Five months after being arrested at his first protest against the Feb. 1, 2021 coup, Thaik Tun Oo led another inside Mandalay Central Prison, also called Obo Prison due to its proximity to the rail station of the same name in Myanmar’s second-largest city.
During his first protest, on March 13, 2021 in Mandalay, Thaik Tun Oo was hit by nine rubber bullets before soldiers dragged him from the crowd. After the second, on August 8 to commemorate the anniversary of the 88 Uprising, he was summoned out of a holding cell and tortured in front of other inmates for two hours.
When the beating – with wooden sticks, rubber batons and electric cords – paused, a hood was placed over his head.
“Kill him,” he heard a senior guard tell his subordinates. It was the same voice that, minutes before, had informed him that his life was only worth the cost of the sheet of the A4 paper that would be used to notify his parents of his death.
“Don’t talk about democracy and human rights,” the same voice had warned. “This is not Mother’s time,” the guard barked, referring to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi whose government had been ousted after winning the national election in November 2020 by a landslide. “This is Min Aung Hlaing’s time,” he said, referring to the general who led the coup.
“I wasn’t sure what was worse. More torture or death,” Thaik Tun Oo says.
He was 20 years old, a second-year physics student at Mandalay University.
Zu Zu May Yoon sold diet pills and beauty products before she was arrested at a protest against the coup on April 22, 2021 near Sule Pagoda in central Yangon. She spent two years and 27 days behind bars, much of the time in pretrial detention.
The first stop for protesters – military-run interrogation centers – is the most dangerous for women, she says. She witnessed a female prisoner being raped in Yangon’s Shwe Pyi Thar interrogation center.
Interrogation is a euphemism for torture, she and other female political prisoners say. Questions are punctuated by fists that leave bruises and cuts on their faces, swollen lips, black eyes, and blood – dried at the sides of the mouth and on nostrils, and seeping from gums, lips, ears and eyes.
Targeting the face is their introduction to torture, former female political prisoners say.
Zu Zu May Yoon had two children, one just nine months old, and a husband when she was detained. The husband had always avoided politics and, as a result, wanted nothing more to do with her after she began protesting. He divorced her when she was incarcerated in Insein Prison and sent their children to live with his mother, she explains in the near barren room she shares with another former political prisoner in Mae Sot, Thailand where she fled earlier this year to avoid being jailed again.
She was 29 years old when she was arrested. Her two years and 27 days in detention strengthened her defiance. “When I was in prison all I wanted was to get out so I could continue protesting.”
The military cannot be allowed to destroy another generation, she explains.
Ba Nyar, 25, who does not want his real name used because it could endanger his family in Myanmar, says, “Everyone who was arrested was tortured.”
“First they handcuffed me. Two police officers took turns booting me. One in the chest and the other in the face. I couldn’t use my hands to protect my face,” he explains. “And then they sent me to hell,” he continues, referring to the torture that happened at night.
He was the first son in his family to go to university. It took his parents 18 years to save enough money so that he could study mechanical engineering. He was in his fourth year at Hmawbi Technological University in Yangon Region when the military ousted the civilian government on Feb. 1, 2021.
Ba Nyar came of age during Myanmar’s “decade of hope.” The National League for Democracy, which also won the 2015 election, was attempting to sideline a military that had kept Myanmar in a chokehold for decades.
After the coup, he joined other students in protests in Yangon, but when the military responded with bullets he moved to Rakhine State and enlisted in the Arakan Army to learn how to fight back.
When he returned, he was arrested at a roadblock in Bago Region on August 9, 2021. The police stole his motorcycle and detained him.
He spent two months being interrogated in Bago Region’s Min Hla Police Station before being sent to Thayawady Prison where, for one year and seven months, he was kept in a cell so crowded that he could only lay down on his side.
He was not permitted to contact anyone. His mother thought he had been killed, until another detainee got a message from Ba Nyar to her.
After his release, on May 3, 2023 he wanted to continue protesting but worried about the consequences for his elderly and frail parents, and his younger brother. After the junta introduced mandatory conscription earlier this year he started planning to escape Myanmar for Thailand to avoid being forced to serve a military that had tortured him.
