Sean Turnell: the quiet economics professor held in Myanmar ‘animal pen’ prison for 650 days

After five years as Aung San Suu Kyi’s economic adviser, Sean Turnell was jailed for almost two years following the 2021 Myanmar coup, and sent to some of the country’s most notorious prisons. In a new memoir, he reflects on the poems of loss and longing penned by past occupants of his cell. Maroosha Muzaffar reports

Sean Turnell in a television interview in Sydney earlier this month (AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images)

“You do not know me, but a friend of mine who works at your hotel has just told me that since 4am this morning intelligence and police have taken over the hotel’s security cameras ... You need to leave as soon as you can.”

That was the message received in early February 2021 by Australian economist Sean Turnell, who was working at the time as one of Aung San Suu Kyi’s most senior advisers in Myanmar.

Five days earlier Suu Kyi and other senior figures in her democratically elected government had been detained by the military in a coup that has now installed a junta regime. Soon after that email from “a secret friend”, Turnell was himself arrested, and the mild-mannered academic went on to spend more than 600 days in some of Myanmar’s most notorious prisons.

Turnell has now documented his ordeal in a memoir entitled An Unlikely Prisoner: How an eternal optimist found hope in Myanmar’s most notorious jail, released earlier this month in Australia. It details how he was employed from 2016 to 2021 as a “special economic consultant” to Suu Kyi’s government.

The anonymous email he received shortly before his arrest appears to have come from someone who appreciated his work, and who dreaded the direction the country was heading in. “Thank you for what you have done for our country,” it concluded. “Please pray for us.”

The military junta claimed that Turnell – an economist with Sydney’s Macquarie University – had violated visa regulations and was convicted of breaching Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act. He was sentenced to three years in prison. But his detention was widely seen as politically motivated.

On the day of the coup itself Turnell had shared a post on his Facebook page that read: “Myanmar will shine again, but for now I am heartbroken.”

His contacts in the US, UK, and Australian embassies urged him to leave Myanmar, he recalls. A day after the coup he posted on Facebook again and thanked his friends for their concerns. He wrote that in Myanmar he had found the “bravest, kindest people I know” who “deserve so much better”.

He remembers making a call to his wife, Ha Vu, a  fellow economist in Sydney, and telling her: “Don’t worry. Chances are, the police are simply trying to give me a fright and hurry me on my way.”

He was arrested from his hotel lobby where he had been quarantined because of the surge in Covid cases. He subsequently spent 650 days behind bars before his dramatic release last year. Turnell was one of nearly 6,000 political prisoners released by the junta as part of an amnesty marking Myanmar’s national day.

Sixteen days into his arrest, Turnell’s wife wrote an open letter to Daw Kyu Kyu Hla – the wife of junta leader Min Aung Hlaing – pleading with her “from one wife to another wife” to speak with her husband and let him “return home to my family in Australia”. This letter went viral on social media. But it was in vain.

His wife then went on to tirelessly campaign for his release.

Before the coup, he says he had been “reading and watching with growing alarm the efforts of the Myanmar military to undermine the legitimacy of the November 2020 elections”.

Once he was thrown into the notorious Insein prison, it was “as mad and bad as its name sounds”.

He writes: “And now I was arriving at this dreadful place. Me. A 57-year-old professor of economics from Sydney, Australia, who had never even received a traffic ticket. A person who had spent just about his whole life in the halls of the academy. A person whose idea of uncomfortable confrontation was telling a student their essay was not really that good. A person utterly, terribly, out of his depth.”

He was handcuffed, his “stuff” was “packed in some pitiful plastic bags and my small carry-on case was set down beside me”. He remembers: “I knew that in a minute or two I would be forced to enter this ghastly place and it would be one of those moments in life that you can never erase. I was sweating profusely. It was hot. Very hot. Sticky, humid.”

Inside the cell, the only other source of natural light, aside from the light through the barred doors, came from a small window high up on the rear wall, he writes. “This too was a simple affair of iron bars, without glass. Not only were the cells dim, damp and uninviting caves, they were also of decidedly modest dimensions: about 2 by 3 metres (8 by 10 feet), I estimated.”

Turnell’s new physical surroundings were terrible and he worried he would “spiral into a psychological pit”. On his first night in the prison, the economist recalls “a tide of cognitive dissonance”. He says “anger rose in my mind; its ebb and flow would be a permanent fixture”.

“No matter how many positive or meaningful interactions I had with fellow prisoners, nothing would change a basic legal fact: I should not have been there in the first place,” he writes. Last year, after his release from prison, the impact director for Amnesty International Australia, Tim O’Connor, said that Turnell should never have been arrested and was denied a fair trial.

In his memoir, Turnell describes the judicial system in Myanmar under the junta as “Kafkaesque”.

He describes the prison cell he was in as “an animal pen” but also recounts being moved by the poems of loss and longing penned by past occupants on the cell walls.

“Discernible beneath layers of white paint inside the cell was the graffiti of past occupants. Much of it I could not decipher, but among it were poems of loss and longing, declarations of innocence, words of religious and philosophical wisdom, and occasional scatological references,” he writes.

When after 650 excruciating days in prison Turnell was finally informed he was free, he could not believe it. “The moment I’d ached for had arrived but I couldn’t comprehend it. Time seemed to stop. Then I felt rising excitement. Joy? Apprehension. Yes, this in lock step.”

He asked the guard, “with a tremor in my voice”, “Please, please tell me you are not joking’.”

Turnell writes in his memoir that he joked about Brad Pitt playing him in a movie. He writes: “I told them [other inmates] I wanted Brad Pitt for me. Apart from the uncanny resemblance, we’re about the same age. But, friends, I worry Hollywood might cast Danny DeVito instead.”

Last year, after his release, Turnell spoke with the Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese on the phone. He told the PM that the Australian embassy in Myanmar would regularly deliver food to Insein prison in tote bags that were emblazoned with the Australian crest.

“He said that normally his food would be served in a bucket but he would get this food and … he would put the tote bags where the bars were on the cell in which he was being detained so that both he could see – and the guards who were detaining him could see – the Australian crest, so that he could keep that optimism,” Albanese said last year. “The Australian crest, of course, with the kangaroo and emu that don’t go backwards.”

A senior fellow at the Lowy Institute, Turnell said in a press release: “I wrote the book to shine a light on the greater suffering of the people of Myanmar under a bestial and genocidal regime. The story of Myanmar has been largely ignored by the world, even as (rightly) support is given to those suffering and resisting evil elsewhere in the world, not least in Ukraine.

“My story of the power of individuals against despotic regimes and an indifferent machine of international relations is one that needs emphasising. People, small people, can still make a difference. Being the squeaky wheel, that annoying person on the phone every morning, hassling the great and powerful, can be worthwhile.”

After his release, Turnell was asked by a Myanmar military official if he hated Myanmar now. “I never hate Myanmar,” the economist replied.

“I love the people of Myanmar and it’s always like that.”