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From sharing a concrete cell with rats and “horrible black tarantulas” to being chained to a steel chair in a windowless box, Sean Turnell said his more than 20-months as a prisoner in Myanmar was horrific.
The prison cells ranged from the rudimentary to terrible. At first he was held in a box the size of a small shipping container, where he was interrogated and punched.
Later he was moved to a sparse cell with an iron barred door which led straight to the elements, allowing Myanmar’s “incredible heat” and monsoonal rain directly into the cell.
“Apart from weather, they’re completely open to other elements so rats and spiders, and centipedes, and awful black tarantulas and scorpions, it’s really awful stuff,” he said.
“The cells are not conducive to any sort of comfort at all, they’re really little more than animal pens.”
Watch: Cancelled: The rise and fall of Aung San Suu Kyi Documentary on Independent TV
The Australian economist and former economic advisor to Myanmar’s ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi said he used his imagination to escape his confines, and took comfort in the small bit of exercise he could get pacing his small cell.
“But all of it does take a toll. The physical deprivation, the constant anxiety, the fear, the incredible insecurity of not knowing when or if you’re going to be released definitely takes a toll on you,” he said in an interview with The Independent.
“The time in prison gave me time to reassess just about everything I was doing.”
Mr Turnell was arrested on February 6, 2021, five days after the military launched a coup against Suu Kyi and her civilian government. He had spent the previous five years working with the civilian Myanmar government on its economic policies.
At first he said the work was hopeful.
“We were creating a new country, and the enthusiasm would just bubble up,” he said.
“A huge amount of stuff was achieved, much of it unfortunately unwound since by the military.”
Mr Turnell said the military was unwilling to cede power, seeking to undermine the civilian government at every turn.
He said the military helped orchestrate Suu Kyi’s fall from international grace, which began in 2017 when the Nobel Peace laureate failed to publicly condemn the violence against the country’s Rohingya muslim minority.
That fall from grace is now the subject of a documentary on Independent TV called Cancelled: The rise and fall of Aung San Suu Kyi , charting her life including her political emergence in the 1980s and her tumultuous time as Myanmar’s leader from 2015 to 2021.
Mr Turnell said Suu Kyi’s biggest mistake was travelling to the Hauge to defend Myanmar against accusations of genocide. He said all she could do was negotiate with the military, but they had a “rat cunning” that made her job almost impossible.
“I know absolutely for certain that she was horrified beyond measure of what was happening, and sought desperately ways to try to bring it to an end,” he said.
“So for me her failure was not so much a moral one, but a political miscalculation.”
After the coup and his arrest alongside other civilian government leaders, Mr Turnell said he knew he would be found guilty the moment he was put on trial. Sentenced to three years’ jail for violating the official secrets act, Mr Turnell said what did come as a surprise was when a prison guard in November 2022 told him he was heading home.
“I said ‘please don’t joke about this’, he said ‘no, not joking you’re going home, you’ve got 10 minutes to grab your things and leave your cell’,” Mr Turnell said.
Mr Turnell was flown back to Sydney, where he satisfied cravings he’d had for two years: “that evening, I had a glass of red wine and an ice cream”.
He has since written a book about his ordeal and said his the readjustment was relatively easy, he counts himself lucky to have a wife and a daughter, and supportive friends.
But more than two years on from his ordeal, Mr Turnell remains fears for the safety of his former colleagues, including now 79-year-old Suu Kyi.
“All the way to the present I maintain, I would say, terrible anxiety about my former colleagues still, for the most part, in prison in Myanmar,” he said.
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