He arrived in Mae Sot, Thailand in early April. Now, he works at a restaurant in the Thai border town seven days a week. He doesn’t even get a single day off a month. His salary is 4,500 baht (less than US$ 130) a month.
The dream of his youth – to become an engineer on a ship – is gone. Instead, he’s struggling to scrape by in a town where he has to pay a monthly bribe to avoid being rounded up by immigration police.
He panics when he sees police officers. He’s hypervigilant. Some nights he can’t sleep. His eyes burn from fatigue as he waits for the first rays of dawn and the possibility of an hour’s sleep.
Even his future is curbed: Working at sea is no longer a dream job. “I was alone and isolated in prison. I don’t want to be alone again on a ship,” he explains.
‘Off the map’
Since the coup, the scale of the arrests and jailing of political prisoners is, as a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch put it, “off the map.”
“There really has been nowhere else in the Asia region where we’ve seen such a massive surge in the number of political prisoners as post-coup Myanmar,” he said.
Kyaw Soe Win, a member of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which monitors arrests, says more political prisoners have been arrested in the three-and-a-half years since the coup than in the four decades that preceded it.
Before the coup, the association had about 3,500 verified political prisoners in its database. As of August 12 it had added 27,184 more.
“To find something comparable, you need to look back to the re-education camps in south Vietnam post-1975, the sweeps of intellectuals and others during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or the round-ups after Suharto took power in Indonesia in 1965,” the Human Rights Watch spokesman explains.
“The military junta’s repression is really off the charts.”
Thaik Tun Oo points out that the number from the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners does not include people detained at police stations, military bases, work camps and interrogation stations.
Kyaw Soe Win explains that the association only includes names of political prisoners it can verify, and that the verification process is rigorous.
A former student activist, he says that the frequency of deaths from torture has also surged since the coup. He was jailed for political activism in 1998 and spent 10 years in prison. He was just one year short of earning a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry before he was arrested.
“We were tortured by [officers from] Military Intelligence. They had training,” he explains.
Now, torture and beatings are carried out by guards, wardens and, at interrogation centers, soldiers. “They have no skills. They don’t know when to stop. So, more prisoners die from beatings,” he says. “The further the prison is from Yangon, the more likely the prisoner will die.”
The spokesman from Human Rights Watch explains: “Before people who are arrested even get to jail to await trial, they are being sent to army-run interrogation centers where there are no rules or regulations. … These are interrogation centers where those being held are subjected to horrific torture methods, sexual abuse and rape, and beatings to death in far too many cases. … By every measure [abuse in Myanmar’s prisons] is much worse than under previous military regimes.”
Thaik Tun Oo is convinced this is likely a deliberate strategy, along with the junta’s decision to deny political prisoners medicine. It’s a way to reduce their number, he says, explaining: “Prisons are the hidden frontline in the revolution.”
Since the coup, the junta has expanded prisons to handle the surge in political prisoners. This may, however, backfire. A compelling and growing body of research (including some conducted within Myanmar) suggests that prisons – despite their minutely-documented ability to destroy souls – can also be incubators for revolution and radical empathy.
Thaik Tun Oo is doing all he can to make what is hidden behind bars visible. After his release, he traveled from Mandalay to an area of Karen State liberated by an ethnic army.
There, with a group of other young people released from prison, he set up the Political Prisoners Network-Myanmar. He’s their communications point person. He’s in near daily contact with almost every news outlet in Myanmar and many beyond. If you’ve read a report about political prisoners in Myanmar, there’s a good chance it came from him.
He’s also switched his major from Physics to Political Science, which he is now studying online. He wants to get into politics after the revolution succeeds.
Zu Zu May Yoon has become a revolutionary singer and songwriter. Last month, she released a video for “Hands Behind Bars.” She chose an anime style to ensure the lyrics, describing the savagery inside Myanmar’s prisons, penetrate the consciousness of youths.
Ba Nyar is nervously waiting for a Thai ID card to work in the country legally.
He wants to work at a humanitarian organization. “I want to help people,” he explains.
He’ll work as an unpaid volunteer.
And Kyaw Soe Win? He hasn’t ruled out going back to university to finally complete the Chemistry degree snatched away from him 25 years ago.
