Guest contributor
Khin Ohmar
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ Regional Plan of Action on Women, Peace and Security (ASEAN RPA on WPS)-adopted in 2022-claims to be a roadmap for sustainable peace in the region by ensuring women’s participation in conflict prevention, resolution, and recovery efforts.
It includes mention of the protection of women from and prevention of gender-based violence and support for national efforts to implement the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security.
The ASEAN RPA on WPS speaks the language of rights and empowerment. It cites international law. It pledges action. Thus, it can be easily applauded that ASEAN has taken a step in the right direction by complying with its international obligations.
But for the women of Burma/Myanmar, especially those who have endured military violence, sexual slavery, and the trauma of war for decades, this plan is not a beacon of hope—it is a betrayal.
Myanmar’s women—survivors, frontline responders, community caretakers, peacebuilders, and resistance leaders—were never included in the process nor consulted in the creation of this regional action plan. We were never invited to the table.
Our experiences were not recognized, our voices were not heard. Instead, the RPA on WPS has been constructed around us – where the military is waging a war of terror against the people and women, and ultimately against us—denying us presence, protection, and political recognition.
This exclusion is not a procedural oversight. It is a moral and political failure. It makes the RPA on WPS illegitimate.
ASEAN continues to shield the violent and illegitimate junta
Since the 2021 military coup attempt, Myanmar has been plunged into one of the most violent and chaotic periods in its history. This illegal military junta has launched more than 4,000 airstrikes. It has burned over 100,000 civilian homes. It has bombed schools and clinics. And it has used rape and sexual violence as weapons of war with horrifying regularity.
The Women’s League of Burma (WLB) has documented total 492 cases of sexual assault against women between February 2021 and June 2024, including at least 13 cases where women were raped and then killed.
This is not new. The Myanmar military has a long, documented history of using sexual violence to terrorize ethnic communities. It has been blacklisted by the U.N. Secretary-General for conflict-related sexual violence since at least 2018.
The rape of women, especially from ethnic and religious minority communities, is not incidental—it is systemic, strategic, and brutal and it has been documented in the U.N. resolutions on human rights situation in Myanmar for decades.
And yet, while ASEAN claims to prioritize women’s protection and prevention from violence, it continues to shield the very perpetrator institution – the Myanmar military – responsible for these crimes.
Myanmar is treated not as a site of atrocity, but as a diplomatic inconvenience. The voices of Myanmar women—the very women who should be at the center of an ASEAN women, peace and security agenda—are completely excluded.
Who speaks for the women of Myanmar at ASEAN?
Let’s be absolutely clear: the women who represent Myanmar within regional institutions like the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC) are not survivors, activists, or feminist leaders. They are military-appointed bureaucrats.
They speak not for the people of Myanmar, but for the military that bombs, rapes, and terrorizes the people.
Under the ASEAN so-called principles of “non-interference” and “consensus decision-making,” this farce is allowed to continue. Since 2017, the military was able to block any discussion of Myanmar at ASEAN meetings as it killed people, raped women. and committed genocide against the Rohingya.
Throughout the Spring Revolution, the women of Myanmar have been at the forefront against the military. They have rejected its representatives at the ASEAN human rights bodies, such as the ACWC, since it has never placed the situation of Myanmar women and children enduring military’s violence and atrocities on the agenda.
And as a result, not a single official ASEAN statement related to violence against women or under the RPA on WPS has acknowledged the mass rape of women in Sagaing and Chin, or the killing of children by airstrikes in Sagaing, Chin, Karen, Karenni, Kachin, Ta’ang, and Shan in the past four years.
What kind of women, peace and security framework is ASEAN adopting? One where war criminals send their proxies to represent women of the country they are bombing, killing and raping—and the region applauds?
More declarations without dignity or substance
ASEAN has not only failed Myanmar women in the present. It has been failing us for over a decade. In 2013, the bloc adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Children. It was full of bold promises: regional cooperation, legal reform, protection services, gender mainstreaming.
And yet, the ASEAN kept itself in complete silence, totally ignoring the Myanmar military’s campaign of rape and sexual violence against women as a weapon of war during its military operations in ethnic homelands over the past few decades as reported by the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN) in its 2002 report License to Rape.
As sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)—including conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV)—has surged across Myanmar over the past four years, from junta interrogation centers and prisons to village raids, ASEAN has remained deafeningly silent.
This silence is not just neglect—it is complicity. Even with its RPA on WPS, ASEAN has willfully excluded these crimes from its agenda, allowing the military’s representatives to continue manipulating regional discourse while shielding themselves from accountability.
This complicity has emboldened the military to persist in using rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war—acts that constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes. And now, as it holds up the RPA on WPS as a badge of progress, ASEAN continues to enable the very perpetrators it claims to oppose, legitimizing their impunity and betraying the very women it claims to protect.
A plan for women without women
Nothing about us without us! U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 demands the full and equal participation of women in all peace and security processes. It is not a suggestion. It is a binding resolution for action; it is a legal and moral obligation.
Every country, and every regional body, has the duty to create national action plans in line with this resolution—through inclusive, transparent, and survivor-centered processes.
ASEAN claims it is fulfilling this duty. But how can it be, when not a single women’s rights groups from Myanmar civil society were invited to participate or consulted in a process of consultation and development of the ASEAN RPA on WPS?
When there was no outreach to conflict-affected and displaced women at the starting time of such process, no platform for women from ethnic minority communities, and no recognition of resistance voices, what kind of legitimacy or mandate would this RPA on WPS claim?
From 2017 to 2025—eight years—Myanmar’s women have been ignored, neglected and excluded.
The RPA on WPS mentioned Myanmar’s enactment of the National Strategic Plan for the Advancement of Women on page 10-adopted in 2013-supported by U.N. Women.
