An Experiment with the Island Detention of Public Enemies in Postcolonial Burma

In January 1959, a newly formed military-led government set up a camp in the Cocos Islands, the remotest archipelago within Burma'.s territory, to confine detainees cast as threats to law and order. Who did it send? Why? What did they encounter there and how did they get back to the mainland? This chapter addresses these questions via a reading of former detainees'. memoirs. In doing so it attends to how the detainees imagined and acted upon possibilities for their own liberation from the camp, and possibilities for the freedom of Burma from military domination. And it considers how the political history of Burma might be reimagined through a reading of memoirs and other sources recounting struggles for liberation, individually and collectively.