As the world celebrated International Women’s Day on Friday, nearly 4,000 Myanmar women languished in junta-controlled prisons, police detention facilities and military interrogation centers across the country for their political activism.
Immediately after the military coup in 2021, Myanmar saw the eruption of a nationwide anti-regime movement in which people from all walks of life joined peaceful demonstrations rejecting the coup. At the forefront of the protests calling for the restoration of democracy in the country were women from a wide range of occupations and professions, from students and housewives to teachers and doctors, among many others.
When the junta cracked down on anyone who opposed it—firing at them with live bullets, and subjecting them to arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings—women suffered along with their male counterparts.
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners-Burma (AAPP), a local human rights watchdog that works to document and secure the release of political prisoners in Myanmar, of the 26,225 people arrested since the coup, 5,427 were women.
The AAPP told The Irrawaddy on Friday that 3,908 women were detained as of Thursday—nearly 21 percent of the 20,101 political prisoners currently detained in the regime’s prisons and detention centers nationwide.
The most high-profile, and oldest, person detained for their political beliefs is the country’s popular leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, 78, who has been detained since the first day of the coup and remains in solitary confinement. She is now 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.
Hundreds of women killed
According to the AAPP’s data, as of Thursday the junta had killed a total of 4,650 people since the coup.
Of them, 822 were 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 against civilian residential areas across the country.
A representative of the watchdog said she had noticed that the number of women killed by the junta has accelerated every year since the coup. There were 95 killed in 2021, but the number rose to 212 in 2022 and 395 in 2023.
“Based on our observation, 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.
“It indicates that the regime is targeting people more than before, regardless of their gender,” she added.
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.
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.
“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,” he added.
