Francis Wade

KZa​ Win seemed to know how his life would end. ‘Before the Revolution opened out,’ he wrote in ‘Skulls’, his final poem, ‘a bullet blew someone’s brains out.’ Eight days later, on 3 March 2021, security forces opened fire on a group of protesters in the city of Monywa, in central Myanmar. K Za Win was among them. A bullet hit him behind the ear....

In​ early September, footage was shown on Indian media of a mass detention camp being built to house three thousand ‘illegals’ in the north-eastern state of Assam. The camp will be surrounded by a twenty-foot-high wall. Crudely painted signs direct visitors ‘To detention centre’. There are watchtowers. Local officials in the Goalpara district of Assam, on the...

Since​ last summer, nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled western Myanmar to Bangladesh. The Myanmar military began its sweep of villages on 25 August in response to attacks on police outposts by an insurgent group aligned to the Muslim minority, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. Those who escaped to Bangladesh have recounted that soldiers, often accompanied by Buddhist civilians, encircled...