For I was going to a place which did not want me or any of my kind, a state that loathed journalists and into which we could only venture by pretending to be something else, most usually tourists.

Yet as I looked out of the aircraft window, I felt a parallel emotion, no less strong than the fear. Through the rain, I saw the gold domes of the Pagodas rising above the skyline, and beyond them, out where the suburbs dwindle into the countryside, the first of the rice fields on whose wide shimmering surface the monsoon clouds were reflected.

And seeing this I felt a surge of longing. I was so glad to be back.

Over the last 10 years, the physical details of Rangoon have been slowly erased in my mind. Stepping off the plane, I saw that the shabby old airport had been replaced by a featureless lump of steel, concrete and glass.

On the approach to the city, we passed an arch which bore the words 'Welcome to the Golden Land'. I remembered that it had been there on my last visit when there had been glimmers of hope that the regime was preparing to enter serious negotiations with the pro-democracy movement.

Rangoon is an untidy place; its colonial-era buildings are mildewed and crumbling, and washing flaps from the windows. Step off the main avenues and you will find streets that are cracked and potholed, filled with cars, motorbikes, bicycles, rickshaws, mangy dogs and crowds of people, Burmese of many ethnic backgrounds: the ethnic majority Burmans, the Indians, the Karen and the Shan, the Chinese, and many others. There is even a population of Burmese Jews with their own vibrant synagogue.

Totalitarian state of fear How I would have loved to have been able to act freely here, to talk to other human beings without being circumscribed by fear, mostly the fear for what might happen to the locals if they were spotted in conversation with a foreigner. That is the great dilemma for the reporter in this totalitarian state, the disaster which you might bring down upon the heads of those whom you meet.

The watchers are everywhere, though you can often spot them for they are conspicuously well-dressed. They wear clean and well-pressed shirts and are sleek with good living. Unlike most Burmese, they do not smile back when you smile at them. A team of three of them shadowed me through the great Pagoda of Shwedagon, one whispering into a walkie-talkie, none making any attempt to pretend they were anything other than secret policemen.

In the daily newspaper . . . the New Light of Myanmar, the junta's name for Burma . . . there are full-page advertisements attacking foreign media, with the BBC singled out for special venom. Reporters are denounced as saboteurs, killers and . . . most woundingly of all . . . SLICKERS.

I learned long ago that it is good never to take any of this too personally. A secret policeman is in the business of fear.

He must intimidate you and, more importantly, the general population so that there is no flow of reliable information.

For the journalist, the punishment is usually arrest and deportation . . . although the military have killed one Japanese photographer . . . but for the general population, the stakes are much higher. The spook has the weapons of torture and secret detention and he will willingly expand this to murder on the orders of his superiors.

In Burma, they have had years to perfect this intimidation. There isn't a sentient person in Rangoon who isn't aware of the potential consequences of speaking about the regime with foreigners.

Yet both civilians and monks vented their feelings to me and to colleagues. And I am not just talking about the clandestine meetings we had with Buddhist clergy or democracy activists. I mean the everyday conversations in markets or at tea stalls where public rage against the regime was expressed in fulsome terms. That is so different to the Burma I remember, where one studiously avoided political conversation.

This openness exists in spite of the fact that the round-ups are continuing.

Even those who looked on or were bold enough to clap the monks as they marched are being hunted down. Television images and photographs are being scanned by the spies as they try to put names and addresses to faces.

At four o'clock one morning, just after the curfew ended, I was summoned into the still dark streets to meet some fugitive monks. I travelled across the city praying all the way that we would not encounter a military roadblock. How would I explain such a journey at such a time?

I was lucky. I reached the safe house and awaited their arrival. I cannot say where this house was located or give hint as to the identity of the owner.

The regime's men would be very quick to grasp any sliver of information, pass it on to their colleagues in Rangoon and track him down. I can only say that he was a brave man who had taken to heart Edmund Burke's dictum that for evil to triumph it is necessary only that good men do nothing.

Wicked and unbearable Just after five in the morning, two monks arrived and we sat in the corner of the room while the householder kept an eye on the front door. The younger of the monks told me that he had not slept in seven days. He listened constantly for the sound of vehicles. "At two or three in the morning, that is when they come, " he said. Both monks told stories of colleagues who had been taken off into detention, stripped of their robes and beaten by soldiers. They also spoke of monks being herded off to labor camps.

"It is wicked and cruel. It is unbearable, " the older one said.

Yet what remains most vividly is not the stories of repression but something the younger monk said at the end.

I asked if the uprising was now crushed or whether there was a chance it would start up again. "We will do the same again if we have the chance, " he replied.

I don't believe there is going to be a Leipzig moment when popular revolution will end the dictatorship any time soon.

But nor is there any chance that the status quo can be maintained.

The question is whether the vital goal of a managed transition from totalitarianism to some kind of representative government can be achieved.

The great danger is that hatred of the regime will grow and become violent and in turn provoke greater repression until the country descends into chaos.

If that is to be avoided, the international community will have to remain seriously engaged, pressing China to use its immense political muscle so that the generals' 'talk' of dialogue is converted into real negotiations. All of this comes against a background of escalating economic crisis. The UN's wise and brave representative in Rangoon, Charles Petrie, told me it was impossible to go back to 'business as usual'. His main concern right now is with helping the millions of malnourished and sick. Getting aid to them while still keeping pressure on the generals is a task complicated by political arguments over whether to isolate or engage with the regime. There is a natural reluctance to provide aid in a state where the military spends 40% of its budget on defence and only 4% on health.

"Why should we be paying for their greed?" the observer may ask. Well, Petrie would say, the answer is simple enough: give aid directly to those who are suffering because if we do not, they will die.

A society awakened The answer must be . . . as it was in South Africa during the transition . . . about combining pressure with negotiation, helping the suffering while targeting any sanctions directly against the elite.

The very worst thing will be if Burma is allowed to slide down the agenda because it is no longer headline news. That is the way to disaster.

The protests have been crushed for now, but nobody should make the mistake of believing that the moment has been lost.

What I detected more than anything else was a society in ferment, still coming to terms with the unprecedented assault on the clergy but awakened to its own potential to create change.

I left knowing that it might be some time before I would be able to go back. But it was not like the melancholy departures of the past.

A time was coming, I thought, when one might walk the streets of Rangoon, past the tea-shops and the little restaurants, the sellers of jasmine and incense, and find a familiar face with whom to sit and drink tea and talk of the days of fearf knowing that they belonged to history.