Sean Turnell holds up a small elephant made of used, prison coffee sachets and proudly describes it as his “most prized possession”.
“It sits right up on the mantel piece with our wedding photo, my other prized possession,” he said.
The beautifully intricate hand-woven elephant is the only thing the Sydney economist grabbed as he was dramatically released from a Myanmar jail one year ago after 650 days of arbitrary detention.
“I choked up when I was given [the elephant] which had been made by a fellow political prisoner and it was the one thing that I tried to keep safe and undamaged.
“I protected it as I moved from prison to prison, so I brought it all the way home.”
It is a souvenir of sorts from an experience Professor Turnell, 59, will never forget.
“I constantly dream that I’m still in the prison.
“[In the dream] I’ve been given a document that allows for my release, and I go up to the prison guards and I present this document and they say, ‘no, no, no, wrong date, wrong stamp, wrong signature’, and I get taken back to the cells.
“And I sometimes get flashbacks, you know, there’ll be some little event happen to me, or I’ll just be walking around and then I’ll be instantly back in the prison.”
He had been working as an economic adviser to the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi when the military seized power in a coup in February 2021, arresting Ms Suu Kyi, several ministers and Professor Turnell.
At first, he thought it was all a terrible mistake, but things became very real when he was thrown in jail and later charged with violating Myanmar’s colonial-era official state secrets act.
He was convicted in a junta-run court after a trial widely viewed as a sham and sentenced to three years behind bars including hard labour.
Cells like ‘animal cages’
For an academic who had never so much as had a traffic fine, every development shattered him.
“I thought I would get kid glove treatment and it would be some sort of house arrest or something like that, but I was in the general prison population and the prisons in Myanmar are awful, indescribably awful,” he says.
He says he was forced to eat out of a bucket which all prisoners ate from, was hit and kicked, caught COVID-19 five times, and was forced to wear leg irons and handcuffs to court.
Some of his prison cells were like “animal cages” open to Myanmar’s unforgiving elements — oppressive heat, relentless monsoonal rain, and mosquitoes.
Professor Turnell says while there were many dark days where he shouted profanities he never knew he was capable of saying, he managed to keep going with the help of his fellow political prisoners and his family, friends and advocates on the outside.
“My fellow prisoners were incredible,” he recalls.
“Even though all of them were in a much worse position to me – they were actively tortured with electrodes attached to them, they were beaten, [denied] access to food – they went out of their way to help me and really saved my life.”
‘Live to get through for them’
On the outside, Professor Turnell’s wife, Ha Vu sent care packages including vacuum-packed fruit cake and books via the Australian embassy in Myanmar, while fiercely lobbying politicians for her husband’s release.
The books in particular he reflects, “saved my life”.
“My wife and my daughter were just doing incredible things in the background — my family, my friends, the Australian government, the US government, the UK government, the Vietnam government — everyone were just doing all these things,” he said.
“I was aware of that and that gave me incredible impetus to keep on going and to live to get through for them as well as for myself.”
During much of Professor Turnell’s incarceration human rights groups criticised the-then Morrison government and its Foreign Minister Marise Payne for not pushing the junta hard enough for the economist’s release.
Ms Payne said they were using every available opportunity to advocate for him.
“I think in the early period, there were a few missteps along the way,” Professor Turnell says now.
“But it’s one of those things where the regime in Myanmar is so bad and so indifferent to international opinion, [that] I’m not quite sure whether it would have made much difference.”
Federal election brings change
He says he noticed things “stepped up” after May 2022 when the Albanese government was elected and Penny Wong became foreign minister.
Ms Wong had called for the government to sanction Myanmar’s military leaders while in opposition, but did not follow through until after Professor Turnell was released.
“That always worried me the whole time I was in the prison, I was thinking ‘I hope a lack of stronger action is not because of me’,” he said.
“But having said that, you can’t help as the person concerned, to have mixed feelings about it because at the same time you don’t want the punishment to come to you because of your government.
“On balance, I would favour a stronger position from Australia, but certainly there were moral dilemmas all over the place.”
He believes it was right for Australia to impose the economic sanctions that it eventually did, but he would like to see our government and others “squeeze Myanmar’s military a little bit more” by restricting its access to foreign exchange and jet fuel.
He also wants the dire situation in the South-East Asian nation to receive as much attention as the war in Ukraine.
“One of the tragedies of Myanmar is that concern for the country has just slipped ever further down the agenda.
“It’s in Australia’s area, our sphere of influence, and the suffering there is great.”
‘Brad Pitt to play me’
ABC News: Keana Naughton
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A year ago, Myanmar’s military leaders surprised everyone by announcing Professor Turnell would be released early and deported as part of an amnesty for almost 6,000 prisoners to mark Myanmar National Day.
Ms Suu Kyi herself told him to tell his story and Myanmar’s story “warts and all”. His book will be released this week.
“Roughly a third of the book was in my head, memorised, the product of all that pacing up and down the cell, so my feeling upon getting home was just to quickly get it down on paper and there was a sense of relief to do that,” he said.
He’s also keen for that story to one day become a film – an idea that began in jail when he was asking his fellow inmates which movie stars they would like to play them.
“I declared that I wanted Brad Pitt to play me, but I have this terrible feeling all the way to the present that they’re going to ask Danny DeVito,” he says with a laugh
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