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THE datelines tell a story. Most reports of the protests in Myanmar come from Bangkok. Never overly hospitable to foreign journalists, Myanmar’s ruling junta has, at its moment of crisis, shut the door altogether. A few have sneaked in, posing as tourists, but internet links have been cut and mobile phone lines are intermittent.

Sometimes in the past the junta has permitted foreign journalists to visit on official visas. This has served two purposes: they can be easily monitored while in-country; and they will be on file should they ever seek to enter incognito. A window opened briefly after the ouster of the former intelligence chief, Khin Nyunt, in 2004. In the ensuing shake-up, the spooks seem to have lost track of their previous journalist visitors.

The window has since shut, but information is getting out anyway. Search for Myanmar on YouTube, and, if you dodge the trailer for the next Rambo movie, you will find dozens of pictures of the protests. Even a poor, isolated country like Myanmar has been affected by the communications revolution. News management is harder than it was.

Nonetheless, many Asian countries still try to control the foreign press by restricting access. When King Gyanendra of Nepal seized absolute power in February 2005, his henchmen cut internet access and mobile-phone lines. They even shut Kathmandu airport for most of the day of his coup. When it opened that evening, however, the “visa-on-arrival” queue at the airport was made up entirely of foreign hacks, many equipped with unblockable satellite phones.

The most successful manager of the press, in one sense, is North Korea. Its almost utter isolation ensures that little is written about conditions in the country, and that what does appear overseas is in large measure speculation.

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You weren't supposed to see this

But even an otherwise open country such as Bangladesh succeeded, under the previous regime of Khaleda Zia, in staying out of international headlines, despite a nationwide, co-ordinated terrorist attack in 2005 involving more than 450 little bombs. Its government’s trick was to make it very hard for foreign journalists to visit.

Pakistan admits journalists relatively freely, but tends to restrict them to the big cities of Lahore and Karachi and to Islamabad, the capital. Most visas are stamped with the obscure-looking caveat “not valid in cantonment areas”. On this ground, your correspondent was once nearly turfed out of a hotel in Rawalpindi at one o’clock in the morning. It took a while for his excuse (an appointment in the morning with Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, who also lives in a “cantonment area” in Rawalpindi) to be verified and an exception made.

China used to require that foreign correspondents based in Beijing obtain the approval of the relevant local authority before travelling anywhere outside the capital. Citing an expected influx of 20,000-30,000 journalists to cover next year’s Olympics, the foreign ministry dropped the rule at the beginning of this year. But some local governments and their thuggish police still plead ignorance of the new dispensation and try to send prying foreign pressmen packing.

Newspaper bosses may prefer these crude approaches to the foreign press to the expensive methods used by governments like Singapore’s, which is generous with access but quick to sue for defamation. Even that, however, has its drawbacks. It may actually deter positive coverage, since it might appear the result of timidity.

In general, easier access would result in better, more balanced coverage. Reporting from a country without letting the government know all but forces a journalist to spend more time with its opponents. The government’s opacity arouses suspicion by suggesting it has something to hide. But then, of course, it usually does.

Something in the air?

Sep 27th 2007 | HONGWEI
From The Economist print edition

Locals think they know why their children are sick

Steven RibetLooking for an answer

The Hongwei Petrochemical Park is just outside the city of Daqing. Celebrated in Maoist myth as the scene of heroic industrialisation, Daqing is still the fourth most productive oilfield in the world. Of the six companies operating in the park, the largest is Daqing Lianhua, a PetroChina subsidiary.

For eight years residents of Hongwei have been waging a fruitless struggle to find the cause of high rates of serious illness in their midst. Out of a permanent population of 3,400, at least ten children have been born with an affliction diagnosed by local doctors as cerebral palsy. It is unprecedented for the incidence of cerebral palsy to “cluster” in this way. Foreign experts think from the symptoms and clustering that the disease is akin to Minamata Syndrome, a neurological condition caused by exposure to mercury in the womb. Cancer rates are twice the national average.

