Insight Myanmar

From a Mirrorless Cell

Episode #515: Toru Kubota is a Japanese documentary filmmaker who believes storytelling can foster empathy beyond abstract argument. A political science student at Keio University who developed an interest in refugee issues, in 2014 he joined a student project interviewing Rohingya refugees in Japan. Using a camera for the first time, he helped produce a short documentary about their lives. In 2016, Kubota traveled to Sittwe in Rakhine State and entered camps housing Rohingya displaced after the 2012 violence. Though officially designated as internally displaced persons camps, he saw them as places of confinement, where communities were segregated and deprived of adequate services. Filming an accidental fire inside one camp became a turning point; editing the footage later convinced him of film’s power to convey lived experience. Following both the military’s 2017 campaign against the Rohingya and the 2021 coup, Kubota returned each time to Myanmar to document events unfolding there. While filming a protest in 2022,soldiers arrested him at gunpoint and used staged photographs as evidence of his participation. He was charged with incitement and immigration violations and sentenced to ten years in prison. Fortunately, diplomatic pressure was able to secure his release after 111 days in detention at the notorious Insein Prison, where he had endured solitary confinement and struggled with despair. Since then, Kubota has supported exiled Myanmar journalists in a variety of different ways. His film “Borderline Resistors” follows exile media collectives along the Thai–Myanmar border. Reflecting on his imprisonment and the fragility of civil liberties, he recalls something an activist once told him: “Freedom is like air. You never appreciate it when you can breathe freely. But you finally realize how important is when you get drowned in water.”

Tremors

Episode #514: Richmond Heath, an Australian physiotherapist, longtime vipassana meditator and senior trainer in tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) discusses the involuntary movements that arise for some people in meditation. He argues they are not signs of dysfunction, but rather expressions of underlying bodily processes. It’s how a person relates to them that matters most. In his late twenties, Heath developed chronic pain that resisted conventional treatment and forced him to abandon the physical activity that had once grounded him. Turning to vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, he encountered intense discomfort but discovered that pain was partly a reaction layered onto sensation. By observing it rather than resisting it, its character changed, opening a new way of relating to the body. As his practice deepened, spontaneous movements began to arise. These ranged from subtle shifts to complex, fluid postures that felt unexpectedly free rather than painful. Because he was not consciously producing them, he experienced them as something happening through the body rather than something he was doing. Yet neither medical nor meditative frameworks could account for it. His vipassana teachers discouraged the movements, and eventually he was asked to leave a retreat; medicine, in turn, tended to framed them as manifestations of pathology. Despite this, he trusted his experience and continued observing. He later described these as “neurogenic movements” and came to understand them as part of a broader rhythm of activation and release. While initially interpreting them as trauma discharge, he expanded this view, noting similar patterns in early development, cultural practices, and states of heightened energy. This led him to conclude that no single framework fully explains the phenomenon. Encounters with Aboriginal elder Jack Beatson and later TRE provided validation and context. TRE, which deliberately elicits similar movements, confirmed that such responses can be accessed intentionally, but also reinforced that they function best when not controlled. Heath emphasizes discernment: the same process can regulate or destabilize depending on how it feels. His guiding question—“are you okay, and is it working for you?”—extends beyond meditation to everyday experiences, reframing reactions like panic as part of the body’s attempts to adjust. Even in extreme conditions, such as conflict zones, these processes may offer limited but meaningful relief. Ultimately, Heath maintains an openness to interpretation, grounded in a simple principle that the Aboriginal elder told him: “Enjoy the ride!”

