Two dictators faced two disasters, one in China, the other in Burma. Onewas an earthquake, the other a flood. Ten of thousands are dead andmillions at risk. Being dictatorial, both regimes have responded in amanner heavy with the politics of sovereignty. In one case that helpspeople, in the other it kills them.
Natural disasters are the world's greatest murderers after war anddisease. Nature does not do revenge (as far as we know) but it leaveshumans to do mercy and recuperation. How humanity performs that task is thetest of civilisation.
China's response to the Sichuan earthquake contrasts so glaringlywith previous responses that I am inclined to revise my view of theOlympics: perhaps they should always be held in dictatorships. After theshambles of the world torch tour, the handling of the earthquake has been apolitical coup, and coming just when Beijing most needed one.
Inviting the media to the scene was fairly low risk. An earthquakeis one big bang and, with the entire Red Army available, a rescue is arescue. The world has fallen in love with trapped Chinese, tearful Chinese,heroic Chinese, efficient Chinese. A nation often portrayed as a massivemonotony is revealed for the first time as composed of sensitive humans.Tibet and the torch have been forgotten and the Olympics shifted fromobscene accolade to worthy reward. China is overnight OK. It leads thenews.
Poor little Burma. Its disaster is far greater and its deaths two,three, possibly four times worse than China's. As the head of the Merlinrelief agency, Sean Keogh, said on the radio yesterday, "such an epiccalamity would test the reserves of any nation," none more so than Burma's.
The nature of its disaster means that the initial death toll from the tidalwave may well be overwhelmed by a secondary one from starvation anddisease. In China, a few more lucky souls may be pulled from the rubble. InBurma tens of thousands continue to teeter between salvation and death. TheBurmese victims need help to a degree that China does not.
The people of the Irrawaddy delta are the most charming and mostwretched in south-east Asia. While the rest of Britain's Indian empireadopted some form of democracy, Burma became a brutish hegemony, itsleaders from the same charm school as Cambodia's Pol Pot. They stillimprison, torture and kill their opponents and ruthlessly suppressdissident minorities such as the Kachins and Karens.
Unlike China, with Olympics in the offing, Burma's regime has nointerest in publicity. Under economic sanctions since 1991, its narrativeto its people is that the outside world, especially the west, is the causeof all their woes. They can be saved only by the omnipotent, self-styledState Law and Order Restoration Council (Orwellian acronym, SLORC). ThatBurma should need foreign help, let alone from foreign soldiers, destroysthat narrative. It is anathema.
To the regime, publicity and the aid it might bring is a greaterdisaster than any hurricane. It suggests incompetence and impotence. Soinstead we read daily stories of western diplomats "putting pressure" onintransigent generals. We read of neighbouring states sending in pitifultrickles of aid. The UN World Food Programme reports that fewer than aquarter of a million victims have received any help at all, in a area withtwo million at risk. Keogh says he saw no helicopters at work. Yet theagencies, which must keep their peace with the regime, dare not complain,let alone take pictures.
The world and its media are playing the dictators' game. They are doingexactly what the Chinese regime wants, and exactly what the Burmese regimewants. They are giving inordinate coverage to every crushed Sichuanschool-child and ignoring two million Burmese.
In China the victim is the story. In Burma it is the awfulness of theregime. The media salves its conscience, as do politicians, by stressingthe "urgency" of the catastrophe and callousness of the generals. Itregards that as its job well done.
Off the Irrawaddy coast has for the past ten days has sat an aidarmada, including two dozen heavy-lift helicopters vital to transportsupplies over water and broken roads. The full panoply of humanitarianintervention, so boasted by Tony Blair in 1998 and by the UN in 2006,stands idle.
That panoply was proudly mobilised by politicians and aid merchants to helpthe afflicted of Lebanon and Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Aghanistan andIraq. Then I recall no pettifogging over proper channels, no "we can doonly what the regime permits". Then lawyers were told to validateintervention rather than object to it. Thousands of human lives were atrisk and that was enough to send in the marines.
Not now. Now, for some reason, we are told by these brave-hearts that wemust defer to the sensibilities of a dictatorship. We must consider whatmight happen if a helicopter were shot down. We must think of aid agencystaff on the ground. We grasp thankfully at this week's dilatory andimplausible "breakthrough", under which the regime promises to let in ouraid if it comes under an ASEAN banner. Like hell it will.
When long ago I was pleading the humanitarian cause of the East Timorese,the usual response was, who are they? The answer was, they were the same asthe Lebanese, the Somalians and the Kosovans, but unfortunately not ontelevision. Only when they rose in bloody revolt did the camera crewsarrive.
The truth of modern foreign policy is that it responds not to humanitarianneed but, as in Iraq, to domestic politics and some warped perception ofnational security. Humanitarianism is only a factor when some catastrophediscomfits those into whose sitting rooms it is beamed by the media.
I have no desire to fight, let alone topple, the Burmese generals. I do notbelieve, if aid pallets were airlifted ashore, the regime's pitiful forcein the delta would dare attack them, and would expect air cover if theytried. Nor do I care what the Chinese or Thais say about the matter. Thishas nothing to do with the fate of the generals, rather with that of thehundreds of thousands of human beings whom they have left to die.
We cannot save lives in China, but we can in Burma. We choose notto do so because the Burmese regime has successfully choked publicity, theconduit that nowadays motivates humanitarian intervention. Burma is not ontelevision. That is civilisation for you.