YANGON, Myanmar -- The lesson in democracy begins promptly at 4 each weekend afternoon. Several thousand people gather behind barricades, eyes trained on the fence surrounding a two-story lakeside home. Traffic police, dressed smartly in pressed white coats, keep two lanes open for passing cars.
When Aung San Suu Kyi, pink orchids in her brushed-back hair and microphone in hand, appears from behind the fence, the crowd breaks into cheers and applause. For the next hour, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner gamely conducts a forum on democracy in a country run by generals.
She often answers questions, submitted in advance, about new quotas for rice farmers or the burden of inflation on pensioners, the use of forced labor to build a dam or involuntary "donations" for computers in schools.
"If we had democracy tomorrow, we would still have problems. It's just that we could talk about them openly," Ms. Suu Kyi told her listeners the other day.
"Security for our children will not come overnight with democracy. But we certainly won't have to worry about the knock on the door in the middle of the night."
Ms. Suu Kyi's remarks do not appear on television or radio or in the next day's newspapers. But a transcript lands on the generals' desks.
And a few days later, newspaper articles, written under pseudonyms, criticize the folly of "that girl," as they refer to Ms. Suu Kyi, who is 50.
Such is the uneasy standoff between the generals and the democrats in the steamy Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Eight months have passed since Ms. Suu Kyi was freed from six years of house arrest, and yet there still is no sign of national reconciliation or progress toward democracy.
Instead, the military rulers here are engaged in a broad effort to win the hearts and minds of Myanmar's 46 million people with a stage-managed constitutional conference, replete with pep rallies, and an economic boom fed by foreigners dreaming of quick profits.
The linchpin of that strategy is an ardent courtship of foreign tourists and investors. While this remains one of the world's poorest countries, traffic jams the streets around the 2,500-year-old dome of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, the capital; billboards advertise Toshiba computers and Kirin beer.
An emerging elite of Burmese millionaires can be found at the yacht club, the glitzy new nightclubs or the three new driving ranges for golfers.
