He wore the traditional Burmese man's skirt, spoke with an out-of-town accent and, right up until the moment of horror, there was no suggestion that the young man was anything out of the ordinary. It was Friday evening and thousands of people were praying at the Shwedagon Pagoda, the golden monument that towers above Rangoon. Before the plain-clothes police could react, the young man whipped out a placard denouncing the junta and placed it round his neck. Then he produced a bottle of petrol, shook it over his clothes and set himself alight.

“He was still standing and he was trying to shout something but I couldn't hear it,” a young Buddhist monk who witnessed the immolation said. “He was trying to speak but the flames were round his face. And then the police jumped on him.”

Six months ago tens of thousands of monks and students demonstrated in the streets of Rangoon, demanding freedom from the brutal junta of General Than Shwe after 45 years of military rule.

But the marchers were beaten and arrested, the monasteries were raided and, six months later, the stirring spectacle of the “Saffron Revolution” has been reduced to this — the agonising suffering of a nameless man. He is reported to be in hospital but with 70 per cent burns his prospects for survival are poor.

It was hard to imagine a Burma worse off than it was in September 2007 but it has come about because all of the frustrations that drove the demonstrators on to the streets last year have redoubled. Food and transport prices are higher than ever, political oppression is greater and the violent treatment of the country's revered monks has increased popular contempt for the regime.

But, for all their bravery, opposition activists in Burma are in disarray. Their figurehead and icon, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, has spent 12 years under house arrest and, after the crackdown in September, the remaining senior leaders have nearly all been arrested.

Those who remain at large are in hiding, their networks broken or in the hands of young and inexperienced activists. And having been physically crushed they face the danger of being politically outflanked after a remarkable move by Than Shwe's government — in February it announced a national referendum will be held on a new constitution, to be followed by a general election in 2010.

The constitution, which has not been published in full, is based on the 14-year-long deliberations of an assembly of handpicked members, which contained no representatives of Ms Suu Kyi or members of her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).

It is expected that it will guarantee 25 per cent of parliamentary seats to the military and to disbar Ms Suu Kyi from politics on the basis that she was married to a foreigner — Michael Aris, the late, British academic.

Western diplomats and members of the opposition assume that the Government will manipulate the result of the May referendum to ensure a yes vote. But for the opposition the vote has shifted attention from the blatant iniquities of the regime to the question of how to campaign.

A “vote no” campaign seems to be the emerging choice but some members of the opposition argue that rejecting the constitution will remove the only hope of a transition to some form of democracy in Burma, however imperfect.

A boycott campaign would be risky — Burmese law makes an offence, punishable by years in prison, of any criticism of the referendum.

The NLD has yet to announce its official position — either by necessity, because it is divided internally, or deliberately, so that the eventual call for a no vote will have all the more impact for being close to the date of the referendum. Meanwhile the activists who remain at liberty do what they can to prepare in a country where any criticism of the government can lead to jail.

Anti-junta manifestos and vote no posters are circulated by e-mail and occasionally posted in university campuses, before being torn down hastily by the authorities. Activists distribute T-shirts bearing “NO!” in huge letters, with the word “smoking” tucked unobtrusively at the bottom — thus disguising a political slogan as a public health message.

Perhaps the most unexpected piece of political contraband is the latest instalment in the Rambo series, a film of predictable brutality, in which the eponymous hero righteously mows down his enemies. The difference is that in this case the film has a South-East Asian setting and the enemies of Rambo are the Burmese Army.

The film has become an underground hit and the authorities have responded with a predictable lack of humour: three weeks ago Ko Thant Zin and Ko Tun Tun, two young men, were arrested and locked up for a uniquely Burmese offence — watching a Sylvester Stallone film.

A zoo has been opened in Naypyitaw, the remote, administrative capital of Burma, by the junta who hope it will attract tourists. The attraction includes animals taken from zoos in Rangoon and Mandalay. Civil servants, who are required to live in Naypyitaw, had complained that there was nothing to do in the city.

Diary of a protest

— As many as a hundred thousand ordinary Burmese people and Buddhist monks took to the streets last year to demand democratic reform and protest against the country's violent military regime

— The confrontation developed from a small-scale protest against a doubling of state-controlled fuel prices announced on August 15, 2007

— Police attacked monks who joined the protesters

— Outraged by the violence, thousands more monks from monasteries across the country marched to demand an apology

— As the protests grew, pro-democracy activists and ordinary citizens joined them in their tens of thousands

— After a period of indecision, the regime cracked down with military force on September 25. Troops entered the cities of Rangoon and Mandalay, firing live ammunition and teargas

— One Japanese journalist and an unknown number of Burmese were killed

— Many witnesses reported seeing soldiers indiscriminately firing volleys into crowds and bloodied bodies dragged from Buddhist temples

Sources: Federation of American Scientists; Free Burma Campaign

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