BURMA:Amid tales of a fierce crackdown by the military, some feel that things must change in Burma, writes a Special Correspondentin Rangoon
An hour after the 10pm curfew on Sunday, Rangoon belongs to the army and police. At a deserted downtown junction, four policemen sprawl on the ground, smoking and bored.
Their loud laughter at a crude joke about pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi carries into the night. A truck full of soldiers slides quietly by.
Raids and detentions of targeted monasteries and neighbourhoods have not stopped in this city still living in suspense while acquiring the patina of surface normality. At dawn the security forces fade away, replaced by early risers walking to work or travelling in the creaky old buses whose recent fare increases did so much to spark the current unrest.
The idea that the Burmese people are at economic breaking point is almost as old as 45-year military rule, but it has acquired a new life after the marches that began with calls for an end to August's huge fuel price rise.
The everyday realities of daily life here are startling and severe. A street cleaner earns 15,000 kyats or about €17 a month. A labourer receives about €29 and a middle-level civil servant or a tour guide about €35.
On those sorts of wages and in the environment of hyper- inflation that has accelerated in recent years, much of the population struggles to afford basic food, never mind normal expenses for rent, transportation, health and children's education.
It is easy to see the results in the thin, pasty physiques here compared to those of the average Thai person, just an hour's flight and a world away.
Increasingly people turn to second jobs, pawn shops and money lenders who charge extortionate rates. "Once they are in that cycle, it's virtually impossible to escape," said one middle-class observer.
Locals follow prices like hawks; everyone is a mini economist. The price of a cup of thick milky tea in one of tea- shops that are the core of the city's social life is 250 kyats, or 14 cents. That doesn't sound much, but it's 25 per cent higher than the same cup of tea last year. City bus fares are now twice what they were before August; a local businessman says he has had to pay his staff extra for transportation costs since then.
A local expert gives some longer-term figures on the extraordinary inflation rates. In 1988, when the last political protests erupted, a tickal of gold was 11,000 kyats. Today the same gold costs 540,000 kyats. A unit of rice that cost 15 kyats in 1988 is today 800 kyats. "It's just impossible, but I don't think the military knows how to fix it," said a local economic expert.
The people are broke and the monks who accept their food alms every morning see their strain - that's why so many monks marched, according to a local white-collar worker still shocked at the violent results.
Business people are jittery, workers are on the edge; this time something must give, he says, echoing sentiments heard from many quarters this week.
A few key leaders from the "88 generation" of freed former political prisoners, who put themselves in the line of fire again by leading the first of the recent protests, are still at large and so are a few monks. Some are managing to talk to outside radio stations from their hiding places.
"They are not leaving the country like people did in 1988, this time they feel the only way to get change is to stay," says a senior manager who took part in protests 30 years ago.
"I feel also that this time it has to happen, otherwise we will be another 50 years under the military."
In the absence of a free press and with the internet shut down, Rangoon again gets its news via informal networks of friends, colleagues and tea-shops.
There are no visible protests now, but there are signals and signs of dissent. Cartoons and poems are being produced and secretly circulated.
People try to recognise each other via a dress code, wearing black to support students, red to support Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, yellow to support the monks.
There was a plan to lay wreaths of flowers near where people were killed in the crackdown. On Sunday, people of all religions were asked via the networks to buy and light candles in support of the ongoing dissent.
Aung San Suu Kyi has herself sent out her own sign. Three days ago she wrapped a yellow banner around the large tree at the gate of her house, containing the religious words "Let there be no harm".
The military insists every day in state newspapers that it has acted with restraint to quell the activities of "trouble-makers" bent on destroying the country.
It is attempting to discredit monk leaders as agitators in disguise, whom it reluctantly has had to prevent threatening national stability.
However it cannot erase people's shock or suppress the stories that continue to emerge of what happened at the protests and of what is happening in night raids still. Eyewitnesses as well as participants are targeted after the military examines its own and confiscated video and still camera footage of events.
Among the nervous are a woman who took pictures of a military-owned CCTV recording the crowds. Also anxious is a witness who says she saw soldiers shoot two demonstrators, bodies placed in a truck and blood being hosed off the street.
The soldiers had a code for demonstrators, according to a man listening to their conversations on a walkie-talkie; civilians were "potatoes" and monks were "oranges".
A senior business manager has been counselling a part-time employee who also works as a private bus driver. With four other bus drivers and their vehicles, the man was made to park his vehicle in front of protesters on a downtown street last week, the manager says.
"He was to wait for one signal which meant he had to flash his lights at the crowd to get them to go back. At a second signal he was supposed to drive at speed into the people. He didn't know what to do," the manager says.
"Luckily for him, the second signal didn't come. At the end of the day the soldiers gave him 3,000 kyats and sent him off. He still feels very sad."
The manager's story provides a new twist on the many eyewitness accounts emerging of trucks driving straight into protesters.
Monks are being sent back to homes in rural areas; there are accounts from various sources of unusual night-time activity at a city crematorium.
Released detainees are describing being made to sit on a wet floor in a crowded auditorium for two days with no access to a bathroom.
There are worries for the sick and the poor whom monks help to support. A monastery in the northwest of the city that takes care of patients with HIV and Aids is now nearly empty, according to a reliable source concerned over how its desperately marginalised dependants will cope.
Many ordinary concerned Burmese seem to believe two seemingly contradictory things; that change must come from within and that it will only come with more pressure from the international community.
A veteran local analyst sees the generals' conditional offer to meet Aung San Suu Kyi as a sign that the military is on the defensive, but is also "just resorting to the usual delaying tactics".
He would like to see "carrots as well as sticks" deployed as part of the arsenal of current political efforts being considered by the UN, EU and the US.
He and many others in this beleaguered country believe now, at last, somehow, there may be a chance for change in Burma.