“Make no mistake about it, the leaders of Myanmar are dictators who trample human rights, have led their nation into an extended economic crisis, and are interested only in keeping their own power. Almost a month after Nargis hit the Irrawaddy Delta, the junta is now finally allowing foreign aid, but not from the United States.

But also make no mistake about this. The United States under its current administration will continue to refuse humanitarian aid and personnel from Cuba, Venezuela, and any other country that doesn’t agree with the Bush-Cheney politics.”

Absolutely.

For a personal account of Myanmar, readers may be interested in Naomi Klein’s piece datelined May 16, and titled “Regime-Quake in Burma and China.”

It’s at http://www.naomiklein.org/main

After discussing the earthquake in Sichuan and how it has shaken loose “grave political weaknesses within” China, Klein turns to Burma:

“None of this compares with the rage boiling over in Burma, where cyclone survivors have badly beaten at least one local official, furious at his failure to distribute aid. There have been dozens of reports of the Burmese junta taking credit for supplies sent by foreign countries. It turns out that they have been taking more than credit–in some cases they have been taking the aid. According to a report in Asia Times, the regime has been hijacking food shipments and distributing them among its 400,000 soldiers. The reason speaks to the threat the disaster poses to the very existence of the regime. The generals, it seems, are “haunted by an almost pathological fear of a split inside their own ranks…if soldiers are not given priority in aid distribution and are unable to feed themselves, the possibility of mutiny rises.” Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, confirms that before the cyclone, the military was already coping with a wave of desertions.

This relatively small-scale theft of food is fortifying the junta for its much larger heist–the one taking place via the constitutional referendum the generals have insisted on holding, come hell and high water. Enticed by high commodity prices, Burma’s generals have been gorging off the country’s natural abundance, stripping it of gems, timber, rice and oil. As profitable as this arrangement is, junta leader Gen. Than Shwe knows he cannot resist the calls for democracy indefinitely.

Taking a page out of the playbook of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the generals have drafted a Constitution that allows for elections but guarantees that no future government will ever have the power to prosecute them for their crimes or take back their ill-gotten wealth. As Farmaner puts it, after elections the junta leaders ‘are going to be wearing suits instead of boots.’ The cyclone, meanwhile, has presented them with one last, vast business opportunity: by blocking aid from reaching the highly fertile Irrawaddy delta, hundreds of thousands of mostly ethnic Karen rice farmers are being sentenced to death. According to Farmaner, ‘that land can be handed over to the generals’ business cronies’ (shades of the beachfront land grabs in Sri Lanka and Thailand after the Asian tsunami). This isn’t incompetence, or even madness. It’s laissez-faire ethnic cleansing….”