The Burmese democracy movement may have died yesterday. Or it could just be regrouping.

It was a loose, ragged, frustrating day in Rangoon, a day of baton charges, beatings and many rumours of much worse. I saw soldiers levelling guns, firing volleys of hard rubber pellets, as well as chases and arrests.

But something like normality is returning to Burma: which is to say that, just as they have been for much of the past 40 years, people are afraid again.

The democracy leaders have already been arrested, the monks are locked down in their monasteries and, yesterday, it was ordinary people who were the most prominent — by their absence.

On Thursday I saw old people and middle-aged women cheering on the protesters as they stood face to face with the soldiers in the road to the Sule Pagoda. Yesterday, there were just young men, some of them slightly disreputable looking, with an air less of outraged idealism than of simple mischief.

Perhaps the protesters and monks were licking their wounds and planning their next step. But the whole day had about it the depressing atmosphere of a mopping-up operation.

Burma’s telecommunications are unreliable at the best of times, but in the past few days an information fog has sunk over the city. One call in ten from a hotel telephone connects to its destination.

At the US Embassy, a concrete fortress that opened two weeks ago with the most expensive and up-to-date technology, no one could make an outgoing call all day. Thanks to the paranoia of the generals, mobile phone SIM cards cost $1,500 (£740) each in Burma, but these days they are no more than a status symbol, so rarely do they connect.

The internet, conduit for so much of the truth of what has happened here, appears to have been shut down completely. There are two main servers – the private one was closed down days ago, but yesterday even the generals’ private server appears to have been switched off.

There are other methods, but they are expensive and inconvenient. So there is little alternative but the old-fashioned way – to go around and meet people in person.

But who? Every day in Rangoon there are fewer and fewer people to talk to. The leaders of the ’88 Generation, the students who first raised the banner against the junta 19 years ago, were arrested, fled or went underground weeks ago. The leadership of the National League for Democracy, the political party of the detained Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, has also been weakened by arrests this week.

One Burmese-speaking foreigner who has spent years living and working in Rangoon told me: “It’s so depressing. In the past few weeks all my Burmese friends have been arrested.”

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