For Whom The Bell Tolls

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Episode #565: In Anyar, or the central Dry Zone, community protection is by necessity locally led and informed by facts on the ground. In a huge area comprising swathes of Sagaing, Magway, and Mandalay regions, often referred to as the country’s “political heartland”, communities have faced intensified violence since the coup and persistent barriers to access, information, and livelihoods. Kant Kaw is a protection specialist, and she explains how humanitarian work, including humanitarian mine action, is being implemented on the ground under these challenging conditions. Unlike many ethnic areas in Myanmar, Anyar was relatively untouched by armed conflict prior to the 2021 military takeover. Communities were largely free from contamination by landmines, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), unexploded ordnance (UXO), and explosive remnants of war (ERW). “There are a lot of casualties in central Dry Zone due to military patrols, airstrikes or incidents of landmines and UXO in the community,” Kant Kaw says. “This is a heartbreaking moment for our area.” As a protection specialist, her work focuses on supporting youth empowerment, education, and community protection, including risk assessment and protection strategies to mitigate threats from landmines and other forms of conflict. Airstrikes rank as the most serious threat to civilians, with military patrols and checkpoints posing serious dangers for civilians, alongside the growing threat of landmines and ERW. The humanitarian mine action brief includes risk education and victim assistance, without direct involvement in ad hoc demining being carried out by some armed groups as well as civilians. Kant Kaw provides training to staff covering risks related to landmines and UXO, how to identify such devices, and safe behaviors, using posters, pamphlets, and storybooks for children.

Before the Union

Episode #564: “We want to make federalism not just as a slogan, but also as an action. We want to turn it into action!” Neineh Plo is secretary to the International Relations and Alliance committee of the Karenni National Progressive Party, and he has worked closely with the KNPP since the 2021 coup through international relations, humanitarian work, and headquarters administration. He describes Karenni State as a place where resistance actors are forced to do two things at once under war pressure: protect civilians at scale, and build an interim governing system credible enough to hold a diverse state together. Neineh Plo argues that Karenni State’s diversity makes unilateral leadership both illegitimate and self-defeating. “KNPP cannot do it alone,” he asserts, “and should not also do it alone and impose its agenda on other people.” He describes the KNPP reaching out to other stakeholders and forming the Karenni State Consultative Council, then drafting interim arrangements meant to translate coordination into real authority. Those arrangements created interim executive, legislative, and judiciary bodies, with the interim executive council providing the most visible services. The list he gives is bluntly practical: humanitarian assistance, food and shelter, civilian protection, education, healthcare, and limited rehabilitation and livelihood support. On the international side, Neineh Plo describes access as constrained by aid systems built to work through the junta’s capital. He says organizations willing to cooperate with non-state actors are limited, even as needs expand in displacement and war zones. Here he references cross-border assistance as a longstanding pathway, but argues for an added channel that can reach resistance-held areas directly, including a proposed inclusive humanitarian forum meant to bring donors and Myanmar stakeholders into a workable design. Neineh Plo treats negotiation as a daily discipline inside the wider resistance ecosystem, including relationships with the National Unity Government. “We disagree,” he says simply, “but at least we are on the same side of the movement.” Federalism, in his framing, is the only model capable of accommodating Myanmar’s differences without returning to domination, and he insists that it has to be practiced now through structures and coalition governance rather than promised later.

What Dreams May Come

Episode #563: As president of the CCDK (Chin Community in Denmark), a non-profit organization established in 2003 by refugees from Myanmar, Van Neih Thang believes he has a duty to advocate for the people of his home country and state. This unwavering sense of purpose is tied to his experience as a refugee. “I feel like I have some duty to do something, even though I’m one thousand miles away.” Van Neih Thang’s parents made the difficult decision to leave Myanmar when he was just thirteen years old. He describes his humble life in Chin State, one of Myanmar’s most beautiful yet most deprived regions, before being swept away at such a young age to a place where the people look and sound very different. Learning the Danish language was hard, he admits, but that was the only aspect of his new home that he found difficult. Amid the culture shocks, he made friends and developed a passion for education, eventually becoming an influential community leader within the Chin diaspora. His connection to Chin State and its people never disappeared. He says that providing humanitarian assistance to the Chin people, as well as the wider population in Myanmar, is crucial. Since the coup in 2021, the military has devastated the region, destroying whole towns, while its people lack equipment and financial support. Van Neih Thang discusses the Chin groups that are fighting the junta, how these groups are divided by generations and language. When asked to consider what a post-military Myanmar might look like, it is clear he does not believe in easy answers. Van Neih Thang reflects on how life could’ve been different, especially as a young Chin. He is conscious of his privileged position, calling that privilege a blessing. But, he says, “it is a blessing with a purpose.”

