Insight Myanmar

Episode #151: Tomas Martin is a prison researcher who presently works with DIGNITY, the Danish Institute Against Torture. His interest in prison research was first piqued when he heard about ten-day vipassana meditation courses in the tradition of S.N. Goenka being conducted in Tihar Jail outside of New Delhi. He is now focusing on how imprisonment in Myanmar, and its ramifications, and not only the prisoners, but the staff as well.Besides the violence which often plagues incarceration, Martin pays close attention to the everyday experience of prison life. One of the more unique areas of his research has been a study of the usually foul prison air and its psychological and physical affects. He has pushed for new prison designs that encourage better ventilation, to improve the overall quality of life for prisoners.On the subject of human rights within Burmese prisons, Martin points out the tragic truth that torture has long been used by the military regime to punish political dissidents. After they go through unfair trials, Martin explains how they then have limited contact with family, and their access to food and medicine is restricted. In addition, they are often either placed in extremely overcrowded conditions or kept in solitary confinement, two extremes that are equally detrimental to mental and physical health.Martin has observed a paradoxical relationship between the revolution and the regime’s attempts at oppression. “Prison is where revolutionary actors and protests are being quelled. People are being locked up and even killed, to destroy the revolution. But the prison is also a place where there is opportunity to collect revolutionary actors and to produce revolutionary action and spirit!”

Episode #150: Joining the podcast over a year after her previous interview, Thiri returns to update listeners on her own personal story, as well as to discuss the state of the resistance and the democracy movement.Thiri describes living with debilitating stress and constant fear until finally she decided she had to flee the country. It was not an easy decision, and transitioning to life in a new country has been traumatic. Separated from her family and community, from her country, and with no possibility of returning while the military regime remains in power, she also feels guilty for abandoning the fight. At times she even feels that she has lost her soul.In spite of the pain that has overwhelmed so many Burmese, it’s important to Thiri that the international community not reduce the Burmese people to a one-dimensional caricature of a devastated population in shambles, which she strongly believes robs them of their humanity.Yet even from a place of safety, Thiri often finds herself triggered, her mind jumping back to the constant fear and dread of her life in Yangon. She has had to compartmentalize these intense emotions in order to complete tasks. In looking back over the past year, Thiri notes how the increasing brutality and violence of the military eventually resulted in many youths fleeing the country, joining the armed resistance, or going deep into hiding. She is dismayed to hear criticism that the resistance movement shouldn’t take up arms to defend themselves. She says, “I am not a violent person, and also I don't like war.” But it soon became apparent to many activists that there was no other way to resist the oppression and tyranny the military was trying to impose on the country. Thiri believes the democracy movement should be an inspiration to people around the world. “A threat to democracy in our country can be a threat to democracy in your country… This is beyond a political strife of brown people in Southeast Asia, it's broader than that… And we are telling you to join us in this fight together, so that we all can live in a society where fascists and dictatorship cannot have a space.”

Episode #149: Nandar Min Swe is a fundraiser for the government in exile. She helped sell NUG bonds, as well as facilitating the sale of subdivided plots of land owned by Min Aung Hlaing and other the military, which can be redeemed upon a successful end to the revolution. These days, she is working on facilitating a cryptocurrency which can circumvent the military regime’s control over the national financial system.Nandar identifies a developing problem, however, in that most fundraising efforts are directed at Burmese donors. “Why are we digging deeper into our own pockets, and our own pockets are not that deep enough, no matter how much we dig into?” she asked herself. She thinks this is due, in part, to Burmese cultural values. Nandar agrees with Phillipp Annawitt, who expressed on a recent Insight Myanmar podcast episode that the “culture of sacrifice” that has long existed within Burmese democracy movements is not a sustainable form of governance, and this is reflected in the Burmese focus of fundraising efforts—the same people give over and over until they can’t, while volunteers are beginning to feel overwhelmed. Nearly two years into the attempted coup, the Burmese diaspora still continues to have to shoulder nearly this entire burden, unable to find a way to break through to a wider audience beyond their own bubble.Going forward, Nandar makes clear she is seeking a new and better country, rather than advocating for a specific party or policy. “I'm not an NLD supporter or a Daw Aung San Suu Kyi supporter. I feel myself to be more like someone who wants to liberate Burma any way I can. And the only way I can right now is by fundraising.”

