Mizzima
With Australian economist Sean Turnell releasing his book on his incarceration in Myanmar’s Insein Prison, it reminds us of another former inmate who spent time in this prison and also put pen to paper.
From childhood, Ma Thida dreamed of helping others―caring for the sick, sharing information despite censorship, and standing up for people’s rights. To stand against the oppression that had been stifling Myanmar’s progress for decades, she joined Aung San Suu Kyi and the many other activists in the National League for Democracy, campaigning steadfastly despite intimidation, harassment, and worse. Because of her efforts, the regime sent her to Insein Prison, where she faced serious illness and bleak conditions.
However, it was in fighting the obstacles of her imprisonment and following the Buddha’s teachings that Ma Thida found what it means to be truly free. In her memoir, Prisoner of Conscience, readers join Ma Thida on her path through captivity and witness one remarkable woman’s courageous quest for truth and dignity.
Ma Thida talks of her struggles in this Insight Myanmar podcast: https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2022/5/2/episode-102-a-voice-of-conscience
Ma Thida has lived through previous cycles of revolution and repression in Myanmar similar to the one we are all witnessing now.
A self-professed bookworm who grew up listening to the BBC, she developed a keen interest in the stories of resistance fighters and philanthropists, and while attending medical school tried her own hand in writing fiction as well. Then in 1988, the military violently suppressed peaceful protesters at the nearby Rangoon Institute of Technology. “All the medical students were shocked to see how a government can kill students easily,” she recalls, noting that some soldiers even fired random shots at patients in Rangoon Hospital. So she joined a group of students and attended a subsequent demonstration, and also began to help make sure the news of what was really happening got out.
As the protests heated up, networks among the democracy activists grew tighter, and Ma Thida soon found herself volunteering at local NLD offices that had formed in the wake of the unrest. They had so few resources they couldn’t even furnish the office, and the work was unending and unpaid. At the same time, Ma Thida realized the historical significance of what was transpiring in the country, and began to take detailed journal entries, recording the daily events, speeches, meetings, and work. She also kept abreast of the dramatic changes happening internationally with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and she hoped that the Burmese people would also be able to rejoice in the same kind of freedom before too long.
But it was not to be. Fellow democracy activists were infuriated when the results of the 1990 elections weren’t honored by the military, and in 1993 Ma Thida began to lobby against the National Convention, an event hosted by the military ostensibly to draft a new Constitution, but was really just a façade to further delay any real democracy. Ma Thida was arrested for merely reading and then passing along a document prepared by the National Coalition Government, an exile group based in Maryland that was formed by a group of Burmese leaders. She was given 20 years for this “offense,” the severity of which Ma Thida believes belies the military’s real concern, that somehow she would be able to convince ethnic leaders to turn against the convention.
Adjustment to prison life was not easy. She found the prison culture and both jailers and prisoners “rough” and “hard.” However, she came to understand and even befriend them over time, and developed her closest relationship with a fellow prisoner, an activist who was accused of beheading a hired thug who had poisoned the water at a Children’s Hospital.
She first found relief from her situation in the form of smuggled books, which she could only read secretly under a blanket. “So the whole night I was just sitting in a squatting position and reading,” she recalls. “It gave me so much strength, because my hunger is not just for having food to survive, but also for intellectual understanding. Without that I don’t think I can survive. That’s why the books are really like a tonic to me.”
