On Sunday, Burma's military rulers extended the country's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest for a further six months.
Local police officials visited the pro-democracy leader in her lakeside residence in Rangoon and read a statement outlining the government decision to renew the detention order for another six months, according to interior ministry officials.
The extension comes exactly a year after Aung San Suu Kyi was told she would be under house arrest for 12 months last November. At that time it raised her hopes that she might be freed at this time, National League for Democracy (NLD) leaders confided to me.
Aung San Suu Kyi has now spent more than ten of the past sixteen years in prison or under house arrest, since the military regime first put her under house arrest in July 1989. The pro-democracy leader was detained again on 30 May 2003 after pro-government thugs attacked her convoy as she travelled in the countryside in northern Burma.
The renewal of the opposition leader's detention by the country's top generals was not unexpected. The articulate and charismatic leader of the main opposition party, the NLD, has long been a thorn in their side.
Aung San Suu Kyi represents the forces for democracy and has repeatedly called on Burma's ruling general's to enter a genuine dialogue to decide the country's political future. Dialogue is not a competition, she told me in an exclusive interview in the NLD headquarters in Rangoon weeks before she was re-arrested more than two years ago.
"We are in opposition to each other at the moment but we should work together for the sake of the country. We certainly bare no grudges against them. We are not out for vengeance," she said.
But Burma's top general, Than Shwe has continually rejected Aung San Suu Kyi's repeated appeals to talk.
"We don't want a dialogue in order to find out who is better or smarter. The only winner if we settle down to negotiations, the only winner should be the country," she said in March 2003.
The NLD convincingly won the last national elections held in May 1990 but the military has refused to hand over power to a civilian administration. Instead the junta launched a National Convention composed of more than a thousand hand-picked delegates to draw up a new constitution.
The National Convention is scheduled to resume discussing the guidelines for the new constitution next Monday (Dec 5). It has been meeting intermittently now for more than a decade preparing the new constitution.
Most Western diplomats in Rangoon though are convinced that the military regime has no intention of handing over power in the near future and is simply using the constitutional talks as a delaying tactic.
In August 2003, the then prime minister General Khin Nyunt announced a seven-point roadmap to democracy. The first step in this national reconciliation process, as the junta calls it, is the National Convention.
Although Khin Nyunt was arrested last year and later sentenced to 44 years in jail for economic crimes and corruption, the regime remains committed to the roadmap, Burma's foreign minister Nyan Win recently told the Bangkok Post.
In an exclusive interview, foreign minister Nyan Win said that after the National Convention had completed the guidelines for the country's new constitution, a legal committee selected by the Attorney General and the National Convention Convening Committee will draft the actual constitution. But he refused to comment on why the political parties had been excluded from the process.
The NLD and the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD) have boycotted the constitutional talks since they resumed after a seven year gap in May 2004. The NLD insists they cannot consider participating while their leader, Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest.
The next step on the road map include a referendum on the constitution and fresh elections. At this stage it is too early to say whether the NLD will be allowed to participate in the elections that will be held under the new constitution. "We'll just have to wait and see," Nyan Win said.
But many analysts believe the pro-democracy parties will not be allowed to participate in future elections. Rangoon's Chinese political advisers have been encouraging the regime to adopt the approach of Pakistan president General Musharaff and ban the existing political parties from taking part in elections.
In the meantime the aging leaders of the NLD have been at pains not to provoke the generals. "The Lady has instructed them to keep the party legal no matter what," said a Western diplomat in Rangoon close to the opposition. At the same time vitriolic verbal attacks on Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD have re-emerged in the state-run media.
Even the semi-independent weekly Myanmar Times has been forced to run diatribes against the NLD and its leaders. "The NLD's political movements are just destructive acts disrupting democratic transition ... colluding with internal and external destructive elements, practising a policy of helping the nation's enemies and relying on neo-colonialists," one pro-government political commentator wrote in a recent edition of the paper.
"The woman who is head of the NLD challenged the government through a course of confrontation, illegally held roadside meetings and spoke ill of the State and the Tatmadaw [the military]," the government scribe also recently wrote in the weekly paper.
Of course the junta's supporters conveniently choose to ignore the appeals that Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly made to the regime to enter a dialogue.
"We have genuine good will towards the Burmese military. I personally look upon it with a certain amount of affection because of my father and I want it to have an honourable position in the country," Aung San Suu Kyi told the Bangkok Post two years ago.
So it was no surprise that the regime has decided to renew her house arrest for a further six months.
"Aung San Suu Kyi's extended detention suggests that the referendum and new elections may be held within the next twelve months," according to a Western diplomat in Rangoon. "There is no way the junta's leaders will release her before then," he said.
Under house arrest Aung San Suu Kyi's phone has been cut and she has been refused visitors. Only her doctor has been allowed to call on her periodically over the past year to check on her medical condition. She underwent a major hysterectomy operation while in detention in August, 2003.
The Red Cross visited her in September, 2003, but have been refused access ever since, according to diplomats in Rangoon. The UN envoy Razali Ismail was the last international visitor to meet her in the first week of March last year.
Since May last year, Aung San Suu Kyi has been held in virtual solitary confinement. "It's intolerable, worse than if she was in prison," the UN special rapporteur Paulo Pinheiro recently told the Bangkok Post. "At least in jail prisoners are allowed regular visits from their families."