The day San Zaw Htwe was arrested he tried to chew through the leg of the wooden chair he was shackled to. He could hear a river outside. He figured he could swim away and escape the little room and the big men and the terrible certainty of years in prison.
The former student activist holds up a bony finger. “There was only this much left,” he says, breaking into a toothy smile at the memory of the chair leg. “They kicked me. My chair and I fell over.” Then his interrogators shackled him to a log. He would serve 12 years for distributing anti-government leaflets.
San Zaw Htwe will turn 39 on Saturday, the second anniversary of the day President Thein Sein took office and pledged to transform Myanmar from a military dictatorship into a free-market democracy. Thein Sein‘s administration has made remarkable progress toward that goal, but at a price that San Zaw Htwe knows only too well: forgetting the past.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is part of “Portraits of Change,” a yearlong series by The Associated Press examining how the opening of Myanmar after decades of military rule is — and is not — changing life in the long-isolated Southeast Asian country.
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Two years into Thein Sein‘s four-year term, reform in Myanmar has taken on an enchanting momentum. Released from house arrest, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has a seat in parliament. The media censorship office is shut. Most Western sanctions have been lifted, and foreign investors are pouring into this once-shunned Southeast Asian nation, eager to build hotels and airports, drill for natural gas and sell cars, beer, soda, medical devices and mobile phone connections.
Lost in this great forward movement is a reckoning with the past. For half a century, Myanmar was ruled by one of the most repressive governments in history. Torture was common. Thousands of political prisoners were jailed without fair trial. And a handful of men, both military and their friends, amassed fortunes, sometimes brutally and often dishonestly.
Myanmar’s ongoing transformation has been largely managed from above, by some of the very men and institutions implicated in abuses. Many fear that dredging up the past could imperil reform. For now at least, silence seems the best way to shore up progress.