TRANSCRIPT Legacies of Political Detention and the Burmese Democracy Movement - May 14, 2021

Source Video: https://youtu.be/vezqe9KLgps Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you everyone for joining our webinar today titled “Legacies of Political Detention and the Burmese Democracy Movement.”

ဒေန တကေရာကလာသေတအားလး ေကျးဇးပါ။ ေဆးေ�းပေခါငးစဉက “�ငငေရးအကျဉးသားြဖစရြခငးရအေမန

ြမနမာဒမကေရစလ�ပ�ားမ�” ြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: This event is sponsored by the Centers for Southeast Asian Studies, both at UCLA and UC Berkeley as well as the UCLA Anthropology Department.

ဒပြဖစေြမာကေအာငပပးေပးခ�ကတာက ဘာကေလတက� သလန UCLA တရ အေ� �ေတာငအာ� ေလလာေရးဌာနများ န

UCLA ရ မ�ဿေဗဒ ဌာနတ ြဖစ�ကပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I want to thank the Director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies Georgia Dutton and the Assistant Director Nguyet Tong.

UCLA အေ��ေတာငအာ� ေလလာေရးဌာရ ��န�ကားေရးမ�း George Dutton န လကေထာက ��န�ကားေရးမ�း Nguyet

Tong ကလညးက�နမ ေကျးဇးတငေ�ကာငးေြပာပါရေစ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Program Coordinator Kitty Hu and the Vice Chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Southeast Asia Studies Sarah Maxim as well as the Chair of the UCLA Anthropology Department Jason Throop for supporting this event.

ေနာက�ပး အစအစဉမ�း Kitty Hu န ဘာကေလတက� သလ အေ� �ေတာငအာ� ေလလာေရးဌာရ ဒဥက� � Sarah Maxim

ကလညးေကျးဇးတငပါတယ။ အစစအရာရာကညေပးခတ UCLA မ�ဿေဗဒဌာန ဥက� � Jason Throop

ကလညးေကျးဇးပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: This is the second event in a series of teachings on the Burmese democracy movement.

ဒါ က�နမတရ ြမနမာဒမကေရစလ�ပ�ားမ�အေ�ကာငးသင�ကားေဆးေ�းပများထက ဒတယပပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: And it is organized in response to this most recent wave of political violence that the military and its supporters have unleashed on the civilian population in Burma.

စစတပန စစတပကေထာကခသေတရ ြပညသအေပါ �ငငေရးအ�ကမးဖကမ�ေတက တန ြပနတအေနန စစဉလကတ

စကားဝငးြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: These teach-ins are organized because the Centers for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA and UC Berkeley recognized a need to have a scholarly discourse on the Burmese democracy movement, as well as a need to disseminate knowledge about the history of political violence and imprisonment in Burma. They have been directed specifically at communities of political activists.

ဒ သင�ကားေဆးေ�းပေတက စစဉလကရတ ရညရယချကေတာ ဘာကေလတက� သလန UCLA အေ��ေတာငအာ�

ေလလာေရးဌာေတက ြမနမာဒမကေရစလ�ပ�ားမ�နပတသက�ပး ပညာ�ငေတေဆးေ�းဖလအပတယ၊

�ငငေရးအ�ကမးဖကမ�န ဖမးဆးမ�ေတရရာဇဝငက လေတသသငတယလ ယဆလ ြဖစပါတယ။ ဒါေတဟာ

�ငငေရးလ�ပ�ားသေတကတမငသကသကပစမတထား�ပး လပခတာေတပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: This webinar on the Burmese prison webinar focuses on the Burmese prison and it focuses on it as both a site of state sponsored terror and violence but also as a site of the political contestation that has historically given rise to new forms of agency, solidarity, and resistance.

ဒအကျဉးေထာငနပတသကတ webinar မာ အစးရခငြပချကန ေထာငေတကဘယလသး�ပး

အ�ကမးဖကြခမးေြခာကခ�ကသလ၊ �ငငေရးအား�ပငမ�ေတမာ ေထာငရအခနးကဏ� ကဘာလ၊ ေထာငေ�ကာငဘယလ

လပပငခင၊ စညးလးမ�၊ အာခမ�ေတေပါေပါကလာသလ ဆတာေတက အဓကထားေဆးေ�းသားပါမယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Political and imprisonment in Burma is widespread and intergenerational. It was present during the colonial era.

ြမနမာ�ငငမာ�ငငေရးအရေထာငသငးအကျဉးချတာက ေခတအဆကဆကမာကျယကျယြပန ြပနသးခပါတယ။

ကလနေခတမာက�ခပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: It was also widespread since independence and took on new forms and new meanings following the 1962 military coup, the 1988 military coup and now the 2021 military coup.

လတလပေရးရ�ပးချနမာလညးကျငသးခပါတယ။ ဒါေပမ ၁၉၆၂ခ�စ စစအာဏာသမး�ပးတေနာက၊ �ပးေတာ ၁၉၈၈ခ�စန

ေနာကဆး ၂၀၂၁ခ�စေနာကမာေတာ အသငသ�နေြပာငးလသားပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: As scholars and social scientists, we are particularly interested in asking about the deep psychological and cultural legacies that are left behind by the practice of mass political incarceration in Burma.

လမ�ေရးသပ�ပညာ�ငြဖစတက�နမတက လေပါငးများစာကဖမးဆးအကျဉးချြခငးရ စတပငးဆငရာ၊

ယဉေကျးမ�ဆငရာအေမဆးေတက ေလလာသးသပဖ ဆ����ကပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: We will explore this in part by examining how the experience of detention shaped the subjectivity of the political prisoners themselves.

တစဘကကေန ေထာငတငးအေတ�အ�ကက အကျဉးသားေတရ ပဂ�လကအြမငေတက

ဘယလေြပာငးလသားေစ�ငသလဆတာ ဆနးစစ�ကည�ကပါမယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: To that end, we are honored and grateful to have both the former political prisoner from Burma, Nay Tin Myint, who will give testimony about his time as a political prisoner.

ဒအတက �ငငေရးအကျဉးသားေဟာငးကေနတငြမငက က�နမတပမာ ပါဝငဖငဟေဆးေ�းေပးတာက အထး

ေကျးဇးတငပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: as well as a team of researchers from DIGNITY, the Danish Institute Against Torture, who have been conducting research on historical and contemporary Burmese prisons since 2016.

ထအတ ၂၀၁၆ကစ�ပး ေ�းေခတန ေခတေပါ ြမနမာအကျဉးေထာငေတက ေလလာေနတ Danish Institute Against

Torture ရ Dignity အဖ�က သေတသေတကလညး ေကျးဇးတငပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Just to let you know we will spend the first 30 minutes having Nay Tin Myint give his testimony.

ပထမ နာရဝကမာ ကေနတငြမငရ ထကဆချကက နားဆင�ကပါမယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: We will then take a five-minute break because this will be a very emotional testimony and then we will reconvene and start our roundtable discussion.

�ပးရင၅မနစနားပါမယ။ စတဖစးမ��ကးမားတအေ�ကာငးအရာေတြဖစလပါ။ �ပးမ ေဆးေ�းပြပနစပါမယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So, first and foremost, I want to introduce Nay Tin Myint, who is currently the chairman of the National League for Democracy supporting organization chapter in the United States, as well as a leader and organizer in the New York City Burmese American Community.

ပထမဥးစာ နယးေရာက�မ� � အမျးသားဒမကေရစအဖ� ပပးေရးအသငးရ လက�ဥက� �ြဖစတ

ကေနတငြမငကဖတေခါလကပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Nay Tin Myint was imprisoned for more than 15 years, 10 years of which he spent in solitary confinement for his participation in the 1988 uprising and democracy movement.

သဟာ ၁၉၈၈အေရးေတာပမာ ပါဝငခတအတက ေထာင ၁၅�စကျခ�ပး ဒကာလအတငးမာ

၁၀�စေလာကတကပတခခရပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: He was one of the student leaders of the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations and also an original, founding member of both the National League for Democracy and the 88 Generation.

သဟာ ၈၈ခ�စဆ��ြပေကျာငးသားေခါငးေဆာငတစေယာကြဖစခသလ ၈၈မျးဆကန အမျးသားဒမကေရစအဖ�ချပတက

တညေထာငခသတစဥးလညးြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: He left Burma in 2007 in order to escape continued persecution and political tension. Even after he had left the country, the Burmese military government placed him on trial in absentia and sentence him to 65 years in prison.

၂၀၀၇ ခ�စမာ သဟာဖမးဆးအေရးယမ�ေတကေ�ာင�ားဖ ြပညပထကခပါတယ။ ဒါေတာငမ စစအစးရက

သမ�တအချနမာ သအမ�ကစစ�ပး ၆၅�စေထာငဒဏချခပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Nay Tin Myint sought asylum and immigrated to the United States in 2008 and despite being a survivor both political imprisonment and torture,

�ငငေရးအကျဉးသားဘဝန အ�ပစကခကာလကေကျာလန�ပးတေနာက သဟာ ၂၀၀၈ခ�စမာ ခလ�သအြဖစ

အေမရကန�ငငကေြပာငးေ���လာပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Nay Tin Myint continues to devote his life to the cause of democracy and freedom in Burma. He is currently one of the main organizers and leaders of the civil disobedience movement in New York City, which advocates for an end to military rule in Burma and the creation of the federal democracy under the legitimately elected government, according to the November 2020 elections.

ယခထတင ကေနတငြမငဟာ �ငငေရးအတကသဘဝကရငး�ပး စညး�းသ၊ ေခါငးေဆာငတစဥးအြဖစနယးေရာက�မ� မာ

စစအာဏာ�ငစနစဆနကျငေရး၊ သပတေမာကေရး၊ ၂၀၂၀ ေရးေကာကပအ�ငရအစးရလကေအာကမာ

ဖကဒရယဒမကေရစစနစေပါေပါကေရး ေတက ေဆာငရကေနဆပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: After being released from prison, he was able to go on and attain his bachelor's degree in 2007 and he's currently studying for a master's in Political Science at Brooklyn College.

၂၀၀၇ ခ�စေထာငကလတလာ�ပးတေနာက သဟာေကျာငးဆကတက�ပးဘ�ယ�ငခပါတယ။ အခ

�ငငေရးသပ�မဟာဝဇ�ာဘ�အတက Brooklyn ေကာလပမာ ဆကလကပညာသငေနပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Translating for Nay Tin Myint is Kenneth Wong. Kenneth is a lecturer in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.

သထကဆချငက ဘာသာြပနေပးမာကေတာ ဘာကေလတက� သလ အေ� �ေတာငအာ�ေလလာေရးဌာနက ကထက

Kenneth Wong ြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Kenneth is also a Burmese American author, blogger and translator.

သဟာ ြမနမာစာေရးဆရာ၊ ဘေလာဂါ၊ ဘာသာြပနသတစေယာကြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Kenneth has written short stories, essays and translations that have appeared in The Myanmar Times, Irrawaddy, The San Francisco Chronicle, AGNI amongst many others.

Myanmar Times, Irrawaddy, San Francisco Chronicle, AGNI တမာ ေဆာငးပါးန

ဝတ� တေတကေရးသားခသတစဥးလညး ြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: He teaches beginning and intermediate Burmese at UC Berkeley and we are most grateful that Kenneth can translate for us today. So with that I'll transition, I'll turn off my own camera and transition to the testimonial.

သဟာ အခ ဘာကေလတက� သလမာ အေြခခန အေြခခလနြမနမာစာဘာသာက သင�ကားပချေနပါတယ။

သအကအညရတာက ဝမးသာမပါတယ။ အခ ကေနတငြမငထကချကကနားေထာငဖ က�နမ ကငမရာကပတလကပါ�ပ။

Kenneth Wong: Very good, thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure for me to be serving in this role as a translator for Nay Tin Myint, my fellow countryman.

ေကျးဇးတငပါတယခငဗျား။ အခလ ြမနမာ�ငငသားအချငးချငးတစဥးြဖစတ ကေနတငြမငက

ဘာသာြပနေပးခငရတာက ဝမးသာမပါတယ။

[Nay Tin Myint speaks in Burmese, followed by English interpretation. No Burmese subtitles.] Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: Everybody, thank you very much for giving me the chance to speak in front of you here, my name is Nay Tin Myint, I live in New York City and I would like to thank all the organizers who made this event happen. Nay Tin Myint:. Kenneth Wong: The reason I want to talk speak here before all of you is because the situation in 1988 and the situation currently in 2021 are similar situations because both involve a military takeover, so I thought I’ll recount my experience here.

Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: In 1988, I was the final year university student at Yangon University. And at that time, because of the deteriorating living situations throughout the country, almost everybody from every walk of life in every corner of the country came out to the street to peacefully protest. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: At the time, I was one of the active student leaders. When the political parties were formed, I became one of the youth leaders for the National League for Democracy, also known as NLD. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: So that's why in that capacity as a youth leader for NLD, I started talking about democracy and human rights. And for that the army put me on trial and sentenced me, for the first time, for 4 years, and the second time, what would amount to a life sentence 20 years. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: During these time under the instruction of the military intelligence, the prison authorities subjected all of us to unjust tortures. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: Outside, we as student leaders faced, braved the bullets and the guns of the army when we were protesting. So that's why I felt that, in the prison as well, we have to continue resisting the unjust authorities, unjust orders of the prison authorities so that was a continuation of our battle. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: For example, when in my first four-year prison term, they came and negotiated with me and told me that if I were to do the hard labor that they ordered us to do, my prison sentence will be reduced and I would be released before my prison term was up. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: Why did I end up putting up such a resistance? Well, it's because I felt that I was not a common criminal. I was arrested unjustly and I was a prisoner of conscience standing up for my country's future and my country’s rights. So I decided, I told my comrades that I decided that I will serve out my four-year term fully rather than comply with their orders.

Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: Soon after I made that announcement, a prison authority called me out so I was alone and I was brought into an office with four or five staff members of the prisons. They kicked me with army boots, hit my face with fists and they struck my back with sticks and rods until I fell to the ground. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: Once I fell to the ground, two people pull me back up again and shackled my feet. These weights were quite heavy so they prevented me from moving about freely. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: I was told then to make my way to a notorious ward that was reserved for political prisoners. Throughout the path that I was making my way, as I was shackled and making my way to the prison to cell, on both sides of the way the staff members continue to hit me with canes that was usually used to hit cows and buffalos. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: So I ended up in a prison cell that was six feet by eight feet and there was nothing on the floor. There was no water jug for me to drink water and there is no extra set of outfit for me to wear. For me to do my all my bodily functions, there was only a bucket that was provided. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: I was provided only two cups of water, so one cup after my morning meal or lunch and then another cup after my dinner, and there was all the water that I was allowed. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: In the two weeks that I was there, I had to do all my bodily functions in those small little buckets. So in time my urine and feces started to overflow from the bucket. And it was a small space so it spilled over onto the floor and I had no way of avoiding it and the terrible smell that was coming out. Over time in a couple of days, lice and insect started to crawl up in those buckets and that was the way I had to live. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: I stood up firmly to this two weeks of torture. At night I remembered that I went to sleep, some insects, worms, and mice would crawl all over my body. But two weeks after that, I was sent back to

my original holding cell and there once again I was put into shackles and I was transferred to a new prison. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: The next prison I was sent to Upper Burma in Myingyan District and it was one of the notorious prisons known to all the prisoners. Because in my paperwork, I have been considered what is known as a prisoner underlined in red, a trouble prisoner, upon arrival once again the prison staff kicked me in the chest, slapped me on my cheek and hit my back. And once again the torture of continued. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: So I ended up in a cell that was meant for solitary confinement. In that cell I had to spend nearly a decade alone. There was nobody to speak to and no books to read. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: Once again, I was put back in shackles and because I was subjected every day to physical and mental torture, over time part of my body part of my body became feeble and weakened. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: One thing I remember distinctly, in the prison there were pigs that were raised for the prison staff. One day, the prison warden came and told me that listen boys, if one of you die, all I have to do is sign one document but if one of these pigs die, I actually have to process five documents. So in a sense, he's telling us that people like me, political prisoners and student leaders who were in prison were not worth the life of a pig. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: I live in a predominantly Buddhist country and I myself was raised as a Buddhist so in my narrow cell at dawn I usually said my prayers as a Buddhist. But one day when I was doing that, a prison authority saw me. The next time I was saying my Buddhist prayers at dawn, wwo people came in and pull me out of my cell and brought me to the office. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: They asked me what was I doing. I simply told them that I was saying my Buddhist prayers but they accused me of violating the prison rules and accused me of conspiring to break out of the prison. So they started hitting me again and they hit me so much that blood was starting to come out of my mouth.

Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: After this treatment, I was put back in my shackle and I was told to make my way across the path that is known as hell's path in prison. It ws called that way because the small lane was paved with little sharp pieces of rocks. And I was told to make my way across that path in what is known as the crocodile position that means crawl through that path. While I was doing that, there were two staff members who continued to hit me with canes that were usually used to hit animals like cows and buffalos. I could not stop because once I stopped, the two other people will continue to hit me. Because I was making my way on my elbows and knees, my flesh started to bleed, split open but I could not stop, I had to keep going until I reached my cell. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: What I want to emphasize is that in prison we had no human rights, no justice or no rule of law to protect us. I had no books to read, I had no freedom to practice my religion. And that was my experience for roughly 15 years in prison. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: In 2005, international pressure was beginning to build. I was freed from that notorious prison along with many other political prisoners, that was how I managed to get out of prison. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: Those were a few examples that I’m able to give to you about my experience during my 15 years prison time. To be honest, if I were to tell you everything that happened to me, there’s not enough time for this meeting. But after I was freed, we once again gathered together and we decided that we will continue our unfinished fight, unfinished revolution. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: People often ask me when I decided that I was going to continue our fight, continue our resistance as student leaders, “Aren’t you afraid that you'll be thrown back into the prison?” I have to tell you honestly, of course, I was afraid that I would end up in prison once again. But I tell myself that I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing this for the country. I’m doing this for the next generation. I’m not doing this for my own personal family either, so I decided that we have to continue our fight. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: In 2007 right before the Saffron Revolution led by the monks, once again the authorities, tried to arrest me but luckily, I escaped their attempt so I escaped from Yangon and ended up in the Thai-Burma border and from there I continued my work.

Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: During that round of arrest unfortunately other famous student leaders were all rounded up and they were sentenced to roughly 65 years. I on the other end escape that fate. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: I was in the Thai-Burma border until 2007 where I continued my work and in 2008 I was able to immigrate to the U.S. But even after my immigration up to today I pledge that I will continue the unfinished revolution for my country to fight for democracy and freedom and human rights. I thank everybody for listening to my testimony. [Consecutive interpretation ends. Burmese subtitles continue.] Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you so much for that very powerful and emotional testimony. Thank you so much for having the courage to share your experiences with us in this very public and very open forum.

ေလးနက�ပး စတထခကစရာအြဖစအပျကေတက ဖငေြပာေပးခတာေကျးဇးပါ။ လတငး�ကညလရတေဆးေနးပမာ ကယ

အေတ�အ�ကေတက ဒလရရတငးတငး ေဝမ�ေပးတာလညး ေကျးဇးပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you also to Kenneth for translating and giving helping give Nay Tin Myint’s testimony a voice.

ကေနတငြမငရထကချကက ဘာသာြပနေပးတ က Kenneth ကလညးေေကျးဇးပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So we will now take a five minute break during which time I will put up the information for a fundraiser that we're having.

အခအချနကစ�ပး ၅ မနစ အားလပချနေပးပါမယ။ ဒအေတာအတငးမာ ရနပေငထညလရတေနရာေတက

ေဖါ ြပေပးထားပါမယ။

[Break: No translation] [Program resumes] Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So thank you again to Nay Tin Myint for that for that moving testimony. Now I would like to introduce our other panelists from DIGNITY.

ဒလထမတထကချကက ေပးခတ က ေနတငြမငက ေနာကတစဖန ေကျးဇးပါတယ။ က�နမအခ Dignity အဖ�က

ပါဝငေဆးေ�းမသများက မတဆကေပးပါရေစ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: The first is Dr Andrew Jefferson, who is a senior researcher at DIGNITY and the principal investigator of their Legacies of Detention and Myanmar Research Project.

ပထမတစဥးက Dr. Andrew Jefferson ပါ။ Dignity က ဆနယာကျတ သေတသနပညာ�ငတစဥးလညးြဖစ၊

ေထာငကျြခငးရအကျးဆကများက ေလလာခတသေတထကအဓကတစဥးလညးြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: For the past two decades, he has conducted ethnographic research on prisons and rights-based reform in West Africa and Southeast Asia.

�ပးခတ �စ ၂၀ ေလာကအတငး သဟာ အေနာကပငးအာဖရကေထာငေတ၊ အေ� �ေတာငအာ�ကေထာငေတထမာ

အခငအေရးဆငရာေြပာငးလမ�ေတနပတသကတ လမ�ဆကဆေရးစနစကေလလာခပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Dr. Jefferson is particularly interested in the relationship between confinement and subjectivity.

Dr. Jefferson ဟာ အကျဉးကျြခငးန ကယပငခစားချကတရဆက�ယမ�က အထးစတဝငစားပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: As well as the meaning, practice and experience of imprisonment and states in transition, as well as prison staff and the agency or perpetrators institutions.

အသငကးေြပာငးေရးဆတငးြပညများမာေတ�ရတ အကျဉးချြခငးရအဓပ�ာယ၊ ကျငစဉ၊ အေတ�အ�ကေတ၊ ေနာက�ပး

ေထာငဝနထမးေတ၊ အာဏာပငအဖ �အစးေတကရ လပပငခငေတက ေလလာပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Dr. Jefferson is also the co-founder of the Global Prison Research Network.

Dr Jefferson ဟာ ကမ�ာလးဆငရာ အကျဉးေထာငေလလာေရးအဖ�အစညးရ တညေထာငသတစဥးလညးြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Our second panelist is Dr Thomas Max Martin who is an anthropologist with a PhD in Development studies. Dr. Martin specializes in prison sociology and anthropology of the state, with a focus on the localization of human rights, reform and the appropriation of penal technologies and architectures.

ဒတယေဆးေ�းသကေတာ Dr. Thomas Max Martin သကေတာ မ�ဿေဗသပညာ�ငြဖစ�ပး ဖ � �ဖးေရးေလလာေရးမာ

ပါရဂဘ�ရသြဖစပါတယ။ သအဓကထားေလလာတာကေတာ အကျဉးေထာငတငး လမ�ဆကဆေရးန တငးြပညဆငရာ

မ�ဿေဗဒြဖစပါတယ။ ေဒသဆငရာ လအခငအေရး ြပြပငေြပာငးလေရးန အကျဉးေထာငဆငရာနညးပညာ

ဝယယေရး၊ ေနာက�ပး အကျဉးေထာငဗသကာတပြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Dr Martin is currently a senior researcher at DIGNITY working on the research project Legacies of Detention.

Dr. Martin ဟာ လက�မာ ေထာငကျြခငးရအကျးဆကများကေလလာေနတ Dignity ရ ဆနယာ

သေတသနပညာ�ငတစေယာကြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Our third panelist is Dr. Liv Gaborit. She is a postdoctoral research at Lund University who holds a PhD from DIGNITY and Roskilde University.

တတယေဆးေ�းသကေတာ Dr. Liv Gaborit ြဖစပါတယ။ သဟာ Lund တက� သလမာ ဘ�လနသေတသန

လပေနသြဖစပါတယ။ Dignity န Roskilde တက� သလက ပါရဂဘ�ကရထားပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Her PhD dissertation consisted of an ethnographic project about the experience of imprisonment in Myanmar. Dr. Gaborit’s current research is about forms of social resilience among activists and prisoners in Myanmar.

သ ပါရဂဘ�စာတမးဟာ ြမနမာြပညအကျဉးေထာငဆငရာ လမ�ဆကဆေရးစနစေလလာေရးလပငနးအေ�ကာငးပါ။

�ငငေရးလ�ပ�ားသနအကျဉးသားေတရ လမ�ဆကဆေရးဆငရာခ�ငရည�မ�က သေတသနလပခပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: She utilizes ethnographic methods and strives to include also participatory action research, activism and co-creation in her research. This has recently led her to be one of the co-founders of the of a new NGO, Myanmar Action Network Denmark.

သဟာ လမ�ဆကဆေရးေဗဒဆငရာနညးလမးေတသး�ပး ေလလာသများပးေပါငးပါဝငတသေတသန၊

အခငအေရးဆငရာလ�ပ�ားမ�၊ ပးေပါငးဖနတးြခငးေတကအားေပးပါတယ။ ဒါေ�ကာငသဟာ Denmark ရ Myanmar

Action Network ဆတ NGO အဖအစညးရ တညေထာငသတစဥးလညးြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: The NGO is created in response to the military coup in an effort to increase Danish support and awareness of the resistance movement in Myanmar.

စစအာဏာသမးတာက တန ြပနတအေနန ၊ Denmark �ငငမာ အာဏာ�ငဆနကျငေရးကလထေထာကခမ�ရဖ ၊

ဒအေ�ကာငး လသများလာေစဖ ဒ NGO က တညေထာငခတာြဖစပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I thank you all for joining us today.

ဒေဆးေ�းပက လာတကေရာကေပး�ကတာ ေကျးဇးတငပါတယ။

[Roundtable discussion] Seinenu Thein Lemelson: The first question that I have,

ပထမေမးခနးကေတာ၊

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I think one of the reasons I wanted to assemble all of you here is, when I was reading your research both in Myanmar as well as on prisons than other parts of the world,

ဒေန အားလးက ဒေဆးေ�းပက ဖတလကရတအေ�ကာငးရငးကေတာ၊ မတေဆတအားလးရ ြမနမာြပညဆငရာ၊

အြခားေဒသဆငရာ အကျဉးေထာငသေတသနေတကဖတရတအခါမာ

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: what I was really struck by in reading your writings was how well people sort of disassembled and unpacked and then analyzed the senatorial and embodied aspects of the prisons where you have carried out your research in Burma but also elsewhere.

က�နမအထးသတထားမတာက အားလးက ေထာငတငးကေဖာ�ဗ�ာ�အေတ�အ�ကေတက ခြခမးစတြဖာ၊ ြပနလညစစညး၊

�ပးေတာေြဖ�ငးေဖါ ြပခတာပါပ။ ဒါြမနမာြပညတငမက၊ အြခားေဒသေတေရာပါဝငပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So the first question I have actually is for Andrew.

ပထမေမးခနးက Andrew အတကပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I was wondering about some of the temporal features of imprisonment, particularly some aspects of continuity and discontinuity.

ေမးခနးက အကျဉးသားေတရ အချနနပတသကတ ခစားချကေတအေ�ကာငးပါ။ အထးသြဖင

အဆကမြပတစးဆငးေနတအချနေတန ြပတေတာကသားတအချနကာလေတအေ�ကာငး။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Especially in the sense of deprivation and the sense of vulnerability and how that shapes the subjectivity of prisoners.

အထးသြဖင ေပျာကဆးမ�ေတ၊ အားငယမ�ေတ၊ ဒါေတက အကျဉးသားရ ကယပငအေတးအြမငေတအေပါ

ဘယလဂယက�ကပါသလ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Particularly when they are detained, but also during the post detainment period, and I know you've done relevant work in this domain in Sierra Leone.

အဖမးခထားခရတအချန၊ ေနာက�ပး ြပနလတလာတအချနေတမာေပါ။ ဒါနပတသက�ပး Andrew က Sierra Leone မာ

ေလလာခတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So I was wondering if you can talk about your findings from Sierra Leone and also give some conjectures as to how it might be similar or different from the Burmese situation.

