Dear friends and colleagues,

Happy New Year! May this year be peaceful and prosperous for you and all your loved ones.

We wish 2023 to be better than the last — for 2022 was a challenging, horrifying year to all our diverse and marginalized communities who call Myanmar home. It marked the first anniversary of the Burmese military’s attempted coup, whose ensuing human rights and humanitarian catastrophe has since continued to deteriorate. More and more women and girls were targeted by the military’s use of sexual and gender-based violence as a weapon of war. 2022 also observed the fifth anniversary of the attacks of genocide against Rohingya, whose year was tragically “one of the worst years for the community as refugees.” Rohingya and other ethnic and religious minorities in Myanmar thus lived through the year as another traumatizing chapter of the military’s generational attempts to violently subjugate them.

However, last year did end with the possibility that our next chapter may finally culminate in our long-awaited justice. The United States government’s official recognition of the Rohingya genocide, the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the preliminary objections in The Gambia v. Myanmar, and the international actions that were taken on Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day were a few of the momentous efforts towards accountability in Myanmar. Others were illustrated by international governments’ issuance of financial penalties and economic sanctions against the junta and its related businesses; last month, Canada became the first jurisdiction to impose sanctions on the military’s jet fuel suppliers. The year even ended with the United Nations Security Council’s passage of a resolution on Myanmar. The historic steps that were taken in 2022 instilled us with the hope that our justice may be well within our communities’ reach.

What we can continue to be certain of is our sincere gratitude to you and your community for supporting us and our work. We truly thank you for believing in us, as well as all the other people in Myanmar who envision an inclusive and federally democratic future back home.

So, with you, we look forward to our year: a year when peace, justice, and freedom will finally prevail.

In solidarity,

January 2, 2023

Women’s Peace Network