Myanmar politics roiled, but junta grip firm

The cyclone that devastated Myanmar’s heartland has also roiled a political landscape dominated by the military for more than four decades.
Buddhist monks are regrouping after the battering they took nine months ago, civil society groups are emerging and foreign aid workers – often agents of political change in the wake of humanitarian crises – are present in unprecedented numbers.
The junta’s grip on power remains absolute. But anger against the regime has probably never run so high.
‘Perhaps incremental change will emerge from engagement on humanitarian problems,’ said Joel Charny, vice president of US-based Refugees International who visited Myanmar just before the cyclone struck.
People were already incensed by the brutal suppression last September of anti-government demonstrators, including the cou-ntry’s revered, saffron-robed Bud-dhist monks. Then came Cyclone Nargis, exposing the junta as inept and heartless, initially blocking international aid efforts and even now still hampering them.
‘The people are blaming the government. They are responsible for many deaths. They don’t care about right or wrong and they let people die just to hold onto power,’ said Aung Myoe, a 32-year-old driver in a comment typical of the mood in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city. ‘In the ‘Saffron Revolution’ they lost their Buddhist legitimacy; with the cyclone they lost whatever concept of efficacy they had with the public,’ said David Steinberg, a Myanmar expert at Georgetown.
Steinberg said the junta constantly trumpet achievements in modernising the isolated and impoverished Southeast Asian nation formerly named Burma.
Analysts say these passions and emerging trends may in the longer term loosen the junta’s grip on power. But for now it’s business as usual: dissidents are arrested, a brutal campaign against ethnic minorities rages on and the military strides toward elections guaranteed to perpetuate its control.