Myanmar: No Safe Shelter

Insight Myanmar

When Hla Hla Win heard her sentence — twenty-seven years in prison at age twenty-three — she did not collapse into disbelief. She recalibrated. “I decided that in politics, the way things change, I will be released. I know it clearly.” She would measure time day by day, not by the weight or the finality of that number. This instinct — to narrow her field of vision to what she could control — runs through her life as a seasoned reporter, political prisoner, and war correspondent.

Hla Hla Win’s career began in the wake of the 2007 Saffron Revolution. At the time, she was working as a teacher, but after having witnessed soldiers attack monks and civilians, she decided she “wanted to do something against this military,” and joined Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB). She had little formal training. “I was new in journalism, I didn’t know much,” she admits. What she had instead was proximity — she listened to monks who described killings in Pakokku and abuses by soldiers and police. But the footage she recorded was confiscated before she could upload it, and within days, she was arrested.