When I heard that the Burmese authorities had arrested Aung San Suu Kyi for the umpteenth time, I almost felt sorry for those hapless generals. It was only a momentary sensation, mind you, but it helped to flag up the dilemma both sides are facing in this absurd confrontation. Aung San Suu Kyi is one of the few truly good people living today, a virtuous woman who practises Mahatma Gandhi's policy of passive resistance and in so doing represents the democratic aspirations of her fellow Burmese citizens.
Her persecutors are a vicious bunch of unelected soldiers who have turned this beautiful country into a living hell. Burma - or Myanmar - is isolated from the rest of the world and its people have been repressed for far too many years. Apart from the brave Buddhist priests who risked their lives to highlight the country's plight a year or so ago, this slight, saintly 63-year-old woman remains their best hope of salvation. The generals may have silenced her for the time being, but, make no mistake, in her case, stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.
The reason for Aung San Suu Kyi's confinement in the grisly Insein jail in Rangoon is ridiculous. A deluded US war veteran called John Yettaw swam across the lake beside her compound and demanded from his unwilling host some kind of absolution for his role in Vietnam and the more recent death of his son. He probably meant well, more likely than not he is suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, but whatever the reason for his crazy actions, he broke the terms of Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest and so she has to pay the penalty.
Yettaw is neither better nor worse than any number of groupies who want to get close to the object of their obsession, but his unexpected watery appearance gave the generals the pretext that they needed to keep her in check. Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest was due to be reviewed this week, but now she is facing criminal charges - a good outcome for her jailers if they want to ensure her silence ahead of next year's elections.
They can't afford to allow her to return to public life because they know that while she is a beacon of hope they symbolise nothing but despair.
As long as Aung San Suu Kyi is out of sight, the generals hope that she will be out of mind, but on this point their reasoning is askew. Keeping her in Insein is not an option. All along the generals have conceded that placing Aung San Suu Kyi in irons would create such opprobrium that they would have to bow to international pressure. That's why house arrest suits them. It removes her from the public gaze, but it doesn't seem excessively brutal. She can receive limited numbers of carefully vetted visitors, she has restricted access to the outside world but to all intents and purposes she is a bird in a less than gilded cage.
That's the theory and down the years despots have attempted to silence their opponents by using dungeons of one kind or another. Sometimes they succeed - Imre Nagy's arrest and eventual execution by the Soviets in Budapest in 1958 springs to mind - but in Aung San Suu Kyi's case, the Burmese generals are on a hiding to nothing. Ever since she returned to Burma 21 years ago to renew the flame of independence originally lit by her father Aung San, she has opposed the rule of the generals. By way of response, they simply didn't know what to do with her and the years of house arrest and repression have done nothing to silence her.
More than that, she has come to represent everything that her jailers are not. Her moral courage is beyond praise. Her quiet authority grows with every attempt made by her oppressors to try to silence her. Her resilience is a shining example to others and a reminder that although the generals have the guns and the big battalions, she possesses an integrity which can only be earned the hard way. Ranged against her, the generals are little more than moral pygmies, diminished by their many oppressions and shamed by their refusal to take heed of a good woman.
But, as ever, Aung San Suu Kyi has provided the last word and it's one that should be heeded, not just in her own country but elsewhere. It's fear that corrupts, not power, she wrote in her memoirs, adding the thought that "fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it". Sounds familiar, doesn't it?