Episode #148: Melody Mociulski’s first trip to Burma was in 1974, during a round-the-world backpacking trip on the so-called “hippie trail.” A fellow traveler at one point convinced her to see Burma. So with little money in her pocket, flew to see for herself. It was the height of the hot season and swarming with mosquitoes, but Melody nonetheless was profoundly impacted by her brief stay in the country.Melody returned to Burma numerous times in the years following, a deep connection continuing to pull her back. The reason for her growing attachment was partly that Burma’s challenges seemed to be ignored by the international community more than other places, but mainly was just how moved she was by the Burmese people. So she founded Clear Path International, a nonprofit that provides medical assistance landmine victims and supports their reintegration into the local community.Eventually this led to female empowerment, which Melody describes as the central core of her passion and activism. In furtherance of this goal, she co-founded Educational Empowerment, whose main mission is to invest in girls’ education because of its positive effect on many aspects of women’s lives. Their work is perhaps most important now, as women are especially at risk during this time of conflict.Melody’s organization also works to provide better lives for children in various ways. For example, they fund children’s books to be printed in ethnic languages, featuring local folk tales, so that the children’s traditions and languages can be preserved. They also allocated funds for a school to be built in the Delta. Understanding the dangers of repeated flooding during monsoon season, they arranged for it to be constructed two feet higher than other buildings. Melody notes with pride that it is one of the few buildings in the area that always remains dry, and that it operates as a kind of emergency hub during heavy rains. Beyond this, her group has also established a number of libraries throughout the country, which offer courses in digital literacy and even job placement.

Episode #147: Many years ago, Jesse Phenow signed up to be a volunteer at a resettlement organizing, initially thinking he would be “the friend and ally and welcomer that that they've been needing.’” But he found something quite different! “This family didn't need me; in fact, in a lot of ways, I was the welcomed, not the welcomer. That family’s posture and sense of welcome was something that I desperately needed, and hadn't really experienced before.” Jesse was completely taken not only with the sense of hospitality of the Karen family he met, but also their savvy, gritty resilience.While in college, Jesse took what would be his first of many trips to Karen refugee camps, and he chose to write his senior thesis on the Karen Revolution, which filled with a much deeper sense of the people and their complex history.After graduation he moved to Minneapolis, where he worked in an office providing mental health services to immigrant communities. “There's a lot of trauma,” he acknowledges. “There's not a Karen person in Minnesota who doesn't have a story about a family member or a friend being harmed, raped, killed, tortured, or a village burned.”Jesse bought and renovated an older building nearby, which he transformed it into a communal space called “The Urban Village.” Its goal is to support Karen and Karenni youth struggling with their sense of identity. “We're hearing from elders a genuine fear around a growing disconnect between them and their kids,” Jesse says. “Our hope is that that connection really starts with a connection to themselves and to their identity, whatever they come to believe that to be, but that they feel a sense of connection.”The aftermath of the coup has exposed an additional manifestation of the generation gap. While the elder generation had to survive near constant assaults from the Tatmadaw, the latter do not have that personal experience, and their different perspectives strongly shape their outlook and sense of possibility.Even since the coup, Jesse has continued his relief trips supporting health and education projects back in Burma and around the border regions. While there, he also helps to document the on-going situation, and interviews elders with the aim of building a historical archive. As tumultuous and challenging as the last two years have been, he says, “The entire country is really fighting back, and I think this type of unity probably hasn't been seen before.”

