Guest contributor
Tun Naung
I was woken in the early morning of February 1, 2021, and told that a military coup had taken place. My mind froze, shocking to realize that something I had only read in textbooks was happening in my own life.
After grasping what had happened, a mixture of emotions rushed through my mind within a short span of time.
At that time, I was a fourth-year university student. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was staying in my hometown, waiting to return to campus.
During my university years, I was actively involved in the student union, serving as vice president in my third year and as a president in my final year.
Our union focused mainly on educational reform during the period of the National League for Democracy (NLD) government (2015-2021) while taking part in political activities when we believed they were necessary.
For example, our union opposed war crimes committed in Rakhine State and joined street protests in Yangon against the military’s actions in 2020.
In the days of university, I read extensively about Burmese political history, especially the struggle of student unions. Since the time of independence, student unionists were involved in the political struggle against those in power.
Due to that, their lives were marked with imprisonment, exile or armed struggle. Compared to them, my own time as a student activist felt relatively safe as it was a period under a semi-civilian NLD government.
When the military coup happened on February 1, 2021, the first thing I had to do was prepare my mind for what might come next. I felt that my choices were already defined by the history of student unions rather than by personal choice.
For student activists like me, there seemed to be only three possible paths: exile, prison, or the jungle. After preparing myself mentally, I left my home without informing my family and went to Yangon to join the pro-democracy movement.
Three weeks after arriving in Yangon, I was arrested on my way to a protest.
The experience at the military interrogation center was terrifying. When I was detained, my mind felt dizzy where I had no clear idea of what was happening.
After two days of beating, torture and verbal abuse, I first came to realize what was happening, what might happen, and what I could expect in these situations.
The endless hours of repeatedly recounting my personal history, the same questions asked by different military personnel left me exhausted. During one interrogation, an officer told me that if I answered, “I don’t know” to any of his questions, he would hit me on the head, one blow for each “no.”
Whenever I feel pain in my left ear today, I remember that officer who intentionally struck only that side during his interrogation.
There was also a man from military intelligence who had been stationed at my university to monitor student union activities. After my arrest, he came to the interrogation center, showing me photographs he had taken of our activities.
He spoke angrily about the things he disliked and took revenge by grabbing my head and hitting it against the wall. One example he mentioned was my involvement in taking students to the police station to protect them from cases of sexual harassment.
Because I was arrested in the early days of the coup when the resistance movement was still largely non-violent, the torture I experienced was relatively mild compared to what many comrades faced later.
Nevertheless, the two weeks I spent in the military interrogation center left a deep scar on my mind.
Before the 2021 coup, I assumed that the days when prison was an unavoidable stage in a political life were over. In the past, many well-known politicians had emerged from prison, but I thought our time was different.
Even though I had read books describing prison experiences, I never paid close attention to how people survived inside. I regretted this deeply as soon as I was sent to Insein Prison, I had no understanding of how the prison system worked or how one was supposed to live in such an environment.
Slowly, I began to understand how it operated. Prison is like a prototype in which the core of the military regime becomes clearly visible. The prison authorities possess many tools to dehumanize prisoners.
They do not speak the language of human rights or dignity. As they control every basic human need, they hold almost unchecked power to strip away freedom and dignity of prisoners.
Although the number of prison officers is small compared to the number of prisoners, they maintain effective control through division. They select certain prisoners and grant them special privileges, turning position into a reward or opportunity rather than a responsibility.
This system encourages prisoners to compete against one another. Normally, the authorities appoint criminal prisoners to manage others, and these prisoners become part of a surveillance network inside the prison.
They also use physical and psychological threats to maintain control. Through this structure, suspicion is sowed among prisoners where distrust becomes normalized and solidarity is weakened. In this way, “divide and rule” is the core strategy of prison governance.
At its core, the politics of prison is the struggle of political prisoners against prison authorities to defend their rights and dignity. Amid constant challenges, political networks are formed among prisoners, as resisting alone was extremely difficult.
Through these networks, we shared information, food, medicine, books, and ideas. At the same time, we cared and supported one another, and in doing so strengthened the network itself.
These networks also organized political activities inside prison. Most of these took the form of memorial events, such as for “Seven July” and the “8888 Uprising.”
In certain situations, the networks became the backbone for collective action, especially when prisoners’ rights were seriously violated or when the broader political climate outside made the mobilization possible.
There were times when we had to be deliberately patient, especially when conditions were not favorable for resistance, such as during my time in Tharyarwaddy Prison.
Participating in these kinds of political movements taught me valuable lessons. I came to understand that political calculation in prison was entirely different from my university years, when the environment was relatively safe.
In prison, the cost of a mistake could be a matter of life and death. For instance, after I was sentenced to three years, I refused to sit in front of a prison officer to protect my dignity.
Because of this, I was severely beaten by his subordinate. Although I still believe that my action was right, I had not anticipated such a brutal response.
I also had the opportunity to glimpse into criminal networks and to observe how the prison system fails to fulfill its core purpose. I do believe that to a certain extent, people are shaped by external conditions as their opportunity sets are limited and their choices defined by circumstance.
Many of the crimes committed by people I met in prison were deeply rooted in the harsh socioeconomic conditions of our country. Even when serious crimes have been committed, the role of prison in a society should be to offer a second chance, serving as a space for rehabilitation and personal transformation.
However, what the current prison system is doing is just the opposite.
Instead of being a place for reflection or human development, it operates as a dehumanizing mechanism. Prison authorities are only concerned with maintaining control, at the same time only focusing on protecting their own interests.
Because I had previously been involved mainly in student union circles, prison became a new kind of political space for me. It allowed me to experience different forms of networking and mobilization under extreme conditions.
Most importantly, it allowed me to meet people who shared similar beliefs, values, and visions from very different corners. I encountered individuals from across the political spectrum, including labor leaders, student activists, artists, senior politicians and so on.
Through daily conversations and long discussions, my understanding of Burmese politics began to shift. As many unresolved questions surfaced in those discussions, I came to realize that important issues were missing from our political thinking.
Surprisingly, economic topics and its perspectives were almost completely absent from our political discussions. I felt that our political framework was too narrow, focusing mainly on identity politics and anti-junta sentiment.
I came to believe that urgent issues needed to be brought into our political lens. This realization shaped my decision to study economics after I was released from prison.
From the first day, I drew strength from the words of former political prisoner Kyi Maung, who once said in an interview, “Prison can’t make a person weak.”
Although prisons are designed to break the spirit of prisoners and strip away what makes us human, prison only strengthened my commitment rather than weakening my values and beliefs.
At the same time, all those experiences changed my understanding of politics. After everything I had lived through, I knew that I would never be the same again.
Tun Naung is a former political prisoner and was imprisoned for two years in Insein and Tharyarwaddy Prisons.
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