In a country ruled by fear, speaking out takes uncommon courage

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My first encounter with Myanmar's embattled dissidents was in a decaying Buddhist monastery in Mandalay, the country's main religious centre. I couldn't see any spies or informers, but the young maroon-robed monk was taking no chances. He led me down a staircase into a gloomy dormitory room, away from any prying ears.

Here he told me an incredible story: how he was raised on government propaganda, how he had always believed the military junta when it claimed that Aung San Suu Kyi was a bad influence, and how one day he happened to hear a smuggled tape of one of her impassioned speeches on democracy. It changed his life forever.

A year after hearing that speech, the 30-year-old monk had become an activist in the underground opposition movement, spreading the word of democracy to other monks and students in Mandalay. "People don't even have the right to talk in our country," he told me. "We want the freedom to talk."

It was my first inkling of the powerful emotions that Ms. Suu Kyi unleashed among the ordinary people of Myanmar, far beyond the walled villa in Rangoon where she was kept under house arrest. But it was also my first understanding of the climate of fear under the military regime, and the courage of the many people who refused to stay silent.

Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma, is a land in a time warp. Cities like Rangoon and Mandalay are reminiscent of other Asian cities in the 1950s. Its streets are dusty and poor, its buildings are crumbling, and the sense of isolation is almost as palpable as it is in North Korea today. The Internet has barely arrived in Myanmar and even then remains tightly controlled.

But the military junta is shrewd enough to allow safety valves in its dictatorship. While more than 1,000 political prisoners were behind bars, the regime would sometimes give freedom to a few elderly and frail dissidents - and even occasionally to Ms. Suu Kyi herself. And then, within a year or so, the doors would slam shut again.

In 2004, a few months after my meeting with the Mandalay monk, the junta allowed Ms. Suu Kyi's political party to reopen its headquarters. I happened to be in Rangoon, and I wandered down to its offices. Its members were stacking up piles of T-shirts with a portrait of Ms. Suu Kyi and their slogan: "Freedom from fear."

I met a 79-year-old man named U Lwin, one of the oldest leaders of Ms. Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy. He had just been released after 10 months of house arrest, and he limped and shuffled slowly around the party headquarters. He was clearly no threat to anyone, yet he had been detained three times in the previous six years. During his house arrest, he had not even a telephone to connect him to his comrades. "I'm a Buddhist," he told me. "I did a lot of meditation."

Another party member, 32-year-old Toe Lwin, remembered how he tried desperately to protect Ms. Suu Kyi from a gang of thugs who attacked her convoy near Mandalay during one of her brief bouts of freedom. He flung himself over her car, trying to defend her, and was clubbed repeatedly on the head. Nearly a year later, he still had deep scars on his skull. It's a danger that worries many NLD members today, fearful that the regime will organize another attack on Ms. Suu Kyi if she tries to travel around the country after her latest release from house arrest.

While the monks and other dissidents lived in poverty, the junta's leaders and their business cronies enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. They lived in luxurious villas in Rangoon's suburbs, driving Land Rovers and shopping in exclusive stores where a small bottle of Martell cognac sold for the equivalent of two years wages for the average factory worker.

In the fall of 2007, the discontent exploded into street protests led by the monks. More than 100,000 people took to the streets of Rangoon, defying the military. Drawing their inspiration from Ms. Suu Kyi, the monks marched through the police barricades to reach her home, where she briefly met them at the gate and accepted their blessings.

Four days later, police and soldiers opened fire on the monks with live ammunition, brutally crushing the wave of protests.

A few days after the bloodshed, I interviewed a monk who had fled from the violence. He recalled the bullets and the fear and chaos. But he vowed to continue the struggle against the regime. "This is just a pause in our fight," he told me in a safe house near the border.

"This is not the end. We have already decided to go to the end. The people are waiting for us. Even if we have to pay with our lives, we will pay."

Geoffrey York covered Asia for The Globe and Mail from 2002 to 2008