KEY POINTS:
Until recently, all that was popularly known of the mute military regime that has ruled Myanmar for 56 years was its aversion to civil rights and outside scrutiny, evidenced by the long confinement of the popularly elected Aung San Suu Kyi, the fate of Buddhist monks who occasionally demonstrate in the streets, and its abiding reluctance to allow foreign observers into the country.
All of that is par for the dictatorial course. A distaste for opposition and criticism can be understood, if not excused. But even repressive regimes can behave responsibly in the face of natural disaster. Myanmar's junta has revealed itself in the wake of Cyclone Nargis to be more deeply despicable than outsiders imagined.
With upwards of a million people left homeless, hungry and sick by the May 3 cyclone, the generals have acted as though their country is under siege. International aid efforts have been seized or rebuffed, and the Government's own offering of any sort of relief to the people appears to be listless, miserable and corrupt.
Reports at the weekend of the country's Prime Minister proudly handing out new TV sets and DVDs to households without electricity attest to Myanmar's political state.
If the generals were fearful of exposing their misrule to the world in this crisis, their resistance to outside help has made their misrule starkly evident. The international community now knows that Myanmar is controlled by people who are willing to see mass suffering rather than run the slightest risk to their retention of power.
And the risk would be slight. If the regime had readily opened its doors to aid agencies and did what it could to assist the distribution of food, clean water, sanitation, medicines and shelter, political questions would be the last subject on most people's minds.
Instead, the junta's self-serving, incompetent response to the disaster has underlined its worthlessness to its own people and made its insecurity apparent to the world. The generals are, as our correspondent Graeme Jenkins put it yesterday, cruel, power hungry and dangerously irrational.
He reports that this is a regime that lays waste to hundreds of villages every year in the course of a quiet civil war. Half a million people had been displaced even before the cyclone sent a tidal surge through the Irrawaddy delta.
The generals allowed in some relief flights last week but insisted on doing the internal distribution themselves. United Nations shipments were suspended at the weekend after all food and equipment flown to the country had been impounded by the regime.
The scale of the catastrophe - perhaps 100,000 dead, 1.5 million homeless, no power or sanitation, effluent in the water supplies, rice paddies ruined by salt water, corpses rotting, disease threatening - would be beyond the means of any but the richest of nations to alleviate unaided. Myanmar cannot recover alone, and any rational government of such a country would recognise that.
The cyclone devastated the country just a week before a national vote was due - the first permitted by the junta in 18 years - for a constitution weighted in favour of military rule. The UN urged the junta to postpone the referendum and concentrate on disaster relief. The best the generals would do was postpone voting in the devastated regions for two weeks.
If the disaster overwhelms what is seen as a cosmetic exercise for continued military rule, it might bring some ultimate benefit to this misgoverned place. There must be a limit to the cruelty and incompetence a desperate people will bear. Myanmar's patience should be at breaking point.
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