Episode #145: Calvin Khoe, the Co-Director of Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia (FPCI), speaks with us about ASEAN’s and Indonesia’s in role in the Myanmar conflict.Khoe emphasizes the importance of allowing ASEAN to lead detailed, closed-door conversations with a wide range of actors within Myanmar, and that it shouldn’t be rushed by outside parties. He criticizes Westerners who he feels are unfamiliar with ASEAN’s protocols (and Asian culture in general) and who push too aggressively for progress.To Khoe, the need for private dialogue also informs his perhaps controversial opinion that it is inappropriate even to publicly chastise the Tatmadaw for its many serious human rights infractions, and that such matters should only be addressed by using soft language with them in private. And perhaps even more controversially, he insists that discussions on the future of the country must involve the SAC, as well as the NUG and various EAOs. This is because he feels that all parties have a seat at the table in looking at the future of the country, and he hopes Indonesia can be seen as a “big brother” member of ASEAN that could facilitate this kind of discussion.Addressing concerns that the military-led elections proposed this year would likely not be free and fair, and thus provide a false legitimacy to the junta, Khoe argues that he does not see any better option for resolving the conflict, and adds that ASEAN and Indonesia could help oversee any elections.Khoe explains how ASEAN and Southeast Asian nations view the role of the military within their respective countries. Most Southeast Asian countries have strong militaries, and Khoe believes that outside countries do not appreciate the local context and history of the region, and the traditional role that militaries play in that part of the world. This is also why he insists that the Tatmadaw does have a role in deciding the future of the country, in spite of the widespread violence they have perpetuated in these past two years.

Episode #145: Who am I?” Valerie remembers asking herself this question while sitting in a meditation hall at Aung Lan Monastery late one evening. “Why are we seeking and loving so much about having this attraction and attachments? What is going on? And so, that's how I started out.”Born in Myanmar to a Chinese Muslim family and a later convert to Buddhism, Valerie eventually relocated to California. There she became involved in the beauty pageant circuit and modeled, and was employed as manager of a commercial lending bank. But when an acquaintance she was due to meet suddenly died, her life priorities were shaken and she decided to attend a meditation course in the Thae Ingu tradition.Her first retreat was excruciating. The pain at one point became so severe she began to fear she was dying. But she was determined and eventually became able to detach from her pain. Her mind sharpened, she delighted in the subtle detail that only a penetrative mind is able to reach. She began to sit for longer and longer periods, examining the origin of suffering and the identification with body, and the conditionality of self. The course had a profound effect on Valerie, as she discovered when she returned home. She stopped modeling, and in fact barely attended to her appearance at all, which led to interventions from management at her bank and alarmed her friends.Then the military coup in Myanmar happened. And as deep as her spiritual journey had taken her, Valerie also found herself unable to sit at all following the coup because of the horrors being perpetrated by the Tatmadaw. Valerie became involved with the democracy movement and began to question her practice in light of the military’s brutality. While fully aware that the ultimate cause of suffering is inside, Valerie also feels strongly that seeking out a peaceful inner life is not possible in the wake of the excruciating harm the military is inflicting on the Burmese people. Valerie felt compelled to choose between prioritizing spiritual or worldly liberation, and temporarily has chosen the latter. Her reasoning is that the singular cause of so much intense suffering on the outside needs to be taken care of in the short term before conditions can again arise that support widespread meditation practice in the future, when peace eventually does return to the Golden Land.For now, her present pathway is clear. “We will try to support those people who are inside the country and fighting for the people, who are fighting for fairness, and fighting for the truth.”

Episode #144: In October 2007, Bobo witnessed uniformed soldiers beating Buddhist monks on the streets of Yangon. That experience radically changed the trajectory of his life.Bobo realized that any success or security he could accrue on an individual level through education and a profession could be snatched away without warning as long as the corrupt and cruel military regime remained in charge. He soon joined Generation Wave, an underground collective formed following the uprising in 2007. The work was dangerous and has put Bobo in the crosshairs since he was a teenager.Following the military coup in 2021, Bobo began working to help mobilize the populace into action with massive nonviolent protests and strikes in key sectors.  As the nonviolent protests continued, the military began using live munitions. Being an organization committed to nonviolent resistance, Generation Wave has had to be creative in their approach.Yet while Generation Wave, itself, has been steadfastly committed to peaceful forms of opposition, there is an understanding that each part of the movement is equally needed in order to counter the Tatmadaw: nonviolent action, armed resistance, the Civil Disobedience Movement, sanctions from the West, recognition of the NUG, etc.For the foreseeable future, Bobo is doing all he can at a personal level to play this role himself, pushing aside any thought of the toll it’s taking. “I don't want to be there,” he admits wearily. “I want to live very peacefully, and to have fun with friends and with my family. I want a normal life like other people, of course. But now all my energy and all my commitment are for the revolution and for the movement.”

