From Telegraph.co.uk :

Burma's generals refine suppression

By Sebastien Berger

Last Updated: 12:42am BST 29/09/2007

Commentary

Any military dictatorship wanting to crush a popular uprising can look to the Burmese junta's actions in recent days as a textbook example.

It is usually the economy that brings down despots - the protests that toppled Suharto in Indonesia were triggered by increases in the cost of rice.

Faced with demonstrations against fuel price rises, Burma's State Peace and Development Council at first broke them up, but once the country's revered monks became involved, allowed them to continue for several weeks.

Even Aung San Suu Kyi, who is generally adored by the civilian population and loathed by the regime, was permitted to greet a group of protesters.

But instead of appeasing the people's anger, it emboldened them, and the size of the crowds in Rangoon accelerated to 100,000.

Coming within perhaps hours of a critical mass that would have seriously threatened the authorities' hold on power, they moved ruthlessly.

Access to Miss Suu Kyi's compound was cut, depriving the protesters of contact with their political talisman. The monks, who gave them an icon of moral superiority and spiritual protection, were removed from circulation. Hundreds were arrested in midnight raids.

With their line of fire cleared of maroon-robed clerics, the junta's troops shot an unknown number of people. Whether 10, 20 or 200 protesters died is in a sense irrelevant – the effect was to destroy the protests' momentum, as shown by the few demonstrators brave enough to face the soldiers.

The dictatorship even managed to avoid a massacre on the scale of 1988, when an estimated 3,000 were killed, and will soon announce that order has been restored and "internal and external destructive elements" defeated.

Now those seen as ringleaders and organisers will be sentenced to long prison terms and dispatched to remote jails around the country, where conditions are harsh and their families unable to visit.

Miss Suu Kyi will remain under house arrest for the foreseeable future and the vast majority of the downtrodden people will return to their daily struggle to survive, their hopes for freedom dashed.

Every time a revolution fails it is harder to bring people out to try again - these were the biggest protests in almost 20 years – and unless there are dramatic developments in the next days and weeks no repetition is likely soon. Worse, events did not reveal any signs of internal divisions within the regime.

Diplomatic denunciations from the West will have exactly the same effect as years of rhetoric already - none at all - and normal relations will continue with its most important ally China, which has conspicuously failed to condemn the junta's actions.

Burma's generals have long experience of crushing dissent. They have just refined their techniques.