Insight Myanmar

Reality Bites

Episode #509: “I don’t have hope. But I think that this is something that I should accept. It is reality.” Chalida Tajaroensuk, a longtime advocate of democratic reform and human rights across the Southeast Asian region, argues that human rights work collapses when it is built on prediction rather than conditions. Her account begins in a provincial Buddhist temple where community care wasn’t an abstract virtue but daily labor among the elderly, the poor, and those without family. From there, she traces a path through Thai student activism, the violence of the 1970s and 1990s, and a period in the jungle alongside the Communist Party, followed by disillusionment with ideologies that promise total change while leaders chased private benefit. Against grand theories, Chalida advocates a method that stays stubbornly small and specific—bailing people out of detention, negotiating with authorities, finding schools for Myanmar children who can’t study in Thai, persuading landlords to accept refugees who must report regularly, building neighborhood trust so displaced people can survive with dignity. “Do a small thing, and then when you have success, you feel success with the small.” Chalida extends that realism to refugee policy, arguing that reforms can still fail in implementation through language barriers, exploitation, and the hollowing out of camp life when key workers are forced to leave. On Thai public life, she is blunt about worsening conditions and the shortage of leaders she trusts, although what remains is obligation and repetition—ground-level fact-finding, people-to-people exchange, and the insistence that action continues even without a promised ending. Asked why she keeps going, Chalida returns to responsibility, not optimism. “I think that this is my duty.” She does not promise outcomes. She does not offer closure. She insists only on the smallest honest pledge: “Today we do today’s best.”

The Justice League

Episode #508: Damian Lilly, a veteran humanitarian and human-rights specialist, who has worked in conflict zones across the world, believes assistance must be joined with protection and accountability. “We can’t just be there to assist people—we also need to be there to protect them.” He formed this conviction through his work with Médecins Sans Frontières, documenting sexual violence in places such as Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Congo and turning testimony into pressure on governments. Working with the UN, he returned to South Sudan later as Senior Advisor on the Protection of Civilians. The civil war there drove more than 250,000 people into UN compounds, and although his work helped shelter so many people, he looks upon it as a failure because in the end, there was no justice or redress. Protection without justice, he says, “really loses sight of what we’re trying to do.” Later on, he was posted in Gaza in his role as UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees: during that time, there were three Israeli military incursions into the territory between 2008 and 2014, with no real repercussions, which only reinforced to Lilly how impunity fuels repeated wars. Accountability, he says, fails not for lack of law but ofpolitical will. When his wife, also a UN employee, received a posting to Myanmar, Lilly and his family moved to Yangon. This was shortly before the coup. He reports watching the tanks roll down the streets. In response, Lilly co-founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP) to pursue prosecutions abroad through what is called “universal jurisdiction,” where crimes against humanity in one country can be prosecuted in another country’s national courts. MAP is seeking cases in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Turkey. Lilly critiques the International Criminal Court and UN Security Council for their paralysis, timidity in engaging the junta, and reluctance to recognize the NUG as the people’s legitimate representative. While the UN employs the claim of neutrality to justify continued relations with the junta, Lilly argues that true neutrality means fidelity to humanitarian principles, not moral equivalence. Despite bureaucratic inertia and shrinking aid budgets, Lilly insists that localization, persistence, and creative legal action can still advance justice. “It is a complex area,” he says, “but an important part of how we address many of these situations.”

Terra Incognita

Episode #507: “It’s a process of learning and unlearning, and understanding that knowledge exists in many places and is everywhere, not just in the academy,” says Davina Quinlivan, an Anglo-Burmese writer and research fellow in English and Creative Writing, of her second memoir, Possessions. Her first book, Shalimar, reconstructed her father’s wartime childhood in colonial Burma through historical inquiry, while Possessions turns toward embodiment and the present, exploring how inheritance lives in memory, belief, and the body. Quinlivan recounts her parents’ Anglo-Burmese backgrounds: born before World War II, they knew each other in Burma before their families emigrated to England in the mid-1950s amid post-independence uncertainty. After marrying other partners, they reconnected decades later and married. Raised in West London in the 1980s, Quinlivan grew up with an inherited Burma shaped by atmosphere and narrative. Though she never experienced what her parents described, their stories formed her imaginative interior. Knowledge in her childhood home was transmitted not through books or institutions but through language, food, fragments of memory, and silence. As the first in her family to attend university, she immersed herself in film and French feminist philosophy, later completing a doctorate and building a long academic career. Yet she began to question the hierarchy that privileges institutional knowledge over embodied and inherited forms. Living in rural Devon with her husband and children, she found English folklore—oak trees, medieval churches, Green Man carvings—entering into dialogue with Burmese cosmology. When her youngest son suffered recurring febrile seizures, she rendered the experience through mythic frameworks, imagining ancestors as active presences. Rather than resolve identity into a single narrative, Possessions holds together multiple landscapes, histories, and ways of knowing within one life.

