Insight Myanmar
“Most people expect some white woman when they meet Debbie Stothard. It’s a very Anglo, white bread name.”
So begins Debbie’s self-introduction to the Insight Myanmar podcast that relates the story of her Scottish great-grandfather who went to Malaya to work on, and eventually own, a portion of the huge rubber company Guthrie’s vast plantations. “I’m a product of colonial capitalism!” Debbie exclaims. He settled down in Penang with a woman who was most likely Thai, but when he got older, returned to Scotland. So Debbie, a Malaysian citizen, is clearly not just the “Anglo, white bread” person her name might imply.
Debbie’s journey as a catalyst for change began to take shape during her high school years, ignited by her first foray into journalism, when she wrote a compelling article addressing a pressing issue within her school community. The principal pulled her aside and scolded her, saying, “‘That’s not the way to solve things!’ But it did solve things,” she recalls, “so I was convinced that I wanted to be a journalist.” In college, she became a stringer for a local paper, then got a full-time job as a crime reporter—the only female on the beat. “I was drunk with power and access,” she acknowledges. “Look, I’m a Malaysian school girl, living in a very sheltered-type situation, and then you unleashed me into a world where you’re chasing the police with stories, where politicians entertain you and show some respect because you’re media.”
Against her parents’ wishes, Debbie refused to return to university, and continued to spend time with colleagues she characterizes as “alcoholic, very jaded, old men,” chasing stories that put her closer to the reins of power. Increasingly drawn into that world, she became less interested in peers her own age; this concerned her parents, who decided to offer to support her to study in Australia, and after a couple of years, she realized she “didn’t have a life.” So she attended Sydney’s University of Technology, where she joined what was then known as a “Third World Solidarity” movement, which engaged in anti-racism advocacy with other Southeast Asian students. Expanding their influence to other campuses, they were energized by the events of the day, which included the People’s Power movement in the Philippines, Suharto’s overthrow in Indonesia, Tiananmen Square in China, the 1993 Thai coup, as well as ongoing oppression in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. “Governments were colluding with each other to violate human rights, and to surveil and persecute human rights activists, at the very least, they were protecting each other from international pressure for human rights violations,” she says.
But nothing captured the group’s imagination like the 1988 democracy movement in the Golden Land. “These were students rising up against a military dictatorship in a country, Burma, which was really mysterious but also fascinating to me,” she recalls. They tried contacting student groups in Burma, but had no luck, then tried to find Burmese students attending Australian universities, but couldn’t locate a single Burmese student anywhere in the country. Debbie was also growing increasingly worried when the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir, pushed for Burma’s inclusion in ASEAN, as she feared it would normalize the latter’s ongoing human rights violations. This is when an idea came to her that would
focus the direction of her future action: “Hey, why don’t we have an alternative ASEAN meeting on Burma?” she proposed to a friend, “because we don’t agree with the anti-human rights positions of our governments.”
CATCH THE PODCAST
Listen to the rest of Debbie’s story on the Insight Myanmar podcast here: https://player.captivate.fm/episode/07792134-a3e0-4987-8060-c73fafe1e51a
