The ruling generals appear to believe they have suppressed the protests and have lifted the barricades around the Shwedagon and Sule pagodas, the focal points of the demonstrations, eased an overnight curfew by two hours and released some of the monks swept up in widespread raids on monasteries.
The demonstrations, the biggest challenge to the junta's power in nearly 20 years, began with small marches against shock fuel price rises in August and swelled after troops fired over the heads of a group of monks.
One young monk said 80 of the 96 taken from his monastery were allowed to return during Wednesday night after being threatened verbally but not physically during interrogation.
"We were forced to change into civilian dress before they interrogated us," the freed monk said. "They questioned us day and night but we were fed two meals a day."
However, there was still a heavy armed presence on the streets of Yangon and Mandalay, the second city, witnesses said.
The junta is also sending gangs through homes looking for monks in hiding, sweeping raids that Western diplomats say are creating a climate of terror.
There was no let up in international anger at the ruthless response to the peaceful protests.
In Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Council, including China, the closest thing the regime has to an ally, condemned the junta's "violent repression".
It called on the generals to allow the U.N. human rights envoy to Myanmar, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, to visit for the first time in four years. He said the number detained was now in the thousands.
"Light must absolutely be shed on what happened," Pinheiro told the council, which adopted a resolution deploring beatings, killings and detentions. Myanmar said the hearing was being used by "powerful countries for political exploitation".
In Washington, the Senate and House of Congress passed resolutions loaded with passionate language to condemn the crackdown.
But nothing has emerged to suggest the generals are prepared to make a deal with Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy won a landslide 1990 election victory the junta ignored.
So far, ASEAN's policy of "constructive engagement" has shown no signs of achieving the "national reconciliation and a peaceful transition to democracy" in Myanmar Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told Gambari on Wednesday it wanted.
The junta has ignored years of Western sanctions on Myanmar, one of Asia's brightest prospects and the world's largest rice exporter when it won independence from Britain in 1948 but now one of the region's poorest despite an abundance of natural resources.
"The NLD has been saying we're prepared to talk, we're not being absolutist, but Than Shwe is being absolutist, at least according to all reports, and that is a problem," Steinberg said.