Never Again

Episode #506: “I think the toll of doing dedicated work even as we grow older is so small compared to that of so many brave Myanmar activists. I can support the cause, but I can also choose not to confront myself with the full reality of what’s going on in the ground. That’s a choice that Myanmar people by and large don’t have! That’s how I carry on doing the work I do,” says Patrick Hoffmann, reflecting on the personal and historical drivers behind his commitment to Myanmar's democracy movement. Patrick’s personal background indicates how individual narratives can ignite a lifetime commitment to global justice, advocating for freedom even from afar. His Jewish family heritage, marked by his father's childhood under Nazi Germany during World War II in Berlin, imbued him with a deep understanding of trauma and the devastating impact of atrocity; combined with the sense that one must never take democracy for granted, and it is always something worth fighting to preserve. This personal history, as both a German and a Jew, fuels his belief that “we, more than any other people, should stand for preventing genocide anywhere,” a conviction that propels his advocacy. Interacting with Myanmar students and activists in Yangon in 2012, he learned early the nuances in democratic models, particularly in the Asian context. After the 2021 coup, Patrick joined German Solidarity Myanmar, moving from conventional humanitarian aid work to more deeply active political lobbying. He advocates for a nuanced approach for Germany to show solidarity with Myanmar’s cause, such as not only condemning the regime but also supporting non-state actors. Through his work, he has realized the power of inclusive narrative building, as well as how art can tell “a much more approachable and human portrayal of people fighting for democracy on the ground.” Despite the immense challenges, Patrick remains inspired by the movement's resilience. “This movement feels so close,” he says. “It’s on the verge of success. We cannot give up now.”

Conflict Takes Root

Episode #505: In February, Timor-Leste opened judicial proceedings against Myanmar’s military regime, marking the first time one ASEAN member has initiated legal action against another. Supporting the case, the Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) submitted evidence documenting serious international crimes, including the rape of a pregnant woman, the massacre of ten civilians, an airstrike on a hospital, the killing of Christian religious leaders, and repeated attacks on churches. CHRO Executive Director Salai Za Uk Ling joins the podcast, and argues that because Myanmar’s legal system offers little protection for minority groups, international mechanisms have become essential. “Because no domestic laws really protect minority groups inside Myanmar, utilizing internationally accepted human rights standards and instruments becomes our only means by which we can promote awareness and try to address the human rights issues of people across Myanmar.” mv8r3g5f International legal action can serve several purposes, he explains. While pursuing long-term justice through legal processes, it also raises global awareness, increases political pressure on the regime, and may help deter future crimes. For people inside Myanmar, these efforts also carry symbolic weight. “We’re talking about ordinary people all across Myanmar. Everyone is in one way or another, directly or indirectly, affected by the regime’s actions,” Za Uk says. Even small recognition of their suffering can provide a sense that the world has not forgotten them. In Chin State, landmines are one element of a broader pattern of violence. Za Uk describes them as part of a systematic campaign to undermine communities in areas where resistance forces have driven out the military. “Landmines are just a piece of the larger puzzle of the regime trying to destroy lives that could be otherwise thriving in places that have been liberated,” he says. Used alongside indiscriminate airstrikes and other attacks on civilians, such tactics amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. More than half of Chin State’s population has been displaced since the 2021 coup. As families struggle to survive amid constant air attacks and hidden landmines, Za Uk warns the threat could become a long-term crisis. “A landmine is like a soldier that never sleeps,” he says. “And unfortunately, the target has been civilians.”