The tragedy of Burma, should we help, how to help

A tragedy, but how to help?

Aung San Suu Kyi has been kept isolated and under military guard in Burma since she, and her political party, won their 1990 elections. She is currently the most famous political prisoner in the world.

The secretive and isolated military junta that has controlled Burma since 1962 has driven a once-productive nation into the floor. Citizens are subjected to forced labour in military work camps. A popular uprising by Buddhist monks in August 2007 was viciously crushed.

Yet, like Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Kim Jong-il's North Korea, the leadership that spurns and denigrates the rest of the world also relies entirely on that outside world to provide relief to their people.

At the beginning of May, Cyclone Nargis struck the coast of Burma. The mangrove forests along the coast that would normally have absorbed massive tides and flooding have all been demolished. Poverty, a lack of electricity for heating and cooking, and direct military intervention, have all resulted in the wholesale destruction of the forests.

The result has been the devastation of the country. Estimates put the death toll at over 100,000 people. More than a million people have been left homeless. Disease and famine have followed.

The international community has been swift in their response. The UN and other disaster-relief organisations have collected donations across the world. Any other government would be thrilled and overwhelmed at this generosity. Not the Burmese junta. They have prevented aid workers from reaching disaster zones and blocked food shipments.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has declared, with astonishing restraint, his "immense frustration" with the military regime.

All of this leaves us with a fundamental question: what is the appropriate response to assisting a totalitarian state in the aftermath of a disaster?

Burma is not the only dictatorship to suffer hardship. Iran has regular earthquakes. China has earthquakes and floods. North Korea has appalling famines.

Some of these are self-inflicted. Famines don't happen in free-market, liberal economies. Flooding is less likely in nations with strong environmental protection laws. Earthquakes cause less damage where builders can be jailed for shoddy construction. Wealthy nations are more able to help themselves when disaster strikes.

Yet none of that is relevant here. The people who suffer during such disasters are invariably the innocent victims of their dictators. NGO commentators have declared that, "We shouldn't politicise aid to victims of disaster." But it is already political.

Robert Mugabe rebadges foreign aid as being a gift from ZANU-PF and is distributed only to paid-up party members. The mullahs of Iran regularly lambaste the US and other democratic nations while quietly accepting foreign aid and support. So too with North Korea.

The Burmese junta will also, no doubt, seek political capital from the aid currently arriving at their shores. They to are ensuring that aid gets only to supporters of the dictatorship.

What does one do to ensure aid gets to the right people? In 1992, during the worst famine in Somalia's terrible history, rival warlords stole food aid to feed their troops, leaving the population starving. The US sent in military support to protect UN food distribution. The results were disastrous and embarrassing.

There seems to be no right answer here. Impoverished countries are as addicted to aid as the average tick-addict is addicted to his next fix. There is no country in the past 50 years, reliant on long-term aid, which has transitioned to become a stable, viable and economically vibrant nation.

As protracted conflicts in Iraq, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan show, there is only a limited influence that foreign donors can have over an authoritarian regime. As people, as fellow human-beings, we reach out to the victims.

Yet, if companies which invest in failed states are regularly accused of supporting dictators, surely we may question the support which those same dictators receive from foreign aid?