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Come Hell or High Water, the Burmese Junta EnduresAung San Suu Kyi is the world's most effectively sidelined leader.

By Jacob BaynhamPosted Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2009, at 1:05 PM ET

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It's a situation so dire and persistent that Suu Kyi's vision of nonviolent resistance unraveling the generals' power can seem naively optimistic. ("There will be change," she has said, "because all the military have are guns.")

For the few remaining armed resistance groups fighting the military in remote swaths of jungle near the borders of India, China, and Thailand, the concept of nonviolent revolution is an idealistic luxury reserved for the cities. Here among the country's ethnic minorities, Burmese soldiers have been burning and looting villages and raping and killing their inhabitants for decades. In the age-old counterinsurgency tactic, they are trying to kill the fish by draining the sea.

A young Shan State Army soldier on the frontline in eastern Burma.When I sneaked across the Thai border to visit the Shan State Army, a threadbare rebel militia in northeastern Burma, I met a man who had been a monk for 20 years but recently exchanged his robes for a gun. He told me what he thought of the pacifism enshrined by Suu Kyi and the protesting monks in Rangoon. "Here, if you have no gun, it's like you're sticking your neck out for them to cut it," he said. "Without a gun, you will not see peace in Burma."

The key to the generals' longevity is keeping people fearful, whether in the jungle or on the city streets. Fear of government spies ensures that public conversations in the city never stray too far into politics. That fear is well-founded. The junta's draconian courts regularly impose massive sentences for petty crimes—just talking to a foreign journalist can earn a Burmese seven years in lockup.

Recently, a famous Burmese comedian known as Zarganar was sentenced to 59 years in prison after mounting an independent relief effort to aid the cyclone victims in the Irrawaddy Delta. In the raid on his home, police found several banned DVDs, including a film of the jewel-encrusted wedding of Senior Gen. Than Shwe's daughter and a copy of Rambo 4, in which Sylvester Stallone guns down the Burmese military in the eastern jungles single-handedly. U Gambira, one of the monks who organized the September 2007 protests, was sentenced to 68 years. A student activist in his 20s was given 104 years for his anti-military political activities.

In this way, thousands in Burma can directly relate to Suu Kyi's plight. According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, 2,162 prisoners of conscience sit in Burma's jails as of Jan. 1, 2009. Thousands more came before them.

I gave the AAPP's office a call when I was reporting from Mae Sot, a town on the Thai side of the Burmese border. I asked the man on the phone if he would be able to put me in touch with a former political prisoner.

A political prisoner for 14 years, Aung Kyaw Oo now works to support Burma's prisoners of conscience."Maybe I can help," he said. "I was in jail for 14 years." I walked to the office and met Aung Kyaw Oo. Aung Kyaw was a frail man with a tired face. Like many Burmese in Mae Sot, he had escaped his homeland and was living illegally in Thailand. Aung Kyaw had been a student activist and was arrested three years after his role in the massive pro-democracy demonstrations in 1988, during which the military killed thousands of people on the streets and Aung San Suu Kyi emerged as a national icon.

Aung Kyaw was abused and starved in prison. He wasn't allowed outside. "They treated me like a slave," he told me. "Like an animal." He survived by controlling his mind through meditation and learning English from scraps of newspaper smuggled in by the kinder prison guards. He read about the Internet and computers and told himself that one day he would learn about them, too.

Aung Kyaw was finally released in 2005. By that time he was very sick, and the free life offered him little consolation. "People were still poor," he said, "still working all day and not having enough to eat. I knew I had to do something to change my country." Fearing a return to jail, Aung Kyaw fled to the Thai border where he works with AAPP, keeping track of political prisoners back in Burma.

At the top of that list is Aung San Suu Kyi, still awaiting her "Mandela moment" when she will step out of her house and lead her country out of oppression. For many of Burma's disheartened, it won't come a second too soon.