Waiting for aid in Burma

If you're trying to keep in touch with how things are going for the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Burma, you might, like me, have seen some worrying reports. Like this one:

Thousands of children in Burma will starve to death within weeks unless food supplies reach them soon, a UK charity has warned.

Save the Children believes 30,000 under fives in the Irrawaddy Delta area were already "acutely malnourished" before Cyclone Nargis hit on 2 May.

And this:

In any other large-scale disaster zone of modern times - such as last week's earthquake in China - the area would be home to armies of health, sanitation and rescue workers, and mushrooming villages of distribution tents.

Instead, the destitute seem to rely mainly on random roadside handouts from parties of ordinary Burmese who come on private mercy missions, spurred into action by the inexplicable absence of much help from their government.

And this:

Yesterday, one account, from 60 miles south of the capital, reported the dispossessed lining the road: "Without clothes or shoes, the thousands of men, women and children could only stand in the mud and rain of the latest tropical downpour, their hands clasped together in supplication at the occasional passing aid vehicle. Any car that did stop was mobbed by children, their grimy hands reaching through a window in search of bits of bread or a T-shirt." A Burmese volunteer commented: "The situation has worsened in just two days. There weren't this many desperate people when we were last here."

And this:

Two weeks after Cyclone Nargis devastated much of the region, killing tens of thousands, people in dire need of food, drinking water and medicine were huddled in schools, temples and makeshift shelters barely clinging to survival amid heavy tropical downpours.

Bodies rotted in the rice fields, ignored and unclaimed. After weeks in which it had dismissed the estimates of the aid agencies, the government revised its toll of the dead and missing on Friday night to more than 133,000, in line with the agencies' estimates. But experts warn that it has not reached its peak and could go as high as 200,000.

As many as 2.5m famine and disease-threatened people are at risk, their crops and livestock ruined. According to the latest United Nations figures, more than 1m victims have received no humanitarian assistance.

Now, I still don't feel well-placed to answer the question whether some kind of external intervention, over the heads of the Burmese authorities, would be a good idea. The Economist is recommending air drops, backed by a Security Council resolution, even in the event that this is vetoed. The Guardian says that air drops are ineffective. In any case, the key questions are surely of this order: they are about what action would be most effective in saving people; and whether, in the prevailing circumstances, effective action can only go through Burma's rulers, or whether there is room for action from outside that ignores them.

For an alternative view of how the issue presents itself, you should read David Rieff in the LA Times. Rieff is someone for whom intervention on humanitarian grounds is now a dirty word. He argues, accordingly, that we have every reason to doubt what the aid and relief agencies are saying about the scale of the disaster in Burma, and that outside intervention, even though one must allow that arguments for it are motivated by genuine humanitarian concerns, would also be, given the countries that would be implementing it, imperialist. '[A]id at the point of a gun', Rieff says, 'is taking the humanitarian enterprise to a place it should never go'. You could call him an ideologue of state sovereignty.