A Growing Horror
Sean Turnell is an Honorary Professor of Economics at Macquarie University who recently appeared as a guest on our podcast. Recognized internationally for his influential book on Myanmar's financial system, "Fiery Dragons," he became one of Aung San Suu Kyi's most trusted advisers. His expertise led to his arrest in Myanmar following a military coup in 2021, resulting in a 650-day imprisonment.
Regarding the Rohingya crisis, Sean Turnell describes how he tried to hold members of Myanmar's military accountable for their actions against the Rohingya in Rakhine State. He authored a confidential memorandum in 2019 for Daw Suu, discussing ways to leverage knowledge of Myanmar's financial system to sanction those military members involved in the genocidal actions against the Rohingya. In the following excerpt, Sean describes his dawning awareness as the atrocities began to become apparent.
“Words are not enough actually to convey both the horror against the Rohingya but also just the terrible moral dilemma that it had for me and others as well.”
It was a growing horror, I would say. Nothing undermined things more than that [the Rohingya crisis], at every level, the actual mechanics of reform, but even at a personal level. In terms of my origin story with respect to Myanmar, I'd got into Myanmar work in order to try and do the right thing, morally and in all sorts of ways. So, to be caught up in something like this was horrifying beyond belief, and immensely challenging about what to do.
So, I'm over there. And, of course, as we all know, the terrible atrocities against the Rohingya go way back, certainly to 2012, but back further into history. There’s any number of terrible things done in Myanmar, but obviously, the Rohingya thing became this much more significant issue during the term of the NLD government. It was a horrifying moment, to be there, and just to think, ‘Well, okay, what do I do here? What is my responsibility?’ A few times, I thought, ‘Look, do I go? Do I just leave and go back to Australia?’ And I thought, ‘I've got to try and help this if I can.’ In a couple of ways.
One of the ways was to get the message across to the government, that this was a really serious issue and that the international community took it very seriously. Because, I think, many people who know Myanmar will know that it's a place which sometimes shields itself from international opinion. And even very good, well-minded people will sometimes hide away, in a sense, from the implications of what might be going on in the rest of the world. So, one of the challenges I had was to make sure that the seriousness to [with] which the rest of the world took the issue was understood; that was number one.
The second one was to think about, within my area of expertise - and here I had to be appropriately modest - think, ‘Well, what can I do?’ The first understanding I had was that I didn't know enough. I had spent a lot of time in Myanmar; I had lots of Myanmar friends and studied as much of the country as I could, but my knowledge was severely limited in so many ways. So, I had to be realistic about what I could do. And for me, it's obviously the economics of it. And I thought, ‘Okay, is there any economic way that we can make things better? How can that have an input, but at the same time, not overstep there either?’ Because, it's a tradition amongst economists to be somewhat imperialist in their understandings of their own discipline, and burst into areas in which economics, to be honest, has really no place or a very secondary place.
I had to be modest in all sorts of dimensions, both to my understanding, and also the limits of what economics could do in that situation. But those were the tasks that I set [for] myself. I was absolutely full on. Again, and again, and again, they would bring up the Rohingya issue, in personal meetings with Daw Suu, with other ministers, with the other reformers and so on. But the second thing was to come up with ideas about on the economic side. And those ideas, again, were sort of both positive and negative.
On the positive side, was there anything that we could do to make the situation better? Were there structural economic reforms that could help the situation, and not discriminate, essentially, between different groups? But then on the negative side, as well, was there any way that we could inhibit the military's activities? And that, I suppose, it is the is the thing that I've never been able to talk [on] before - except I do briefly in the book - was that I did come up with a plan of sanctioning the military from inside, understanding the financial interests of various military officers involved in Rakhine. I wrote a memorandum of how we might do that. And, at the risk of fast forwarding too much, that memorandum became a key document in the prosecution against me later on, once they saw the implications of that.
It was enormously challenging at so many levels, and beyond that. Words are almost not enough actually to convey both the horror against the Rohingya but also just the terrible moral dilemma that it had for me and others as well. And very seriously considered, because it really put into jeopardy everything.”