By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Sep 10 2004 (IPS)

Rangoon’s military government is arming itself to be perceived as a promoter of tolerance towards women in Burma as the world readies to mark the 10th anniversary of a landmark international conference on gender equality.

A report released this week by the junta underscores the kind of reality it has in mind when talking about the work underway to help women in that South-east Asian country, renamed Myanmar, secure their rights.

The most glaring is its take on violence against women, a global problem that governments pledged to combat through a raft of measures at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, in 1995.

As far as the junta is concerned, ”violence against women is not a major issue” in Burma, but ”an area of concern for women’s health and advancement of women,” stated Rangoon’s report to a meeting held here this week on the status of women in the Asia-Pacific region ahead of next year’s ‘Beijing Plus 10’ conference.

Research conducted by a government committee in ”many states and divisions” revealed that the ”magnitude of both physical and mental violence is quite low,” added the ‘Report on Myanmar’s Implementation of the Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action.’

But such a surreal scenario is up against more powerful portraits of the deadly conditions under which the women in Burma have to live.

The release this week of ‘System of Impunity,’ a painful account of rape and sexual violence perpetrated by the Burmese military on women from the country’s ethnic communities, is a case in point.

”Women and girls from different ethnic groups report similar stories of rape, including gang rape; rape and murder; sexual slavery; and forced ‘marriage,” stated the 62-page report that was published by the Women’s League of Burma, an umbrella organisation of 11 groups fighting for the rights of Burman’s and the country’s ethnic communities.

This report is the third in two years to narrate the stories of women who were victims of a weapon of war that the Burmese military has been using frequently – namely systematic rape. The first two reports were ‘Licence to Rape,’ which revealed that 625 girls and women had been victims of sexual violence, and ‘Shattering Silence,’ which highlighted 125 cases of rape committed by Burmese troops.

There was hardly a hint of such torment in the official account on violence against women presented to the Bangkok conference this week.

Nor did Rangoon mention the name of the country’s most well- known political prisoner, pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in its submissions about the role of women in governance in the country – an issue that governments pledged to address, by increasing greater women’s participation, in Beijing.

In other areas, too, human rights activists from Burma point to the junta’s failure to live up to the commitments it made in Beijing to usher in a better world for women.

The junta’s much heralded National Convention to draft a new constitution for the country is a typical example. According to Burma watchers, there are very few women among the 1,000 representatives handpicked by the regime to participate in the convention, which began in May but had been suspended since.

”If the regime can attack and place in custody a famous lady like Suu Kyi, it knows it can get away doing far worse things to women who are not known,” Nang Lao Liang Won of the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN), said in an interview.

”Nothing has changed for women in Burma during the last 10 years,” she added. ”That is why so many women are escaping as refugees and migrant workers, and that is why the women who have been abused are talking.”

According to Paw Hset of the Karen Women’s Organisation, the reports of rape and the attitude of the Burmese government towards women – ”keeping them under control of men” – reflects the absence of women’s rights in Burma.

”Women are not safe under the military regime,” she asserted in an interview. ”It is a male-dominated system, with the military on top.”

The Shan and the Karen are among the 10 major ethnic minorities in Burma.

However, such a stark difference between the fiction that the junta is conjuring and the painful realities of abuse endured by women hardly comes as a surprise to Burma watchers.

After all, Rangoon stood out among the 189 countries that participated at the 1995 Beijing women’s conference – it sent a delegation led by a man.

And like it did then, the junta made it known at a conference five years later to review the progress since Beijing that the ”status of women in Myanmar remains to be the highest in the world.”

Human rights activists are hoping that Rangoon would not be able to get away with such a fairy tale for the third time, during next year’s conference to assess the status of women across the world.

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