A lone spectator watched as the pride of the Myanmar air force, two Chinese-made jet fighters scorched the concrete in takeoff. A small brown dog had sloped to the edge of the runway and stood to attention on three legs, the fourth buried in its mangy coat on a seek-and-destroy mission of its own.
As the fighters departed, the dog meandered back to its shady base beneath the wing of a Myanmar Airlines passenger aircraft that, like the rest of the fleet, wasn't going anywhere for half a day. Business at Yangon (Rangoon) International Airport is not exactly brisk.
Starved of foreign currency, the military regime that runs Burma has declared itself open for business but no one is calling. In a drive to attract tourists in particular, 1996 was declared Visit Myanmar Year, and brochures were produced containing warm personal welcomes from the generals.
What they didn't advertise was that people were being driven out of their homes to provide sites for the foreign-owned multi-storey hotels that remain largely empty. Or that the local population was organised into forced labour gangs to clear the sites before it left. These, relatively speaking, were the lucky ones. Others are press-ganged into service as porters for the military, backbreaking and dangerous work. A refusal to carry out such work - or other tasks such as road repairs or cleaning public buildings - results in being thrown in jail.
Burma's bid for international business and tourism has been hobbled by a range of sanctions by the West, in particular the United States. They've managed to keep most of the multinationals out or driven them out by squeezing their domestic trade. Apple, Carlsberg, Levi Strauss, Disney and Dunnes Stores have all cut the connection after less than subtle pressure back home.
The generals who extend the hand of friendship to foreign tourists are the same bunch who have ordered the killing of as many as 10,000 of their own people since 1988, when student-led demonstrations swept the nation. This is the same regime that declared the 1990 elections void when the pro-democracy NLD, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, won more than 80 per cent of the seats.
The National League for Democracy (NLD) says more than 100 of its MPs are still in jail, together with several hundred ordinary party members.
Amnesty International reports that rape, torture, brutal beatings, and solitary confinement for long periods are commonplace in the jails. An exiled student leader, Tha Nyunt U, who spent five years in jail for organising protest meetings, says many people die in jail because of a lack of treatment. "People die all the time because they're being treated with dirty needles," he told me.
Last month, after an absence of several years, the International Committee of the Red Cross agreed to go back into Burma and inspect conditions in the jails. According to Aung San Suu Kyi, the move prompted the regime to transfer hundreds of inmates out of Insein jail in Rangoon to prisons in remote parts - out of reach of the Red Cross and relatives bringing much-needed food parcels.
The monsoons arrived early this year. Rangoon's streets, an odd mixture of the crumbling colonial and state-built austerity, are awash with the rains. During a rule that ended after the Pacific war, the British rebuilt Rangoon in a grid system with short streets to allow the prevailing winds to ventilate the city. But when the monsoons come, the rains strafe the streets, scattering the thousands of desperately poor people who come there each day to trade on the filthy pavements. Hundreds more are crammed together into decrepit office buildings converted into one-room homes. From above, they watch as everyone sells but no one buys.
Given the chance, the people have much to buy and sell. Burma has petroleum and natural gas, zinc, lead, copper and tin. It also has tungsten and timber. It even has precious stones. But trade is controlled by the generals and their cronies who take the larger share to maintain a certain lifestyle and their power base.
The regime spends an estimated US$380 million a year on the armed forces, now numbering 500,000 conscripted men and women but set to increase. That's almost twice what the country spends on health and education combined. The education budget has been halved with the closure of many of the universities, seen as the seedbeds of insurrection.
The regime continues to arm itself by side-stepping the Western ban on arms sales. According to Robert Karniol, a Bangkok-based analyst with Jane's Defence Weekly, Singapore and former Eastern Bloc countries contribute substantially. China is also a major supplier, and Karniol says the special relationship between the two is further evidenced by Chinese-built spy stations spanning the strategic area around the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal. "The West isn't sure whether this is a Bejing-run operation or a joint venture but the co-operation complicates the matter," according to Karniol.
After years of fighting, the regime has signed ceasefire deals with rebel groups in the ethnically separate states of Karen, Kachin and Shan. According to Western observers, the rebels were not so much defeated militarily as bought off by autonomy deals that mean the right to deal in drugs.
