Burma: Forgotten and locked in the shadow of the past

Nearly 20 years ago, Burma, the hermit of south-east Asia, and under military rule since 1962, almost experienced a revolution.

The student uprising of August 1988 vented the fury and frustration of a people whose future, so promising at the time of independence from Britain, had turned into a nightmare of tyranny, stagnation and whimsical socialism dictated by the military dictator Ne Win.

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One year before the far more celebrated act of Chinese popular defiance at Tiananmen Square, Burma's "8/8/88" uprising was violently suppressed with the loss of thousands of lives.

But despite the brutality of the army's assaults - aided by the fact that, unlike China, Burma was essentially off the map for the West, and most of the killings went unrecorded by the foreign media - the Burmese people emerged victorious.

Ne Win went into retirement. A new set of generals took his place, calling themselves SLROC, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, but in acknowledgment of the justice of the people's demands they conceded general elections.

That was one triumph. The other was that, in the cauldron of the uprising, Burma had found a leader. Aung San Suu Kyi, the only daughter of the hero of Burma's struggles against Japanese and British colonialism, was in Rangoon by chance in the summer of 1988. She lived with her family in Oxford, but had returned to the parental home to look after her seriously ill mother.

Living abroad throughout her adult life, Suu Kyi's involvement in Burmese affairs had until that point been very limited. But caught up in the drama of the uprising, she grasped the need of the moment and became the figurehead of the regime's opponents. And yet she was far more than a figurehead: bringing her knowledge and experience of democracy, from India to Britain, she gave the rebels a degree of political maturity that they would have lacked without her.

The fruit of the uprising was the general election, held in 1990. Astonishingly it was relatively free and fair, and Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy won a landslide victory. But despite that mandate and the momentum for radical change that it represented, the process was already curdling, the generals were busy hauling down the shutters. Suu Kyi, her potency as a leader recognised by the generals, was locked up in her home before the nation went to the polls. She remained there in the glow of victory - and then the junta refused to recognise the result.

That was 17 years ago, and Burma has been living in the deep shadow of those events ever since. The ruling junta have consolidated their power: by keeping Suu Kyi locked away (she has been given her freedom several times since, but every time she proves to be as popular as ever, she is isolated again); by handing out ferocious jail sentences to her supporters and anyone else who defies the regime; and by conducting unending, brutal wars against the ethnic minorities on the country's borders. Burma's wealth of resources have encouraged companies such as Total, the French oil giant, to do deals with the regime.

Suu Kyi remains locked in her home, more isolated than ever. And the spasmodic, mostly symobolic pressure from the West has yet to precipitate anything in the way of democratic reform.