‘I’m not Jason Bourne!’ Sean Turnell, the economist jailed by the Myanmar junta

Sean Turnell is seated with his back to Sydney’s harbour at a small table on the strip of restaurants along the Barangaroo promenade. It’s a hot and humid day and I’m running a couple of minutes late. When I see he’s wearing shorts and a polo shirt, I quietly curse myself for changing into my suit for the meal.

He tells me that he thought about dressing up for our interview, given it was the Financial Times, but his wife Ha Vu told him not to be silly. “The FT dresses up for you!” she said. She was right. 

It has been a surreal week for Turnell, the Australian academic and former economic adviser to the Myanmar government who was arrested after the 2021 coup that deposed the country’s former leader Aung San Suu Kyi. He was convicted for violating official secrets laws and spent 650 days in Myanmar jails before being abruptly released a year ago. His book, An Unlikely Prisoner, has just been released in Australia and he has squeezed in our lunch between onstage talks and signings. “If life is bread and circuses, I’m in the circuses part,” he says.

The odd thing for Turnell, 59, is that it was little more than a year ago that he was being held in Insein prison in Yangon, reading “Lunch with the FT” articles that Ha, a fellow academic, sent him along with packages containing books and cake.

Turnell has given me the view of the waterfront, with commuter ferries backing into the wharves and lunchtime joggers pounding the pavement in the rejuvenated stretch between Darling Harbour and the casino that dominates the area. He describes Barangaroo as his “new backyard”, as he lives around the corner. 

Turnell has suggested Kinhboy, a trendy-looking Vietnamese restaurant, as Ha is originally from Hanoi and he knows the food well. 

But before we order, the conversation turns to Colditz. The story of the infamous German second world war prisoner-of-war camp fascinated Turnell as a child, and he reveals that he visited the “creepy” castle near Leipzig after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He had no idea that he would end up in a similar predicament himself after the 2021 coup in Myanmar, when the powerful military took back control of the country, deposing and imprisoning members of Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government and installing General Min Aung Hlaing as leader. 

“Oh, the irony,” he says of the “connective tissue” of such experiences. “You pull back and see your life and place in history,” he says.

Turnell drew on the “stiff upper lip” attitude of the characters in Colditz and similar stories after he was detained while trying to settle his hotel bill in Naypyidaw, the modern capital of Myanmar. “I didn’t want to be that guy who breaks down and whimpers. I was the weakest link — my Burmese colleagues were the real deal — I didn’t want to break down,” he explains. 

Turnell, who looks in much better shape than in the images of the stick-thin and heavily bearded man that flashed around the world on his release last year, returns to the menu. 

He recommends a charcoal chicken and lychee dish or a crackling pork bánh hỏi, but says he can’t eat them as his front teeth are in a bad way. He explains that the food in Insein was served in communal buckets. Small stones, which he suspects were rust fragments from the cooking pots, were obscured in the rice and broke his teeth, which haven’t yet been properly fixed. 

He wants pho soup but the restaurant can’t oblige, so he opts for some Hanoi vegetarian spring rolls followed by fried rice with prawns and Chinese sausage. I settle on mud crab dumplings served with laksa broth, which are topped with caviar, followed by charcoaled king prawns served with a papaya salad.

Turnell comes from a working-class south-west suburb of Sydney, and had no immediate connection with Myanmar. He worked at the Reserve Bank of Australia as an economic analyst before switching to academia in the early 1990s, and it was during this period that he found himself house-sharing with a member of the Myanmar diaspora. This inspired an interest in the country’s politics and economics that would, in time, lead him to become a central figure in its government and democracy movement.

But before we get into this, Turnell has a more important question for me: are we having a beer? His eyes light up when I say that, on a hot day like this, there is no other choice. “Good, good!” he laughs, and we order two bottles of Hanoi. Turnell tells me about a “fresh” beer sold in the Vietnamese city, an unpasteurised version that has to be drunk as soon as it is made, and which he prefers to the standard type we have in front of us. 

