Don’t expect the cyclone in Burma to have benign political side-effects

07 May 2008

Rod Liddle says that there is a natural hope that the interventions of the UN and charities in the disaster-stricken country will open it up. But history does not support such optimism

I am not convinced by the thesis that natural disasters can by themselves effect welcome political change. At the most, they can sometimes act as a catalyst, as was most likely the case in East Pakistan; as Mark Pelling and Kathleen Dill put it in a paper for Chatham House two or three years ago, the most one can hope for is that ‘they put into process potentially provocative social processes’, which might lead to a more strenuous form of agitation. And it would seem to follow from this that the more readily the Burmese government allows outsiders into their country, and the more effectively these outside agencies are seen to operate, the greater the chance for change.

That said, Bangladesh would most likely have clawed its way to independence without the 1970 cyclone and, arguably, the most exacerbating factor in encouraging dissent there was the government’s geographical remoteness from the afflicted area. The Burmese capital Rangoon, meanwhile, copped the full brunt of the cyclone. Elsewhere there has been little evidence of long-term political change occurring in the wake of disaster. It is true that the Sumatran tsunami probably hastened the speed with which the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), which had been fighting a long and at times extremely violent guerrilla war, agreed to discuss peace terms with the Indonesian government. And it is true too that the eventual peace agreement, brokered by the west, has pretty much held even until today. But equally, both the GAM and the government in Jakarta were already on trajectories which made some sort of agreement highly likely, even before the tsunami wrought its devastation.

For Burma, the best hope is that the charities and the UN go in and open up the country in a manner which has not been possible for 30 or so years. But I would not bet that this will happen.

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gerry

May 7th, 2008 6:09pm Report this comment

Another contributing factor is, as with the Boxing Day tsunami, that the mangrove swamps which would have afforded some protection, had been destroyed.

Ilan Kelman

May 11th, 2008 9:37am Report this comment

Thank you for an excellent article with solid analysis. Liddle's comments are supported by extensive academic research into "disaster diplomacy" http://www.disasterdiplomacy.org But in this case, the media have been clamouring for the story that Cyclone Nargis will inevitably cause political change in Burma. Liddle avoids that bandwagon, presenting instead a realistic picture.

David Preiser

May 12th, 2008 7:47pm Report this comment

Yes, well said. One also hopes that people will apply this lesson to things like Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University, the New York Philharmonic's appearance in North Korea, and the upcoming Olympics in China. Probably not, though.

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