Between War and Peace

Episode #513: Georgi Engelbrecht of the International Crisis Group links two stories that matter for Myanmar: the Mindanao peace process and Russia’s ties to authoritarian partners in Southeast Asia. He begins in the Philippines with what he calls the conflict’s “master cleavage” — Muslim communities inside a state seeking self-determination against what they see as colonial intrusion. That grievance was reinforced by migration, exclusion, and underdevelopment until it hardened into decades of separatist war. But the macro narrative never explained everything. Alongside it ran “horizontal violence”: clan feuds, communal disputes, and local power struggles that don’t disappear just because a deal is signed. For Engelbrecht, the 2012 and 2014 agreements with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front were a turning point, not an ending. The MILF largely abandoned fighting, the Bangsamoro autonomy project became real, and governing structures took shape after the autonomous region was established in 2019. Yet the region remains “in flux,” with delays, elite rivalries, contested legitimacy, and violence that has shifted rather than vanished. From Mindanao he pivots to Myanmar and what major powers mean by “stability.” Russia’s push into Asia, he argues, accelerated with its rupture from the West, as Moscow sought partners and arenas beyond Western leverage. In Myanmar, that lens favors the junta: Russia tends to read rebellion as instability and the central state as the default counterweight. With pipelines for hardware, parts, training, and contact, “Myanmar, because of Russia's help, is not that isolated anymore,” and perceptions of durability become a force multiplier. His wager is blunt: “Russia is banking on victory of the regime.” China, by contrast, cannot afford distance and hedges across actors because Myanmar’s disorder sits on its border. As Engelbrecht puts it, “Chechnya [for Russia] is probably what Myanmar is for China.” For Moscow, this becomes part of a broader pattern—how Russia shows it can keep partners standing, stay relevant beyond Western systems, and act as a patron for regimes the West is trying to isolate. For Myanmar, that means the relationship isn’t a blueprint for victory—but it can function as scaffolding: not determining the war’s shape, but bracing the regime’s ability to persist.

Left Behind

Episode #512: “The overall consequences are so bad that I myself urged the Norwegian government to stop some of this.” Hanne Sophie Greve, a Norwegian judge and long-time human rights jurist, argues that Telenor’s conduct in Myanmar created foreseeable and preventable pathways to severe human rights harm, but existing legal systems struggle to respond proportionately. She frames the case as both a corporate failure and a test of how Norway—a state that portrays itself as committed to democracy and human rights—handles the risks created when a majority state-owned company operates in a fragile political environment. Greve reconstructs Telenor’s entry into Myanmar during a period of political opening, when optimism about liberalization was widespread. She notes that Telenor had a strong reputation for transparency and human-rights due diligence, which she describes as a tool designed to identify high-risk contexts. Precisely because of that due diligence, Greve identifies the company’s first major failure: Myanmar’s telecommunications sector was structurally high-risk even during the democratic transition, because the legal system lacked safeguards, and Telenor knew this. She argues that the company should have insisted on legal protections and planned for an emergency exit. When political conditions deteriorated and sanctions reinforced those risks, Telenor still failed to act on what it knew. The second failure was Telenor’s handling of real-time interception equipment. Although lawful when imported, Telenor kept it in Myanmar after sanctions were imposed and was later operationalized by the military. She emphasizes that leaving such capacity behind in a country sliding toward authoritarian violence is not a neutral act. She also strongly criticizes Telenor’s exit and sale of its Myanmar operation to a military-linked entity, arguing that sensitive data should have been deleted rather than left accessible. Greve describes the situation in present-day Myanmar as a constant conflict in which surveillance enables arrests, repression, and lethal violence. While she says Telenor’s criminal liability under Norwegian law remains legally uncertain, she argues that if responsibility is established it would attach to the company itself, not individual employees. She concludes by treating the case as a warning about how control over communications infrastructure directly affects whether a society can function at all, and she expresses hope that Norway can support a peaceful transition for Myanmar’s people. “I would love to see my own country in Norway participating in bringing about that peaceful transition for the benefit of the people of Myanmar.”

Bonus Episode: Shelter From The Storm

In this bonus episode, Better Burma’s monastic donation manager, Mora, shares what he has been seeing on the ground in Myanmar after years of conflict and displacement, now compounded by the March 28, 2025 earthquake. He explains why so much of Better Burma’s work runs through monasteries and nunneries, as these communities have become frontline sanctuaries for children, providing shelter, food, schooling, and basic healthcare for thousands who have nowhere else to go. Mora describes what it takes to deliver aid under current conditions, the scale of damage and urgent rebuild needs across sites in Sagaing, Mandalay, and surrounding areas, and what Better Burma has been doing since the quake, from constructing temporary and permanent housing to repairing collapsed walls and roofs and helping communities relocate out of unsafe structures. He highlights one orphanage nunnery caring for more than 90 children, including infants, now living in unsafe bamboo shelters after their building was destroyed, and he explains how economic hardship has crushed local giving, forcing some nunneries to travel long distances just to gather rice to send back to the children. He closes by underscoring how vast the remaining needs are, from classrooms and teaching halls to restored water access and basic monastic requisites lost in the debris, and invites listeners who want to support this work to donate at betterburma.org/donation.