The spring rolls arrive quickly and look remarkable, their outer casing netted, almost like a bird’s nest. We end up sharing these and the crab dumplings, which — soft enough not to cause Turnell dental distress — are the star of the show, the laksa sauce and sweet-tasting caviar combining to great effect.

We talk about Turnell’s brutal interrogation in “The Box” — a tiny room-within-a-room where he was held for two months after his arrest, accused of plotting to take over Myanmar at the behest of George Soros, the IMF and MI6. 

He had been told to bite his tongue by his fellow prisoners, but when the interrogator claimed Soros owned the IMF, Turnell’s academic mind took over. Chained to a chair, he started arguing the point, to the fury of his tormentor. I remark that this was probably one of the strangest examples of applying extensive knowledge of financial history to a real-world situation. “Yeah, and it just got me into trouble,” he sighs. 

In 2009, Turnell published a book, Fiery Dragons, which charted Myanmar’s journey from being the richest economy in south-east Asia at the start of the 20th century to the poorest at the beginning of the 21st, through the lens of its financial institutions. The following year, he travelled to Myanmar for the first time when he was invited to visit Aung San Suu Kyi, who knew of the book and had just been released from house arrest.

He fell in love with the country, describing the decaying grandeur of cities such as Yangon as “like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake”, and bonded with the politician over Sherlock Holmes stories and Tolkien novels. After her National League for Democracy party had won a landslide victory in the 2015 elections, Aung San Suu Kyi asked him to act as the country’s economic adviser.

It seemed like a new dawn for Myanmar, which had effectively been controlled by the military since a coup in 1962. Turnell said he felt “absolutely blessed” to be put in a position where he could help direct economic reforms from the ground.

His plan was to turn a country with a stagnant and vulnerable economy into the “last and the best of the tigers” by boosting international trade, following the example of Vietnam. Fixing Myanmar’s banking system — which he describes as little more than a corporate cash box for the country’s oligarchs — was a priority. 

He recalls an encounter with Boris Johnson in Myanmar from this period. Johnson, then the UK’s foreign secretary, made a beeline for Turnell at an ambassador’s function and loudly commended him for delivering an economy “going gangbusters”. The modest Turnell, who did not think the economy was going that well, thanked him and apologised for Australia’s recent victory over England in the Ashes cricket, prompting Johnson to “bound off” again. 

Any early optimism soon faded as the military launched a brutal assault on Rohingya Muslims in 2017. The attack on the Rohingya minority in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State led to 10,000 people being killed, 300 villages being torched and an exodus of more than a million refugees to nearby Bangladesh, according to the United Nations. 

Xenophobia and religious bigotry had long had a grip on Myanmar society, with aggression against the Rohingya — regarded as unwelcome immigrants by many in the majority Buddhist country — going back decades. Nonetheless, the crackdown shocked Turnell and immediately cast a pall over his reform agenda. 

Aung San Suu Kyi’s international reputation was tarnished by her failure to speak up against the attacks. Addressing the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2019, she placed most of the responsibility for the Rakhine atrocities on Rohingya insurgent groups, and said “genocidal intent cannot be the only hypothesis” when explaining her country’s actions. The ICJ nonetheless ruled that Myanmar needed to protect the Rohingya minority from genocidal actions; this year, the UN said the military had shown no willingness to address what it called “systemic discrimination” against the minority.

Turnell tells me he considered “pulling up stumps” and going home to Australia after the crackdown. “I didn’t want to be the standard defender of an authoritarian government, saying at the least the trains run on time or anything like that,” he says. 

He nonetheless felt loyalty to both his Myanmar colleagues and the democracy movement, and opted not to leave. He defends Aung San Suu Kyi, who he says “would rage against the stupidity and venality” in private but had to tread more carefully around the military in public.

He started to work on a plan with his colleague to “put the squeeze” on the finances of military leaders and establish a blueprint for the Rohingya refugees to return to Rakhine State over time. This was all done behind the scenes, he says, and he admits the “very imperfect” plan was derailed by the onset of Covid-19 and ultimately the coup that the civilian government had tried to avoid.