ဒေတာ Sierra Leone က�ာေဖေတ� �ချကေတက ြမနမာြပညကအေြခအေနေတန တလား၊ ကြပားလား။

နညးနညးေဆးေ�းေပးပါလား။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Well, thanks very much for that great question and thanks for the opportunity for myself and for our team to participate in this.

အငမတနေကာငးတေမးခနးပါ၊ ေကျးဇးပါ။ က�နေတာန က�နေတာအဖ �သားေတက အခလပါဝငေဆးေ�းခငေပးတာလညး

ေကျးဇးပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: The testimony of Nay Tin Myint set the scene really viscerally. As social scientists, as prison scholars as we sometimes call ourselves, we’re likely to be a little bit more abstract.

ကေနရ ထကချကက ကကကကကငးကငးန ပဖငလကပါ�ပ။ လမ�ဆကဆေရးသပ�သေတသြဖစတ က�နေတာတကျေတာ

တစခါတေလ ေယဘယျေလာကပေဆးေ�း�ငတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: But I think since we are ethnographers with a particular attunement to people's lives and the meanings that they attached to their lives, I think nevertheless they'll be quite a good match.

က�နေတာတက လေတရဘဝနအနကအဓပ�ာယကအသားေပးေလလာတ လမ�ဆကဆေရးစနစကေလလာသေတဆေတာ

ကကေတာကကမယထငပါတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I also really appreciate your question about temporality because it's something that's concerned me in a lot of my work.

အချနကာလနပတသက�ပးေမးတာလညး ေကျးဇးတငတယ။ ဒါ အလပမာက�နေတာေလးေလးနကနကစဉးစားမတ

အေ�ကာငးပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: So the question is not just about what is prison like but also what is it like to do time in prison. You're also asking about how prison shapes and molds people, which is also a thing that i've been concerned with.

အေမးခနးရ အ�စသာရက၊ ေထာငကဘယလပစလလေမးတာမဟတဘး။ ေထာငကျတအေတ�အ�ကက

လတစေယာကက ဘယလေြပာငးလေစပါသလဆတာပါ။ ဒါက�နေတာ ေတာေတာေလလာြဖစပါတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I’ll try an expansive answer if that's all right. i've prepared a few thoughts along these lines.

ခငြပမယဆရင အကျယတဝင �ကးစားေြဖပါမယ။ က�နေတာ�ကတငချေရးထားတာေလးေတက ေြပာြပမယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: So i've been studying prisons as places that confined people for quite a long time, but I realized over the years

ေထာငက လေတကထမးချပရာေဒသအြဖစ က�နေတာေလလာေနတာ�ကာပါ�ပ။ ဒါေပမ �ကာလာေတာ

Andrew M. Jefferson: it's not only places that confine, it's also time that confines so when people are detained and arrested and put in prison, they're kind of taken out of time or taken out of their life course into another time if you like, a time that's regulated or restricted.

ေထာငဆတာ လေတကထမးချပရာေဒသတငမက၊ သတက ပငကမလဘဝေရးစေ�ကာငး၊

ကာလေရစးေ�ကာငးကေနဆထတ�ပး အတငးအကျကအချပအချယများလတ ကာလတစခထထညသငးလကတာလ

ေတးမတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Often in very damaging ways

များေသာအားြဖင လေတက �ကး�ကးမားမားထခကေစပါတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: As the testimony made pretty clear, prison disrupts time and therefore it can be thought of as a disruption or of being out of place and out of time.

ကေနေြပာြပခသလပ ေထာငက အကျဉးသားေတရ ကာလေရစးေ�ကာငးက ရပဆငးသားေစတယ။ သတရငး�းရာကာလ၊

ေနရာေဒသကေန ြပငပကဆထတတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Another matter I think that's really important is that confinement often doesn't stop when a person is released.

ေနာကအေရး�ကးတာတစခက၊ ေထာငကြပနလတလာရငေတာင အချပအေ�ာငကချကချငးလတေြမာကမသားပါဘး။

Andrew M. Jefferson: There's a sense that the effects of imprisonment, they live on, and we know this from a lot of literature, but I’ve confronted it in my own field work in Sierra Leone. They often lives on through generations.

အကျဉးကျြခငးရဆးကျးက ဆကလကခစားရပါတယ။ ဒါေတက ကျမးဂစာေပေတမာေတ�ရပါတယ။ Sierra Leone က

က�နေတာအေတ�အ�ကအရေြပာေနတာပါ။ တစချ�ဆ ေနာကမျးဆကအထက သကတမး�ညတဆးကျးေတပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Some of these themes I first began to think about doing field work in Sierra Leone,

ဒအေ�ကာငးပထမဆးစဉးစားမတာကေတာ Sierra Leone မာ၊

Andrew M. Jefferson: where I got to know, over a period of months, a group of over 50 former combatants from the civil war who had just been released from six years in prison and

ေထာငကလတလာခါစ စစသားေဟာငး ၅၀ ေကျာေလာကန လေပါငးအနညးငယေလာက ထေတ�ဆကဆ�ပး

Andrew M. Jefferson: I met with them regularly over a period of months and I slowly learned about the ways that they made sense of both their imprisonment and their lives after.

သတက အကျဉးကျကာလက ဘယလသးသပ၊ အဓပ�ာယ�ာလဆတာ ေလလာခတနးကပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I learned about this sense of loss. I learned about their sense of dislocation. I learned about their anxieties, their vulnerabilities and I learned about the fact that, even though they were free, they didn't feel any sense of freedom.

သတရ ဆး�� းမ�ဆငရာခစားချကေတ၊ သတ ေနရာေပျာကရြခငးနပတသကတခစားချကေတ၊ အပအပငန အားငယမ�ေတ

က�နေတာနားလညလာတယ။ ဒါေတတငမကဘး၊ လတလာတာေတာငမာ သတဟာ လတလပမ�က မခစား�ငဘး၊

Andrew M. Jefferson: I wanted to share just four lines of a very famous poem with you and the audience

က�နေတာနာမည�ကးကဗျာတစပဒထက စာသားေလးေ�ကာငးက ပရသတ�ကးက ေဝငေပးပါရေစ၊

Andrew M. Jefferson: I’ve used this in an article. It is a poem by Lord Byron, writing in the 1830s. It's called The Prisoner of Chillon.

က�နေတာ ဒကဗျာက ေဆာငးပါးတစပဒထမာလညး ြပနထညထားတယ။

ဒါ Byron ရ ၁၈၃၀ခ�စပငးေလာကက ကဗျာပါ။ “Chillon ကအကျဉးသား” လေခါပါတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: And in the very last part of the of the poem, he's talking about when he was about to be released from prison.

ကဗျာအဆးသတခါနးမာ ဇာတေကာငက ေထာငက လတေတာမအေ�ကာငးက ေြပာြပပါတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: But he talks about the relationship he established with the insects in his cell and to the chains that had bound him. So I’ll just read the last four lines, it says:

သက သန မတေဆလြဖစေနတ အကျဉးေထာငထကပးေကာင၊ ေနာက�ပးသကချပေ�ာငထားတ

သ�ကးကငးေတအေ�ကာငးက ေြပာြပတယ။ ဖတြပပါမယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: “My very chains and I grew friends. So much a long communion tends to make us what we are. Even I regained my freedom with a sigh.”

ေနာကဆး ၄ ေ�ကာငးပါ။

ငါ သ�ကးန ငါေတာငမတေဆြဖစလာခ�ပ။

ဒလ ကာလ�ကာ�ညစာ ေပါငးသငးခရေတာလညး

ဒလပ ြဖစရေလမေပါ။

လတလာတာေတာငမ ငါသကြပငးချမတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I think this is an extremely powerful sense of how prison makes itself felt in the life of the prisoner.

ဒါဟာ အကျဉးေထာငက အကျဉးသားရဘဝအေပါ ဘယအထသကေရာကမ��လဆတာက ပပြပငြပငေဖါ ြပထားတာပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: They come to almost belong, even when it's such an alienating environment as Nay Tin Myint has described.

လေတကစမးစမးကားကားဆကဆတေနရာမာေတာင သဟာ ေနသားကျသားတယလ ဆ�ငပါတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: They develop relationships and connections and this idea “I regained my freedom with a sigh,” there's almost a sense of regret of being released.

သဟာ ဒေနရာမာ အရာရာန မတဖ � ြဖစခလ “လတလာတာေတာငမ ငါသကြပငးချမတယ” ဆေတာ သဟာ သားရမာက

ဝမးနညးမတယလ ေြပာေနသလပါပ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: And that regret goes both ways. It's both a fear of what will freedom bring, what does the future look like when I’ve been 15 years in prison, what can one anticipate when one has been taken out of time,

ဒဝမးနညးမ�က �စမျးြဖစမယထငပါတယ။ လတလပသား�ပးေနာကြဖစလာမာေတက စးရမရတာရယ၊ ၁၅

�စ�ကာေထာငထမာေန�ပးထကလာတအခါ အနာဂတကဘယလပလဆတာမခနမနး�ငတာရယ၊

ကာလေရစးေ�ကာငးရ ြပငပကထကခရတမမဟာ ဘာေတကေမ�ာလငရမာလဆမေသချာတာရယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: as I have talked about before and I’ve met this also with young people from poor urban neighborhoods in Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone မာေတ� ခရတ ဆငးရတ �မ�လယရပကကကလငယေလးေတအေ�ကာငးက�နေတာ

ေြပာြပခတယမဟတလား။

Andrew M. Jefferson: We've also talked about well initially they were happy, but then they just came back into their own miserable stigmatized existence.

ပထမေတာ သတေတေပျာ�ကပါတယ။ ေနာကေတာ စတညစစရာ အစနးထငေနတဘဝက ရငဆင�ကရြပနတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: One of the other issues is that the way you experience time in prison depends it varies from person to person, it's not the same. Ot also depends on what circumstances you come out to.

ေထာငထမာကနခရတအချနနပတသက�ပး အကျဉးသားတစေယာကချငးစရခစားချကေတက မတ�ကဘးခငဗျ။ ဒါ

ကယအေြခအေနေပါမာမတညပါတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Will you be stigmatized? Are you still at risk of persecution even though you're free? Are you welcomed as a hero?

ဘဝက အစနးထငသားမာလား။ လတလပလာ�ပး ကယက ေနာကထပအဖ�ပခရဥးမာလား။

သရေကာငးလဂဏြပခခရမာလား။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Can you make some kind of sense out of the suffering? Do you have a sense of this was a sacrifice that I’m happy to have made even though I’m feeling really damaged by it?

ကယဒက�ေတက အဓပ�ာယ�ရလား။ ဒလ ေပးဆပခရလ ဒဏရာေတကျနခေပမ ေပးဆပရကျးနပတယလ

ေတးလရမလား။

Andrew M. Jefferson: That's another aspect.

ဒါကလညး ေနာကတစချကေပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: There's also the situation of course that prison disrupts life courses, messes with family relationships. It's actually an experience that has to be explained to other people, at least in a way that other people can comprehend.

ေထာငကျေတာ ကယဘဝေရစးေ�ကာငးက ေခတ� ဆငးငသားတယ။ မသားစဆကဆေရးေတ

ကသကေအာကြဖစရတယ။ ဒါေတက လေတနားလညေအာင အငမတန �ငးြပရခကတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I mean who of us can really understand what Ko Nay was telling us earlier, we heard the words

ေစာေစာက ကေနေြပာေနတစကားလးေတက က�နေတာတနားလညေပမ က�နေတာတ တကယကယချငးစာ�ငပါရလား။

Andrew M. Jefferson: but did we really capture the richness of the experiential existential side of that, it's very difficult to communicate that.

ဒလ ဘဝရ ေြပာငေြမာကေဝဆာတအေတ�အ�ကတစခက တကယကယချငးစာနားလညဖက ခကခပါတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Maybe this is not worth saying, because it's been it's so very clear from the testimony that the prison is a violent, anxiety-provoking space, and this is what I’ve also learned from the data from Myanmar.

ေထာငဆတာ �ကမးတမးတယ၊ စတေသာကေရာကေစတယဆတာေတာ ေြပာစရာ မလပါဘး။ ဒါ�ငးပါတယ။

ြမနမာြပညဆငရာသေတသနအချကအလကေတထမာ က�နေတာလညးဒါကေတ�ရပါတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Prisons are fear-filled places and have been for the last I don't know how many years since colonial times. They've always been like that, where everyday life is regulated and controlled in very intrusive, intimate fashions.

ေထာငဆတာ ေ�ကာကစရာေကာငးတေနရာေတ၊ ဒါဘယေလာက�ကာခ�ပလဆတာေတာငမသေတာဘး။

ကလနေခတကတညးကပါပ။ အကျဉးသားေတရ တစေနတာေတက တငးတငးကျပကျပချပချယ�ပး ��က��ကခ�တခ�တ

ဝငေရာကစကဖကတေနရာပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Let me say a little bit about the political prisoners that I’ve interviewed myself if that’s okay.

က�နေတာေတ�ဆေမးြမနးခငရခတ �ငငေရးအကျဉးသားေတအေ�ကာငးနညးနညးေြပာြပပါရေစ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I did some field research in Myanmar.

က�နေတာ ြမနမာြပညမာ ကငးဆငးေလလာခတာတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Not as much as Tomas but I interviewed four former prisoners who had been elected and became parliamentarians in either the regional and national parliament.

Tomas ေလာကတမများပါဘး။ ဒါေပမ တစချနက ေရးေကာကပ�ငလ တငးန �ငငေတာအဆငလ�တေတာမာ

အမတြဖစလာတ လေလးဥးက က�နေတာ ေတ�ဆေမးြမနးခဖးတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: And I interviewed them about how they had become politicized, so I actually wasn't so interested in their prison experience but more in how they got into politics, but of course the prison played a big role in that.

က�နေတာသတ �ငငေရးနပတသကလာပက ေမး�ကညတယ။ သတရ

အကျဉးသားဘဝအေတ�အ�ကအေ�ကာငးမဟတဘး၊ ဘယလြဖစ�ပး �ငငေရးေလာကထေရာကလာလဆတာကပါ။ ဒမာ

ေထာငက ေတာေတာအေရးပါတာက ေတ�ရတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I learned from them that prison was experienced both as hardship and sacrifice, but also as formative and transformative.