America and Iran

The limits of free expression

NEW YORK is used to the drama (and the traffic) created by visiting dignitaries. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, caused more stir than most. He started by asking whether he could lay a wreath at Ground Zero as a show of respect. “Access of Evil” cried the tabloids; “Zero Chance”, and “Go to Hell”. Condoleezza Rice called the idea “a travesty”. Fairly swiftly, the visit was ruled out by the New York Police Department on security grounds. But Mr Ahmadinejad then prompted an even bigger ruckus when he appeared at Columbia University's World Leaders Forum on September 24th.

Politicians, from city councillors to presidential candidates, were appalled that an invitation had been extended in the first place. Sheldon Silver, speaker of the New York State Assembly, threatened to withhold state support from Columbia. Mitt Romney, a Republican hopeful, released a television commercial condemning the visit. But Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president, refused to withdraw his invitation. It would offend against the principle of free expression, he said: a principle revered in America, but not in Iran. Perhaps to save face, he opened the forum by blasting Mr Ahmadinejad as a “petty and cruel dictator”, questioning his “intellectual courage”, and describing his take on the Holocaust as “ridiculous”.

The campus was plastered with posters both supporting and condemning Mr Ahmadinejad's appearance. A list of children supposedly on Iran's death row hung on the campus gates. Audience members challenged him over reports that more than 200 people have been executed in Iran so far this year. Members of an ad hoc student committee wore black T-shirts with a quotation from Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Mr Ahmadinejad's remarks and answers drew applause in parts, but much of what he said was met with incredulity. He called for more research into the Holocaust as well as more investigation into the “root causes” of the September 11th attacks. When asked about the oppression of women in Iran, he retorted that they were exempt from many responsibilities “because of the respect culturally given to women”. His audience laughed out loud when he said that, in Iran, “we do not have homosexuals like in your country”.

The attention being paid to Iran, at Columbia and in Washington, is increasing pressure to do something about its fishy nuclear programme—though something short of war. The urge to turn the screws, combined with the meekness of UN sanctions, has led to new efforts to divest America's pension funds from companies—mainly foreign ones, or subsidiaries of American groups—that do business with Iran. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's governor, will soon sign a bill that will divest California's two main public pension funds (for civil servants and teachers) from all such companies. The funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, are the two biggest pension funds in the country; CalPERS alone manages 0 billion, of which about billion will have to be pulled out of companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Alcatel, a telecoms firm. The bill's backers hope that other states will follow suit, and that eventually the federal government will be persuaded to tighten its own sanctions.

Illustration by Bill Butcher

ECONOMISTS have long warned that the world economy could not fly for ever on the single engine of American demand. A one-engined plane is more likely to crash. With its housing market blighted and its consumers growing fearful, America now faces a mounting risk of recession. The good news, however, is that the world has found some powerful new engines in China and other emerging economies. Even as credit markets seize up, a world economy that is less dependent on the United States is more likely to stay aloft.

The power of this new motor is startling. For several years, emerging Asian economies have accounted for more of global GDP growth than America has. This year China alone will for the first time accomplish the same feat all on its own (at market exchange rates), even if American growth holds up. American consumer spending is roughly four times the size of China's and India's combined, but what matters for global growth is the extra dollars of spending generated each year. In the first half of 2007 the increase in consumer spending (in actual dollar terms) in China and India together contributed more to global GDP growth than the increase in America did.

Of course, this silver lining has its cloud. A sharp slowdown in China now would have much nastier global consequences than in the past, and the Chinese economy has weaknesses. But it does not look like getting into trouble over the next couple of years (see article)—the period in which America looks as though it may be feeble. If China can keep flying high, it will help keep the world economy safe.

Of course, if America suffers a recession, then Asia's exports will weaken. But this should not hurt GDP growth too much because other factors should help offset the weakening. It helps that China and most other Asian emerging economies are now exporting more to the European Union than to America. China's exports to other emerging economies are growing even faster. It helps, too, that domestic spending has strengthened and is likely to stay strong: China, along with most of the rest of Asia, is one of few parts of the world without a housing bubble.

