Another View

Thant Myint-U is one of the world's foremost experts on his native Myanmar. The former fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, UK offered up an explanation for the military government's seemingly inexplicable stance on foreign aid.

In a thoughtful piece in May 22's International Herald Tribune, he wrote,

"... the actions of the generals should also come as no surprise.

Myanmar's ruling junta is not simply a military government. At its core is a security machine developed over a half- century of civil war and foreign intervention. Everything is viewed through a security lens.

The idea of throwing open the country's borders to international aid teams goes against the most basic instincts of the men in power. It will never happen."

For them it is a case of protecting national sovereignty, and therein lies the paradox. For several potential donor nations, there is no legitimacy for a government that denies its people its democratically-elected representative, Aung San Suu Kyi.

The word the United States choose to describe those running Myanmar right now is a "regime". When Washington uses that word, even a fifth-grader can tell us from very recent history that chances are, someone in the US capital is "gunning" (forgive the pun) for change.

Especially when you consider that among other governments labelled regime are, well, Iran and Cuba. (Enough said.)

So is it any wonder that the generals are spurning the Good Americans at their door. When Uncle Sam wants regime change, Uncle Sam gets it. Uncle George makes pretty sure of that.

What about the other Western government then? Now, there is Britain, Myanmar's former colonial masters, which insists - as does the BBC and other international media - on still calling it "Burma". It may seem petty but surely London cannot expect the generals to be too receptive towards a country that refuses to acknowledge what they decree as the country's rightful name, that by the way, even the United Nations accepts. (Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon being the first world leader to be physically in Myanmar inspecting the affected region may just back that theory up.)

But before this descends into a squabble over words that neglects the real problem at hand, the point to be made here is that those held at arm's length by the generals do to a certain extent only have themselves to blame.

In the same article, Mr Thant pointed out that Myanmar is just now "emerging from decades of armed conflict, where aid has long been politicized and where the urgent tasks of emergency relief may soon be coupled with the immeasurably more complex challenges of recovery and reconstruction."

"As early at 1990, Rolf Carriere, then Unicef director in Yangon argued that there was a desperate need for humanitarian and development aid in Myanmar, and that it could not wait for democratic change.

His call went largely unheeded. The military government pleaded for assistance, especially from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to reform the economy. But Western governments had just begun to impose sanctions in the hope of nudging the junta towards democracy, and nearly all aid - including through the UN - was cut off."

Would the military government - in power since 1989 - be like a woman scorned? The world is waiting, as are the thousands starving, dying in the flooded regions.

All this underscores a deeply-entrenched distrust for Western governments on the part of the military government, and this is something that may take more than a cyclone to unroot.