Wrong. It takes me back to the summer of 1986 when RTE sent me out to South Africa to cover the drastic state of emergency imposed by the white regime. There were troops on all the street corners of Johannesburg. Each morning brought news of a fresh wave of arrests. Stories of torture and assassination were flooding into the offices of human rights groups.

Back then if anybody had predicted there would be a black government in less than a decade, they would have been declared insane. Yet I was there precisely four years later to witness the advance to democracy.

So now I put my head on the line and say: don't get carried away by the imagery of repression in Burma. The story isn't over. Not remotely. There are important reasons why this uprising is different from the last. The world was a very different place back in 1988 when students took to the streets and were gunned down in their thousands.

The Berlin Wall still stood and China was yet to embark on its path to integrating with the world economy. It was . . . to put it mildly . . . a permissive environment for authoritarian regimes. Back then the Burmese junta was not an anachronism. Across the world there were vile dictatorships of the left and right protected by their relationship with superpowers.

But we have moved on. If you want to understand just how much things have changed, consider the response of the junta to the protests in Rangoon and the other big cities. Back in 1988, they felt confident enough of international apathy to murder huge numbers of people. This time around the oppression has been nasty but nothing on the scale of what we saw 18 years ago. There is one reason for this.

China does not want to be embarrassed by its smaller neighbour. This isn't just because the Olympic games are coming up in Beijing.

The shrewd heads in Beijing have been worried about their clients in Rangoon for some time. The Chinese take a long view of politics and when they look at Burma they see trouble. Not just trouble for the generals but potentially for China itself. Burma is an important investment zone and a source of energy for the booming Chinese economy.

Economic growth is the key strategic goal for Beijing which doesn't want its own vast population driven to rebellion by grinding poverty. Nor does Beijing want business disrupted by embarrassing international arguments about the human rights record of its client. Still less does it want to see the example of an unelected government being swept from power by a popular uprising. Heaven knows what hopes that might spur in China. So my sense is that while China will stand by the generals in public, it will privately press them hard to open some kind of dialogue with the opposition. The Chinese have every interest in a managed and negotiated solution.

FOLLOWING THE MAO LEXICON

For the Chinese know, as any sane observer does, that the problems of endemic poverty which fuelled the uprising will not go away. Around 90% of the population live in poverty in a country where the wealth is entirely concentrated in the hands of a military elite.

There isn't a crime in the international law book that the generals haven't committed. Still they have managed to trade and travel, sending their looted wealth to foreign bank accounts and their foreign minister to make speeches at the UN. The junta lives by slogans that come straight from the Mao lexicon of political thought:

"Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy, " the propaganda machine declares. And that is one of the more inspired outpourings.

The junta leader, General Than Shwe, recently spent a small fortune on the wedding of his daughter. The happy couple's gift list was said to be worth around 37m and sparked a run on precious stones as guests hurried to cosy up to Burma's de facto royal family.

The couple poured lavish quantities of champagne and posed for photographs in front of an ornate golden bed. Like most kleptocracies, the regime in Rangoon has a relaxed attitude to matters of taste.

Back in the 1990s when foreign firms were heading to Burma in search of lucrative contracts, the businessmen I lunched with in Rangoon would argue that 'constructive engagement' was the way forward with the generals. As Burma prospered, so the argument went, the wealth would trickle down to the general population. Exposure to the outside world would draw the generals into a more civilised western way of doing things. But it didn't happen that way.

The poor got poorer and the prices went up, until one fateful day six weeks ago when the generals jacked up the price of fuel and the long-suffering population revolted. It began with 400 people marching in a rural town on 19 August last. From there things escalated, with the country's Buddhist clergy at the head of the demonstrations. There is a precedent for such spiritually guided rebellions in Asia.

Remember the self-immolating monks in Diem's Vietnam? Then as now the protest was against a corrupt and brutal regime.