If emerging Asian economies start to look weak, their governments have some scope to strengthen them. Most, with the exception of India, have small budget deficits; some even have surpluses. So if exports collapse, governments also have ample scope to boost domestic demand.

Commodity prices, too, will continue to feel the effect of the emerging economies' increased importance. It is commonly assumed that an American recession would cause a sharp fall in the prices of oil and other commodities. But emerging Asia accounted for two-thirds of the increase in world energy demand over the past five years. So if Asia remains strong, commodity prices should too, and commodity-producing emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia and the Middle East will also continue to thrive.

Emerging Asia cannot pick up all the slack if America goes into recession. Average world growth will slow—and, arguably, it needs to. But Asia can help to keep the world chugging along. Indeed, a modest slowing in the American economy could even help Asia in the long run if it forces governments to switch the mix of growth from exports to consumption and so make their future growth more sustainable.

Not so long ago, the rich world used to regard emerging economies as risky and unstable. That view needs to change: emerging economies now look like a force for stabilising the world economy.

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LIKE North Korea's Workers' Party, another vile dictatorship that has visited misery and penury on its own people, Myanmar's junta has survived in part through diplomatic triangulation. Like North Korea, it has borne isolation and rhetorical hostility from the West by cosying up to the neighbours, notably China. And it has tried to avoid total subservience to any one of these by playing them off against each other.

Reuters

No way out?

As in the past, the world's initial response to the junta's violence was marked by bickering and point-scoring. On September 27th, the United Nations Security Council met in response to pressure from the West for co-ordinated sanctions. But Russia and China argued that the unrest was an internal matter that should not be on the council's agenda at all.

America announced new sanctions against the regime, in keeping with a policy some Western countries have pursued for nearly two decades. They are cheered on by a vocal and well-organised exile movement, and, when she was able to make her views known, by Aung San Suu Kyi herself. Her heroic stature has helped make Myanmar a fashionable cause. Awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1991, she has attracted the backing not just of fellow winners such as the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, but also of Laura Bush, the president's wife and Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister. The next Rambo movie features our hero taking on the tatmadaw single-handed.

Shareholder-activists and ordinary consumers have also done their bit to encourage a boycott. But the campaign to punish the regime sometimes seems to have lost sight of its real goal, and to be ready to celebrate isolation itself, not the change it is supposed to bring.

In fact, isolation has never really been on the cards. Any gap is eagerly filled by Myanmar's neighbours—not just China, but also India and Thailand and other members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Even in the Western camp there have been differences in approach between the three most important members, America, the EU and Japan.

American leaders have insisted the junta honour the 1990 election result and step aside. To this end, they have imposed wide-ranging sanctions. The most important of these block foreign aid and lending to Myanmar by the World Bank, IMF and Asian Development Bank. Official aid flows to Myanmar are among the lowest of any poor country in the world—around .50 a head each year, compared with, for example, in next-door Laos.

The EU has been more equivocal, demanding greater respect for human rights and a transition to civilian democracy, but appearing to accept fresh elections as the way to get there. Its sanctions have been correspondingly milder. Japan has been softer still. Burma's biggest aid donor until 1988, it has continued to provide small-scale help, apparently hoping to retain a smidgen of influence.

These days, however, if any countries can sway the junta they are the regional ones: ASEAN, especially Thailand; India; and above all China. When ASEAN controversially admitted Myanmar in 1997, on the organisation's 30th anniversary, it said membership would be an engine for positive change through “constructive engagement”. ASEAN's culturally sympathetic but fast-growing founder members would show Myanmar the way. This was guff.

Viewed most cynically, Myanmar's accession was part of a bid by ASEAN members to secure access to the country's rich resources: timber, oil, gas and minerals. Using more sophisticated (but no less cynical) geopolitical arguments, ASEAN diplomats justified admitting the unsavoury bunch as a way to prevent Myanmar becoming an arena in which China and India would vie for influence.

But this is happening anyway. China had a head start, and is maintaining its lead comfortably. Itself responsible for quelling an uprising with a massacre in 1989, China's government had few qualms about expanding ties with Myanmar during the 1990s. It supplied weaponry, including multiple-rocket launchers, fighter aircraft and guided-missile attack craft.

Western and Indian analysts worry that China sees Myanmar as part of its so-called “string of pearls” policy of building naval and intelligence bases around the Indian Ocean. There were reports that China was delivering signals equipment for monitoring stations on various coastal sites, and had a permanent presence on Great Coco Island (see map). Such talk has fuelled Indian paranoia, though Western analysts dismiss it.

Border trade, through the thriving, sleazy town of Ruili, also boomed. In the 1990s it included opium and heroin; shared needles produced China's first HIV epidemic, helping teach China the importance of “stability” in its neighbour.

In recent years the economic relationship has been transformed by China's hunger for energy and its involvement in big infrastructure projects. According to EarthRights International, an American NGO, Chinese firms are by now involved in about 40 hydropower projects and at least 17 onshore and offshore oil-and-gas projects. They have also announced plans to build a 2,400km (1,500 mile) oil-and-gas pipeline from Arakan in western Myanmar to China's Yunnan province.

China has also given the junta diplomatic support, helping for years to keep its behaviour off the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. But Myanmar is far from a client state. This week Chinese spokesmen called for restraint in responding to the protests. Their pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.

Reuters

Meritorious service

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THE generals who rule Myanmar must have been hoping they had successfully crushed the protests over their drastic increase in fuel prices last month. Arrests of suspected protest leaders and attacks on demonstrators by civilian goon-squads seemed to be doing the trick. But then, earlier this month, the army incurred the wrath of the country's respected Buddhist clergy by firing over the heads of a group of protesting monks in the central town of Pakkoku.

Some reports said monks were also beaten and arrested. The clergy demanded an apology. The junta refused. So the monks took to the streets of Yangon and other cities in their thousands, marching and chanting prayers. They urged laymen not to join the protests. They have also threatened, in effect, to excommunicate the junta by refusing to accept alms from them.

Raising the stakes, the army fired tear-gas canisters and warning shots to break up one of the biggest protests this week, in the western town of Sittwe. For two days, plain-clothes security men blockaded the golden Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, the country's most sacred Buddhist shrine. On September 20th they gave way and allowed around 1,000 monks, who had marched on the shrine through the pouring monsoon rain, to enter it. Irrawaddy, a newspaper run by Burmese exiles from neighbouring Thailand, claimed the junta had declared an emergency and authorised its forces to open fire on protesters if necessary.

All of this has recalled the mass pro-democracy uprising of 1988, which the regime put down harshly with the loss of thousands of lives. That, too, began in economic disgruntlement when the junta abruptly cancelled high-value banknotes. It then spread to a political movement in which students and monks played leading roles. Two years later the clergy imposed a boycott of military families similar to the one now being threatened.

This week's, like other, smaller protests over the years since then, failed to budge the junta. Hopes have risen, time and again, that demonstrations would gather momentum and trigger an unstoppable revolt, only to fade away.

But if there is one group in Burmese society that the generals might hesitate to confront, it is the clergy. Not just because it might whip up the masses to overthrow their tyranny at long last, but because of the influence Buddhists believe they have over the process of rebirth. Giving alms to monks is one of the main ways to make “merit”, so if this is denied the generals, they may lose their chance of advancement in their next life. A punishment amply merited.

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“FEAR”, the lady used to say, “is a habit.” This week, inspired in part by the lady herself, Aung San Suu Kyi, partly by the heroic example set by Buddhist monks, Myanmar's people kicked the addiction.

Defying the corrupt, inept, brutal generals who rule them, they took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands to demand democracy. They knew they were risking a bloody crackdown, like the one that put down a huge popular revolt in 1988, killing 3,000 people or more. In 1988 Burma's people were betrayed not just by the ruthlessness of their rulers, but also by the squabbling and opportunism of the outside world, which failed to produce a co-ordinated response and let the murderous regime get away with it. This time, soldiers are once again shooting and killing unarmed protesters (see article). Can the world avoid making the same mistake twice?

