Searching for answers in Burma

By Clive Myrie BBC correspondent in Rangoon

It's the rainy season now in Rangoon. Dark, menacing clouds hang over the city as we touch down at the international airport.

The temperature, a sweaty 29 degrees. This is my second trip to Burma and again I'm amazed at how innocent it looks.

You're not bombarded by rampant commercialism, shopping malls and giant billboards selling lots of things you don't need. This is not a place of skyscrapers, McDonalds and Starbucks.

It's a gentle city of golden pagodas and pious Buddhist monks; a little faded but still beautiful with glorious colonial era buildings on tree lined streets.

Aung San Suu Kyi is in custody again

But Rangoon is the capital of a troubled country, for decades isolated from the outside world. An isolation forced on the Burmese people by their despotic leaders.

The army has been in control now for more than four decades. In 1990 the people rose up and, in an election, told the generals just how misguided their rule was.

They didn't like that and ever since have trampled on anyone who dares question them.

The nation's first lady and pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi lives in one of those glorious colonial era houses. In fact for 8 of the last 12 years, she wasn't allowed to leave her home having been placed under house arrest.

Now she's in custody again. It's for her own safety, the generals say.

The Moustache Bros

I wanted to find out why the junta had chosen this moment to flex its muscles again. After all, it was only a year ago that Aung San Suu Kyi was released, a time when there was a real feeling that things might be changing for the better in Burma.

I made the journey north from Rangoon to the second city of Mandalay to see two men who've known Aung San Suu Kyi for years, and have paid a heavy price for their loyalty.

Rangoon: "Not a place of rampant commercialism"

They're a comedy act called the Moustache Bros and they had said they were willing to talk to me on the record.

As the car made its way there I kept looking behind to make sure I wasn't being followed - my video camera and recording equipment hidden deep in my backpack.

When eventually I arrived at my destination, a fairly large house on a main road, I was greeted by two smiling men with huge moustaches, Lu Maw and Pa Pa Lay.

They ushered me into a front room. On one wall were scores of colourful puppets or marionettes, some a metre high. The brothers make and sell them to tourists.

And on the other wall, numerous photographs of them with Aung San Suu Kyi, some dating back to the 1980s.

Performance ban

The Moustache Brothers use comedy and satire to pass comment on the world around them. In 1996, they performed on Independence Day at the invitation of Aung San Suu Kyi before thousands of people outside her home in Rangoon.

During the show, Pa Pa Lay cracked a joke at the expense of the junta. He was sentenced to seven years in jail.

Pa Pa Lay did his time in a hard labour camp, breaking rocks for road construction

Now the brothers are not allowed to perform in public places, so the front room I was standing in was also their theatre.

Pa Pa Lay did his time in a hard labour camp, breaking rocks for road construction. His legs were always shackled at the ankle by a metal bar. He had to walk like a penguin, he told me.

Lu Maw spoke pretty good English and he liked to pepper his conversation with well known phrases that he'd learned from tourists.

I "kept the home fires burning while my brother was in jail," he'd say; I "shoot from the hip" with my comedy. My dad was a comedian so I must be a "chip off the old block."

'Everyone's running'

Lu Maw told me about the sense of fear that now exists within Burma's opposition movement since the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi.

"Everyone's running," he said, "hiding out, keeping a low profile. No-one wants to hear that knock on the door in the middle of the night."

The day before I met them, one of their friends was taken away, suspected of fraternising with a western journalist. His wife was beside herself with worry. No-one had heard from him since.

He told me that Aung San Suu Kyi's support base had widened considerably in recent months, that more and more Buddhist monks were backing her and that the junta was terrified they'd link up with student activists to try and bring about change.

That's one of the reasons why we're seeing the clampdown, he said, that's why Aung San Suu Kyi is now in detention.

They call Burma the Golden Land, because of the golden spires of those Buddhist temples. But it's also a place of repression, fear and torture.

So many have suffered at the hands of the military for daring to speak out in defence of democracy. But those voices won't go away, even if they've been silenced - for the moment.