Tuesday, May 06, 2008; Posted: 09:51 PM
But what form that frustration might take _ and whether it could lead to the political change long sought by protesting monks and democracy campaigners _ remains unclear as thousands in the southeast Asian nation struggle simply to cope with the aftermath of the disaster.
"People in general are quite frustrated and angry, but I cannot say whether that will lead to street protests," said Soe Myint, editor of the Mizzima News, a New Delhi-based Myanmar news publication run by exiles. "People right now are fighting just for their survival."
The disaster has posed difficult dilemmas for the ruling junta: To help the country's estimated 1 million homeless, it has taken the unusual step of requesting international assistance, but the response has come with criticism and conditions, including demands to open the country to foreign aid workers and disaster assessment teams.
President Bush on Tuesday offered the help of the U.S. Navy, a contribution unlikely to be accepted enthusiastically by a regime that accuses the U.S. of trying to subvert it.
Natural disasters have a long history of altering political landscapes. The failure of Mexico's ruling party to adequately respond to Mexico City's 1985 earthquake is widely believed to have sparked its eventual fall from power. Fury over Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle's theft of aid money following a 1972 earthquake fueled the Sandinista uprising that eventually overthrew the government.
By contrast, earthquakes in Pakistan in 2005, Turkey in 1999 and Greece a few weeks later spurred political rapprochements when neighboring enemies reached out to help.
"Catastrophic `natural' disasters create the conditions for potential political change _ often at the hands of a discontented civil society," wrote Mark Pelling, a human geography expert at King's College London, in a research paper. "A state's incapacity to respond adequately to a disaster can create a temporary power vacuum, and potentially a watershed moment."
Myanmar's military junta, which has ruled the country since 1962, has long resisted both internal and external pressures to relax its grip and allow democratic reform. It showed little sign of bending to popular frustration last September, when thousands of highly respected Buddhist monks led the largest pro-democracy protests in nearly two decades.
Authorities arrested thousands of monks and other protesters. The government said 10 people were killed, while the United Nations put the number at 31. For a time, the country's Internet system was shut down in an effort to keep reports and photos of bloodshed from the world.
Following Saturday's devastating cyclone, which obliterated whole villages in the coastal Irrawaddy delta region and left at least 22,000 dead and 44,000 missing, Myanmar's government has come under intense criticism for failing to adequately warn villagers in the path of the storm.
The government, warned by Indian authorities of the storm's approach, broadcast limited televised warnings, but those failed to reach many in the storm's path, a region with little access to television or regular power.
Storm victims complained that the regime did not sent soldiers to help in large numbers until Tuesday.
The government also has infuriated survivors by making only tentative moves to open the country to international relief organizations poised to deliver badly needed clean drinking water, plastic sheets and other aid. A first delivery of aid arrived Tuesday from Thailand, but many relief groups were still struggling to get visas for their staff and permission to deliver assistance, said Pamela Sitko, an organizer for World Vision, a Christian charity working in Myanmar.
"It's one thing to be hit by a cyclone and another thing for your government to prevent people from helping you," said Maung Zarni, a longtime Burmese exile now working as a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford. "Psychologically, people are going to feel extremely angry and frustrated."
Those frustrations may play out on Saturday, the day the country's military junta hopes to hold a long-planned referendum on a new national constitution that would entrench military rule by giving military-appointed lawmakers the power to block any proposed constitutional amendment.
Ignoring opposition demands for a delay, the government has insisted it will go ahead with the vote in all provinces of the country except those most seriously hit by Cyclone Nargis.
As a result, the vote "will be an opportunity for people to express their anguish," Myint predicted.
Opportunities for protest are few in the tightly controlled dictatorship. The leader of the pro-democracy movement, Nobel Peace prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi, has been under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years. The regime has released many of the thousands of detainees from September's protests, but some of the protest leaders have left the country.
The political effects of natural disasters are difficult to predict.
Following the devastating 2004 Asian tsunami, secessionist rebels in Indonesia's hard-hit Aceh province reached a peace accord with the country's government. But the disaster had little similar effect in conflict-riven Sri Lanka, where breakaway Tamil Tiger guerrillas are now engaged in a full-out war with government forces.
"You get completely different outcomes," said Robert Templer, a Burma expert and director of Asia programs with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. "So you have to be cautious about suggesting which direction (Myanmar) is headed. It could go either way."
While crises _ and particularly those mishandled by the government _ can become a rallying point for change, they can also draw a divided society closer together and "re-ignite some kind of social bonds," Zarni said.
Myanmar "is a society where the bonds of trust have been broken. Disasters can bring people back together," he said.
Still, conditions in cyclone-ravaged areas of the country are unlikely to produce much warmth toward the government in coming weeks, experts said.
May marks the start of Myanmar's rainy season, and suffering is expected to be widespread among the many homeless. The country is prone to malaria outbreaks in the low-lying areas hit by the cyclone. And even in Yangon, the country's former capital and largest city, power is not expected to be restored for weeks.
A few top military leaders could potentially be pushed out of office if widespread public discontent emerges, Zarni said. But "there's zero chance of civilians taking over," he predicted.
After the military has spent years destroying the country's other institutions, "the only institution that is really functioning is the military," he said. "That's the sad but true reality of the country."
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