Sean Turnell on his 650 days in a Myanmar jail

Sean Turnell endured 21 months banged up in a sweltering Myanmar prison. His book about the experience is also a love story.

Sean Turnell and his wife, Ha Vu, who sustained him during 650 days in prison

“History will be kind to us, not least because I ­intend to write it.”

The Australian economist Sean Turnell made that promise to fellow political prisoners after being detained at the hands of Myanmar’s ruthless military junta, who arrested him at a Yangon hotel, and for 21 months kept him banged up in a series of sweltering hellholes.

The 59-year-old was freed last November, and he has wasted no time fulfilling his promise.

His insider’s account of an ongoing human rights catastrophe in Myanmar makes intense reading, not just for the injustices he endured alongside millions of Myanmar citizens, but for the anger that leaps off the page.

An Unlikely Prisoner tells the story of Sean Turnell’s imprisonment in a Myanmar hellhole, where many champions of democracy are still detained.

This is a book written in fresh rage, for his own suffering and that of so many others in a country to which he has devoted much of his career.

Turnell was a special economic adviser to Myanmar’s then-civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi when the military overthrew her government on February 1, 2021, winding back 10 years of democratic reforms.

The coup came two months after an election that delivered the Nobel Laureate’s administration a second, resounding ­victory.

Rumours of a military plot had circulated in the country for months, though when it finally happened Turnell, like so many others, was shocked.

He had been finalising a plan to help the impoverished country bounce back from its pandemic-induced downturn when he was arrested at Yangon’s luxury Chatrium Hotel.

Staff lined the driveway to wave off the well-respected academic as he was taken away.

Some raised their hands in the three-fingered salute made ­famous by the Hunger Games film franchise but since adopted by democracy movements throughout Asia.

Turnell with his Vietnam-born economist wife Ha Vu, and the prime minister Anthony Albanese after his release

Within weeks such gestures would be greeted with teargas and bullets as the junta unleashed its violent intolerance on an incredulous population.

Having played a role in Myanmar’s democracy project, ­Turnell would also be there for its dismantling, even if at times he could only guess what was happening from a succession of jail cells.

A military that had historically used mass rape, arson and torture to suppress minority populations in Myanmar was now turning its savagery on the majority ethnic Burmese population.

And foreigners would not be immune.

“You foreigners, you think you can do what you like,” one police officer spat at Turnell during an early interrogation to ­extract his phone and computer passwords.

“But you are here. There is no one to help you. If you don’t give up the password now you will never see your wife and family again.”

Many will have heard snatches at least of the extraordinary interview Turnell gave live to the BBC as he was being arrested in Yangon, four days after the coup.

But his account of what happened afterwards, as he was isolated, struggling to understand what was happening to him, and at the mercy of a bloodless security force for whom he would serve as a useful pawn in a larger game, roils the stomach.

This is a frightening and illuminating insight into life as a political prisoner.

Turnell with very welcome supplies from the Australian embassy

Turnell’s forensic capacity for detail often skews towards the arcane filth and petty cruelties; his first cell in Tamwe police station was a “space of such filth and decrepitude that I am reluctant to sully the pages of this book with too detailed a description of it”.

His insights into the cause of the disastrous coup are also instructive. Suu Kyi lost much of her ­global support for defending the military’s genocidal 2017 “clearance operations” against minority Rohingya Muslims. Turnell describes the giddy early days of her government when Yangon airport was a revolving door for chief executives and diplomats and there was a “broad feeling in the air that we were part of something good, something special”.

He is clear-eyed about the self-inflicted damage those atrocities, and the “missteps in responding to them”, did to Myanmar’s ambitious reform project.

Suu Kyi’s moral failure made it easier for the military to move against her.

Turnell getting a Covid injection

This book is ultimately a love story, however, to the many good people festering in Myanmar jails and torture cells, ousted leader included.

If its title – An Unlikely Prisoner: How an eternal optimist found hope in Myanmar’s most notorious jail – sounds like black satire it’s because Turnell often felt like a character trapped inside one.

His Vietnam-born economist wife Ha Vu is one of the heroes of this story, lobbying constantly for more privileges for her ­husband while pushing a sclerotic Canberra to work harder at ­securing his release.

The couple’s coded language in intermittent phone calls, the controversial books slipped past dull-witted censors (Orwell’s 1984 was a memorable win), the boozy fruit cakes sent through diplomatic bags, are all triumphs of outsized significance to a man who has lost control of his fate.

Books are another. Turnell took tips from Robert Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts on how to survive a kidnapping, from Australian professor Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s Uncaged Sky on ways to defy his captors, as she did as a prisoner of the Iranian Islamic regime.

When not penning “terrible” love poetry to his wife, black ­humour was their romantic currency.

There are more surprising revelations; King Charles was a steadfast supporter, as was US Republican senator Mitch McConnell. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd also agreed to a plan (which never got off the ground) to act as a special envoy to secure Turnell’s release.

For all the time he spends questioning his own bravery, however, Turnell emerges as the ultimate hero, a five-foot-nothing academic who repeatedly expresses incredulity that a Sydney economist with an Alexander Hamilton obsession could end up in such dire straits. He is shocked at the physical abuse he experiences – shackling, near starvation, beatings – but says it hardly compares to what others continue to suffer.

Night after night Turnell heard the screams of those being tortured in nearby cells.

Day after day, he saw evidence of it on the broken bodies of political prisoners inside Yangon’s Insein jail, a notorious ­colonial-era penitentiary whose name correctly implies the ­madhouse it is.

Some of those prisoners begged him to ensure they not be ­forgotten.

This is him keeping that promise.

Amanda Hodge is a Walkley award winning foreign correspondent for The Australian.