Nine months after the military coup, Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG), which stands in opposition to the junta, has declared the formation of a command structure to coordinate between civilian resistance forces and allied ethnic armed organizations also known as EAOs in which women are currently starting to play a more present role and, as armed resistance to a military coup intensifies, women continue to fight for gender equity along with an end to dictatorship.
The coup has sparked a broad revaluation of such entrenched views, and the protest movement is now calling for a change not only of a flawed political system but also social inequities.
In addition, the fact that more and more women are joining the military, a male-dominated field, these days is a step forward towards the recognition of their well-rounded abilities, especially in countries such as Myanmar where what happens is that male leaders tend to ignore the ideas of women in their organizations and fail to recognize their valuable input, in fact, women’s potential to contribute to peace in Myanmar is still greatly undervalued and in this regard, women’s organizations across Myanmar specifically demanded that the peace process should involve more of them.
In October 2015, when the NCA was signed by the government and the EAOs, they agreed that a “reasonable” number of women should be included in all future peace talks, more concretely, a few months later, parties to the NCA signed a “Framework for Political Dialogue”, which included a pledge to make efforts to reach 30% women’s participation in future dialogues, however, not a single peace conference or negotiating committee has met this target, and there is no mechanism in place to make sure that 30% of seats at the negotiating table are filled by women.
It seems clear that the potential that the female section of the military hold is still overlooked, they are not trained as commandos, even if they want that training and in most functions or meetings of KNU and other organizations, women are invited to serve food, clean, and entertain, rather than to share their ideas, there is really no role for women in the KNU decision-making processes as the fact that the majority of decision-makers in CSOs are males shows, and even more so in EAOs.
Furthermore, in a population of 52 million, half of all women are not in the workforce, their social positioning is therefore vulnerable because of sectoral and occupational segmentation, gender pay gaps, poor skill levels, and the fact that women have to bear the sole responsibility of care work are other concerns, there is also a lack of political representation as women occupy only 13 percent of all seats in the Union Parliament.
In this regard, women in Myanmar mobilized to critique both the masculinist underpinnings of the armed groups and to protest asking for greater inclusion and political participation in both state and non-state decision-making structures, while women’s participation in both armed resistance and women’s collective peace movements may seem contradictory, in Myanmar, ethnic armed groups are seen as essential allies in ethnic minority women’s struggle for equality and peace, it’s important to understand though that the struggle is not only against the military rule but to overturn traditional attitudes towards women, in fact, the purpose of military organizations is not to improve women’s equality but to win the nation’s wars and prevail against enemies, the integration of women into the military is beyond the concept of equality; rather, it is to improve the quality of the force.
Following Myanmar’s independence from the British colonizer in 1948, women were largely excluded from the military but despite this, Myanmar women have held an influential and important role in their indigenous society, they have contributed significantly to the political, economic, social, and cultural development of the nation throughout its history.
Integrating women and gender perspectives into the military can create opportunities to revise conceptual and morale factors and adapt organizational culture and structures to maximize effectiveness.
The United Nations experience has shown that female peacekeepers are more effective at addressing the specific needs of female combatants during demobilization and reintegration, they are also more effective at interviewing survivors of gender-based violence and interacting with local women in communities where the women may not be comfortable with speaking to male peacekeepers, but in order to reap the full benefits of integrating women and gender perspectives into military organizations, the implementation must include specific policies and mechanisms for women to achieve leadership and decision-maker positions within the organization which can also be regarded as gender-friendly policies at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels are required to ensure the success of the integration.
There is a need to move away from gender-blind policy-making at the local level and recognize that decades of conflict and displacement have had gender-specific consequences, in both conflict and post-conflict zones, there is a need to tackle men’s experience as soldiers both in terms of its economic, social, and psychological.
The conflict has reinforced gendered norms and expectations and that democratization and decentralization will not automatically override them but women are really key players in peacebuilding because of their civil society activism, organized through ethnic women’s organizations.
In conclusion, stakeholders in Myanmar should continue to work towards gender mainstreaming in the governance structure and the peace process, if this happens, it will finally be possible to address the social injuries experienced by various genders in conflict-affected areas, therefore making it possible to bring about a more robust peace in Myanmar.
References:
Women join the fight against the military in Myanmar, available at:
can defections takedown Myanmar’s military? available at:
https://thediplomat.com/2021/11/can-defections-take-down-myanmars-military/
EU condemns human rights violations by Myanmar armed forces, available at:
https://thefrontierpost.com/eu-condemns-human-rights-violations-by-myanmar-armed-forces/
UN Women Myanmar, available at:
https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/countries/myanmar
Tracing women in armed resistance movements, available at:
https://ebrary.net/187202/sociology/tracing_women_armed_resistance_movements
Women and armed conflict, available at:
https://www.burmalibrary.org/en/category/women-and-armed-conflict-burmamyanmar
Integration of women and gender perspective into Myanmar Armed Forces. Available at:
gender, violence and Ethnic conflict in Myanmar, available at: https://teacircleoxford.com/2020/07/08/gender-violence-and-ethnic-conflict-in-myanmar/
Sexual and gender-based violence in Myanmar and the gendered impacts of its ethnic conflicts, available at:
https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFM-Myanmar/sexualviolence/A_HRC_CRP_4.pdf
By Gaia Gambaro : The European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