The Valley of Samādhi

Episode #562: “I thought there was something, but I didn't know there was a way to get there.” That sense of longing has shaped Eion Meades’s spiritual life. His father abandoned the family when Meades was around ten years old, leaving his mother to raise six children while working long hours as a cleaner. He drifted toward crime and bad behavior before leaving home at fifteen. He hitchhiked across Australia and New Zealand, then traveled through Asia. Not finding a clear spiritual path on his travels, be returned to Australia to join Chenrezig Institute, a fledgling Tibetan Buddhist community there. Meades became one of the earliest residents and builders of what later grew into a major Tibetan Buddhist center. The Buddhist community gave him structure, intellectual clarity, and a disciplined path toward awakening. “I felt, ‘Ah, this is it, I'm home!’” The commitment of the community to building the center inspired him. Over time, however, he sought more meditative depth than he felt Chenrezig provided, and turned to Robert Hover, an American teacher from the U Ba Khin Vipassana lineage. Under Hover’s guidance, Meades’s practice became an intense confrontation with fear, emotion, and altered states of consciousness. He describes Hover as almost shamanic, representing a more personal and experimental form of Vipassana practice. Another decisive influence came through Mary, an older psychic medium connected to the Tibetan Buddhist community. Through her, Meades encountered trance mediumship, spirit guides, visions, and other experiences that defied “rational” explanation. Mary eventually led him away from the security of institutional Buddhism and into a more uncertain but deeply personal spiritual path. Later, another U Ba Khin lineage teacher, John Coleman, became important to Meades because he was willing to seriously discuss experiences that seemed to blur the boundary between deep meditation and psychic phenomena. Meades came away feeling that some advanced meditative states naturally opened unusual capacities, even if Buddhist traditions often hesitated to speak openly about them. Through all his experiences, Meades never lost sight of awakening as the central aim of spiritual life. Looking back, he describes spiritual growth as a long process of integration and transformation. By the end of his reflections, he speaks less about institutions or psychic abilities than about what spiritual practice ultimately leaves behind. As he puts it, “the wisdom and love you gain in this life will never be lost.”

Limits of Leadership

Episode #561: The third episode in a three part series, this was recorded inside Malaysia’s Parliament during the final stretch of Malaysia’s ASEAN chairmanship. It sits where diplomacy meets consequence—non-interference, the limits of influence, and the reset button of rotating leadership. Beneath that is Malaysia’s lived reality: refugees arriving as people, not headlines, often in legal limbo and reliant on UNHCR papers. MPs speak of gaps in data, barriers to legal work and schooling, strained clinics, and the politics of backlash. The first guest is Zahir Hassan, a first-term MP for Wangsa Maju in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s most densely populated constituency. An engineer and disaster-risk advocate, he treats displacement as a systems failure that has turned permanent. Refugees were meant to be part of “a few months transition,” yet some families are now third or fourth generation in Malaysia. With no legal status, “they technically cannot work. They cannot earn a living here, [so] for them to survive over the years, they have got to work illegally,” he says. Hassan also warns that Malaysia can’t drift year after year without proper data, planning, burden-sharing, and serious leadership at regional levels, and that stronger action needs to be taken towards the crisis. Mohammed Suhaimi Abdullah, MP for Langkawi and a former two-term senator, describes Bukit Malut as a settlement that began in 1982 with about 12 Rohingya families, and has grown to nearly 15,000 today. Some residents, he says, “have got blue identity card,” adding, “when you have a blue card, you have to treat them like Malaysians;” despite this, he laments that much of the region is plagued by poor infrastructure and few schools. Abdullah rejects stereotypes, asserting that these Rohingya communities are “not poor people! They’re very hard-working,” and adds that this fact that has created resentment among local populations who are not willing to take on equally strenuous jobs. Finally, Hassan Karim is a MP for Pasir Gudang and a lawyer shaped by civil-liberties fights. Referencing his youth, he says: “We fought any attempt by the [Malaysian] government tosuppress the space for democracy.” Karim’s actions aligned with his words then, as he notes that he was arrested on sedition charges for protesting authoritarian tendencies. Concerning thecurrent influx of refugees, he calls out Malaysian society for not extending sympathy to those fleeing conflict. “This kind of humanism must transcend religions and race,” he insists. If Malaysians can mobilize around Palestinians in Gaza as a matter of human rights, he argues, they cannot practice moral compartmentalization when the persecuted are nearer, poorer, and politically inconvenient. As Karim ask openly, if Muslim solidarity is invoked loudly elsewhere, why is it so thin here? His harshest criticism, however, is for Myanmar’s military, adding that currently, “I feel pessimistic. I never heard or saw any tangible effort [of progress.]”