Days after Myanmar’s military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in February 2021, an Australian economist working with her received an anonymous email telling him the police were watching his room and that he should flee.
Sean Turnell, an economics professor at Macquarie University, was detained soon after, as the military launched a sweeping and bloody crackdown on democracy protests and those who had worked with Suu Kyi’s government.
Accused of being a spy and convicted by a junta-run court in a case slammed by rights groups, Turnell served 650 days in prison in Myanmar before being pardoned and released last year.
In an interview with AFP marking the publication of his new book about the ordeal, he recounted feeling he might not make it out alive, being a co-defendant with Nobel laureate Suu Kyi and the most memorable birthday cake ever.
The warning email he received from “A Secret Friend” came too late and he was arrested at his hotel shortly afterwards — while giving an interview to the BBC.
Held first in a police station in Yangon, he could still hear the banging of pots and pans that marked the early protests against the coup, he wrote in “An Unlikely Prisoner.”
Of the weeks-long investigation into him by the police and military: “I can only use that overused label of Kafkaesque,” he told AFP in Sydney.
Once, he was presented with a document marked “confidential” and asked how it had come into his possession.
It was a document he had written as part of his work for the government, he explained.
“I said, ‘Look, I had it because it was mine. I wrote it’. And they said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t have had it’.
“And so at that moment, you know, I realised not for the first, not for the last time that I was way beyond the looking glass.”
Away from the interrogations, life in prison was hard and lonely, Turnell told AFP, adding he received “minimal” health attention.
During the steamy monsoon season, he described being “damp and hot and, all at the same time, your food goes mouldy, insects and rats and other rodents come.”
“The health risk factors were to the max,” he said. “I was worried about that. I thought I just might die there.”
Amid the darkness, there were lighter moments too.
On his 58th birthday, his fellow inmates did the impossible and made him a birthday cake in a makeshift oven.
They “somehow managed to get some flour and water and various other things, which you weren’t even sure what they were, some raisins and other things, and made this cake,” he said.
“It was the most wonderful cake imaginable.”
– On trial with Suu Kyi –
Turnell was later moved to a prison in the military-built capital Naypyidaw, where Suu Kyi was his co-defendant in his trial for allegedly breaching the country’s official secrets act.
Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her opposition to a previous junta, was detained on the morning of the coup and hit with a raft of other charges.
She has been largely hidden from view since the coup, appearing only in grainy state media photos, with Turnell one of the handful of people to interact with her.
“She was incredibly strong throughout” their trial, he said.
“She was, I think more concerned to keep the spirits up of the people, like me, charged alongside her, than she was about her own situation.”
The compound she was being kept in was “marginally” better than the cell of an average political prisoner, he said, but added he still worried about the health of the 78-year-old.
During the days they were together, they talked about literature, movies and what little they could glean about world affairs, he said.
They were each jailed for three years on official secrets charges and Turnell was preparing for another Christmas away from his family.
Then a pardon came “out of the blue,” and he was released alongside three other high-profile foreign prisoners — former British ambassador Vicky Bowman, Japanese journalist Toru Kubota and Myanmar-US citizen Kyaw Htay Oo.
Back in Australia, he spoke to the media about the conditions he was kept in and about the junta’s ongoing bloody crackdown.
He said he later learned this had “upset” the junta, which rescinded his pardon, making him technically a wanted man in Myanmar again, which was a “real shock.”
“I hasten to add it hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm nor sense of duty about speaking out on Myanmar,” he said.
