The military regime's inadequate response in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis highlight its failings, writes TONY KINSELLA.
LUNCHTIME LAST Friday week was fairly miserable for the 200,000 inhabitants of Laputta. The lashing rain and gusting winds, as forecast on Burma's state media, were seasonal if heavy.
Workers in the junta-owned tourist hotels closer to the Irrawaddy must have suspected what those with access to foreign media already knew. A cyclone was on the way and the hotels were making exceptional storm preparations.
Around 2pm, Cyclone Nargis roared in from the Bay of Bengal. Torrential rain, driven by winds of over 200kph, was accompanied by a wall of sea water up to six metres high. Nargis flattened Laputta and roared inland. The 190,000 inhabitants of Bogalay succumbed to its wrath on Friday evening. Close to midday on Saturday, Nargis ravaged Rangoon, a city of nearly six million people, with winds peaking at 240kph.
On Wednesday last, local officials talked of 10,000 dead and 30,000 missing in Bogalay alone. The following day brought reports that 80,000 had perished in and around Laputta.
Lloyd's List reports that the container terminal at Thilawa, about 25km downstream from Rangoon, had been severely damaged, with all its cranes destroyed.
Houses were flattened, wells polluted with sea water, roads, railways and bridges washed away. Sewage floods the streets and power lines are down, meaning there is no electricity to operate water plants. Human and animal carcasses decompose in the salt-poisoned rice paddies.
Burma's transport infrastructure was nothing much to write home about before Nargis hit. The 320km drive from Rangoon to the junta's newly-built Stalinist capital of Naypyitaw took up to 10 hours. The country had only 3,200km of paved roads in 2005, according to the CIA.
Official Burmese estimates place the death toll at 22,500, with another 41,000 missing. Diplomats in Rangoon have suggested a death toll closer to 100,000.
These figures seem remarkably low when compared with the few eye-witness reports filtering out.
Quite what these estimates are based on, in a country of 55 million, is impossible to determine. The junta last attempted a partial census 25 years ago. What passes for government in Burma has little idea of how many subjects it rules.
If Naypyitaw has no idea how many Burmese there were before Nargis struck, how can it possibly estimate casualties from its remote fortress capital? The sad truth of what may well be the world's most brutal regime is that it doesn't really care.
Burma has been ruled by a military junta in one form or another since 1962. Over almost half a century, the generals have succeeded in turning what was one of the wealthiest countries in southeast Asia into one of the world's poorest nations.
The generals initially opted for one-party rule under the Burma Socialist Programme Party. This allowed them to play cold war footsy with Moscow and Beijing - while the lawless, opium-producing Golden Triangle helped smooth relations with the CIA during Washington's Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian misadventures.
The Burmese people have time and again challenged their military masters, most poignantly in 1974 at the funeral of the country's most famous son, former UN secretary-general U Thant.
Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won 392 out of 489 seats in May 1990, but the junta disallowed the results. She remains under house arrest in Rangoon.
In August 2007, the military junta ruthlessly suppressed widespread protests led by Buddhist monks.
Burma is a wealthy, fertile country whose people are starving. The country has significant oil and gas fields, and gem and mineral deposits.
All this has been squandered by the armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw, which now number 500,000 and are sufficiently well equipped to be ranked as the 12th most powerful army in the world.
The brutality of the Burmese junta, headed by Senior Gen Than Shwe, who is 75 and rumoured to be seriously ill, lies more in how it has failed and beggared its people than in its treatment of opponents, or ethnic minorities. Some 200,000 or more Burmese may have died because of the junta's failures. If the rice crop is destroyed, millions more will be at risk.
Dictatorships waste scarce resources on security forces to monitor and control their people. They also stifle initiative and criticism. Junior officers and local officials hesitate - and people die.
As criticism is career toxic, a junta can never learn from mistakes. Democracies are more efficient. When Cyclone Sidr struck Bangladesh in 2007, 3.2 million were evacuated, and around 4,000 died. The comparison is obvious.
Chinese, Indian, Thai and UN aid is being accepted in Burma. The junta refuses direct western intervention.
France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, talks of intervention without invitation. Naypyitaw, and others, could view that as invasion.
Laura Bush's hasty and intemperate press conference at the White House on May 5th couched an appeal to the Burmese junta to accept foreign aid in terms so menacing as to almost guarantee their rejection.
Her husband's idiotic and incompetent invasion of Iraq has, at best, frozen serious debate about a UN right of humanitarian intervention into the internal affairs of nation states.
She can be forgiven, since she holds no public office and was hurrying to Texas for her daughter's wedding. Her husband's legacy, not to mention his "heck of a job" in post-hurricane relief in New Orleans, are less eligible for forgiveness.
Hundreds of thousands of Burmese are dead or dying and millions more are at risk because we have yet to agree minimum global standards and intervention procedures. There is no legal basis and there are no procedures for UN intervention. Aid is urgent, but setting structures for global relief efforts is vital.