Turnell regrets that the civilian government did not do more when it had the chance. “One of the mistakes was that they didn’t spend the political capital to go against the bureaucracy, to clean out the top level, but also to go against the military much more aggressively,” he says of the pre-coup era.

He nonetheless remains disappointed by the international backlash against the civilian government over the attacks on the Rohingya. “It is very distressing for me. That’s not to say that the civilian government didn’t make mistakes. There’s no question about it, but overwhelmingly those mistakes were sins of omission, not commission,” he says. 

Turnell fears that, after Covid, Russia’s Ukraine invasion and Israel’s war with Hamas, the situation in Myanmar is now a low priority for the international community. “With Suu Kyi locked away, it’s like a curtain went down and no one’s thought about it since,” he says. He believes that the junta is now waiting for her to die.

The junta has faced recent setbacks and Turnell says his optimism over the future of the country will return should the “men in green fall”. He argues that the 78-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi could come back as a symbolic “Mandela-like” short-term leader, despite her problematic image internationally. “She is still the one figure that could unify the country,” he says.

The wind starts to pick up on the harbour and we realise we have been talking for over an hour and no one has offered us more beer. I pick a few prawns out of the rice but we’re done with the food. 

Turnell tells me that the foreign author who has had the biggest impact on Myanmar society is George Orwell, who, local scholars argue, plotted out the country’s story across a trilogy of books: Burmese Days, about the imperial era; Animal Farm, about the souring of independence; and 1984, explaining the modern dystopia. “It’s a joke but one with real meaning,” Turnell explains. “It’s spookily prescient.”

From an economic perspective, that dystopia is most prevalent in what happened in the country’s telecoms sector. I recount how, on a former beat, I wrote about Myanmar being one of the world’s last greenfield telecoms markets when Telenor of Norway won a contract to build a mobile network there in 2013. It introduced a mobile money system — the sort that has lit up the economies of Africa — but the junta has turned that into what Turnell calls a “financial surveillance system”, used to track payments between people. “The technology of liberation, modernity and hope has been turned into an instrument of oppression,” he says glumly. 

Much of Turnell’s 650 days in captivity was spent in Insein (pronounced “insane”), a colonial-era panopticon prison based on Jeremy Bentham’s ideal. He recalls being shoved around the prison while in leg chains by a guard and yelling, “I’m not Jason Bourne!” Standing at just over 5ft tall and weighing around 50kg, the academic jokes that if his story were turned into a film, it would be Danny DeVito and not Brad Pitt playing him. 

It was economics rather than escape plans that kept Turnell sane. While in The Box, he mentally plotted aggregate supply and demand frameworks. “It took my mind away,” he says, as he recounts constructing cross curves in his mental models, factoring in government spending, interest rates, exchange rates and disaggregating imports, exports and trade flows. “I’d like to say I’d come up with the answer to the great question of economics for internal and external balance but, nah, it didn’t happen,” he says. 

Turnell was able to monitor the state of the wider economy while inside. He noted that the number of planes flying over the prison had slowed to a trickle, signifying Myanmar’s increasing isolation, and was able to monitor the fluctuations in price of contraband goods. He was also able to apply his economic eye to prison life. An internal market operated, but the currency wasn’t cigarettes, as in the war stories of his youth, but drink sachets. A sweetened local brand of coffee traded like Swiss francs, while plain Nescafé acted as copper coins, he says.

Speaking of coffee, I realise we won’t be getting any, as the restaurant has stopped serving. We are the only people left in the place. It is time to leave.

Having been back in Sydney for a year, Turnell has joined the Lowy Institute, a think-tank that specialises in global affairs, where he will write on south-east Asia and economics. He will continue to focus on Myanmar, despite knowing that he is unlikely to set foot in the country again.

Turnell remains an optimist. He points to the promenade outside the restaurant, where he walks with Ha every morning, and says he is frequently stopped by people who wish them well. “I’m more sanguine about humanity, not less,” he beams.

Nic Fildes is the FT’s Australia and Pacific correspondent

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTWeekend on X and Instagram, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen