Midnight in Myanmar
A few news outlets and some friends from Yangon say Suu Kyi has been moved from her home, where she was under house arrest, to the notorious Insein prison. Insein is the favored metaphor for a country run like a cell block, and Suu Kyi is obviously Myanmar's most revered celebrity.
The explanation for the regime's hesitance to respond to the protests until today had been China's influence; China was supposedly preventing an ally and neighbor from causing regional embarrassment prior to the Olympics. This was indirectly a way to claim the West held some moral suasion in its ability to blame China for the behavior of Burmese generals. But that storyline ignored most of Myanmar's recent history: The generals now in power have never actually shown themselves much vulnerable to pressure from the outside, even when that pressure comes from the few friends they have.
This story has replayed itself consistently over the past five years, through many supposedly imminent freeings of Suu Kyi, the capital city's move north, the sham constitutional convention: Policy experts ascribe some action or failure to act on the part of the junta to international or regional pressure, and the junta then acts contrary to expectations, apparently unperturbed by its reputation as a brutal dictatorship. It seems extremely difficult for outsiders to acknowledge that they cannot influence the actions of a few secretive Burmese thugs.
