The paucity of hope

Monks on the move

Everything is Broken: A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma. By Emma Larkin. Penguin Press; 271 pages; $25.95. To be published in Britain by Granta in July as “Everything is Broken: The Untold Story of Life Under Burma's Military Regime”; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

BACK in 1995, The Economist asked Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's opposition leader, now under house arrest, if she saw any hope for her benighted country. “I do not hope,” she replied in her crisp, rather school-mistressy way. “I persevere.” Fifteen years on, hope still seems a frivolous indulgence, despite plans by the ruling junta to stage an election this year that will lead to a notionally civilian government.

This moving account of the regime's response to a devastating cyclone two years ago is a timely warning against optimism. What kind of government actively impedes the delivery of life-saving aid to its people? By its own, probably drastically understated guess, 138,300 people died or went missing when Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy delta in May 2008. Yet the junta rejected most foreign offers of assistance. Help from the United Nations, countless NGOs and even the American navy was rebuffed. By the time some aid was allowed in, it was too late for many.

Emma Larkin is the nom de plume of an American living in Bangkok who wrote an earlier book about George Orwell's links with the country. She secured a visa to visit Myanmar in the aftermath of the cyclone, providing her with a close-up view of the clash between an isolationist regime and an often ignorant outside world. “Does anyone know where I can access the data?” asks a forlorn, newly arrived NGO worker. In Myanmar there are no reliable data, and if there were, access would be denied by the regime.

That makes it hard to write a book whose central question is why the junta behaved so callously. Perhaps it really did fear that the aid effort might provide a pretext for invasion. More likely it was paranoid about allowing foreigners in after the brutality used against rebellious Buddhist monks in September 2007 had outraged popular opinion.

The author is reduced to passing on rumours to explain the inexplicable. There is not much doubt, for example, that the generals are superstitious. But is it really true that, late one night in 2007, the wife of the dictator, “senior general” Than Shwe, went for a walk in Yangon around the Shwedagon, Myanmar's holiest pagoda, with a dog and a pig on leads? The story is, apparently, widely believed: a dog signifies Monday, a pig Wednesday. Miss Suu Kyi was born on a Tuesday, so the perambulation bound her into powerlessness.

Perhaps soothsayers advised against accepting foreign aid. A cruder suggestion is voiced by a Burmese friend of the author. Than Shwe sees himself as an incarnation of ancient kings, and a king does not bother about how his slaves are doing: “Their death or hardship is not his concern.” That does not stop another story emerging: about the human decency and compassion of a people colonised by their own army who did their best for their afflicted compatriots. Myanmar is indeed an object lesson in perseverance.