Return to Nowhere
Coming Soon…
“I think this experience of seeing violence that close and not being able to protect myself or my mother… gave me a strong urge to actually address violence, that I have felt all my life.”
Minna Fredriksson is a Swedish human rights advisor at Diakonia, a faith-based Swedish development organization. As a child, she witnessed abuse, violence and addiction, and these formative experiences shaped her life-- which now embodies a decades-long commitment to justice, gender equity, and humanitarian response in conflict-affected regions, particularly Myanmar. Her insights are crucial for anyone interested in ethical aid work, displacement, and trauma-informed humanitarianism. For those working in or concerned with Myanmar—especially in light of donor fatigue, diminishing resources, and escalating repression—Fredriksson’s reflections offer a sobering assessment, reasons for hope, and ideas for the future.
Fredriksson worked for years in Indonesia before transitioning to Myanmar in 2013, where her first post involved managing Diakonia’s humanitarian initiatives in nine refugee camps along the Thai border as part of the Border Consortium. This was a time, during the opening transition period, when donor governments—in particular the US, Sweden, Germany and Japan—were pushing for refugee returns, despite ongoing insecurity in Myanmar. She explains how, bound by institutional reporting cycles, political considerations and fixed timelines, donor agencies gradually become detached from on-the-ground realities. “There is a clash between this sort of difficult, long term, super serious decisions to be made by people, and the donor perspective on something… you get funding for the next one year, and after that, [they] want to see the change.”
Fredriksson emphasizes the complexity of encouraging returns to a country that is still unsafe. Many of the refugees were born in the camps and had never set foot in Myanmar, and so a return could very well mean entering a political system that continued to discriminate against their ethnic communities. One story that stayed with her came from a youth group of Karen refugees, who showed her a Burmese schoolbook that labeled them as “insurgents” and “troublemakers;” in other words, the government was declaring—and teaching—how the entire ethnicity was an enemy of the state!
In contrast to much top-down humanitarianism, Fredriksson—like a number of other recent, Insight Myanmar guests—praises the model of humanitarian aid that places refugee communities at the center of program design and delivery, such as the Border Consortium. “Treat [the refugees] as a community with all the respect that you would show outside a camp setting,” she says, describing this more ethical and trusting approach.
Her next work took her inside Myanmar, which brought a different set of challenges. She quickly realized that modes of expression that emphasize public sharing and open communication—or those that typically characterize trainings and meetings run by aid organizations—need significant adaptation in a country where a history of repression has profoundly shaped interpersonal communication. She noticed that participants in her workshops were reluctant to speak, even in safe settings. “The kind of protection mechanism of not sharing… really becomes interesting in the room, when you put the foreigner there, like me,” she says. She explains that internalized censorship is often misunderstood by outsiders as cultural reserve, when in fact it is a survival tactic in managing life in an oppressive system. Fredriksson recalls just how much she learned from local trainers and facilitators, and how she admired their use of culturally appropriate linguistic play and humor to build trust and energy in a room.
Another important lesson she had to learn about Myanmar concerned the intersectionality of power structures in social engagement. She notes how class, ethnicity, religion, urban-rural divides and gender strongly shape civil society interactions. For this reason, a key goal of Diakonia’s rights-based approach was to support women-led and feminist organizations in pursuing their agendas on their own terms, a successful initiative that she felt generated much optimism.
Fredriksson also saw Myanmar’s civil society—especially youth and women—as resilient and self-directed, noting their refusal to be token participants in top-down programming. She praises Myanmar organizations’ autonomy and critical stance, recalling how they often rejected joint forums with INGOs when those gatherings felt extractive or irrelevant. “We want to have our forum,” she recounts them saying. “We know what we're about.”
Moving to the present day, Fredriksson draws attention to a troubling trend that undermines those kinds of local successes that Diakonia and other organizations have supported: that is, governments that once championed human rights and humanitarian aid, such as Sweden, are now aligning foreign aid with nationalist agendas. She describes Sweden’s development goals now as mainly to stop migration and support business and investment. This shift to prioritizing transaction relationships has resulted in pushing Myanmar low in Sweden’s foreign aid priorities. Fredriksson then draws a direct line between those funding cuts and Myanmar’s deepening crises. “The concern and the worry, of course, is the level of isolation… it breaks my heart when I hear that people say, ‘it’s like the world doesn’t care!’” She’s especially disturbed that one of the first portfolios cut by the Swedish government was funding for information and communication about development cooperation.
Fredriksson offers valuable insights into future directions for her field. She argues that humanitarian responses must become trauma-informed, participatory, and centered on the people in the communities an organization works with. One should become primarily a listener, she adds. This is the antithesis of the “savior complex” that often plagues Western aid organizations, and requires humility to carry out. It also necessitates creative integration across problem solving domains such as humanitarian aid, peacebuilding, media, and democracy-building; issues need to be addressed holistically and in coordination rather than siloed, as is often the case.
Another insight that Fredriksson offers is to avoid romanticizing community structures, especially traditional ones. She explains that all societies have their share of injustices, especially around gender inequalities. “Those need to be addressed,” she affirms. She emphasizes that solidarity means more than good intentions—it requires platforms that amplify lived experiences and ensure that affected communities take and maintain control over their futures.
Finally, Fredriksson underlines the destructive impact of informational repression—what she calls a form of “soft violence.” The isolation, confusion, and misinformation that pervade Myanmar’s conflict zones aren’t just disorienting; they contribute to despair and mental health breakdowns. “When the repression is about making it difficult to get information or communicate… it really wears on people.” She recounts a recent conversation in which a colleague told her, “It’s quite often you hear [about suicides] nowadays… Some people are overwhelmed with everything that they need to experience, and not knowing where to turn to.”
Fredriksson sees podcasts like Insight Myanmar as vital in countering the information blackout imposed by the regime. She views them as essential tools to resist the silencing and erasure of Myanmar’s ongoing struggle. “Part of the repression is putting people in a dark room and putting the lid on and not allowing for conversations or information or communication to happen. It’s really important to try to counter that.”
In closing, she addresses the importance of keeping the struggle alive. “It’s a motivation for me to continue to talk about Myanmar, to continue to raise awareness, to continue to share what people are sharing, and make sure that there is information about what’s happening.”