ေထာငမာ သတအတက �ကမးတမးတဒက�တစခ၊ ေပးဆပမ�တစခ၊ ဒါတငမက ေထာငဟာ သတက ပျးေထာငေပးရာ၊

အသငေြပာငးေစရာေဒသလညးြဖစတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: In many senses made them into the people they were as they were speaking to me. It changed them, so their stories were tales of struggle and tales of political formation.

ဒအေတ�အ�ကေ�ကာငသတဟာ က�နေတာေတ� ခရတလမျးေတြဖစလာ�ကတယ။ သတဇာတလမးေတက

�နးကနေရးဇာတလမးတငမဟတဘး၊ �ငငေရး ဖင�ဖးေရးဇာတလမးေတလညးြဖစတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: But they also told me stories of lives that were dramatically interrupted by the prison.

ေထာငက သတရဘဝေတက ြပငးြပငးထနထန အေ�ာငအယကေပးခတယလလညး ေြပာြပ�ကတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: But I’ve come to think of these interruptions not so much as breaks or dramatic ruptures but more as links, actually more as continuities than discontinuities.

က�နေတာအြမငအရ ဒအေ�ာငအယကေတက အြပတအေတာကေတမဟတဘး။ အချတအဆကေတနပတတယဗျ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: You might imagine that they were really vivid sort of ruptures in their lives,

ဆေတာ၊ ဒါေတက ဇာတလမးဆကေတလြဖစေနတယ။ ဇာတလမးြပတသားတာမဟတဘး။ သတသကတမးထက

အကေ�ကာငးေတလဆ�ငတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: but at least when they tell it as a narrative, it becomes more like just one event, one deeply significant event.

သတ ြပနေြပာြပတအခါမာ ဒအြဖစအပျကေတက ဇာတလမးတစခထက အေရးပါတ အပငးတစပငးလပ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Sometimes told alongside “I also had a family or I had children and by the way, I was in prison for 10 years and then I carried on doing activism.” Often it's told in quite a matter of fact.

တစခါတေလ သတေြပာပက၊ ကျပမာမသားစ�တယ။ သားသမး�တယ။ ေနာက စကားမစပ ေထာငလညး ၁၀

�စကျဖးတယ။ ဘာမေရး�ကးခငကျယမဟတသလေလသန။

Andrew M. Jefferson: In that way, it seems that prison experience becomes woven into life stories and I think that's an important analytical point actually.

ဒေတာ ေထာငတငးအေတ�အ�ကက ဘဝအေတ�အ�ကေတန ယက�ယေနတယ။ ဒါကအေရး�ကးတ သးသပချကတစခပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: One other thought about time and then I’ll give you a chance to ask my colleagues some questions.

က�နေတာေနာကတစခေြပာြပ�ပးရင က�နေတာလပေဖါကငဘကေတကလညး တစလည ေမးခနးများေမးပါဥး။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I’ve been thinking about the people detained recently, especially the younger generation. I mean four months ago,

က�နေတာ လတတေလာ အဖမးခလကရတလေတ၊ အထးသြဖင လငယေလးေတအေ�ကာငးေတးမတယ။ လနခတ ၄

လတနးက

Andrew M. Jefferson: I don't think the young people who have been detained since would have been anticipating detention. They wouldn't, they were just getting on with their lives, they were not thinking.

ဒလငယေတ သတေတ ဒလအဖမးခရလမမယလေတးမခ�ကမယမထငဘး။ ကယအလပကယလပေန�ကတာ။

ဘယဒလစဉးစားမမလ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: They were not thinking presumably that there might be a military coup and even if they were thinking, they were not imagining themselves in prison.

အာဏာသမးမယလ သတေတးမချငေတးမမယ၊ ဒါေပမ အဖမးခရလမမယထငမာမဟတဘး။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I imagined their experience would have been quite a shock. So the way in which they experience or their experience becomes integrated into their life stories will again depend very much on how their families and their communities receive them on release.

သတအတကဒါ ေတာေတာထတလနအဩစရာြဖစမာပ။ သတအေတ�အ�ကေတက သတဘဝအေတ�အ�ကေတန

ဆက�ယေနတယ။ ဒေတာ ေထာငကသတလတလာတအခါ သတအတက အ��ရယ�ေနေသးတယလ

စးရမေနရဥးမလား။

Andrew M. Jefferson: whether they will continue to feel it at risk, let me leave it there.

ဒါက သတမသားစနအသငးအဝနးက သတက ဘယလြပန�ကဆမလ၊ ဆကဆ�ကမလ ဆတာေပါမာ မတညတယ။

က�နေတာဒမာပ ရပလကပါရေစ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you so much, Andrew. I mean that that was such a rich set of observations and you know if we have enough time, I’d like to circle back to you.

ေကျးဇးတငပါတယ။ အငမတန ကျယြပနတ သးသပချကေတပါ။ အချနရရင ဆကေမးချငပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: You offered so many really amazing and sort of metaphors and frames to understand the prison experience and this idea of community and the environment as well. I like the term links versus ruptures and emphasizing the continuity versus the discontinuities.

��ငးယဉေြပာသားတာေတ၊ ေဘာငတစခအတငးကေန ေဆးေ�းသားတာေတ၊ အကျဉးသားေတက

သတပတဝနးကျငကတယတာလာတာေတ၊ အချတအဆကေတနပတလား၊ အကေ�ကာငးေတနပတလားဆတာေတ၊

အဆကြပတသားတဘဝဆတာထက အဆကမြပတစးဆငးေနတဘဝနပတတယဆတာေတ၊

အားလးသပေကာငးပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I would like to now turn to Tomas who actually carried out really fascinating work on the nature of prison air and breathing of political prisoners in the prison.

အခေတာ �ငငေရးအကျဉးသားေတ��� ကခတေလရ အဂင ါရပေတကေလလာခတ Tomas

ဆတစလညသား�ကရေအာင။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Tomas, I was wondering if you can describe the lived experience of air in the Burmese prisons.

Tomas ေရ၊ သတေတ� �ကခတ ေလေတအေ�ကာငးနညးနညးေြပာြပပါလား။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: And how it relates to both the affective and cognitive realms or prison life.

သတအေတ�အ�က၊ အေတးအေခါေတအေပါဘယလ အကျးသကေရာကမ��သလ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: And I know that breathing was often a site of control for prison authorities seeking to administer punishment.

တချ�ေနရာေတမာ အာဏာပငေတက အြပစေပးတအေနန အသက�တာကေတာင ကနသတတယလလ သရပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: But it was also in some ways a sign of resistance, especially for those who would engage in certain types of breathing practices, whether it was meditation practices or other practices.

အသက�ေလကျငခနးလပတတ၊ တရားထငတတတ အကျဉးသားေတအတကကျေတာ

ဒါကအာဏာကဖဆနတအရာတစခဆပါေတာ။

Tomas Martin: Thank you very much and thank you also for this question which dives straight into the most recent research I’ve been engaged with on prisons in Myanmar.

ဒအေ�ကာငးေမးတာေကျးဇးပါ။ လတတေလာပပေ�းေ�းလပထားတ ြမနမာြပညကအကျဉးေထာငေတန ပတသကတ

သေတသနေတအေ�ကာငးေြပာ�ကရေအာင။

Tomas Martin: Thank you very much for inviting us into this fascinating panel and yes the backdrop of a very strong testimony, I look forward to engage here. Actually my work on air is starts with an interesting thing.

ဒေဆးေ�းပမာ ပါဝငဖဖတလကတာေကျးဇးတငပါတယ။ အငမတနထးြခားတ

ကယေတ�အေတ�အ�ကကလညး�ကား�ပး�ပဆေတာ ဒါကေနာကခထား�ပး ေဆးေ�းချငပါတယ။

က�နေတာ ေလကစ�ပးေလလာြဖစခတာ စတဝငစားစရာေကာငးတယ။

Tomas Martin: I’m connected to a human rights organization as a researcher but

က�နေတာက လအခငအေရးအသငးတစခက သေတသနပညာ�ငဆေပမ

Tomas Martin: I have had a critical take on human rights for quite many years, especially in prisons and have been interested in finding out what happens when institutions like prisons get new rules, how do institutions adapt to new sets of rules.

တကယေတာ က�နေတာ လအခငအေရးအေ�ကာငးကေဝဖနသးသပေလ�တာ �ကာပါ�ပ။ က�နေတာစတဝငစားတာက

အကျဉးေထာငေတမာ စညးကမးအသစေတချမတတအခါ ေထာငက ဒါေတကဘယလနညးနေကာငယကျငသးသလ

ဆတာပါ။

Tomas Martin: It's quite obvious that the prisons change people and there's a lot of people who wants to change prisons.

ေထာငေ�ကာငလေတ ေြပာငးလသား�ငတယ၊ ေထာငေတက လေတာေတာများများက ေြပာငးလေစချငတယ။ ဒါကေတာ

သသာပါတယ။

Tomas Martin: And one of the ways to change prisons is to train the people, influence the way they behave but also offering new rules to institutions, to these bureaucracies. But another thing which I’ve grown increasingly interested is things, you introduce new things.

ေထာငက ေြပာငးလလရတ နညးတစနညးကေတာ ဝနထမးေတကသငတနးေပး�ပး လေတရ

အကျငကေြပာငးေပးတနညးေပါ။ ေနာကတစနညးကေတာ စညးကမးသစေတချမတတာ၊

အပချပေရးစနစသစေတချမတတာပါ။

Tomas Martin: New things are considered game changers like if you get CCTV cameras you’re supposed to improve security, if you get flushing toilets you’re supposed to improve sanitation, if you get gas stoves you get better nutrition. Things carry a lot of inherent power.

ေနာကပငးက�နေတာပစတဝငစားလာတာကေတာ ပစ�ညးဥစ�ာေတတပဆင�ပး ေြပာငးလေစတအေ�ကာငးပါ။

ဥပမာ ကငမရာေတတပလကရင လြခေရးပတးတကလာမယ။ ေရဆအမသာထားေပးလကရင

ကျနးမာေရးပေကာငးလာမယ။ Gas မးဖတပလကရင အဟာရေကာငးလာမယ။ ပစ�ညးေတမာ

ပကတခနအား��ကတယ။

Tomas Martin: But they are also folded into social context and appropriated by people in unique ways and they tell significant tales about power relations and institutions, especially in charged environment like prisons.

ဒအရာဝတ� ေတကလမ�ဆကဆေရးနပတသကလာတယ။ တချ�လေတက ဒါေတက တစနညးနညးနအပငးသမးတယ။

ဒါေတက လလချငးဆကဆရာမာ ခနအား�ပငဆငမ�ေတက ေဖါ ြပတယ။ အထးသြဖင ေထာငလ

ထလယ�လယေနရာမျးမာေပါ။

Tomas Martin: which are so characterized by the deprivation of things and also by the manifested control of physical boundaries.

ဒါေတက ပစ�ညးေပးေဝရာမာေရာ၊ ေနရာဆငရာကနသတချကေတမာေရာ ထငထင�ား�ားြမငရတယ။

Tomas Martin: It's important to understand how people react to material deprivation as we've heard from from Ko Nay

ပစ�ညးဥစ�ာေတမရ�ငရင လေတဘယလတ ြပန�ကသလ။ ကေနရ ြဖစရပမာက�နေတာတ ဒါက �ကားခရပါတယ။

Tomas Martin: how horrible it can be in solitary confinement, when your toilet bucket is overflowing but also how important it can be when a co-prisoner just very quickly give you a few plastic bags.

တကပတခရချနမာ မလ� ာအးလ�တာက ဘယေလာကဆးဝါးသလ။ အေဆာငတအကျဉးသားတစေယာကက

ကယကယကကာကယဖ

Tomas Martin: with which you can protect yourself, protect yourself from smell, protect yourself for hygiene

အနအသကေတကကာကယဖ ပလတစတစအတတစအတေပး�ငခရငေရာ။

Tomas Martin: It's important also how access to things can contribute to your sense of self.

ဒလေတး�ကညရင အရာဝတ� ေတကသးခငရတာဟာ ဘယေလာကအေရး�ကးလဆတာ နားလညမာပါ။

Tomas Martin: We know about the famous newspapers from the Burmese prisons. We know how people struggle to access writing materials, food stuff.

ပစ�ညးသးခင�မ�ဆတာက ကယအေပါကယဘယလြမငသလဆတာနလညး ဆငတယ။ �ကားဖး�ကမာပါ။

အကျဉးသားေတက ြမနမာအကျဉးေထာငေတမာ ေထာငသားေတ သတငးစာငတမတေန�ကပ၊ စာေရးကရယာေတ၊

စားစရာေတ ခကခကခခ�ာေဖ�ကပ၊

Tomas Martin: And this agency of Frankenstein-ing things out of plastic bags and nails that has been so significant for the political prisoner community.

ကယ�ကမ�ာကယဖနတး�ငဖ ပလတစတစအတေတ သမ�ေတသး�ပးမ�မြဖစတပစ�ညးေတက ဖနတးတာေတ၊ ဒါေတဟာ

�ငငေရးအကျဉးသားေတအတက အေရးပါလပါတယ။

Tomas Martin: And so this interest in things have been important for me in my research, both in relation to big things like infrastructures, the labor camp system of Myanmar,

ဒါေတက က�နေတာသေတသနအတက အေရး�ကးတယ။ �ကး�ကးမားမား

အေြခခအတြမစအရာဝတ� ေတတငမဟတဘး။ ြမနမာြပညက ေထာငသားေတကအလပ�ကမးခငးတစနစေတ၊

Tomas Martin: and also in terms of the architecture, this physical architectures. I’ve studied quite intensely the building of Oboe prison in Mandalay

ဒအေဆာကအအေတရ ဗသကာဆငရာအေနအထားေတ၊ က�နေတာ မ��ေလးက အးဖအကျဉးေထာငက

အထးဂ�ြပ�ပးေလလာခတယ။

Tomas Martin: which is sort of the model prison for the military period but also minor technologies, visiting rooms, bunk beds and ventilation, and this is what brought me onto air.

