The politics of aid

There is nothing astonishing or even surprising about the way the brainless generals of Myanmar are dithering over international aid after last weekend's typhoon. The "international community" can jump up and down all it wants with frustration and exasperation and moralising, but it won't do any good. When you are dealing with an unfamiliar or uncongenial mindset, you have to understand it if you really want to get anything done.

The need for action is blindingly obvious to everyone. Maybe 100,000 missing or dead, vast devastation, the imminent threat of severe and widespread disease and starvation. It is not a time for playing games.

But the military regime in Myanmar, which has been in power for 46 years, is in a serious dilemma. If it doesn't act quickly and on a large scale, it will be faced with desperate disease, anger and insurrection. Its reputation rests (apart from brutality) on superior power, intelligence, expertise and wisdom, the usual traits of tyrants. Failure now could tear the mask from the face of the regime.

But to let in the hordes of international "aid workers" clamouring for access could be just as catastrophic, in political terms. It would be an admission of impotence. It would put the administration of large parts of the country into the temporary hands of foreigners. There's nothing "the international community" (meaning principally the US) would like better than pour marines and contractors and intelligence officers into this closed territory to find out what's going on and spread some new ideas and lifestyles. And the generals know that all too well.

Even Lil' George Bush is not making a secret of it. Both he and Laura came on TV berating the generals for prevarication, promising conditional aid, deliberately calling Myanmar by its old name of Burma, deliberately saying they'd like to help the people "but we'd like them to live of freedom too", and generally using the occasion for political purposes. An American honour was bestowed on the house-arrested opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi: a more loaded message could not have been sent. And the generals were then expected to swing wide the long-locked doors in grovelling gratitude?

The Myanmar generals are damned if they do and damned if they don't. They have been floundering around doing photo-ops, hoping for help from China and India and other regional powers, trying to channel aid through themselves, and trying to keep the dreaded "west" out of the picture. The Americans and the Brits are having a hard time swallowing the idea that China and India have more leverage here than they have, and that they need to stand back and shut up. Some in the west have been pushing the idea that when a regime cannot protect its people, other countries have a legal responsibility to intervene; by, for example, dropping food aid from the air, regardless of who gets it (no prizes for guessing who that might be).

The bottom line is that the wretched victims of the storm, and the subsequent flooding and destruction, are not getting the help they need. They have become the victims of politics. And not just domestic politics either: they have fallen victim to the politics of the testosterone-driven west, which cannot stop telling everyone what to do, cannot bear the thought of beng thwarted by a military dictatorship, cannot tolerate deferring to China and India, and as usual is carrying on like an elephant in a china shop.

The question of who really cares about getting help to the people who need it, without political or moral preconditions, is being answered in some interesting (but unsurprising) ways.