Win Tin

Myanmar’s conscience

Win Tin, a Burmese journalist and political activist, died on April 21st, aged 85

May 3rd 2014 | From the print edition

IN SEPTEMBER 2008, as hundreds of prisoners

were let out of Insein jail in Myanmar’s former

capital, Yangon, one small, elderly, wavy-haired

figure continued to stand by the gates. He had not

changed into civvies, or taken his things; he still

wore his blue prison shirt. Win Tin was refusing to

take part in the amnesty, arranged by Myanmar’s

military regime, on principle. If he accepted it, that

implied he also accepted the charges he had first been locked up for almost 20 years before, mostly

opposition activism and satires against the regime in his bestselling newspaper, the Hanthawaddy

Daily. The petty criminals who raced past him were expected not to misbehave again. He was

different, and ill as he was—with a dozen complaints left untreated in prison—he intended to

misbehave just as he had before. Only when he had made that point clear to the warders, as

evening fell, did he walk away. He was still wearing the blue shirt.

In prison, all those years, nothing had stopped him trying to write. What else should a journalist

do? He earned another five-year stint for having a pencil and paper in his cell, and writing a letter

of protest with them. He got another seven for assembling and smuggling out to the UN

rapporteur, in 1995, details about human-rights abuses in Insein, editing them secretly in the

darkest corner of his cell. He wrote regularly for the inhouse, single-copy prison magazine.

Deprived of his pencil, he befriended a cat which shed a few hairs when he stroked it; these, bound

with paste made of pounded brick and water, made passable red crayons, with which to write on

the wall

As long as the black stripes

on the yellow background

are painted vividly enough,

the tiger is still a tiger

Younger prisoners called him “Ba Ba”, Uncle, and would send him philosophical or political

questions scratched with old nails on pieces of plastic bags. He would scratch whatever answers he

knew. For he spent most of his time in isolation, sometimes in the “Dog Cell” where the Alsatians

were kept, curled in a small cage on a bamboo mat on concrete, deprived of sleep by the animals

fighting. Regular beatings smashed his teeth out, leaving him to chew the coarse prison rice with

his gums. Yet nothing curbed his appetite for words, books and simple information. At a glimpse

of a face he would cry, “Any news today?”, so that “Mr Any News” became his nickname with the

guards.

Every year he was invited to make peace with the regime. He always refused, though with a

courteous smile. General Ne Win had tried to be friends before he went to jail, inviting him to

dinner and so forth, but he was unswayed. In 1991 they took him from jail to show him round an

exhibition which had, as its motto, “Myanmar is strong if the army is strong”. He was even less

swayed. The place for soldiers was in barracks. They could not run countries. Since Ne Win’s coup

in 1962 that had brought the generals to power, and especially after the brutal suppression of a

popular uprising in 1988, they had trampled all the freedoms of the Burmese people. Soon after his

release the army had begun to liberalise, to allow opposition newspapers and parties and, in 2010,

elections. But he trusted none of it. He demanded a wholesale apology and wanted them gone.

Fried eels and football

This marked a distinct difference from his long-time ally, Aung San Suu Kyi. Though his life up to

then had been spent editing and publishing newspapers, he had persuaded her in 1988 to found,

with him, the National League for Democracy (NLD). He was nearly 60, and his own paper had

just been shut down. Within the party he was known as “Saya”, Sage, and the regime assumed he

was Miss Suu Kyi’s puppet master, but he did not see himself as a politician. To the extent he was,

he was the antithesis of her cool, aloof, rather aristocratic approach: a man of the people, a

trader’s son, naturally humble, a gregarious enjoyer of sausages, fried eels and Champions League

football; and a complete non-compromiser.

Unbendingly, he refused to play the army’s game. In 2010 the NLD boycotted the elections; Win

Tin thought it should do the same in the by-elections of 2012, even though it won nearly all the

seats it contested. For him, Miss Suu Kyi was too soft and much too pro-establishment. Her

father, after all, had been both the hero of independence and the founder of the Burmese army.

She negotiated with the generals, where he never would, and she was revered by party members

in a way he thought bad for democracy. He was no fan of violent opposition himself; that, he said,

was not the Burmese way. But he made no secret of trying to find another figurehead, someone

younger, to replace her.

Since he had never married, and had lost all his property while in prison, he spent his last years in

a two-room cabin in the garden of a friend. It was stuffed with books and ever open to visitors,

but those who called would find him still in a blue prisoner’s shirt. He wore no other sort. For

despite the reforms and the lifting of Western sanctions, the generals had not yet apologised and

Myanmar was not yet free. In his own words, therefore, “I decline my release, /I am prepared to

stay.”

From the print edition: Obituary