အးဖအကျဉးေထာငက စစအပချပေရးကာလမာ စြပေထာငတစခြဖစတယ။ ေနာက နညးပညာေတ၊

ေထာငတငးဧညခနးေတ၊ ထပဆငအပရာေတ၊ ေလဝငေလထကကရယာေတ၊ ဒါေတကေန ေနာကဆး ေလအထေပါ။

Tomas Martin: Essentially, it came to me as an interesting story in the sense that I was looking for people who have built prison in Myanmar to understand a bit of the architecture.

ဒါြဖစလာပကထးြခားတယ။ က�နေတာက တကယေတာ ေထာငအေဆာကအအေတအေ�ကာငးေမး�ကညချငလ

ေထာငေဆာကလပသေတက�ာေနတာ။

Tomas Martin: I came to know that there was actually a former prisoner who had been designing prisons from inside,

အဒကေန ေထာငေဆာကလပေပးေနတ အကျဉးသားေဟာငးတစေယာက�တာက သ�လာတယ။

အတငးလအေနနသကေထာငက ဒဇငးဆေပးေနတာ။

Tomas Martin: an engineer who was a key person in the 88 Uprising.in the famous Rangoon Institute of Technology, he's been in prison sentenced to life.

သက ၈၈အေရးေတာပမာအဖမးခရတ RIT အငဂျငနယာေကျာငးသား၊ တစသကတစက�နးေထာငကျေနတလ၊

Tomas Martin: Slowly but surely, he began to use his engineering skills in prison and got a particular role making estimates for prison design in the region.

တြဖညးြဖညး သအငဂျငနယာပငးဆငရာက�မးကျငမ�ေတေ�ကာင သဟာ ေဒသခေထာငေဆာကလပေရးစမကနးေတမာ

ကနကျစရတကခနမနးသတစေယာကြဖစလာတယ။

Tomas Martin: And I was fascinated by this story of being sucked into the production of prisons as a political prisoner.

ဘယလြဖစ�ပး သ ေထာငေဆာကလပေရးထပါသားရတာလဆတာက�နေတာသပသချငတယ။

Tomas Martin: I asked him if he had ever tried to influence the designs and he said no, it's very, very difficult. But he had done one thing - he had stealthily raised the roof of the walls

က�နေတာသကေမးတယ။ သပညာသး�ပး အကျဉးေထာငဒဇငးေတေြပာငးလကတာမျးေတလပ�ငခလားလ။

သပလပရခကတယလ သေြပာတယ။ ဒါေပမ သလပ�ငခတာတစခက ေထာငေခါငမးက မသမသာြမ�ငေပးခတာ။

Tomas Martin: to enable better access to free air for prisoners who struggle with cold, heat and breathing. So he had put two extra feet of wall

ဒလလပလကေတာ အပ၊ အေအးဒဏကရငဆငရတ၊ အသက��ကပတအကျဉးသားေတက ကညရာေရာကတယ။ သက

ေထာငနရက �စေပတးေပးလကတာ။

Tomas Martin: to improve the air quality. I found that was very, very fascinating

ေလေကာငးေလသန ပရေအာငေပါ။ ဒါက�ကားရတာသပ စတဝငစားဖေကာငးတယ။

Tomas Martin: In that sense that I began to understand how air is basically controlled in prison and how important it is to access air. I began to talk to former political prisoners about air and I was surprised.

ေထာငထမာ ေလဆတာ ကနသတထားတအရာြဖစတယ၊ ဒေတာ ေလရ�ဖက အေရးပါတယ။

�ငငေရးအကျဉးသားေတက ေမး�ကညေတာ က�နေတာေတာေတာအအားသငခရတယ။

Tomas Martin: How intensely they experienced both the joys and pains of air and especially relation to smell

သတရ ေပျာရ�ငတာနာကျငတာေတ၊ အထးသြဖင အနအသကနပတသကတဟာေတက ေလနအများ�ကးသကဆငတယ။

Tomas Martin: as we also heard from Ko Nay how institutions like prisons, both by design and default, expose prisoners to dehumanizing experiences of bad smell, of heat and cold.

ကေနေြပာြပခသလပါပ၊ ေထာငဆတာ သဒဇငးကက အနဆးေတ၊ အပဒဏအေအးဒဏေတန လေတက

လမဆနစာဆကဆဖ လပထားတာြဖစတယ။

Tomas Martin: But also have prisoner are taught to resist and live with heat and cold, often through meditation something that Liv has also studied.

အကျဉးသားေတကလညး အပ၊ အေအး၊ အနဆးေတကခခရငဆငဖ တရားထငတယ။

Tomas Martin: And how smell could also be activated against the system, how you could sort of hide contraband in shit buckets to protect your agency,

တချ�ကျေတာလညး အနဆးေတကသး�ပး အာဏာပငေတကြပနလညစားတယ။ ဥပမာ၊ မစငအးေတထမာ

သးခငမ�တအရာေတက ဝကထား�ကတယ၊ ဒနညးန ကယလပပငခငက ြပနတကယတယ။

Tomas Martin: olfactory protection. I thought that was very fascinating.

အနဆးသးတ ကာကယေရးစနစလေြပာ�ငတယ။ တကယ စတဝငစားစရာေကာငးပါတယ။

Tomas Martin: So my research show how air more recently in the democratic period has changed and become a frontline in prison reform and how international agencies have moved into Myanmar prisons and tried to reorganize prison space to improve air quality and protect prisoners from tuberculosis.

က�နေတာသေတသနအရဆရင ေလဟာ ဒမကေရစေခတမာ ေထာငြပြပငေြပာငးလေရးတကစစရ

ေ� �တနးြဖစလာပါတယ။ �ငငတကာအသငးအပစေတကလညး တဗေရာဂါကာကယေရးအေနန

ေလေကာငးေလသနပရေအာင ြမနမာေထာငေတက ြပနြပြပငဖ �ကးစား�ကတယ။

Tomas Martin: So in that sense, the study of air is quite significant to show how prisoners struggle with air

ဒေတာ ဒ��ေထာငက�ကညရင ေထာငတငးေလထေလလာေရးရ အ�စသာရကပ�ကးမားလာတယ။

Tomas Martin: how they tried to push back, how they tried to survive and how the management of air changes with different penal regimes.

အကျဉးသားေတကအာဏာပငေတကဘယလအာခ�ကလ၊ ဘယလ�ငသနရပတညဖ �ကးစား�ကသလ၊ လေြပာငးသားရင

ေလထထနးသမးေရးကဘယလေြပာငးလသားလ။

Tomas Martin: I think that that right now we are understanding that this is not a linear process and the political prisoners in Myanmar right now under the coup there most likely will be struggling with breath and smell and heat and cold

အခက�နေတာတနားလညလာတာက ဒေြပာငးလပဟာ ေြဖာငေြဖာငတနးတနးမဟတဘး။

အခဆ အာဏာသမး�ပးတေနာက �ငငေရးအကျဉးသားေတဟာ အသကဝဝ��ငေရးတ ၊ အနဆးေတ၊

အပအေအးဒဏေတကကငးေဝးဖ �နးကနေနရ�ပလ မနးလရတယ။

Tomas Martin: in similar ways as Ko Nay in the 1990s but maybe also in new ways, I mean the infrastructure of Myanmar prisons have improved.

ဒါဟာ ၁၉၉၀ေလာကတနးက ကေနရ ြဖစရပေတန ြပနသားတေနတယ။ ဒါေပမ တချ�ကျေတာလညး မတြပနဘး။

ြမနမာအကျဉးေထာငေတရ တညေဆာကဖ �စညးပေတက အနညးငယေတာ ေြပာငးလသား�ပေလ။

Tomas Martin: There's been installed mushroom fans and toilets, but the air is also been weaponized in new ways we've not seen before, we have drones flying around in prisons surveying prisoners’ every move.

မ�ပစပနကာေတနအမသာေတလညး�လာ�ပ။ ဒါေပမ အရငကတစခါမ မ�ကဖးခသလ ေလက

လကနကအေနနသးလာတာလညးေတ�ရတယ။ ေလထမာ drone ယာဉေတပျဝေန�ကတယ၊

အကျဉးသားေတရလ�ပ�ားမ�ေတက ခေရေစတငးကျ မတတမးတငထားတယ။

Tomas Martin: And we have guards most likely now armed with pepper sprays. So the politics of air is intense in prison that can teach us something about how people live and how they struggle to survive.

ေထာငေစာငေတဟာ အခဆ င�ပရညြဖနးလကနကေတ ကငေဆာငထားမယထငတယ။ ဒေတာ ေလနပတသကတ

လ�ပ�ားမ�ေတက ေရချနြမငလာတယ။ ဒါက ေလလာရင ေထာငထမာ လေတဘယလေန�က၊ �ငသန�ကသလဆတာ

သငခနးစာရ�ငတယ။

Tomas Martin: Of course also in the period of COVID-19, it's another exposure to danger and risk and vulnerability that is particularly significant right now.

အထးသြဖင ကဗစကာလအတငးမာ ေလဟာအ��ရယလညးြဖစ၊ အားနညးချကလညးြဖစတယ။ ပအေရးပါလာတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you so much, Tomas. I just find your work on air and the Burmese prison so fascinating. I know from my uncle's own account, he was also a political prisoner after 1990,

ေကျးဇးတငပါတယ။ Tomas ရ ြမနမာအကျဉးေထာငတငးေလထဆငရာ သေတသနကသပ

စတဝငစားဖေကာငးပါတယ။ ၁၉၉၀ မာ �ငငေရးအကျဉးသားြဖစခတ က�နမဥးေလးေြပာစကားအရဆ

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: that one of the main things he recalled, he would always mentioned was the stench of the hood that they will place on their heads.

သေကာငးေကာငးမတမတာက ေထာငးသားေတေခါငးေပါမာစပတ ေခါငးစပရ အနအသကပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: That's from the get-go when they come to capture them. I don't know if they use the hood as frequently after this coup, but that was something that they would use in 1988 and 1990. Thank you so much.

စစချငးလာဖမးတာန ဒါကသးတယ။ ဒအခ အာဏာသမး�ပးေနာက ဒလေခါငးစပေတသးလားေတာမသဘး။ ဒါေပမ ဒါက

၁၉၈၈၊ ၁၉၉၀ မာသးခ�ကတ ပစ�ညးတစခပ။ ေကျးဇးပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So Liv, I know that you've done some fascinating work on sort of auditory hallucinations that prisoners would experience.

Liv က အကျဉးသား အာ�ေမာကမား�ပး အသေတ�ကားတတတာပတသက�ပး

သပစတဝငစားဖေကာငးတသေတသနေတလပခတယလ သရတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Particularly when they're placed in solitary confinement, so I don't know if you can describe that work a little bit.

အထးသြဖင တကပတခရတအချနမာေပါ။ ဒအေ�ကာငးနညးနညး ေြပာြပေပးပါလား။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: And describe.in what situations auditory hallucinations are experience as threatening and in what cases they might actually be experienced as positive as for some other prisoners.

ဘယလအေြခအေနမျးေတမာ ဒအသဆငရာအာ�ေမာကမားမ�ေတက ေြခာကြခားစရာေတြဖစတတသလ။

ဘယအေြခအေနေတမာ တချ�အကျဉးသားေတအတက ဒါေတက သာယာတအေတ�အ�ကေတြဖစတတသလ။

Liv Gaborit: Thank you so much, I just want to quickly refer back to what Thomas had just said.

ေကျးဇးတငပါတယ။ ခနက Thomas ေြပာထားတအေ�ကာငးအရာဆ ြပနသားပါရေစ။

Liv Gaborit: Because I am working on a paper together with a researcher in Myanmar where we interviewed some of the people who've just been imprisoned during this coup.

က�နမက အခ ြမနမာသေတသတစေယာကနေပါငး�ပး စာတမးတစေစာငေရးေနပါတယ။ ဒအတက လတတေလာ

အာဏာသမးြခငးနပတသက�ပးေထာငကျခဖးတ လတစစက ေတ�ဆေမးြမနးခပါတယ။

Liv Gaborit: One of them talks about asphyxiation torture in the prison vents, about how so many people felt like they were being,

လတစေယာကက အသက�ပတခရသလ�ပစကတအေ�ကာငးက ေြပာြပတယ။ လေတာေတာများများက သတ

Liv Gaborit: Like that air was taken away from them on purpose, it's definitely still there.

�ေနကျေလက တစေယာကေယာကက တမငတကာ လယကယသားသလခစားရတအေ�ကာငးေြပာတယ။

Liv Gaborit: She also comments on the lack of COVID-19 precautions inside the prison. So that definitely continues to be an important topic.

ကဗစဆငရာကာကယေရးေတေလျာနညးတအေ�ကာငးလညးေြပာြပ�ကတယ။ ဒါလညး အေရး�ကးတကစ�တစခ။

Liv Gaborit: If we go to the auditory experiences, I tried to avoid the word hallucinations because hallucinations is something we use it in psychiatry to talk about people with mental illness.

အသ�ကားေယာငတကစ�ေြပာမယဆရင က�နမကေတာ အာ�ေမာကမားမ�ဆတ အေခါအေဝါကေ�ာင�ကဉချငတယ။

ဒါက စတေရာဂါ�တလေတအေ�ကာငးေြပာရင စတေရာဂါဆငရာပညာ�ငေတသးတစကားပါ။

Liv Gaborit: And I actually don't think that's what I see in the prisons. I think I see people in a sick environment, but I don't see sick people.

က�နမေတ� ြမငခတ ေထာငတငးကစ�ေတက ဒါေတမဟတဘးထငတယ။ သတေတက

ဆးဝါးတေနရာကေရာက�ေန�ကေပမ စတေရာဂါသညေတမဟတပါဘး။

Liv Gaborit: But what I did encounter when I did my fieldwork in Myanmar was that a lot of people would talk to me about hearing voices inside the prisons.

