Mizzima

Aung San Suu Kyi has called on the international community to keep paying attention to the situation in Myanmar, according to her former economic adviser, Sean Turnell, in an interview with VOA.

He met every week with Aung San Suu Kyi for a year whilst they were on trial together in Naypyitaw. He said that she had a good understanding of what was happening in the outside world because she got information from him and other sources.

She had heard about the war in Ukraine. According to Mr. Turnell, she was aware that the international community’s attention had drifted away from Myanmar and that the world was paying more attention to Ukraine. She understands this and thinks that it is entirely reasonable, but she also thinks similar attention should be paid to Myanmar.

Sean Turnell is an Australian economist who was formerly a policy advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi. He was arrested shortly after the 1 February 2021 coup, on 6 February 2021. He then spent 650 days in prison before being released in an amnesty in November 2022.

During the interview, Mr Turnell also mentioned the situation in Rakhine State whilst Aung San Suu Kyi had been in power. He said that international criticism of her handling of the Rakhine situation was unwarranted.

He claimed that she was doing things in the background that people were unaware of because she could not go public with the information. She was always concerned about what the military was doing in Rakhine State and tried to identify who in the military was responsible for atrocities there. She was trying to put pressure on the military.

As evidence in Mr Turnell’s trial, the junta prosecution even produced a document that set out some of the economic measures Aung San Suu Kyi’s government was trying to undertake against the military to prevent the atrocities in Rakhine and other places.