Burma’s military junta is undeniably immoral in refusing to permit full-scale international assistance for victims of cyclone Nargis. But they are hardly irrational or perverse. The generals must be aware that natural disasters are rarely good for the status quo. The Armenian earthquake of 1988 was a critical event in exposing the shambles that underlay the Soviet state. Natural calamities in Nicaragua, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Turkey, amongst other countries, served as “catalysts for significant political change,” sparking revolt in some cases but in others “reconciliation of domestic conflicts, a truce between longtime enemies, or a new openness to outside ideas that arrive with international assistance.”
Huge protests that erupted in East Pakistan after a 1970 cyclone killed 500,000 people gave momentum to the independence movement that led to Bangladesh seceding. Similarly, note Mark Pelling and Kathleen Dill, British analysts who examine the relationship between disasters and political change, a 2004 earthquake in Morocco prompted massive public protests, and arguably enhanced support for Islamist groups that distinguished themselves in post-disaster relief operations. “The socio-political and cultural dynamics put into motion at the time of catastrophic ‘natural’ disasters create the conditions for potential political change – often at the hands of a discontented civil society,” Pelling and Dill contend.
“In Burma, the cyclone’s aftermath presents an opportunity for opposition groups to make limited gains,” says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, of Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. “There will be mounting pressures on the government because of its inadequacies. Opposition groups have the upper hand.” The “cyclone could trigger social unrest in Burma,” says Aung Zaw, editor of Irrawaddy Magazine, a Thailand-based opposition publication. “I do think there’s going to be a political upheaval.”
Others suggest the disaster could ultimately lead to reconciliation between the junta and the outside world. “A scenario in which the military regime collapses and the country embarks on an inclusive transition to democracy embracing political parties and ethnic groups long excluded from power remains improbable,” says Ian Holliday of Hong Kong University. By contrast, he suggests, “the possibility that the junta, for many years prickly, stubborn and isolated, will be forced to reach out across ideological and ethnic divides to stabilize and reconstruct the country is distinct and real.”
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