of the lowest
such percentages in the region.
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| Ethnic Lisu women wait for the arrival of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi at the Hsiseng township in Shan state, Myanmar September 5, 2015. Photo: Reuters |
A similar gender imbalance meant just 14% of official
participants were women at last August’s Union Peace Conference, according to
analysis by the Alliance for Gender Inclusion in the Peace Process (AGIPP), an
umbrella group of women’s rights organizations.
The alliance’s findings showed that 20% of ethnic armed
group delegates were women (though the figure varied significantly across the
different groups), but the government cohort included a mere seven women, or
9%, of its 75 official delegates.
The largely symbolic event, dubbed the 21st Century
Panglong after the historic peace agreement struck in 1947 between Suu Kyi’s
national founder father, Aung San, and key ethnic minority leaders, was
presided over by then-UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon, who also mentioned the
need for greater women’s participation in a speech to attendees.
The event made no major advances in ending the country’s
many armed conflicts.
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| Ethnics leaders attend the opening ceremony of the 21st Century Panglong conference in Naypyitaw, Myanmar August 31, 2016. Photo: Reuters |
Now, with the second conference set to begin on May 24,
there is no indication that there will be a significantly larger number of
women involved. International conventions recognize the importance of women’s
participation in peace negotiations in achieving long term solutions.
While peace talks in Myanmar continue to focus on
interactions between armed groups, women are more likely to experience the
effects of conflict in or around their home villages. Along with children, they
account for most of those living in internally displaced peoples (IDP) camps.
Military impunity for acts of sexual violence in conflict remains an ongoing
concern.
According to Nang Phyu Phyu Lin, AGIPP’s ex-chairwoman,
the alliance’s representatives will be allowed to attend only as observers and
will not be allowed to present at the conference. While organizations like
AGIPP say they have worked behind the scenes to meet ministers, army chiefs and
ethnic armed group leaders to promote their cause, a number of barriers remain
to their official participation.
Gender equality advocates say traditional attitudes in
Myanmar often lead to the exclusion of women from public roles of
responsibility and insist that their place is “in the background.” In terms of
the peace process, the muted role is known as “tea-break advocacy”, where women
resort to lobbying male delegates while serving them tea during breaks in the
official talks.
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| A Myanmar activist holds a poster of then jailed pro-democracy opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in a 2007 file photo. Photo: Reuters/Darren Whiteside |
It appears that Suu Kyi is also among those who believe
women – other than, presumably, herself – best serve by remaining in the
background.
On March 8, while giving a talk to women entrepreneurs on
International Women’s Day, Suu Kyi raised the issue of women’s role in the
peace process, insisting that as women accounted for 50% of the population they
should also bear 50% of the responsibility for achieving peace.
However, she stressed this did not mean equal
representation at the peace talks table and suggested women could do their bit
by paying taxes and raising “peace-loving” children.
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| An ethnic Rohingya woman holds her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter after fleeing the mass burning of houses and violence in Myanmar in 2012. Photo: Reuters/Andrew Biraj |
The comments riled many gender equality campaigners. “I
think she is thinking that the majority of women are like her mother –
supporting politicians from behind the scenes,” said May Sabe Phyu, director of
the Gender Equality Network (GEN) and a recipient of the US State Department’s
International Women of Courage award in 2015.
Instead, seats at the peace table are reserved mainly for
politicians and soldiers. Since women are a minority in politics and hold
virtually no powerful military positions, the process is being steered mostly
by men with guns, which arguably hardly bodes well for a lasting end to
conflict.
“Usually men on both sides are more interested in power
and arguing and disagreeing over territories,” said May Sabe Phyu. “But for
women, who are dealing with day to day problems in their communities, the
practical things are more important than arguing over territory. To be able to
start really effective discussions about issues on the ground, women’s voices
are very much needed.”
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| Woman workers and children from Myanmar’s Mon state inside a vehicle taking them back across the border to Myanmar after fleeing conflict and working in Thailand. Photo: Reuters |
Of course, it is not just up to Suu Kyi’s civilian-led
government, but to the autonomous Myanmar military, ethnic armed groups, and
the small number of other represented parties to support women’s participation.
But as long as the government fails to set an example of gender equality in the
process there is little to spur others on, critics say.
The recent ouster of former Karen National Union
vice-chairwoman Naw Zipporah Sein has removed the only high-profile woman
representative from the ethnic representative groups at the peace table.
In a recent interview with The Irrawaddy, a local news
outlet, she described the different experiences of men and women in war and how
she believed that impacted on their approaches to peace.
“If men die in battle, it is over. If they don’t die,
they win. For them, it sounds simple, but for women the suffering remains like
a wound. It is traumatic,” she said, referring particularly to women who suffer
from sexual violence in conflict.
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| Women walk past graffiti that reads “What? When? Change” drawn on a bridge in Yangon, Myanmar. Photo: Reuters |
May Sabe Phyu echo that view, pointing to the fact that even when deals are signed on paper during peace negotiations they are often just “promises in the air – nobody closely monitors or follows up on [their enactment].”
Women who have to live within the day-to-day realities of
conflict are more likely to keep pushing for practical changes on the ground,
she said.
Suu Kyi has made it clear that “peace” – or her vision of
it – is her government’s main goal. Critics say that’s meant everything from the
economy to human rights concerns have been overlooked as a result.
Yet since her NLD government’s rise to power the country
has experienced some of the worst fighting in years. As the next round of her
peace initiative opens, genuine and lasting peace seems a long way off, as doe’s
gender equality.