It is always dangerous to read too much into things. It is true that "Such crises tend to underscore government incompetence and corruption, and stiffen resistance to already unpopular rulers." This has happened to the Bush Administrations following Katrina. My intuition was that the regime was hoping that the population along the coast would die off by disease and starvation so that the leaders could take over the land and resources for themselves and rebuild more modern cities using Western help.
From the Burma Project:
Natural resource abundance not only helps prop up authoritarian rule, it also leads to large-scale oil, gas, and mineral extraction projects with ???project-level??? earth rights abuses, such as forced labor, land confiscation, displacement, and environmental degradation. These project-level earth rights abuses are also correlated with the systematic denial of civil and political rights, which prevents the people from taking a stake in their social, political, and environmental fate: this is Burma???s resource curse.
Winds of Change
Cyclone Nargis may have done more than just wreck Burma's cities. It may also spell doom for the government.
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The massive storm that hit Burma on May 2 could not have come at a worse time for the generals who rule the country. As Cyclone Nargis raged toward them across the Indian Ocean, Burma's military government was busy preparing for a referendum—originally scheduled for May 10—they hoped would ratify a new constitution legalizing military rule.
In fact, the generals were so preoccupied with making sure their new charter would pass smoothly that they played down urgent warnings from India and others of the impending cyclone, according to foreign wire reports. That delay would prove fatal to legions of their subjects who were caught unawares. Now,
with roughly 17,330 square kilometers of Burma underwater and tens of thousands confirmed dead, the generals have reluctantly agreed to postpone balloting in two of the worst-hit provinces—but, incredibly, have insisted it will go as planned in the country's north.
Yet even if the vote passes, the ruthless soldiers who have ruled this Asian state since 1962 may have made their final blunder—or at least started a process that will lead to their eventual downfall. From Mexico City to Managua to the Middle Kingdom, natural disasters in the past have had a way of undermining ruthless and incompetent leaders. The process can take years. But once set in motion, the forces unleashed by a destructive natural event—and a ham-handed government response—can prove as unstoppable as an actual tsunami.
Just how badly Burma has suffered is still hard to determine, since the xenophobic and paranoid regime has accepted only a trickle of international aid and denied visas to virtually all foreign journalists. But the official count of the dead and missing already exceeded 60,000 as of this writing and was expected to grow. More than 1 million Burmese have lost their homes, and Shari Villarosa, the top U.S. diplomat in the country, warned last week that the lack of food, medicine, clean water and other basic needs could bring the death toll to 100,000. World Food Program spokesperson Paul Risley said the victims' needs were so vast that they've been "like trying to fill a bathtub with an eyedropper."
Meanwhile, the government seems to have gone missing in action. The 400,000-strong military kept an unusually low profile last week, suggesting serious dysfunction at the top. Sr. Gen. Tan Shwe, the nation's leader, was nowhere to be seen. Buddhist monks and nuns appeared to be spearheading community clean-up campaigns—although state censors instructed the media to report only on military relief efforts. But some troops seemed more concerned with social control than social welfare. Instead of helping emergency services, for example, some soldiers conducted surveillance of local NGO staffers who were offering free funeral services to the bereaved families, according to Aung Zaw, a Burmese exile and editor of The Irrawaddy, a Thai-based magazine about Burma.
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