When Ohmar was a senior at Rangoon University, like many other students who participated in the bloody 1988 protests, she and her colleagues were pursued by Burma’s military intelligence unit. They fled to rebel-held territory on the border with Thailand, where they bonded with the ethic minority Mon people over shared anti-government views. She applied to the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok for political asylum, was resettled in the United States in 1990 and eventually became an American citizen. She studied in western Massachusetts and made her way to Washington, D.C., where she became well versed in the tactics of the exile activist, even testifying before a Senate subcommittee in 1995.

In 1998, Ohmar returned to the Thai side of the Thailand-Burma border and founded the Burma Partnership, a civil society group. Fourteen years later, as the new quasi-civilian government made overtures to blacklisted exile activists to return, she took the first of several trips back into Myanmar, where she worked on human rights issues such as reducing rising discrimination against minority Muslims, strengthening women’s rights and expanding the role of civil society. On her trips back, she has remained outspoken and skeptical of the government’s reform efforts. After traveling to Thailand earlier this year, she found that the Myanmar government would no longer issue her a visa to return, she says via Skype from Thailand.