In New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Western leaders, led by George Bush, harangued the junta, and threatened yet more sanctions. They have probably already shot their bolt. Western sanctions have been tried and have failed, in part because Myanmar's neighbours have for years followed a different approach. Its fellow members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations waffled about “constructive engagement” while making economic hay in Myanmar from the West's withdrawal. India, too, anxious about China's growing influence, and hungry for oil and gas, has swallowed its democratic traditions and courted the generals.

China itself has built an ever-closer relationship. The two countries, after all, have a lot in common beyond a shared border. Since the 1980s a wave of “people-power” revolutions has swept aside tyrannies around the world. Mercifully few regimes, and few armies, are willing to kill large numbers of their own people to stay in power. Two big exceptions have been Myanmar and China, whose government in 1989 likewise stayed in power through a massacre.

Yet it is China that now offers the best hope the outside world has of changing Myanmar for the better. Admittedly, it is a thin hope. There are plenty of reasons to doubt China's willingness to upset Myanmar's generals. China's traditional posture, heard again this week, is to oppose any “interference in the internal affairs of another country”. It trots out this formula so often when foreigners criticise its own behaviour that, even if it supports change, it is hard for it to utter more than platitudes, as it has this month, about the desirability of a “democracy process that is appropriate for the country”.

China has also been the chief beneficiary of the partial Western boycott. Myanmar offers two of the prizes China values most in its foreign friends: hydrocarbon resources and a friendly army, willing to give it access to facilities on its coast on the Bay of Bengal. China has become the junta's biggest commercial partner and diplomatic supporter.

Nevertheless there are two reasons why China might now see its own interests as best served by assisting a peaceful transition in Myanmar. The first is that China wants stability on its borders, and it is becoming obvious that the junta cannot provide it. The generals' economic mismanagement has helped reduce a country blessed with rich resources to crippling poverty. Fleeing economic misery as much as political oppression, up to 2m migrants from Myanmar are in Thailand. And it was an economic grievance—a big, abrupt rise in fuel prices—that sparked the present unrest.

The junta has at least succeeded in cobbling together ceasefire agreements with most of the two dozen armed insurgencies lining its borders. But the price has been lawless zones where banditry and illegal-drug production are rife. Myanmar's slice of the “Golden Triangle” on its Thai and Lao borders was for a while in the 1990s the world's dominant heroin producer. It has been largely priced out of that market by Afghan competition. But it has successfully diversified into methamphetamines. The business relies on precursor chemicals coming from China, but, just as heroin from Myanmar brought China addiction and, through shared needles, HIV and AIDS, so “ice” can wreak havoc. Nobody expects any transition to democracy to be trouble-free. But, Chinese leaders must be asking themselves, can it be any worse?

China must also be wondering nervously how all this will affect next year's Olympic games in Beijing. Already, protests about China's support for the government of Sudan, larded with comparisons to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, have shown that its foreign policy as well as its human-rights record at home is under scrutiny. Myanmar is justifiably a popular cause in the West. If China proves actively obstructive to international efforts to bring the junta to book, it may provoke calls for a boycott of the games.

It is of course wrong to assume that China can dictate to Myanmar. In the generals' deluded world-view, only they can preserve Myanmar's independence. They will take orders from no other country. China's role is crucial, nonetheless. It must not blunt the impact of measures taken by other countries and provide the junta with a shield to fend off demands to do what it should.

That, at least, is easy to prescribe. It should stop shooting protesters; free all political prisoners, including Miss Suu Kyi; scrap the constitutional guidelines drawn up by its farcical “national convention”; and start serious talks with all groups, including Miss Suu Kyi and her party. The aim of those talks should also be clear: to arrange a transition to civilian, democratic rule. For their part, provided free and fair new elections are held, Miss Suu Kyi and her party should not insist on the results of the election they won in a landslide in 1990 being honoured. And, unpalatable as it is, they should offer the generals whatever incentive they need to go quietly. This all sounds a pipedream. It will certainly remain so if the outside world does not unite around a set of demands, and agree on the sticks and carrots that might make deaf old soldiers listen.

