The Box

Sean Turnell is an Australian economist who was detained by Myanmar’s military regime from February 2021 until November 2022. An Unlikely Prisoner, his account of the ordeal, has quite a personal tone as he relates his struggle with unjust imprisonment by a regime whose hallmark was ‘a mix of the needlessly brutal, the petty, and the incompetent’. This personal story is also mixed with politics, for Turnell has an insider’s view of Myanmar’s ongoing struggle for freedom, one of the great dramas of modern Asian history.

In the 2000s, Turnell’s expertise on Myanmar’s economy drew the attention of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi – ‘Daw Suu’, as he respectfully calls her – the leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the main opposition to the military regime. For two decades, Daw Suu had been under either house arrest or some other type of restraint, until in 2011 the military tried to change its spots by introducing a new, quasi-democratic constitution. In national elections in 2015, the NLD won an overwhelming victory, forming a government led by Daw Suu, and Turnell joined her team as an adviser. While it kept an iron grip on security matters, the military had to sit back and watch as the NLD steered the country towards greater democracy and a more open economy. In the 2020 national elections, the NLD once more swept the board. This time, refusing to accept this fresh mandate, the military mounted a coup, imprisoning Daw Suu and members of her government, Turnell, and at least ten thousand of her civilian supporters.