က�နမကငးဆငးေလလာတအခါမာ လေတာေတာများများက ေထာငထမာ အသေတ�ကားေယာငမတာက

ေြပာြပ�ကတယ။

Liv Gaborit: Even though it wasn't a topic I identified from the get-go. I didn't set out to write about voices, but people told me about these voices and I realized there was a pattern.

ဒါ ကနဥးမာ က�နမေလလာဖရညရယထားတာမဟတေတာ ဒအေ�ကာငးေရးဖ မစဉးစားမခဘး။ ဒါေပမ လေတက

က�နမက ဒ �ကားေယာငတအသေတအေ�ကာငးလာလာေြပာေန�ကေတာ၊ ဒမာ

တညတာေတ�ေနတာသတထားမလာတယ။

Liv Gaborit: Some people talked about voices as something that really created a lot of suffering. Some even driven to attempt suicide because of the voices and others would just say that “a spirit came to visit and he talked to me and then he left. It wasn't a big deal.”

တချ�က �ကားေယာငေနတအသေတေ�ကာင နာကျငတာေတကေြပာတယ။

ကယကယကေတာငသတေသချငတအထပတ။ တချ�ကျေတာလညး ဝညာဉတစခက အလညလာသားတယ။

ေနာကြပနသားတယ။ ဒါပါပလ ေြပာ�ကတယ။

Liv Gaborit: And I realized, there was a pattern in who would say what and who would have which relation to the voices.

ဘယလလေတက ဘာေြပာတတသလ၊ ဘယလလေတက ဒဝညာဉန ဘယလဆကဆတတသလဆတာေတက

�ကညလကေတာ တညတာေတေတ�ရတယ။

Liv Gaborit: And those who suffered the most were the people who were in solitary confinement, who sat there all alone with the voices and who didn't have any way to understand what is it that's actually happening to them.

အြပငးထနဆးခစားခ�ကရတလေတဟာ တကပတခရ�ပး ဒ�ကားေယာငတအသေတန

တစကယတညးပတမေနတလေတြဖစတယ။ ဘာေတြဖစေနလဆတာနားမလည�ငတလေတေပါ။

Liv Gaborit: Whereas the people who told me about the voices as visiting spirits, spirits that could actually help them develop and be more compassionate.

ဝညာဉကသတဆလာလညသားတယ၊ သတက ပမေမတ� ာထားတတလာေအာငသနသငေပးသားတယလ

ေြပာတလေတကျေတာ

Liv Gaborit: They were people who participated in meditation retreats inside the prisons. And in this meditation retreats they had a community, so it was a shared experience. When they heard the voices, they could just open their eyes and they could just see people around them and see everything is okay.

ေထာငထမာ တရားထငတသငတနးေတတကေနတလေတြဖစတယ။ ဒလအသငးအဖေတကျေတာ

အသငးအဝငးေလးတစခ�တယ။ အသေတ�ကားေယာငလာရင မျကစဖငလကရငသတအနားမာ

တြခားလေတကေတ�ရတယ၊ အားလးအေြခအေနေကာငးတယဆတာ သရတယ။

Liv Gaborit: And if they felt concerned, they could ask a teacher and the teacher would always say, almost no matter what, you come to the meditation teacher in this tradition of meditation, they always say it is okay, continue trying and you will succeed.

ေနာက သတစတပတာေတက တရားြပေနတဆရာေတကေမး�ကညရင၊ ဘာေ�ကာငတရားလာထငေနတာြဖစြဖစ

နညးြပေတကေတာ ဆက�ကးစားပါ၊ ေအာငြမငပါမယလ �စသမေလ�တယ။

Liv Gaborit: And this was enough to calm down the students and let them live with the voices in peace.

ဒါနပသတစတေအးသား�ပး �ကားေယာငေနတအသေတန သဟဇာတြဖစေအာငေနတတသား�ကတယ။

Liv Gaborit: But the people in solitary confinement, they didn't have this chance to check in with anybody, so the voice was kind of got their own life and really managed to drive them into suffering.

ဒါေပမ တကပတခေနရတလေတကျေတာ တြခားလေတန ေဆးေ�းလမရဘး။ ဒေတာ ဒအသေတက အသကဝငလာ�ပး

သတက ဒက�ေပးေရာ။

Liv Gaborit: So what I find super interesting is like how, how could we take some of that strength from the meditation communities and give it to those who have to suffer alone in solitary confinement.

က�နမစဉးစားမတာက တရားထငတအပစရအငအားေတက တကပတခရတ အထးကျနအကျဉးသားေတန

ဘယလမ�ေဝေပးလရမလဆတာပ။

Liv Gaborit: Because we are already seeing new political prisoners going into solitary confinement and we can expect many more will go into solitary confinement.

အခေတာင တကပတခရတ�ငငေရးအကျဉးသားသစေတက ေတ�ေနရ�ပ၊ ေနာကေနာငလညးတးလာဥးမာ။

Liv Gaborit: And of course we cannot use this knowledge to give them social relations inside solitary confinement, that's a given.

ဒအသပညာက တကပတခေနရတသေတက လမ�ဆကဆေရးေြပလညေစမာေတာမဟတဘး။ ဒါက�ငးပါတယ။

Liv Gaborit: But it's quite interesting that this research suggests if people know beforehand, that it's totally normal to hear voices when you go into solitary confinement, it's quite a normal reaction of your mind and that's something we see around the world.

ဒါေပမ စတဝငစားစရာတစခက၊ ဒသေတသနအရဆ၊ အကယ၍သာ အကျဉးသားေတက တကပတခရရင

အသေတ�ကားေယာငမာက �ကတငသနားလညထားရင၊ ဒါ စတရတန ြပနမ�ဆတာသေနရင၊ ဒါက

ကမ�ာတစဝနးမာလညးေတ� �ကရတယေလ။

Liv Gaborit: That can actually give people a sense of calm and it might even help them to live with those voices with less suffering.

ဒလသေနရင သတ စတ�ငမလာ�ငတယ၊ �ကားေယာငတအသေတနအတေနထငရလညး အသေတေ�ကာင

သပေသာကြဖစ�ကေတာမယမထငဘး။

Liv Gaborit: So I really hope that that knowledge can reach some of the people in Myanmar who will have to live through solitary confinement in the coming time.

ဒအသစတက ြမနမာြပညက တကပတခရမလေတက ရ�ေစချငတယ။

Liv Gaborit: And then another observation I have about, like why we talk about these embodied and sensory experiences

ဒလ ခ��ာကယနပတသကရာ အာ�ေတအေ�ကာငးေြပာရတ အေ�ကာငးေနာကတစခက

Liv Gaborit: is that there's quite a significant difference between the testimony of Ko Nay and what Tomas and Andrew and I will look into normally.

Tomas, Andrew နက�နမတ အ�မေလလာေနကျကစ�ေတန ကေနရထကဆချကေတက ေတာေတာေလးကာြခားလပါ။

Liv Gaborit: Because political imprisonment is an extraordinary experience. And these horrible experiences are far removed from the everyday life and unimaginable to many of us.

�ငငေရးအကျဉးသားြဖစရတယဆတာ အငမတနထြခားတ အေတ�အ�ကပါ။ ဒဆးဝါးလတြဖစရပေတက က�နမတလ

အလအများစအတကဆ ေနစဉြဖစရပေတနယဉရင စဉးစားလမရ�ငေလာကေအာငပါပ။

Liv Gaborit: But what we do with prison ethnography is that we try to look at the everyday life, so we look at what happens in between those very horrible experiences.

က�နမတက ဘာလပလဆေတာ ေနစဉြဖစရပေတက ြပနသးသပပါတယ။ ဒဆးဆးဝါးဝါးြဖစရပေတ�ကားထက

ကာလမာဘာေတြဖစခသလ။

Liv Gaborit: Like how you actually get through decades inside this person, how do you manage to cope not only in the hardest time but also in between. How do you go through the time? How do you do time?

ဆယ�စတာကာလက ဘယလနညးန အာငးတငးြဖတေကျာခ�ကသလ။ အဆးဝါးဆးအချနကာလေတတငမက၊

�ကားကာလေတမာေရာ ဘယလနညးန ကယကယကေြဖသမရပါသလ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you so so much Liv. Really, really fascinating work.

ေကျးဇးပါ။ အငမတနစတဝငစားဖေကာငးပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: The next question that I have is actually for Ko Nay who I’d like to circle back to.

ေနာကေမးခနးတစခေမးဖ ကေနဆြပနသား�ကရေအာင။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I noticed he turned off his camera, but hopefully he's still there.

ကငမရာခဏပတထားပရတယ။ �ေတာ�ေသးတယထငပါရ ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So Ko Nay I was wondering if you can describe your experience of time while you were in prison, so your story specifically of time in the sense that Andrew was talking about.

ကေန၊ Andrew ခဏကေြပာခတ ေထာငထမာ�ေနတနးက အချနကာလနပတသက�ပး ကေနဘယလခစားခရသလ။

ေြပာြပပါလား။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: What was your life like before prison and how did your memories of the past as well as your conceptualization that the future impact how you coped with the everyday situation in the in the prison environment?

ေထာငထမေရာငခငကာလဘဝအေ�ကာငးမတမတာေတ၊ ေနာကအနာဂတပရပေတ၊ �ပးေတာ ေနစဉြဖစရပေတက

ဘယလရငဆငခပါသလ။

[Interpretation continues. No Burmese subtitles.] Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: I think that's a very good question. The one thing that I distinctly remember was that when I was first thrown into prison, I was a 20 years old young person. So I had a lot of freedom, I had a lot of fun as a young person normally would. But once I got into prison, I noticed that I started to long for the same freedom that I had outside, so it resulted in me not being able to eat, not being able to drink. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: My prison term was nearly 20 years. If I started thinking about the past, I started to remember the fun time that I had with my friends and with my family. And suddenly I would feel suffocated. If I started to do the math, that's 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and 12 months a year, so all those things started to make me feel suffocated. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: So I decided that if I were to think about my past, it would be painful. If I were to think about my future, it'll be painful. So I have to concentrate on the present only in order to be able to remain alive. I told myself that I have to stay alive because I have to continue fighting for my country and for my people. That's how I managed to concentrate on my belief and my present and my belief in Buddhism, my faith. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: Before I went into prison, I had joined a meditation center so I knew how to meditate. When I was in prison, especially in my times of isolation, I continued to meditate and those times of

meditation became tonics, empowering feelings for me to stay alive. The other thing that kept me alive was my conviction that I was fighting for the truth so that kept me alive. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: Once I was able to concentrate on those two things, I was able to regain self-control. In other words, I was able to eat and drink water again. With that, I was able to tell myself that no matter what kind of torture I was subjected to, I can survive. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: If I were to think about the 15 years that I had to live through, right now I am amazed that I was able to live through that. But I firmly believe that it was because of my conviction and because of my meditation-based Buddhist faith. And those were the two things that managed to help me heal throughout those times. Thank you very much. Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you so much again for sharing your experiences. It was very enlightening for all of us. [Burmese subtitles resume.] Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So the question that I have for Kenneth.

က Kenneth ကလညးေမးချငပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I know that you're constantly reading and very well versed in both contemporary and classic Burmese literature.

က Kenneth က စာေတာေတာဖတတယ၊ ေခတေပါစာေပေရာ၊ ဂ��ဝငစာေပေရာ

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Contemporary Burmese literature is actually really quite replete with prison autobiographies, short stories, novels and poetry written by former political prisoners, many creative individuals, some of the most creative individuals I would say,

ေခတေပါစာေပမာ အကျဉးသားအတ� ပ�တ� ေတ၊ အကျဉးသားေဟာငးေတေရးထားတဝတ� တေတ၊

ကဗျာေတအများ�ကးပါပါတယ။ အေြပာငေြမာကဆးအ�ပညာသညေတ ပနးချဆရာတစချ� ရလကရာေတပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Artists, novelists, and journalists were also imprisoned by the military throughout the years. Can you describe this literary tradition of prison autobiographies and novels?

စာေရးဆရာေတ၊ စာနယဇငးသမားေတလညး �စအဆကဆကမာ အာဏာ�ငေတက ေထာငချတာခခ�ကရတယ။ ဒ

ေထာငတငးဆငရာ စာေပေတ အတ� ပ�တ� ေတအေ�ကာငးနညးနညးေြပာြပပါလား။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: And how detained writers and poets in Burma attempted to satiate their yearnings to create while in prison as well as to communicate with the outside world?

အဖမးခထားရတ စာေရးဆရာ၊ ကဗျာဆရာေတက သတရ ဖနတးချငစတန အြပငေလာကနဆကသယချငတဆ��က

ဘယလ ေြဖသမ�ကသလ။

Kenneth Wong: I remember reading about these things from the autobiography of Hanthawaddy U Win Tin, the famous former political prisoner.

က�နေတာ ဒအေ�ကာငးေတက နာမည�ကး �ငငေရးအကျဉးသားေဟာငး ဟသာဝတဥးဝငးတငရ

ေထာငတငးအထ� ပ�တ� မာဖတဖးတယ။

Kenneth Wong: Now no longer with us unfortunately. He was known for insisting on wearing the blue prison shirt even after he was freed because he felt that

အခေတာ သ မ�ေတာပါဘး။ ေထာငကလတသားေပမ ေထာငအကၚျြပာေလးကဆကဝတခတသ၊

သကယတငေထာငကလတသားတာေတာင

Kenneth Wong: because he felt that that was a sign of solidarity with people who was still in prison and I remembered that he talked about finding plastic sheets and

ကျနရစခတ ေထာငထကရေဘာေတန တစေသးတညးတစသားတညးပါဆတာြပချငလပါတ။

က�နေတာမတမတာကေတာ သက ရရာပလတစတစရကေတက စက� အြဖစသးခတယ။

Kenneth Wong: turning them into writing instruments and fighting sharp nails or sharp pieces of rock.

စာေရး�ငဖ ခလးအခ�နေတ၊ သမ�ေတက ေရးစရာပစ�ညးအြဖစသးခတယ။

Kenneth Wong: in order to be able to scribble on these because they weren't allowed to have books or pen and papers like how Ko Nay had testified.