The 10-year action plan deliberately removed the part about the situation and solution for ethnic minority women, especially from remote and conflict affected areas facing SGBV that civil society proposed.
Even then, the proposed draft did not carry out an inclusive and meaningful participatory consultation process with grassroots women, particularly women from conflict affected areas. How can any national action plan or law that purports to protect a community or change the community’s situation for the better exclude that very community from any part of the process of making those laws and policies?
The question must now be asked to the U.N. Women and the donors supporting the U.N. Women’s regional and Myanmar offices that supported both the RPA on WPS and Myanmar’s 10-year action plan: how could they neglect the situation, voices and participation of women, particularly from ethnic and religious minority communities who are directly impacted by the conflict and violence in these planning processes?
How could they themselves continue to remain silent and complicit in the military’s violence and use of rape as a weapon of war against women of Myanmar? How could they allow ASEAN to neglect and exclude these women from this regional action planning process?
What are U.N. Women in Myanmar doing? Why is there no reporting to the donors about women of Myanmar being excluded from the process? How could this be acceptable?
Inviting one or two or a few women from Myanmar randomly only after the RPA on WPS was adopted as tokenism to tick the box to save their own interest is absolutely wrong and unacceptable. Especially at such a time when the women of Myanmar have been deliberately and severely targeted and persecuted by this unlawful military junta.
Even before 2021, there has not even been an awareness campaign inside Myanmar to inform women that such a plan would exist. How can ASEAN claim it is implementing a regional framework for women’s protection and leadership, when it does not even inform the women living under siege?
This is not an oversight. It is systemic exclusion. It is the erasure of an entire population of women who are inconvenient to political calculations by ASEAN. And U.N. Women, with their financial and technical assistance to the process, must equally bear the responsibility and be accountable for their negligence.
If ASEAN is serious about Women, Peace and Security, it must begin with three actions:
1. End junta representation in all ASEAN women and gender mechanisms, processes and forums: immediately suspend the junta’s current delegates to the RPA on WPS implementation and related processes as well as in the ACWC, as they are not legitimate representatives of Myanmar women.
2. Support Myanmar women-led and -owned WPS agenda and implementation: ASEAN shall form a regional delegation of feminist women leaders including representatives appointed by the National Unity Government (NUG), with meaningful and independent mandate to initiate a process specifically only for Myanmar women, who were excluded and left behind in the original process with the aim to ensure inclusion of Myanmar women’s experiences, concerns, voices, and recommendations to be integrated into the RPA on WPS.
This delegation first and foremost shall reach out to women leaders from Myanmar’s democratic and ethnic resistance movement and feminist movement, especially from conflict-affected areas, to learn about their own initiatives and actions.
For example, at WLB–of which I am a founding member–women, peace and security has been the main focus and agenda we have been implementing on the ground since its inception by the U.N. Security Council. WLB conducted training and produced leaflets in several ethnic languages to raise grassroots women’s awareness.
Then, the delegation shall consult with these local women leaders of Myanmar to agree on the modality for the consultation process over the RPA on WPS with them to develop their recommendations for the action plan concerning Myanmar women.
Take a backseat, but do not lead. Provide them assistance as they identify as needed under war time to convene Myanmar’s women-led and -owned process: grassroots women’s networks, ethnic women’s organizations particularly from conflict areas, survivors’ groups, feminist groups, and resistance leaders to come together.
They are the true leaders and survivors with sound and durable solutions for sustainable peace that will help ASEAN strengthen its RPA on WPS to be inclusive and meaningful for effective implementation covering the situation of not only Myanmar’s women but of all women in the region.
3. Acknowledge and act on SGBV and CSRV: ASEAN must amend the ACWC with the mandate that provides independent operational power, including to set up mechanisms such as for reporting and complaint-receiving and convening public hearing, as well as the mandate to engage with civil society groups–particularly of women and child rights groups and survivor groups–formally and regularly to collaborate to address the SGBV and CRSV-related situations.
This includes public reporting and recommendations to ASEAN to commit to ensure justice and reparation for victims and survivors of SGBV and CRSV and hold perpetrators, including state actors, to account.
Anything less is performative—a facade of gender progress used to shield accountability and entrench impunity.
The women of Myanmar are not waiting for ASEAN
The women of Myanmar are not waiting for ASEAN’s action to resist or stop the junta’s violence or to build peace that is inclusive and sustainable.
They have been already organizing for decades. They are building young women leadership schools in conflict and displacement zones. They are leading protests. They are documenting war crimes and SGBV and CRSV cases.
They are treating the wounded. They are defending their communities and villages and caring for children and elderly fleeing from military bombs and artillery shells. And they have been doing all of this without ASEAN’s help—and despite its inaction, negligence and total silence.
But in this time when ASEAN takes a leading role in resolving the Myanmar crisis, this inaction, negligence and silence is no longer acceptable. ASEAN must be called to account. Its declarations and RPA on WPS mean absolutely nothing if they exclude us–the women of Myanmar who are resisting this brutal military.
ASEAN’s plans of action on paper and in statements mean nothing if their real action is only protecting perpetrators and continuing their complicity in the junta’s crimes against our women and children. Its credibility means nothing if it cannot even call out the Myanmar military for using rape as a weapon of war against the women in Myanmar.
History will judge ASEAN not by the elegance of its documents, but by the lives it failed to protect. The women it failed to hear. The crimes it failed to name, and thus, the peace it failed to make possible.
Khin Ohmar is a Myanmar human rights activist who was involved in organizing the 1988 nationwide pro-democracy uprising. She is also the founder and chairperson of Progressive Voice, a Myanmar human rights organization. She developed the Women Peacebuilding Program for Women’s League of Burma and served as program coordinator from 2000 to 2006.
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