A natural calamity is usually an occasion to set aside political differences and show compassion. But Burma, ruled by ultranationalistic but rapacious military elites distrustful of the sanctions-enforcing West, came under mounting international pressure to open up its cyclone-wracked areas to foreign aid workers and supplies or face an armed humanitarian intervention.
Such threats helped lay the framework for an ASEAN-led aid operation, a middle option that ended an impasse over the Burmese regime's refusal to allow the entry of foreign relief teams other than from the neighboring states it considers friendly, including India, China, Southeast Asian nations and Japan.
The politics of international assistance, however, has obscured the role of a key actor whose growing activism in recent years has helped turn up the heat on the Burmese generals.