Inside the interrogation room of a Myanmar detention center, what Myat remembers most clearly is looking up from the floor and everything being green.

Tools for Repression in Myanmar Expose Gap Between EU Tech Investment and Regulation

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2021-06-15 09:00:03

Inside the interrogation room of a Myanmar detention center, what Myat remembers most clearly is looking up from the floor and everything being green. The officials questioning him sat on green plastic chairs behind a green table on a thin green carpet. Myat, a Burmese student in his mid-20s, was arrested in late March in Yangon, one of hundreds of young people who have been detained for protesting the military coup that occurred in February. Myat is a pseudonym: To protect his identity, The Intercept is withholding his real name and the specific date of his arrest.

“When they first caught me, about 30 police just beat me up quite badly. They also dragged me on the road for about 100 meters and I think I lost consciousness,” Myat said. “But somehow I wasn’t bleeding, so they kept beating me until I bled.”

In the police car following his arrest, Myat was forced to unlock his smartphone, which was subsequently confiscated. Then he was moved to a secretive military compound in Shwepyithar Township, which the junta has been using to detain protesters, journalists, and others swept up in mass arrests. Myat was questioned by soldiers who only months before shared power with democratically elected civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who nevertheless presided over a genocide by the same military of the Muslim Rohingya people, displacing some 740,000 to neighboring Bangladesh and according to United Nations investigators, killing more than 10,000.

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