Myanmar has given us one of the most admirable women alive, Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and the world’s most repugnant regime. Until May 2, the military government... was competing for that title with Zimbabwe’s racist tyrant, North Korea’s lunatic autocrat and Cuba’s bumbling Castro brothers. But then Cyclone Nargis happened — and the junta seized the opportunity to edge ahead of its rivals. It is hard to say what was worse: concealing the magnitude of the cyclone... from the population and making no preparations, even though the meteorological system had given... 48 hours advance notice; grossly lying about the number of victims...; denying foreign relief agencies access to the country and shunning help...; forbidding civilians to distribute what little aid was available... Or going ahead with the referendum designed to ratify a constitution that took 14 years to write, all of whose articles can be summed up in four words: We will rule forever.

The regime has gone through various phases... which left a country endowed with abundant natural resources in a state of utter ruin, and, later, a more Latin American-type system in which the economy is partly owned by government... In four and a half decades, the junta has made only one mistake — to allow relatively free elections in 1990. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won them by a landslide. The junta disregarded the result and, learning from its mistake, never allowed the daughter of the nation’s independence hero... to live in freedom again. As long as Myanmar’s next-door neighbours — especially China, Thailand and India — were kept happy... and as long as there was no danger that civil unrest could spill over the various borders, the generals had carte blanche from the rest of Southeast Asia to do as they pleased.

... contd.