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THERE are reckoned to be 400,000 monks in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), about the same as the number of soldiers under the ruling junta's command. The soldiers have the guns. The monks have the public's support and, judging from the past fortnight's protests, the courage and determination to defy the regime. But Myanmar's tragic recent history suggests that when an immovable junta meets unstoppable protests, much blood is spilled. In the last pro-democracy protests on this scale, in 1988, it took several rounds of massacres before the demonstrations finally subsided, leaving the regime as strong as ever. By September 27th, with a crackdown under way, and the first deaths from clashes with security forces, it seemed hard to imagine that things would be very different this time.

One genuine difference is that, in the age of the internet and digital cameras, images of the spectacular protests in Yangon, the main city, have spread at lightning speed across Myanmar itself, encouraging people in other towns to stage demonstrations of their own; and around the world, bringing the crisis to the attention of leaders as they gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. The remarkable images from Myanmar have meant that, for a while at least, a country that has been brutalised and pauperised by a callous and incompetent regime for 45 years has the attention it deserves.

The latest round of protests began last month, after the government suddenly imposed drastic fuel-price rises. At first, the demonstrations, organised by veterans of the students' movement that led the 1988 protests, were fairly small. The regime arrested many leaders and sent plain-clothed goons to beat up demonstrators. It looked as if the protests might fizzle until, earlier this month, soldiers fired over the heads of monks demonstrating in the central town of Pakkoku. Some reports said monks were also beaten and arrested.

In Buddhist tradition, monks are rather different from in the West: large numbers of young men don russet robes for just a few years. So they are more integrated into the wider society, and more influential.

The clergy demanded an apology, setting a deadline of September 17th. The next day, their demand having been ignored, they took to the streets. They also, in effect, excommunicated the military and their families by announcing they would refuse to accept alms from them—a serious matter in a devout country.

Setting out at 1pm each day from the golden Shwedagon pagoda—Myanmar's most sacred shrine—a seemingly endless line of shaven-headed monks, many barefoot, has passed through the streets of Yangon. At first the monks limited themselves to chanting prayers and discouraged the public from joining them. But on September 22nd a hitherto unknown group, the All Burma Monks' Alliance, called on people to “struggle peacefully against the evil military dictatorship”. After this, large numbers of ordinary Burmese joined in, many linking hands along the route of the monks' procession. The monks' chants became overtly political, including the cry, “democracy, democracy”.

At first, the regime dithered. It fired tear-gas canisters at one of the first monks' protests, in the western town of Sittwe. But for the next few days, its forces stayed out of sight. On September 22nd, to their astonishment, a group of monks and laymen was allowed to pray outside the normally heavily guarded home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) and icon of Myanmar's struggle for democracy. Though Miss Suu Kyi is under house arrest, she was able to walk to her gate and, in tears herself, greet the tearful protesters.

Miss Suu Kyi's public appearance—her first since she was detained four years ago—proved a boon to the demonstrators. On Monday (September 24th) the protest in Yangon was said to be 100,000-strong. Monks waved the red “fighting peacock” flag, the emblem of the students who led the 1988 protests.

That night the regime broke its silence at last. On state television and radio, it warned of unspecified action “according to the law” if protests continued. The next day the protesters defied the threat, staging a demonstration at least as big as Monday's. As on previous days, the young monks were marshalled along the route by older ones with megaphones, followed by a vast throng of ordinary Burmese, and the odd government spy.

Those taking part were enormously moved by the defiance they achieved, as if that were an end in itself. Yet no one The Economist spoke to believed the government would yield; they were marching less in hope than in anger and despair. “I don't think we can defeat the government; I can't imagine what will happen,” said one young woman, “But we hope. We hope for the success of our revolution.”

Soon after Tuesday's march ended, troops and riot police moved in to positions around Yangon. The junta hunkered down for talks in Naypyidaw. That is the remote new capital the paranoid regime has built itself in the centre of the country for obscure reasons (perhaps on the advice of its soothsayers, or in fear of an American invasion, or of just this sort of popular uprising). Britain's ambassador, Mark Canning, went there and met two deputy ministers. He said they were under the illusion that the protests had been stoked by “meddling” foreign powers. Miss Suu Kyi was reported to have been moved to the regime's dreaded Insein prison.

