The soothsayers surrounding Than Shwe, the paranoid general at the apex of Burma’s monstrous military regime, are in high favour. Their prophecies of civil unrest followed by a great natural disaster swayed his decision three years ago to move the capital north to Naypyidaw (“abode of kings”), an isolated eyrie remote from storm-blasted Rangoon and the fetid sea of devastated or obliterated townships, bloated corpses and destitute survivors that the fertile Irrawaddy delta has become.
- Extracted from Rosemary Righter, “A test of the UN’s moral authority”, The Times, 12 May 2008.
Of all the articles I have seen on Burma over the past week this is one of the better ones. New Mandala readers hoping to get to grips with the immediate crisis, the prognosis for any (unilateral?) humanitarian intervention, and the longer term political dynamics will find that Righter’s brief argument rewards a close inspection.
1 response so far ↓
1 jonfernquest // May 13, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Somebody told me they thought this whole affair was really very surprising and unpredictable, and I asked them what they thought was unpredictable, the hurricane or the response afterwards by the Burmese government?
They said both, but if someone had had the forsight to project this sort of thing, which is within the realm of possibility of disaster planning, British Gazetteers from the colonial period mention devastating hurricanes along the Bengal coastline and Michael Charney’s 2000 PhD dissertation discusses about the historical ecological impact of hurricanes and other natural disasters in Arakan.
Given that it could be predicted, the response by this government could also be predicted, as numerous people have pointed out beforehand, the mindset of the leadership of the country could be likened to an **irrational paranoid hunkered down in a foxhole suffering from a siege mentality**, an extreme defensive position, someone who could care less what the world thinks or even what their own people, who have been rebelling pretty much continually during the 60 years (since 1948) of the post-WWII era, think.
**Western policy continues to isolate the country and push it ever further into the hands of their protector China**. This little bit of political realism has been a major force shaping the current crisis.
Of course, blaming that isolating policy of the West for what happened would be ridiculous, but one can counterfactually imagine other possible worlds in which the leadership of the country had been **drawn adroitly out of their foxhole through accomodating policies, for the greater long-term benefit of the greater population that lives outside the foxhole, exposed to the elements, and one benefit would be surviving disasters like this. Who knows maybe Aung San Suukyi would have been elected Prime Minister a couple of times already. It has been 20 years of isolating and punitive western policy. The time to punish the immoral leadership of the country is after the lives and livelihoods of the people in the country are secured.
What I can’t really understand is why they just don’t go ahead, use the United Nations “right to intervene,” and enter the country and supply aid. They must be worried about the Chinese response.
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