Episode #143: The Burma Act’s origins can be traced to before the coup, according to Michael Haack, a longtime advocate. Its goal was to provide support for civil society while limiting the power of the military. One of its major features was calling out the Rohingya genocide, but Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell feared it would reflect poorly on his close friend, Aung San Suu Kyi, who at that time was leading the country, and blocked the bill’s passage.The final version of the Burma Act drew rare, almost unanimous bipartisan backing in the House, but it was again blocked by McConnell. So a decision was made to include it as an Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a bill that funds the US military and has passed annually since 1961. Haack notes that the language of the Burma Act specifically allows for only non-lethal aid.Haack emphasizes the groundbreaking nature of the bill, in that it lists many of the Ethnic Resistance Organizations (ERO) by name, along with the NUG and PDFs. Yet advocacy for continued attention to the crisis in Myanmar remains challenging. The Burmese diaspora’s failure to effectively coordinate their efforts with local legislators has been an on-going issue. Haack suggests a two-pronged approach to advocacy work. One is cultivating relationships and building trust with influential people and groups. The other is kicking off a well-coordinated media campaign, ideally with a compelling figure at its center. However, Myanmar’s ethnic groups now have their own direct lines of communication to the West—which was until recently not the case—making what were once Bamar-centric conversations and policy in the US far more complicated. Not only are past histories being contested, so also are visions of what a federal democracy even means.In the end, though, Haack notes that “Congress runs on winning campaigns,” and so for him, the best thing about the Burma Act is that…it (finally) passed!

Episode #142: “What must a government do to be worthy of recognition?”  This is a question that Philipp Annawitt poses in a recent The Diplomat article, and discusses with Insight Myanmar Podcast vis-à-vis the NUG and its allies.The concept of “legitimacy” has evolved in the past couple of centuries century. Considering the various strands of “legitimacy” standards in present-day Myanmar, Annawitt emphatically states that the military junta meets none of them. In contrast, he points out that the NUG (and its allies) carries out many of the commonly accepted, functional duties of a government in those areas of the country not under Tatmadaw control, and has even overseen security for civilians and administered justice in safe areas inside the country.But not only have few nations recognized the NUG as Myanmar’s legitimate government, it has hardly shown even modicum of support, especially in the face of the junta’s obvious abuses and demonstrable inability to govern well. Annawitt calls this out as indefensible. The robust Burmese diaspora communities around the world have been more than doing their part to keep the NUG afloat. This connects to the unique and amazing spirit of collective sacrifice that characterizes the NUG, which includes tens of thousands of civil servants volunteering their time. Moreover, Annawaitt finds that this spirit of sacrifice becomes a political factor in determining future career opportunities, should the Tatmadaw be defeated.That said, Annawitt also feels that the lack of wages for NUG’s civil servants is a serious issue with major ramifications that urgently needs addressing. Sustainability and the ability to fund all areas of the government are serious concerns. Given this situation, Annawitt envisions a big and urgent role for development partners to come in with financial resources and technical assistance. In fact, if more is not done to build up the government structures of the NUG, Annawitt cautions that there is little hope at any improvement for the country or its people, as the military leadership cares little for infrastructure beyond fattening their own pockets.Still, the present situation is a long way from being a utopian federal democracy, and Annawitt acknowledges the NUG’s various shortcomings, including a lack consultation with ethnic allies and a convoluted decision-making process. But Annawitt repeatedly reminds us is that this is not a peacetime government or a mature federal system, but a functioning though transitory bureaucracy with limited resources, that at the same time is actively resisting a brutal military. “In the current situation, a pressure is there constantly,” he says. “Pressure for survival, security pressure, and communication is really difficult. And the demands, physically, health, psychologically, on all the actors, are overwhelming.”