On Wednesday the authorities announced a two-month night-time curfew and troops surrounded monasteries in Yangon. But swarms of protesters again poured on to the streets, defying tear-gas, warning shots and baton charges. The first deaths, including of monks, were reported. On Thursday, troops burst into monasteries around the country to make arrests but, again, this did not stop monks and laymen from hitting the streets, where riot police shot at them.

EPA

Dream on

In 1988, when protests also had an economic basis, monks took an active part. They did so again in 1990, after the regime called an election and ignored the result (a landslide victory for the NLD). But this time they are in the vanguard. Given the reverence they are accorded by the predominantly Buddhist public, they will be harder for the regime to dismiss as criminals and subversives.

It is unclear who is leading the monks' protest movement, says Aung Naing Oo, a political analyst and veteran of the 1988 student movement. But, he says, they seem well organised. Some of the clergy's top leaders on the State Sangha Council have been bought off by the regime. Others, though, seem sympathetic to their young disciples. At the very least, says Mr Oo, it can be assumed that the protesting monks have the blessing of the abbots in charge of the monasteries. The raids on the monasteries seem designed to smash this source of resistance.

The tatmadaw (armed forces) did not hesitate to arrest, beat and jail monks in 1988 and 1990. But this time, not only are the monks (and many Buddhist nuns too) leading the protests, but the numbers taking part are also far larger than before. Furthermore, the army has changed. In 1988 it was mostly professional and had recent experience of waging war against Myanmar's sizeable ethnic-minority militias. Since then its numbers have been greatly expanded through conscription, which means many of today's soldiers are ill-trained peasant boys, whose families will have suffered from the regime's colossal incompetence. Ironically, the army's success in forcing many of the armed ethnic insurgencies to accept ceasefires has left it with few soldiers with much real experience of fighting.

The regime may be trying to calibrate its response to the protests, using limited force at first to quell opponents. That said, it still has elite disciplined units which would be unlikely to flinch if ordered to open fire on unarmed monks and nuns.

If there are any cracks in the junta's unity, nobody outside knows about them. General Than Shwe, the 74-year-old paramount leader, is rumoured to be gravely ill but it is assumed that, when he goes, his replacement will be just as thuggish. Taking account both of the expanded army and of the sizeable ethnic militias, Myanmar is one of the world's most militarised countries, notes Martin Smith, a writer on the place. The junta's leaders, pointing to the country's chaotic period of parliamentary democracy between independence in 1948 and the military takeover in 1962, sincerely believe the army is the only institution capable of holding Myanmar together. They are determined to cling to power whatever the cost.

It is just possible, however, that the regime may match violence with concessions. Earlier this month, it wrapped up, after 14 years, a national convention to draft the guidelines for a new and supposedly democratic constitution. In fact, the new charter would leave the army in charge and political rights severely curtailed. But its precise wording has not yet been decided and the next steps towards implementing it are uncertain. This leaves scope for promises of progress, in the hope that this will weaken the protests.

Few demonstrators would trust such promises. But, combined with a stranglehold on the monasteries, and other repressive measures aimed at whittling down the numbers of protesters, they might be enough to show, once again, that resistance is futile. Back in 1988, at the peak of the protests, even as soldiers were mowing down the crowds, many Burmese felt sure the rotten regime was ready to collapse under the unstoppable force of “people power”, as the Marcos regime in the Philippines had two years earlier.

Even if the regime does crumble and the junta stuffs its bags with gemstones and heads for exile, Myanmar's troubles would still be daunting. Many of the ethnic minorities continue to distrust the majority “Burmans”, even including the democrats. And the NLD has been gutted by years of oppression. Miss Suu Kyi, inspiring figure though she is, is an untested leader who has perforce been woefully out of touch with events.

As in 1988 and 1990 the Burmese people have shown they want to choose their own leaders. In the past they did not fully reckon on the ruthlessness of the people they were up against. One day, as with all tyrannies, Myanmar's will fall. But much blood may flow before that day dawns.