Put the people first
9-May-2008

Sometimes nature can do what humans can’t – open national borders to the outside world. Such is the case with Cyclone Nargis and the resulting tsunami that hit Burma last weekend tragically wiping out perhaps 100,000 coastal and delta dwellers and exposing the utter inadequacy of the Burmese military government in dealing with the disaster.

The Burmese junta led by General Than Shwe has been singularly closed to world trends and world criticism. They have run Burmese democrats out of power and shut down dissent. Aung San Suu Kyi remains a potent symbol of Burmese democratic aspirations, but she is virtually a prisoner in her home. The military junta has taken on most infrastructural roles and economic management of the nation. Burma today is a military capitalist state reliant on relationships with a small number of sympathetic trading partners in the ASEAN community. For the most part, it is a pariah to the West, relatively isolated from key centres of influence and power.

That may change with its reluctant decision to allow international assistance to bring much needed relief to the dire situation it now faces. Water, food, shelter, transport and medical supplies are being rushed to provide help in the most affected areas. The Americans have also offered Burma millions of dollars worth of help, but to date they remain shut out of the country. Their history of antipathy runs long and deep. With or without American aid, the millions of Burmese who survived Nargis now have to suffer delays in help reaching them. This is because aid agencies are at the mercy of the nation’s bureaucratic red tape - visas being the major obstacle to entering and moving about the country.

Burma’s most critical area is the Irrawaddy delta where a million remain homeless. The military has been mobilised to aerially drop supplies to survivors, but getting medical assistance and food distributors to this area is a tough assignment. The Burmese mentality has been so long closed to the rest of the world that it is encrusted in its resistance. The generals who rule, as individuals, have a heart for the suffering inflicted by nature on their people. But their trained incapacity as a ruling clique inhibits their ability to think outside of their tyrannical boxes. They have been so long empowered to control their citizens, they are at a loss now to know how to actually assist them.

The people of Burma are also supposed to be going to a long-planned election this weekend. It is black comedy, an appalling farce, that the military could think of holding a referendum for a new constitution in the middle of this humanitarian crisis and one that will require international assistance to begin to address the scale of it. The World Food Programme, the Red Cross, and World Vision are already straining to meet the need. Rangoon, Burma’s overstretched capital is said to be without running water and electricity. Yet, all of this seems to make not a whit of difference to the mindset of the nation’s military. If the referendum gets up in their favour, it will be because people are too downtrodden to care. If it doesn’t it will be a powerful message to the junta coming indirectly from nature herself: people first, politics
later.