SURVIVING THE INVERTED WORLD OF POLITICAL REPRESSION
AN UNLIKELY PRISONER – How an eternal optimist found hope in Myanmar’s most notorious jail
By Sean Turnell
Viking 2023
ISBN: 978 1 76134 292 9
RRP: $35 (PB)
Reviewed by Anne Henderson
Literature over decades has left many records of the individual experiences of those forced to endure unjust and cruel incarceration as political prisoners. A good majority of such prisoners do not live to tell their story. Others wish not to relive the torture. But those who do leave a record serve to remind the world that tyranny and base cruelty as a partner to power cannot be disregarded as a feature of human existence.
Such is Sean Turnell’s memoir of his 650 days as a prisoner of Myanmar’s junta following the February 2021 coup which overthrew the recently democratically elected National League for Democracy government. That government had been elected in a landslide. A landslide that threatened local cabals and which generated what Turnell calls “urban mythmaking … xenophobia, ethnic chauvinism and religious bigotry” which combined to develop a conspiracy that the new government and its economic planners was “in the grip of a sinister foreign cohort – led by George Soros” to return Myanmar to colonial rule. Sean Turnell was part of that so-called cohort in the eyes of the junta – he was working as Aung San Suu Kyi’s economic adviser from 2016 as the small democracy began planning a new economic future.
Sean Turnell’s memoir of his incarceration is a compelling read. It opens the door to the political conundrum that is Myanmar’s politics before and since the coup of 2021. It also throws light on the fate of legendary Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi whom Turnell calls Daw Suu. Convicted of yet another three years to add to her earlier sentence in the trial that would, in September 2022, eventually convict Turnell and other former members of her government, her response to her fellow accused was to say how proud she was of them for their stand and a message to Turnell to “tell your story”. For Daw Suu, Turnell writes, her sentence was “practically another day at the office”. Rumour now has it that Daw Suu may be dead and the regime has suppressed information. Other rumours suggest she is under home arrest.
Although warned by a friend in an email that the military intelligence was on its way (“Five days into the coup, they came for me.”), nothing could have prepared this Australian academic and economist Sean Turnell for what would happen to him. From the beginning it was a case of loss of control matched with a brusque stripping of his agency. “I was the one without a seat in the lifeboat.” Taking away his phone, passport, computer, memory stick and iPad would begin the process. Then the waiting without knowing why. Then the commands to pack a small backpack, then the realisation he was “beyond the looking glass”. Protests in the streets had little effect and Turnell was soon in a police cell in a run down colonial building with a very large rat as his companion. An officer from the Australian embassy had managed to pass him a small roll up mattress and a mosquito net.
Turnell’s 650 days in the hands of Myanmar’s junta network of prisons is a description of personal deprivation and extreme cruelty, engagements with other political prisoners that lift his spirits, ingenuity and survival in the depths of despair and a revelation of the primitive infrastructure that supports Myanmar’s junta control. Escorts of prisoners between jails and rustic courts are conducted like parodies of modern day presidential convoys. A pack of 40 prisoners squashed into a van, shackled and weak are hardly in need of sirens, speed through traffic lights and escorted by numbers of armed militia.
In two months, Turnell – not a huge guy – lost ten kilos. His accommodation in those months was what he called “the Box” – a small transport container like box within a room where he had no space to stretch out and where he slept cradled around a fixed chair – the only item in the room. He contemplated suicide but was kept going by eventually some contact by phone with his wife Ha and embassy officials. He also contemplated how he could take comfort that he was arrested after many others and could not be accused of betraying them under questioning. He writes:
When you have lost all other status, or anything really to maintain self-esteem, the respect of fellow inmates was everything.
It is with his move to Myanmar’s notorious Insein prison (“Insein prison is about as bad as its name sounds”) that Turnell feels the full force of incarceration. The prison, built by the colonial British rulers of Burma, has all the hall marks of Port Arthur’s model prison constructed by the British in the early nineteenth century in Tasmania. The cells, spread out like spikes on a bicycle wheel, are all overseen by a central tower. The cells are open to the elements – heat, rain, mosquitos, damp, endless discomfort. By the time Turnell entered Insein, the junta had arrested some 17,000 locals. One of the punishments at Insein was to make a prisoner “mow” grass – one blade at a time in the heat of the sun. Surprisingly, as with other accounts of such incarceration, support among the prisoners for each other kept Turnell going.
Then came the charges laid for his conviction. Charges that led to a year of Kafkaesque style contradictory and illogical arguments that Turnell – under a century old colonial law – had breached Burma’s Official Secrets Act of 1923. In other words, he was being charged with what he had been hired to do. In time he was informed he was being investigated for being a spy.
Moved to Myanmar’s Naypyitaw prison with its oppressive climate, Turnell was now in the same prison as Daw Suu who had her own space apart from the regular inmates. Here Turnell was imprisoned with former senior government officials, one of whom was charged with a breach of the Official Secrets Act for revealing a speech he made at the UN General Assembly. Another, Bo Bo – former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Myanmar – was charged with ensuring Myanmar’s foreign reserves were safe from corruption and mismanagement. He remains in Myanmar’s prison system. Encounters with these men were enriched moments for Turnell. These figures of state importance gave him intellectual stimulation. They had the same interest in reading and books that Turnell craved.
The show trials and their outcome were decided well before the sentencing – the comedy played out in so many pages of history over the past century for totalitarian societies. Turnell writes:
… the writing was on the wall for all of us. No-one was walking out of court free; I knew that, however the junta decided to go about it, there would be findings against me.
As the trials proceeded, the prosecution developed what Turnell describes as “the twilight zone, destroying their credibility with obvious lies, fake documents, and bizarre presentations”. During the 18 months of judicial proceedings, Turnell became a special support for Daw Suu with whom he spoke to in English, giving her whatever updates on outside news he could. Just before the verdict, Turnell came upon a mirror in the courthouse. He could not resist a chance to see himself. The image that stared back at him was a shock, but he writes – in reference to being reminded of Orwell’s picture of a broken Winston Smith in 1984, – “Unlike Orwell’s creation, however, I was not completely defeated by my awful doppelganger. Not yet.”
The tragedy for Myanmar, apart from the junta’s survival, was that among those accused and living with Turnell at Naypyitaw prison were some of Myanmar’s best and brightest young leaders. Turnell describes their fundamental strength as being their continuance of opposition even within the constraints of the junta’s prison system. They were behind what the prisoners labelled the “BBC Wall Service” which endeavoured to get out world news to other prisoners from whispers inside. Guards would leak snippets and the service would spring into action. It could keep spirits up but never have real effect on the system they endured. Even as it unnerved the prison authorities at Naypyitaw whose unhappiness was reflected in their observable drunkenness.
Throughout Turnell’s ordeal, he was allowed brief moments of contact with Australian diplomatic officers and even his wife Ha. These were crucial to his survival mentally even if strictly controlled. Turnell and Ha developed of a special code of communication even as their topics of conversation were strictly restricted. Turnell writes of how he found he came to open up emotionally to Ha which no doubt served to sustain him psychologically. In time, it would be Australian diplomatic efforts that saw Turnell being included among some 5000 prisoners being released to mark a holiday in late November 2022.
Turnell’s account of his time in Myanmar’s prison system is now an important record, one that might give heart to those who continue to press for the overthrow of the junta. Currently, the signs are not so positive, but this record shows that human endurance can survive against repression. But outside help is also crucial.
Anne Henderson is Deputy Director of The Sydney Institute and author of Menzies at War, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Prime Minister’s Award for Australian History.