‘I Wanted Democracy’

The interrogators, he noted, were always police, not soldiers. He was alternately made to sit on a chair and on the ground during the questioning.

Detainees were fed twice a day, rice and fried cabbage. A small amount of drinking water was available each day. For the first 15 days, neither latrines nor bathing facilities were provided. He never bathed, because there were always three or four soldiers present, making crude remarks.

In a few days the soldiers played their intimidation trump card, moving to "derobe" the monks—excommunicate them. The military even brought in Sangha nayakas, Buddhist officials authorized to officiate in the conversion of a person from monk to layman. The nayakas refused to recite the appropriate scripture, so the soldiers simply forced monks to don civilian dress and pronounced them laymen.

"This included senior monks," says the monk, a tall man with an elegant shaved head and an easy smile, still wearing prison-issue flip-flops. "But I took my vows a long time [six years] ago, and from that moment on I know I'm a monk whether they take my robes or not. I felt angry to be forced to change my clothes, but I was still a monk."

Nothing about the soldiers' conduct surprised him, he says. As a novice in his native Rakhine state on the Bay of Bengal, he had seen the feared Tatmadaw, the military, raid villages, looting, raping women and taking away young men to serve them as porters.

A week after their arrest, "detainees got blankets and plywood flooring in the hall after one detainee died due to sleeping on the cold concrete," he says.