The Doors Of Repression
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“Suddenly you have this keyhole into a gulag existence that a lot of [Burmese] people lived in, and then [just as] suddenly it’s gone! Almost to the point where you think… ‘Did I really see that!?’"
Nic Dunlop, author of the book, Brave New Burma, recounts how an unexpected encounter in Bangkok changed the course of his life. It began in 1992, when he ran out of money traveling in Thailand, and was offered a free place to stay by the Jesuit Refugee Service; it was there that he met some Burmese student exiles who had fled the country during the 1988 uprising. Among this group was Aung Zaw, who would soon go on to found The Irrawaddy. “It sparked my interest,” Dunlop recalls. “I felt profoundly out of place, and that I needed to understand and learn more.” As he describes, his initial “ignorance” gave way to curiosity, which developed into a sense of deep empathy. This fueled forward decades of commitment that Dunlop carried with him as a photojournalist, documenting one of the world’s most repressive regimes, with its invisible systems of control, and the stories of its victims.
Dunlop released Brave New Burma in 2013, just as the transition was underway, primarily with Europeans and North Americans in mind, to educate them about oppression and what it looks like. Despite receiving little attention upon its release, the book has only grown more relevant since the 2021 coup.
After his encounter with those Burmese students in 1992, Dunlop crossed into Karen State from Thailand, visiting refugee camps and meeting insurgents. Although the experience was profound, he recalls how at that time, he didn’t have much of contextual understanding yet for what he observed. Then in 1995, he entered Myanmar again, just after Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest. What struck him was the absence of military brutality and even the mere presence of soldiers, in other words, the eerie normality that pervaded everything. “Everything seemed to be… caught in a different sort of time warp.” Expecting coils of razor wire and armed soldiers on every street corner, he then realized that the sense of overwhelming military control was instead being internalized. As Dunlop puts it, coining the observation of an Eastern European dissident, “The censor is no longer at his desk, he’s in my head.”
That “invisible dictatorship” became a central theme in his book. “It was a mixture of both collusion and coercion,” Dunlop explains: spies were everywhere, yet unseen; political conversations would instantly shut down. It was repression not of spectacle, but of subtle, constant surveillance. “How do you photograph that?” he asked himself. “You could have a paranoid conversation on a Rangoon street corner. But how do you photograph that? Of course, you can’t!” So began his quest to make the invisible, visible. Commissioned by The Guardian, he began documenting signs of forced labor, child labor, prison labor, and social control.
Yet for Dunlop, it wasn’t enough to just capture it all—he wanted to challenge the West’s simplistic narratives about the country, the dominant “good versus evil” framing. Although admitting that in some sense this is not an unfair characterization, his book was an effort “to create a more nuanced portrait of… what a modern dictatorship looked like, in all its complexity and all its contradictions.”
One example is his examination of ethnic conflict and Burmanization, which comes alive in the chapter titled “Scorched Earth.” There, he highlights the complex dynamic at play between Myanmar’s various ethnic minorities and the dominant Bamar authorities. Dunlop argues that notions of racial and cultural superiority are deeply entrenched not just among this Bamar majority, but is also found among many of the minority groups as well. “Burmans often have... a chauvinism that's shared amongst other ethnic groups too,” he says. “Shan might consider themselves better than Palaung. Palaung will consider themselves better than the Wa.” Even within the various ethnicities that are Buddhist, each group claims “the true Buddhism that rests with them.” This mythmaking, Dunlop explains, has been masterfully manipulated by the military for decades, particularly under General Ne Win, who promoted the idea of a “family of races.” It fostered a toxic nationalism in which “to be truly Burmese is to be Burman and to be Buddhist.”
In his chapter called “Burma’s Gulag,” Dunlop exposes the country’s prison system, where political prisoners and common criminals endure hard labor. “In a military dictatorship, there’s no distinction between a common criminal and a dissident,” he says. He photographed prisoners, shackled at the ankles, working on roads and quarries. He shares how he once took covert photographs in a quarry while his wife distracted the guard; when the guard saw what he was doing and shouted at them, they acted like confused tourists, apologizing as they backed away. There were other “near misses” as well. For example, at one point, he was nearly detained by military intelligence after photographing forced labor. They demanded to know his name, which Dunlop ironically claimed was Eric Blair (George Orwell’s real name), and proceeded to hand over a harmless roll of film; fortunately, they were allowed to leave unharmed, and were not later linked to the incident.
Dunlop remains unsparing in his indictment of the military’s crimes. He recounts documenting the aftermath of the 2003 Depayin massacre, when Aung San Suu Kyi and her followers were ambushed. Unable to reach the site himself, he photographed a picture someone else had taken, and combined it with interviews of the survivors. He was able to piece together a that the attack was deliberate, political violence orchestrated by the military regime, using paid, armed thugs targeting politicians and their supports alike.
One of his more famous photographs is a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi. Taken in black and white, his work captures the powerful gaze of a complex leader. “She’s a tough woman,” he says. “You don’t go through what she went through and be soft and gooey on the inside.” Yet Dunlop also became disappointed in her dismissiveness toward the ethnic minorities, a bias that he believes reflects her privileged upbringing. In his estimation, this narrowed her political vision as she underappreciated her country’s peripheral histories and conflicts. Dunlop is equally critical of the Western romantization of Suu Kyi, which he believes led to performative gestures instead of real policy change. He also feels this one-dimensional portraiture blinded Western observers to looking seriously at the underlying conditions that ultimately led to the 2021 coup, all while continuing to reduce the complex dynamics of the Burmese political situation to a simplistic “good versus evil” narrative. And though he has little love for the junta, he also calls out the West’s caricature of Myanmar’s military as a monolith of cruelty. Dunlop instead paints a complex portrait of its conscripts—many of whom were coerced, indoctrinated, and themselves impoverished. “It’s not just about brutality. It's about structure, about indoctrination, about poverty, about the choices— or lack thereof— that these young men had.”
Dunlop closes with a note on ethical engagement. “You have to approach these things with humility, because they are complex and difficult. And the more I learn about Burma, the less I know.”