A contemporary observer wrote: "The city people who had for years remained passive in the face of the Diemist police crowded into the pagodas to kneel and weep."

In the Philippines, the moral force of the Roman Catholic Church gave courage to the hundreds of thousands who joined the 'People Power' revolution against the odious dictator Ferdinand Marcos. In the increasingly secularised west, we find it hard to imagine how a population could invest such hope in spiritual leaders. On the streets of Rangoon and Mandalay, they were the only ones able to give an example of courage.

What has kept the Burmese quiet for nearly two decades is a system of internal repression that would do credit to the excesses of Stalin. I will always remember Burma as a country where the fear of betrayal haunts every conversation. The telltales and spies are everywhere.

FRACTURED OPPOSITION

Yet there are still those brave enough to speak out. All week, they have been calling the BBC Burmese service . . . a great lifeline of free expression that makes all the difference in the world to the oppressed of Burma. One pro-democracy activist who has gone into hiding called a colleague to say she would keep on fighting. "For as long as it takes, " she said.

Anybody who has studied Burma knows what a tall order that is. With the monks shackled, beaten and locked up, and the population cowed in the face of guns and threats, it might seem like a wilful delusion to speak of an end to the dictatorship.

The opposition is nothing like a united and organised force. It exists in small pockets, mostly made up of students and intellectuals, many of them veterans of the uprising of 1988. Abroad there are vociferous Burma lobbies but they have yet to attain the force and exposure that the anti-apartheid movement achieved in the South African struggle. The fractured nature of the opposition was at least part of the reason why the population rallied behind the monks.

But here I come to the second reason to feel some hope. Although the army has enjoyed untrammelled power for decades, it would be wrong to automatically assume that it is a monolith. The old Asia hands who have followed the Burma story for years tell me the best hope for change lies with younger army officers, those who have not been entirely corrupted by power and wealth. Looking into the future, they must know that military rule is not eternally sustainable. And the longer they postpone an accommodation with prodemocracy forces, the greater the likelihood that it will end bloodily and badly.

That is the way of things with dictatorships. It might take years to get to the tipping point but it could end very grimly for the men in uniform. Think of Ceausescu's firing squad or Saddam on the gallows.

The strange thing is that the opposition's most respected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is committed to dialogue with the military.

She has eschewed any form of violent protest and spoken repeatedly of her respect for the army as an essential institution in Burmese life. I know this not only from reading her words but from several conversations we had when she was briefly released from house arrest.

I remember her taking me on a tour of the lakeside villa where the regime has kept her imprisoned. It was an austere place and among her few diversions were prayer, reading and listening to the BBC World Service. At the time I had just come from living in South Africa and she told me that she had followed my despatches on the transition to majority rule.

TASTE OF FREEDOM

Aung San Suu Kyi questioned me in detail about Mandela and the peaceful accommodation he had reached with the white security establishment. I warned her that although the South African security forces had indeed been brutal they had been subject to political direction, were regularly investigated by a free press and subject to judicial oversight. None of these conditions pertained in Burma.

She asked me how Mandela had convinced the security elite they would be safe under black rule. "By not being vengeful, " I told her. Back then her mind was already well-focused on how to create the circumstances under which the military could be eased out of total political control.

Aung San Suu Kyi knows the opposition is not in any position to defeat the military with simple people power, at least for the foreseeable future. But it has succeeded in badly shaking the ruling elite. For all the images of terror we have seen in the past week, the taste of freedom will have been intoxicating for those who took to the streets and the millions of others who heard about them on the radio or saw the images on the internet. Certainly there is disillusionment now. Friends returning from Rangoon talk of encountering many frightened and dispirited Burmese.

As I wrote at the outset, it reminds me so much of South Africa in the grim June of 1986. But leaders like Aung San Suu Kyi and the brave democracy activists hiding out in safe houses around Burma know that patience and courage can bring the result they hope for. Burma will be free.

And sooner rather than later.