Leading article: A human tragedy, but good may come of it

Independent

The official death toll from the cyclone that smashed through western Burma at the weekend was last night put at more than 10,000. Road and rail links, not good at the best of times, have been disrupted or destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people are in desperate need of shelter and clean water. Last night – two full days after the disaster – the Burmese foreign minister went on television to say that the government was prepared to accept international help.

That it was the foreign minister, with the prime minister beside him, who eventually announced that foreign aid would be accepted may suggest a tussle between the forces in Burma that look outwards, to however limited a degree, and those who look stubbornly inward. In the administrative paralysis that followed the protests by Buddhist monks late last year, it was the inward-looking generals who won. The demonstrations were broken up by force; monks were deported en masse from their monasteries to the countryside. The junta brutally reasserted its control.

If Burma's rulers have accepted that this disaster is too big for the country to handle on its own, and that relieving the suffering of their stricken people should take precedence over their hermit instincts, this is progress of a kind. The decision to open the country a crack is still progress, even if the response is born of fear for the regime's survival. An inadequate response to a natural disaster can spell danger to those in charge.

There have been times, though, when some real good has come of such aid efforts, when dire need has forced open not just the doors of government ministries, but minds of closed societies as well. Chilly relations between Greece and Turkey warmed almost overnight when Greece became the first country to offer assistance to Turkey after the catastrophic earthquakes of August 1999. They warmed further when Turkey reciprocated after the Athens earthquake the following month.

And in December of 1988, the Armenian earthquake prompted the then Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, to break with 70 years of Soviet practice and throw the stricken region open to foreign aid agencies. The outpouring of international goodwill that followed benefited not only the victims, but the image of the Soviet government.

The Burmese junta might reflect that opening up also holds dangers. The response to the Armenian earthquake helped usher in the greater openness that contributed three years later to the Soviet Union's collapse. A more productive conclusion would be that a closed dictatorship is an anomaly in the modern world and that today's reluctant opening should be a prelude to change.