How else can one possibly describe the junta in the capital, Yangon?
When cyclone-driven water swept over that poor Asian land, carrying whole villages away, the outer world was prepared to mount a massive effort to relieve the suffering from a natural catastrophe of numbing scale.
The full horror of the storm’s aftermath is yet to be known. The scant details that have made their way out of the reclusive country have come from the very few Western newspeople who’ve managed to make their way across the frontier.
As many as 100,000 people are thought to have perished. The survivors, many of them in remote and isolated districts, are without shelter, nourishment, medicines or even drinkable water.
And what has been the regime’s response?
The tyrants denied visas to international aid workers, forbade relief shipments to enter the country. And when finally a trickle of food began to find its way in, the army stole it!
So for 10 days after the storm, stockpiles of desperately needed supplies were stalled outside the closed borders. Only last Monday was the first U.S. cargo plane loaded with relief goods allowed to land in Myanmar. Even now, after more than a fortnight, the flow of aid is inadequate.
Given the difficulty of getting to some of the worst-stricken areas and the delay in organizing a distribution network, it remains to be seen how much of the aid actually will reach the victims in time.
The behavior of Myanmar’s rulers is worse than merely shameful. In plain words, it amounts by any reasonable reckoning to a crime against humanity — an offense for which the guilty deserve to be prosecuted.
When fragile societies are overwhelmed by immense natural calamities, the helpless victims look to great nations for their salvation.
At the first sign of the regime’s determination to block humanitarian assistance from the outside world, the U.S. should immediately have set about organizing an international force to deliver aid by whatever coercive means necessary.
So the first question is why that didn’t happen. Why were precious days allowed to slip by, at a probable further horrific cost of lives?
The explanation is clear. At least in part, we failed to act for the very reason that Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cohorts are able to operate with near impunity out of Pakistan’s border region, and that the Taliban threaten to nullify what once looked to be a decisive victory for freedom in Afghanistan.
And for the same reason that, on a different continent, this country has played what can only be described as a timid, halfhearted part in attempts to end the genocidal nightmare in Sudan.
That reason is because our military is stretched almost to breaking and our collective will has been sapped by the cost and the heartbreak of our exhausting and unending ordeal in Iraq.
When great crises present themselves, great nations are obliged to respond. When they do not, the tragedy is compounded.
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