Myanmar's generals are ruled by paranoia

To the outside world, the reaction of Myanmar's military regime to last week's devastating cyclone seems not just obscene, but inexplicable.

Instead of rushing to help its desperate people, the regime of General Than Shwe all but shut off the country from foreign assistance while pushing ahead with a referendum on a new constitution. But to those who know the regime, its reaction is perfectly in character.

Myanmar's government is among the most xenophobic in the world, deeply distrustful of outsiders and all they represent.

So the idea of letting foreign-aid workers and even foreign soldiers into the country, if only to deliver aid, fills its leaders with dread.

"They believe that the countries of the outside world are eager to defeat them and take over their country," said Josef Silverstein, a Myanmar watcher and retired professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

The regime's xenophobia has it roots as far back as 1824, the beginning of clashes with colonial Britain that would end with Myanmar (then Burma) being incorporated into British India in 1886. "They are still living in the 1820s," Silverstein said of today's military and its worldview.

There was a brief democratic flowering after World War II when Burma, then one of the richest and most promising countries in Southeast Asia, looked outward. But the country turned inward again in 1962 when the army seized power, expelled most foreigners, cut trade ties with other countries and embarked on the "Burmese way to Socialism," a strict form of self-reliance that has kept Myanmar in a hermetically sealed capsule ever since.

The regime's fear of the outside world has deepened as the outside world, outraged at the years-long detention of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and last year's bloody suppression of a monk-led uprising, has stepped up its criticism of, and sanctions against, the military government.

So the idea that foreign aircraft might start shuttling into their airspace and foreign warships arriving in their ports makes the regime's leaders nervous, even if the effect might be to save hundreds of thousands of lives.

"If a military regime sees military planes, it wonders if it's being invaded," said Bridget Welsh, a Myanmar specialist at Johns Hopkins University. "They can't recognize that some interventions are good."

Than Shwe, 75, leader of the regime since 1992, has spent his career steeped in the paranoia and isolationism of the military culture.

In that culture, the military is seen as the only force that can keep the country together, safe from the twin threats of chronic ethnic unrest and foreign hostility.

Than has overseen at least three purges of other military officers apparently considered a threat to his rule.

"He is deeply suspicious not just of people outside but of people within his own military system," Welsh said. Used to supreme power, "He doesn't listen, he tells."

Silverstein and other experts say that Than and his colleagues in the military elite are poorly educated, not well traveled and ill-informed about the outside world.

They send their children to elite schools and often live apart from the general population, even moving their capital from Rangoon to the isolated redoubt of Naypyidaw, or "Abode of the kings," in 2005.

Accustomed to unquestioned control, they bridled at the thought that foreign governments and humanitarian organizations might deliver aid independently.

"Traditionally, they try to benefit from every crisis," said Zaw Kyaw, a Toronto activist and observer of Myanmar politics. "They want to take all the credit for handing out the aid."

There is another reason for the regime's hostile reaction to foreign offers of help. The cyclone happened to come just days before the planned constitutional referendum.

It seems extraordinary to the outside world that the government would push ahead with the referendum in most of the country in the midst of a national catastrophe, filling the state-controlled airwaves with get-out-and-vote messages instead of disaster news.

But the vote was of paramount importance to the regime. Though viewed by democracy advocates, and much of the world, as a sham designed merely to perpetuate the regime in power, the vote was seen by the military as a necessary step to shore up its legitimacy, tattered since last fall's violence.

Reach Marcus Gee at mgee(at)globeandmail.com

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)