But other rebel groups fight on, whether for independence or for control of the drugs trade. Last week the army sealed off the border between Thailand and Shan state after fierce fighting between the Shan state army and Myanmar troops. That part of the country is on the edge of the so-called Golden Triangle drugs territory which includes parts of Thailand and Laos. According to US drug agencies some 80 per cent of the world's poppy harvest comes from Burma and they accuse the generals of ignoring or even helping the trade in return for regular million-dollar backhanders. Some say they control it. But the business has backfired and heroin is beginning to grip the country. Addicts and AIDS are the latest problems for a health service that serves barely half the population. Only about a third has access to clean water and sanitation.
The hospitals are so bad patients get worse instead of better. A lack of simple infection protection means many die. The regime and those who feed off it are treated in Western clinics or go abroad for even the simplest operations.
There is an old joke in Rangoon that if you want an accurate picture of the country during British rule read George Orwell's Burmese Days but if you want to know what it's like now read the sequel. The regime has picked up a few ideas from 1984. They used to call themselves SLORC, the State Law and Order Restoration Council. Now they hide behind the title of the State Peace and Development Council or SPDC. But it's really the same old bunch of military men who seized power under General Ne Win in 1962. Ne Win, now in his 80s, stepped down in favour of General Than Shwe a few years ago, but Ne Win is said to retain the real power.
Thought control is important. The generals write the history books, the newspapers and the radio and television news. A cruder form of propaganda is the series of billboard messages in Rangoon that exhort the people to "sacrifice their blood and sweat" for the state and warning them to "beware of treacherous outsiders" who seek to undermine the state.
BUT the SPDC retains its most vicious propaganda campaign for Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. In the papers, she's described variously as "the snake" or the "democracy actress". Despite the fact that her father Aung San led the country to independence from Britain, the regime tries to paint her as a spiritually inferior woman who lowered herself further by marrying a foreigner. That charge may carry some weight among the more traditional Burmese but against Suu Kyi it's something of a blunt blade.
She has proved her credentials long ago. When her husband Michael Aris lay dying from cancer, the regime offered her permission to travel to England to see him one last time. Knowing she would not be allowed back into Burma, Suu Kyi declined the offer. The people that devotion and she is the focal point for opposition to the regime.
The SPDC refuses to speak to her, let alone negotiate with her but there are United Nations-led moves to establish contacts between the two sides. Last week the UN said it was planning to send an envoy to Rangoon this summer to look at the possibility of restoring development aid in return for political dialogue between the regime and the NLD. But the UN denies rumours that up to a billion dollars is on offer.
Burma's neighbours - Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia - who recently welcomed it into the trade block ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) have begun gently prodding the generals in the direction of change. Totalitarianism is bad for business in the region. But the UN's idea of change may be very different to the kind favoured in a part of the world where only partial democracy is favoured.
And there will be serious difference over the pace of change. The SPDC has said it will give the people power eventually but only when the country is ready. They don't say when but the how includes a plan to keep a quarter of the parliamentary seats and much of the cabinet positions for themselves. And the new constitution they've been drafting for the past 10 years is said to specifically exclude anyone who married a foreigner, a clause designed for one person only.
The clamp-down on all political movement by the legions of secret police and low-level informers means the democracy movement in Burma must organise in whispers. The NLD is trying to educate people not to be afraid and when they're not afraid to resist or at least not to co-operate.
It's a slow process. Westerners living in the country describe the people of Burma as being serene sometimes to the point of appearing sedated. Outsiders put it down to the Buddhist philosophy that says there is a cause for suffering but also an end to it.
They have waited for nearly 40 years for an end to this bout of suffering. And it came after two periods of British rule with a Japanese invasion in between. "We are a very patient people," says U Tin U, a government minister before the regime took over and now vice-chairman of the NLD. He predicts the generals will eventually cede power and go peacefully. "There will be no violence and no revenge. We are also a very forgiving people," he says. They have a lot to forgive.
Richard Crowley is a presenter on RTE's weekday radio programme, Morning Ireland