သတက ကေနေြပာခသလပ ေထာငထမာ စာအပထားခငမရခ၊ ခတန စာရကသးခငမရခလတ။

Kenneth Wong: And that was how he managed to smuggle out his famous poem called “Tiger” about his indomitable spirit.

ဒလနညးနသဟာ သရ “ကျားရ”ဆတ ကဗျာက ခး�ပး အြပငပေပး�ငခတယ။ ေထာငကျေနေသာလညး သမခချငစတက

အရငလပဆတကဗျာပါ။

Kenneth Wong: His spirit that he was determined to fight on. And it was quite fascinating because to me it seems like they wanted to let the outside world know that even in prison,

ေ� �ဆကေတာလနေနဥးမယ ဆတ ကဗျာပါ။ ဒါအငမတန စတဝငစားဖေကာငးတယ။ က�နေတာအတကေတာ ဒါဟာ

ေထာငထေရာကေနတာေတာင သတ စတမေလ�ာ အ�� းမေပးေသးဘးဆတာ

Kenneth Wong: They were not broken yet, like Ko Nay said, you know they were determined to show that they wouldn't surrender, they wouldn't give up.

အြပငကလေတက သေစချငတယဆက ေဖါ ြပပါတယ။ ကေနေြပာခသလပ သတကဘယေလာကဖ�ပေနေန၊

ဘယလအခကအခ�ေနေန ဒးမေထာကဘးဆတာက ြပချငတာပါပ။

Kenneth Wong: No matter what kind of hardship and torture they were subjected to, that was something very inspiring to me. His story was just one of the many

က�နေတာအတက ဒါဟာ အားကျဖေကာငးတ စနမနာတစခပါ။ သဇာတလမးက အများ�ကးထက တစပဒပါ။

Kenneth Wong: that shows that they used many ingenious ways of finding family members who are meeting them or packages that are going out to the outside world, to smuggle out their words, their literary creations.

သတဟာ လာေတ�တမသားစေတ၊ အြပငြပနေရာကသားမ အထပအပးေတကေနတစဆင သတရ စကားေတ၊ စာေတက

ြပငပေလာက မေရာကေရာကေအာင ြပနပဖ နညးလမးအမျးမျးသးခ�ကတယ။

Kenneth Wong: So that it'll go out and live on in the outside world, even though they are trapped in that six by eight cell.

သတအကျဉးကျေနစဉမာေတာင၊ ေြခာကေပ၊ �စေပေလာက�တအေဆာငေလးထမာ ပတမေနတာေတာင ဒလနညးန

သတ အ�ပညာေတက အြပငေလာကြပနပေပးခ�ကတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you so much Ko Kenneth. There was of course the famous case including the poet who you described of them actually having their sentence increased by seven years

ေကျးဇးပါ က Kenneth ေရ။ ဒကဗျာဆရာေတ ဒလလပလကလ သတရေထာငဒဏက

ခ�စ�စထပတးေပးခတာေတလညး သာဓက�ခတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: because they smuggled out several I think newsletters and volumes of poetry while in prison.

သတက ေထာငကျေနစဉမာ စာေစာငေတ၊ ကဗျာေပါငးချပစာအပေတခးထတလ ဒဏခတတာြဖစမယလ

က�နမထငတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So we will be going until probably close to 12:30pm.

က�နမတ ၁၂ နာရခအထေလာကဆကေဆးေ�း�ကရေအာင။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Because I do have one more question for our panelists and it's rare for us to be able to gather for the conversation like this so we will continue to go.

ဒလ စကားဝငးမာ လစတကစ�တာအေတာ�ားတယ။ ဒေတာ ေနာကေမးခနးေလးတစခေမးချငတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: For those of you who have to leave, for those of you in the audience who have to leave.

ပရသတထမာ ဆကနားေထာငဖ အချနမ�လ ထကရေတာမလေတကလညး အသေပးချငတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: This will be posted on the UC Berkeley Center for Southeast Asia Studies website so you can catch the remainder of it if you have to leave now.

ဒေဆးေ�းပက �ပသသငးထား�ပး ဘာကေလတက� သလ အေ� � န အေ� �ေတာငအာ�ေလလာေရးဌာနရ website မာ

တငေပးပါမယ။ ဒေတာ မ�ကညမလကတ ကျနတအပငးက ေဆးေ�းပ�ပးတေနာက လာ�ကည�ကပါလ ဖတေခါပါရေစ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I encourage audience members to begin, as we wrap this up and I post my last question, to begin posting their questions on the chat if you have as we transition to the Q&A with the panelists. So you can start doing that now.

က�နမတေဆးေ�းတာေတက အဆးသတေတာမာြဖစလ ပရသတထက ေမးချငတေမးခနး�ရငလညး ပ �ကပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: The last question that I had is actually for everyone, for all our panelists and it's a very broad question and it doesn't necessarily have to encompass just Myanmar.

ေနာကဆးေမးခနးက အားလးအတကပါ။ ကျယြပနတေမးခနးပါ။ ြမနမာြပညအေ�ကာငးသးသနေမးတာမဟတပါဘး။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: But the question is.

ေမးခနးက

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: How does mass political imprisonment in any given society, for Myanmar or elsewhere, shape the subjectivity of its civilians? That’s intentionally broad so I don't know if anyone's going to take that on.

လေတက အစလကအြပလကေထာငချရင တငးသြပညသားေတရ ကယပငခစားချကေတအေပါ

ဘယလအကျးသကေရာကပါသလ။ တမငတကာ ကျယကျယြပန ြပနေမးလကတာပါ။ ဘယသေြဖချငပါသလ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Yes, Andrew.

Andrew, ေြပာပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I would love to take this question on, at least make a start.

က�နေတာဒေမးခနးက ေြဖချငပါတယ။ စေြဖ�ကညမယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Because what I hear the question as is, it's actually a very Myanmar-specific question.

က�နေတာအြမငအရ ဒေမးခနးဟာ ြမနမာြပညအတကကကေမးသလြဖစေနတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Even though it doesn't have to be, I hear it as such. So what does the arrest and detention of thousands of people

ဒလမရညရယရငေတာငမ၊ က�နေတာနားထမာ ဒလ�ကားမတယ။ ဒေတာ လေတကေထာငချဖမး�ပး အကျဉးချမယဆရင

Andrew M. Jefferson: do to society and to the relationships between citizens or subjects and the state? This is kind of what our research project is about so it really appeals to me.

လအသငးအဝငးကဘယလ ထခကေစသလ။ ြပညသေတန �ငငေတာတရဆကဆေရးက ဘယလေြပာငးလသားမလ။

ဒါက က�နေတာတရ သေတသနလပရပနသကဆငေနပါတယ။ ဒေတာက�နေတာ စတဝငစားတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Liv and Thomas and others can chime in here. I think there are at least six things. One is that it destroys trust and undermines the legitimacy of the regime.

Liv ရယ၊ Thomas ရယ၊ ေနာကကျနတသေတလညး ဝငေြပာချင ေြပာ�ကလမမယ။ အနညးဆး ၆ ချက �ပါတယ။

တစခက လေတ ယ�ကညမ�ေပျာကကယသားမယ၊ အာဏာ�သေတ တရားမဝငတာ ပေပါလငလာမယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: Another is it reveals the potential, that is always there, in law and the institutions of justice to be violent.

ေနာကတစခက တရားဥပေဒစးမးေရးေဆာငရကေနတအဖ �အစညးေတမာ အ�ကမးဖကတတတအေလအထက

အ�မ�ေနတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: We don't always notice that. And another thing is, and I should be careful not to predict too much, but I think it's something that will exhaust.

ဒါက က�နေတာတ အ�မတမးေတာ သတမထားမ�ကဘး။ ေနာကတစခက ... က�နေတာသပေဟာကနးမထတမဖ

သတချပရမယ၊ ဒါေပမ ဒါဟာ ေလာငစာကနသားမအရာလထငတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I'm fascinated with the idea of ideas about exhaustion and foreboding. I think there is a risk that it will wear people down and wear them out.

က�နေတာက ကနခနးတတတအရာ၊ အရပအေရာငြပေနတအရာေတက သပစတဝငစားတယ။ လေတ

တြဖညးြဖညးေြခကနလကပမးကျ�ပး စတကနသားမ အလားအလာ�တယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: This idea of what future can we anticipate under these kind of conditions. So life, to go back to this discussion about time, life becomes a time of threat as well as a time of promise,

ဒါဆ ဘယလအနာဂတမျးက ေမ�ာကးလရမာလ။ အချနနပတသကတစကားက ြပနဆကမယဆ ဘဝက

ြခမးေြခာကမ��ကးမားတအချန၊ အခငအေရးလညး�တအချနြဖစလာတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: especially if you're a young person protesting.

အထးသြဖငဆ��ြပေနတလငယေတအတကေပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: And another important aspect is on the one hand, it reveals the strength of the military in that they can do what they are doing.

ေနာက အေရး�ကးတတစချကက၊ တစဘကမာလညး စစတပက သတအခလလပ�ငတာေ�ကာင သတအားသာတာက

ြပသ�ငတယ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: But also, I think it reveals the weakness of the military. The fact that the military cannot tolerate dissent, they cannot stand critique. They somehow need to be loved unconditionally.

ေနာကတစဘကကလညး စစတပက ဘယေလာကချချာလဆတာသသာတယ၊ သတက စနေခါလာရငသညးမခ�ငဘး၊

အေဝဖနမခ�ငဘး။ အေ�ကာငးတစခခေ�ကာင ြပညသဆက �ခငးချကမအချစေမတ� ာက ေတာငတေနသလပ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I mean, I think that's not the sign of a strong institution. That's a sign of fragile and vulnerable institution. And the final point, which is a bit more positive and upbeat.

ဒါဟာ အငအားေတာငတငးတ အဖ �အစညးရ လက�ဏာမဟတပါဘး။ အငအားနညးတ၊ မခငမာတ အဖ �အစညးရ

လက�ဏာပါ။ ေနာကဆးတစချကက အားတကစရာေလးပါ။

Andrew M. Jefferson: I'm hoping that what is going on can also awaken people to action, animate things, politicize a new generation. And I think there's definitely evidence to that effect

အခြဖစပျကေနတာေတကြမင�ပး လေတ တစခခလပချငလာ�ကမယလ က�နေတာထငတယ။ ေနာကမျးဆကသစတစခ

�ငငေရး�း�ကားလာမယ၊ လ�ပ�ားချငလာမယ၊

Andrew M. Jefferson: amongst the protest movement, the civil disobedient movement and different things. So that was my sort of quick five-point take on your very broad and wonderful question.

ဒဆ��ြပတာေတ၊ CDM လ�ပ�ားမ�ေတက ဒါက သာဓက ြပေနပါတယ။ ဒါက ဒအငမတနေကာငးတေမးခနးန ပတသက�ပး

က�နေတာေြပာချငတ ၅ ချကပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you so much Andrew. Anyone else?

ေကျးဇးပါ။ ေနာကဘယသေြဖချငလ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Yes, Liv.

ေြပာပါ Liv.

Liv Gaborit: I want to add that it's not only political imprisonment, it's like the whole justice sector in Myanmar has a lot of problems.

က�နမြဖညေြပာချငပါတယ။ �ငငေရးအကျဉးသားေတေထာငကျေနတာတငမကဘး၊

ြမနမာြပညတရားဥပေဒစနစ�ကးတစခလးက ြပဿနာအများ�ကး�တယ။

Liv Gaborit: I remember when I first moved to Myanmar and started doing field work, I was so scared because I wasn't registered correctly where I lived. And I knew that the sentence for this, that I risked, was several years of prison.

က�နမမတမေသးတယ။ သေတသနလပဖ ပထမဆးြမနမာြပညေရာကခါစက က�နမက ေနတေနရာမာ

မနမနကနကနမတပတငမထားလ ဒအတကအေရးယခရရင ေထာငတစ�စ၊ �စ�စေလာကကျ�ငတာက�နမသတယ။

Liv Gaborit: But then after I stayed in Myanmar for a longer time, I realized that there were so many old absurd laws, that I could always go to prison for something.

ဒါေပမ ေနာကေနတာ�ကာလာေတာ ဒလ အဓပ�ာယမ�တ ဥပေဒေဟာငးေတအများ�ကး�တယဆတာသလာတယ။

အေ�ကာငးတစခခေ�ကာငအချနမေရး ေထာငကျ�ငတယ။

Liv Gaborit: I could go to prison for standing on a dark road after sundown. I could go to prison for again living places where I couldn't be registered because the laws asked for documents that didn't exist.

ညဘကေနဝင�ပးေနာက ေမာငတေနရာမာရပေနရင ေထာငကျ�ငတယ။ ဥပေဒအရလအပတစာရကစာတမးေတက

က�နမဆမာမ�လမတပတငလမရတေနရာမာ ေနေနလလညး က�နမ ေထာငကျ�ငတယ။

Liv Gaborit: Or I could be arrested for doing some of the interviews I did with people from groups that were deemed to be terrorists.

အ�ကမးဖကသမားလသတမတထားတလအပစထကသေတက ေတ�ဆေမးြမနးမလလညး အဖမးခရ�ငတယ။

Liv Gaborit: But at some point, I just, like Andrew says, there's some exhaustion but there's also some like absurdity. I just I couldn't keep being scared.

ခနက Andrew ေြပာသလပ။ ေနာကေတာ တစချနမာ စတကနသားတယ။ ဒလ �းေပါေပါဟာေတစဉးစား�ပး

အ�မေ�ကာကရ �ေနလ မြဖစေတာလပါ။

Liv Gaborit: And it's the same reality that many people in Myanmar live under, like the people who work for organizations who cannot be registered correctly because of the way the state works.

ဒအေြခအေနက ြမနမာြပညကလေတာေတာများများရငဆငေနရတအေြခအေနပါ။ ဥပမာ အစးရရလပပကငပေ�ကာင

သတအလပလပေနတ အဖ �အစညးေတက မတပတငလမရဘး။

Liv Gaborit: The people who cannot do their work legally for so many reasons. And even if you do abide by the law or try to, the state can always make up a charge, whether they say you have walkie talkies or that you broke COVID-19 restrictions.

