M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — Should another hurricane
like Katrina hit the United States, perhaps in Florida, and Cuban leader Raul
Castro offer to send units of the Cuban army to deliver succor to those
affected, the Bush administration may hesitate to allow those units
"unrestricted access" to the country.
Similarly, were a typhoon or other natural
calamity to ravage Poland, that country's rulers may hesitate to welcome an
influx of Russian and Chinese troops, even though these would be bringing with
them relief supplies rather than armaments.
Given that regime change in Myanmar is
explicitly on the agenda of the United States and the European Union, both
should have anticipated the cold reaction of the generals in Myanmar to their
increasingly peremptory "requests" to provide relief.
The French are returning home rather than
handing over their supplies to countries allowed entry into Myanmar, such as
India and Thailand. At least one of the European Union's former colonial
superpowers is playing as indefensible a variant of politics as the thuggish
and archaic geronotocrats in uniform in Myanmar. These are men hardly likely to
flinch from the prospect of hundreds of thousands of their own citizens
suffering because of the absence of relief, for their only motivation is
self-preservation.
