KEY POINTS:
Splashing holy water over commuters, the Buddhist monks clutch their saffron robes around their knees and squeeze on to the crowded decks of ferries lined up in the translucent dusk on the Hlaing River.
Above the estuary, the glow from thousands of imported Chinese candles fills the windows of the old quarters of Yangon. In the private back room of a smoky riverside tea house, dock workers gloomily slurp flat, grey noodles from porcelain bowls and curse the power cuts that have left Myanmar's capital a virtual ghost town after dark.
In a corner, Ko Min Shah looks furtively towards the door, half-expecting the "Em-Eye", Myanmar's sadistic military intelligence service. He scribbles in frustration as his ballpoint runs out. "I want to write a message for you with my wife's details, to take out for me. You can carry it to the Thai border; she may be there. There are charities there who can help me, no?" he says hopefully.
"I'm not politically motivated. I'm just trying to find my wife. There is no real dissent here in Yangon. People are too scared to be members of any democratic movement. We are all just victims, people like me who are trying to get their lives back."
Ko Min, 47, his wife and two sons were swept up with hundreds of others in a military raid on their village near Bagan in 2005. The family were put to work, clearing jungle and digging latrines and an irrigation system for a military camp outside Mandalay.
"My youngest son and I only managed to escape last November," he says. "It was the rainy season and we were swept down a ravine and managed to escape the camp. I still don't know if my wife and eldest are there. I see her every night breaking rocks at the roadside. She is in my nightmares, not my dreams."
"Porterage", a colonial euphemism meaning forced menial labour, sits at the heart of the humanitarian crisis enveloping Myanmar, whose dreams of democracy were shattered in 1962 when Ne Win, commander of the armed forces, embarked on an ill-fated push towards socialist totalitarianism that put the Army at society's centre.
Under Ne Win and his successors, the Burmese military rulers - the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) - have become convinced that foreigners are trying to destroy them, a view that shapes international relations and their persecution of democracy campaigners, including Aung San Suu Kyi, still under house arrest in Yangon.
Over the past decade, up to a million people such as Ko Min Shah have been exiled to "satellite zones" and "labour camps", building bridges, military camps, irrigation systems and oil and gas pipelines.
Forever denying the extent of the slave camps, Myanmar's junta last week announced a "historic deal" with the International Labour Organisation, allowing victims of the camps over the past 40 years to seek compensation without fear of retaliation. The ILO claims the junta will establish a "complaint mechanism", but so far not one victim has even contacted the ILO.
In Myanmar today, there is no free speech. Owning a computer modem or a fax is illegal, and anyone talking to a foreign journalist is at risk of torture and jail.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has just been ordered to close its offices, ending its humanitarian work in border areas, where 500,000 tribespeople live in fear of the military, and around the new capital, Naypyitaw, where gulag-style camps exist. No one knows what prompted the junta to relocate Myanmar's capital to this isolated, dusty place 320km from Yangon.
The first to move, last year, were elements of the military, who forcibly recruited thousands of local people to build garrisons and a major dam to generate electricity; 100,000 slaves are thought to be building it.
Mway Khaing, one of 20,000 Mon villagers forced to work on the roads to Naypyitaw, said: "Soldiers came at night to my village last January. Young and old, women and men, older children, we were treated alike, like animals and slaves. Those who ran were shot in the back. A mother of four, my neighbour, was tied to a pole and raped. They tied a huge stone around her neck and left her to be eaten alive by the ants."
Yangon has seen its first protests since 1987. At their heart has been the country's staggering inflation. With the average salary about 1,300 kyats ($1.40) a day and the price of a small bag of rice at least 400 kyats, life under the twin blights of military rule and international sanctions is becoming increasingly intolerable.
David Mathieson, from New York-based Human Rights Watch in Thailand, said: "Generals have become masters at turning energy deals into protection money, and where do you think that the money is going to go? It's not going to education or health programmes - it's going to the military to build a better command centre in the mountains to repress the population."
Last year, Russia, also a major arms supplier to the regime, voted against putting Myanmar on the UN Security Council agenda. The very same day, Russia's state-owned Zarubezhneft oil company was awarded Moscow's first contract to explore Myanmar's offshore oil and gas reserves.
- OBSERVER
Secret new capital city opened to western journalists
The outside world this week got its first glimpse of the secret capital Myanmar is building deep in the jungle. In 2005, the military junta that rules Myanmar abruptly announced that the capital was moving from the leafy colonial city of Rangoon by the coast, to an area of malaria-infested jungle 400km inland. One of the world's most secretive countries was moving its Government to a closed city that was off-limits to outsiders.
But on Monday foreign journalists were finally allowed in to see the new city, Naypyidaw. And they also got a rare glimpse of the junta's elusive chief, General Than Shwe.
What they found was a planned city on a vast scale. The parade ground where General Than Shwe addressed the troops is huge, and overlooked by three 10m high statues of the country's most famous kings.
All the hotels are grouped together in a single area called the "Hotel Zone". Across an expanse of empty land, apartment blocks are being built for bureaucrats who are being forced to move to the new city, painted in incongruous pastel shades that evoke nothing so much as a Western suburb transplanted to the jungle. In the "Government Zone", ministries are several kilometres from each other. And in the "Military Zone", roads are wide enough to double as runways.
Nobody really knows why General Than Shwe decided to move the capital to Naypyidaw. The official version is that Rangoon had become too crowded and congested, but with Condoleeza Rice sounding threatening, the junta may have looked west towards Iraq and decided to plan for the worst.
An Indian journalist who managed to get inside Naypyidaw ahead of other foreigners last month has another theory. The city, wrote Siddharth Varadarajan, "will not fall to an urban upheaval easily. It has no city centre, no confined public space where even a crowd of several thousand people could make a visual - let alone political - impression."
- INDEPENDENT