အေ�ကာငးအမျးမျးေ�ကာင အလပက တရားဝငလပလမရတလေတ။ ဥပေဒနအညေနရငေတာငမ အစးရက

တစခခလပ�ကဖနတး�ပး တရားဆ�ငတယ။ Walkie Talkie ပငတာတ ၊ ကဗစဆငရာစညးမျဉးေတက

ချးေဖါကတယတ။

Liv Gaborit: As we saw they just did to both on Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint. There's always that risk and that just completely undermines any trust in the justice sector.

သတ ေဒါေအာငဆနးစ�ကညန သမ�တဥးဝငးြမငကလပလကတာကပ�ကညေလ။ ဒါမျးေတက လေတ

တရားဥပေဒစရငေရးက အယအ�ကညပျကေစတယ။

Liv Gaborit: And it also means that when you speak about rule of law, that doesn't really make sense, before you have the legal reforms in place to actually create a democratic society.

ဒါဘာကေဖါ ြပလဆရင၊ တရားဥပေဒစးမးေရးအေ�ကာငးေြပာချငရင ပထမအရင

ဒမကေရစစနစကျတအသငးအဝငးကဖနတးဖလတယဆတာပ။

Liv Gaborit: So it also means for the democracy movement right now, that if they really want to change, if they really want the Tatmadaw authoritarianism out of the state of Myanmar in the future,

ဆလတာက အခဒမကေရးစရ�ေရးလပေနတလေတက တကယက ြမနမာြပညရအနာဂတမာ ဒမကေရစစနစလချငရင

Liv Gaborit: it's not only the Tatmadaw. It's also the whole system that we need to reform to actually be able to create that society.

တပမေတာန အာဏာ�ငေတက ဖယ�ားရမယ။ ေနာက လအသငးအဝငးသစတညေထာငဖ စနစတစခလးက ြပငရမယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Yes, Thomas.

Thomas, ေြပာပါ။

Tomas Martin: I think following up on what Liv said,

Liv ေြပာေနတာက ြဖညေြပာရရင

Tomas Martin: one thing that one could maybe imagine that mass political imprisonment would do is that

တစခခနမနးလရတာက လေတက ဒလ အစလကအြပလကေထာငချေနမယဆရင

Tomas Martin: there would be some solidarity with people in prison. And they would be attention to this particular institutions, very dark sides, not just for political prisoners.

အကျဉးသားေတပ စညးလးလာမယ။ ဒစနစရ ေမာငမကခါးသးမ�ေတက လေတပ သတြပလာမယ။

Tomas Martin: But what do we need prison for in society? And what role should we play?

�ငငေရးအကျဉးသားအေ�ကာငးေတတငမက၊ ဘာြဖစလ ေလာက�ကးမာ ေထာငေတထားေနရတာလ။ ေထာငရ

အခနးက�ကဘာလ။

Tomas Martin: There's this hope I think for people work on prisons like me, that political imprisonment also means that a lot of elites suddenly end up in prison.

ေထာငေတကေလလာေနတက�နေတာတလလမျးေတကေတာ ေမ�ာလငချက�တယလေတးမတယ။

�ငငေရးဖမးဆးမ�ေတေ�ကာင အထကတမးလ�ာတစချ�ေတလညး ေထာငကျသား�ငတယ။

Tomas Martin: And they come out sometimes, of course scarred.

တစချ�ေတက ဒဏရာေတန အြပငြပနေရာကလာတယ။

Tomas Martin: But sometimes also in a position to take over a political control.

တစခါတေလ သတက �ငငေရးအရ လပပငခငေတလညးရလာတတတယ။

Tomas Martin: And there is something about the potential for mass political imprisonment to also change the prison.

လေတက အစလကအြပလကေထာငချရင ေထာငလညး ေြပာငးလသားတတတယ။

Tomas Martin: And we've not seen that so much in the past. And unfortunately we see this in many countries because mass political imprisonment is not unusual. Many contexts and many transitional

အရငကေတာ ဒါေတက သပမေတ� ခရဘး။ ဒါေပမ စတမေကာငးစရာကေတာ �ငငေတာေတာများများမာ လအများစက

�ငငေရးအရဖမးဆးတာေတေတ�ရတယ။ ဒါဟာ သပအထးဆနးေတာဘး။ အေ�ကာငးအမျးမျးေ�ကာင

Tomas Martin: governments which are populated by former political prisoners tend to forget the prison.

အသငကးေြပာငးေရးကာလအစးရေတေတာေတာများများမာ �ငငေရးအကျဉးသားေဟာငးေတပါေနတာ ေတ�ရတယ။

Tomas Martin: So I think this is more on an aspirational note. Maybe this time, people of Myanmar,

ဒေတာ အားတကစရာလညး�ပါတယ။ ဒတစေခါက

Tomas Martin: when this struggle hopefully leads to a new beginning, would remember the prison.

ဒါေတ�နးကနးလ �ပးသားရင ေနာက နဒါနးသစပျးမယဆရငေထာငတငးအေတ�အ�ကေတက မေမ�ကပ

Tomas Martin: And reap some from this potential of this negative situation to change this institution for the better, as Liv said, more fundamentally.

အဆးထက အေကာငးဆသလ၊ Liv ေြပာခသလပ ေထာငေတက ပေကာငးလာေအာင

ေအာကေြခကေနြပြပငေြပာငးလေပးဖ လပါတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you so much, Thomas. Ko Nay or Ko Kenneth?

ကေနန က Kenneth ေရာ ေြပာစရာ�ပါသလား။

Kenneth Wong: I can probably translate for him and see if Ko Nay has any kind of comment. So the question is basically about the impact on society from mass incarceration. Did I get it right? Is that the essence of it?

က�နေတာ ဘာသာြပနေပး�ပး ကေန ြဖညေြပာစရာ�လားေမး�ကညပါမယ။ ေမးခနးကေတာ လေတက အစလက

အြပလကဖမးဆး အကျဉးချတအတက လအသငးအဝငးအေပါဘယလ ဘယလအကျးသကေရာကမ��မလ။

[interpretation continues. No Burmese subtitles.] Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: First thing is the one of the unforeseen advantages of when you do this kind of massive incarceration, in the people's mind they come to realize that the army and the police and all the institutions that are supposed to be protecting the public are no longer serving the same purpose anymore.

Kenneth Wong: So first is unquestionably the fear instill in the people's mind, that they fear that they have lost their future, they no longer have security. But as a consequence of that, they may also be inspired to take up arms and uproot that system that is giving them that insecurity. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: The other bad consequence is that if it continues the same way, people will start to undoubtedly fear the army and the police. So in the future when the system is uprooted and we form a new government, it is critical that we somehow figure out a way for the public to change this mindset. [Burmese subtitles resume.] Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Thank you so much, Ko Nay, for the response. Ko Kenneth, I don't I don't know if you care.

ေြဖေပးတာ ေကျးဇးပါ ကေန။ က Kenneth ေရာ ဘာေြပာချငသလ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Ko Kenneth, I don't if you care to respond as a Burmese American and as someone who grew up in Burma.

ြမနမာ�ငငမာ �ကးြပငးလာတလတစေယာကအေနန။

Kenneth Wong: I think all the researchers have spoken eloquently about it, so I don't feel like I need to add a lot more.

သေတသေတအားလးက ေဝေဝဆာဆာ ေဆးေ�းသား�ပးပါ�ပ၊ က�နေတာအများ�ကးြဖညေြပာစရာမလပါဘး။

Kenneth Wong: But I do remember that one of my classmates, my former classmate in university day, was in his youth, he was sort of like a happy-go-lucky, come from a well-to-do family.

ဒါေပမ က�နေတာ တက� သလေကျာငးေနဘကသငယချငးတစေယာကက သားသတရမတယ။ ငယငယတနးက သက

အေပျာ�ကကတယ။ လကထအသငးအဝငးကြဖစတယ။

Kenneth Wong: All he was interested in was wearing elastic jeans and imported shirts and showing off on the street.

သ အသားကပဂျငးေဘာငးဘေတဝတတယ၊ �ငငြခားအကၚျေတဝတတယ၊ လမးမာ �� းြပတယ၊

ဒါေတေလာကပစတဝငစားတယ။

Kenneth Wong: But somehow he got involved in ‘88 and he was thrown into prison. And when he came out of prison,

ဒါေပမ အေ�ကာငးတစခေ�ကာင သ ၈၈ ခ�စေတာလနေရးမာ ပါ�ပး ေထာငကျသားတယ။ ေထာငကလတလာေတာ

Kenneth Wong: he became politically awakened and he became one of the elected MPs of the NLD Party so that speaks to the idea of prison as a transformative experience, something that gives them street credit if they want to go into politics.

�ငငေရး�း�ကားသတစေယာကြဖစလာတယ။ ေရးေကာကပမာ NLD ြပညသကယစားလယတစဥးြဖစလာတယ။ ဒါဟာ

ခနကေြပာတ ေထာငတငးအေတ�အ�ကေ�ကာင ဘဝေြပာငးသားတာက သကေသြပတာပါပ။

ဒ�ငငေရးအကျဉးသားအေတ�အ�ကက �ငငေရးေလာကထေြခလမးစချငရင မ�မြဖစတ မတေကျာကလြဖစေနတယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Street cred is a nice word for that. Thank you, I hadn't thought about it in that context before.

မတေကျာကလေခါတာ ေကာငးလကတယ။ ေကျးဇးပါ။ က�နမဒလ မေတးမခဘး။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: We will just do one question because we're over time and start winding things down.

အချနေကျာေန�ပ၊ အဆးသတရေတာမာြဖစလ ပရသတေမးခနးတစခပ ေြဖဖအချနရပါမယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: The question is from Hannah Russell and she says “we have been seeing the same tactics that have been used by the previous military regimes of midnight raids,

Hannah Russel ရေမးခနးပါ။ အခ စစတပကလပေနတ ညသနးေခါငအမတကဖမးတာေတ၊

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: wide-scale arrests, protests crackdowns, and torture and violence committed on mass on civilians.”

ဆ��ြပသေတက အစလကဖမးတာေတ၊ �ဖခတာေတ ြပညသေတက �ပစကတာေတက

အရငကလညးသးခတနညးေတပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I would like to ask the whole panel, “If the Tatmadaw hasn't changed and the institutions of prison and violence as tools of control haven't changed, is the movement that now opposes it sufficiently different to the previous resistant movements to prevail?” So that's actually a good question to end things on. Any takers?

တပမေတာက အချးမြပငေသးဘး၊ ေထာငစနစက မေြပာငးလေသးဘး၊ အ�ကမးဖကစနစသးတာလညး

မေြပာငးလေသးဘး။ ဒေတာ အခေတာလနေရးလ�ပ�ားမ��ကးက ေအာငြမင�ငေလာကေအာင ယခငကလ�ပ�ားမ�ေတန

သသသာသာကာြခားပါသလား။ သပေကာငးတ ေမးခနးပါ။ ဘယသေြဖချငသလ။

[Interpretation follows. No Burmese subtitles.]

Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: One of the main differences in ’88, we had no cell phone, we had no digital cameras, with no portable phone. The IT technology was barely developed at the time. So even though the researchers and the international observers said about 3000 people died, according to their eyewitnesses and people who actually witnesses, they say that. The death toll was probably in the tens of thousands. Kenneth Wong: But the difference is in 2021, there were cell phones. And every arrest, every midnight raid, every detainee that ended up being dead, with the family claiming the corpse in the next morning, all of those are recorded. So right now, we know that there are about 4000 people who have been arrested and nearly 800 have died. Kenneth Wong: And among them about 50 of them are children under the age of 18. And we also know about the case of the youngest child who was a girl who was killed in her own home, shot while she was racing to her father's embrace in her own homes. So those kinds of evidence, when the international community demands it to prosecute the guilty parties, we are able to provide them. Nay Tin Myint: Kenneth Wong: The difference this time is that the younger generation is leading this fight. Generation Z is very well connected with the international community, the IT technologies are much better. And the generation is connected with the international student bodies and other younger people from across Southeast Asia so we have things like the multi-alliance that draws support from the international community in the region. Kenneth Wong: And we are also hearing words of encouragement from the UN leaders and international leaders who are giving us words of encouragement. So that is why the younger generation is fully convinced that the revolution is going to prevail. They are continuing to fight with the conviction that we will prevail, and I believe in the same thing. [Burmese subtitles resume.] Seinenu Thein Lemelson: I think that's a good note to end things.

ဒါေလးနပ အဆးသတရင ေကာငးမယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: So thank you so much to all my panelists. To Andrew, Liv, Tomas

ေဆးေ�းေပးခသများက ေကျးဇးတငပါတယ။ Andrew, Liv, Tomas

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Kenneth and especially Nay Tin Myint for giving his testimonial sharing that with us today.

�ပးေတာ က Kenneth, အထးသြဖင ကယအေတ�အ�ကေတကြပနေြပာြပေပးတ ကေနကပါ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: This, as I said, will be posted on to the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the UC Berkeley Center for Southeast Asia Studies websites and

ေြပာထားသလပ ဒအစအစဉက

�ပသသငးထား�ပး UCLA ရ အေ� �ေတာငအာ�ေလလာေရးဌာန၊ သးခပါ�င UC Berkeley ရ

အေ� �ေတာငအာ�ေလလာေရးဌာန website မာ

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: it will be part of a series of teach-ins, as I said, on the Burmese democracy movement and specifically political forms of violence that take place in Burma. Thank you so much to everyone.

ြမနမာ ဒမကေရစလ�ပ�ားမ�န �ငငေရးအ�ကမးဖကမ�မတတမးဆငရာ သင�ကားပချေရးအစအစဉထက တစပဒအြဖစ

တငေပးထားပါမယ။

Seinenu Thein Lemelson: Many, many thanks, thank you.

ေကျးဇးအများ�ကးတငပါတယ။