The crisis in Haiti has everyone’s attention, including mine. I will not comment about it because I know next to nothing about that area. Some have been drawing parallels between it and the Myanmar crisis of two years ago. In Haiti aid is bottled up because the infrastructure is largely destroyed. In Myanmar there was not much infrastructure to be destroyed in the delta area, but the thing that caught everyone’s attention was that aid was not getting through simply because the generals controlling the military government would not let it through.
I do not wish to appear as an apologist for the military government of Myanmar, but there were things that the U.S. and European countries did that may have encouraged the general’s response. The best summary of this is in the second and third paragraphs of the first page of a letter from Derek Tonkin, whose site networkmyanmar.org tracks what happens in Myanmar. I can’t say it better, so I won’t.
