Is it just me or was everyone completely unaware of a cyclone in Burma, exactly four years ago this month?

According to the United Nations, at the time, roughly 140 people died and 18,000 were left homeless. Roughly.

What about a tsunami later that year? Didn’t hear about that? Me neither.
There is basically no media in Burma – or Myanmar - not media the way we know it, anyway.

Myanmar is a military dictatorship, run by a committee of generals, or Junta. The average wage in the country is $1,900 a year. What that buys is anyone’s guess, but rest assured the vast majority of the nation’s 55 million people are desperately poor.

We know the ruling generals deal in forced labour camps for children, that education is largely only available until the age of nine and that upwards of 3000 entire villages have been burned to the ground in the past 10 years as punishment for civil unrest.

Late last year, Buddhist monks in Burma began what is known as a Saffron Protest. Quietly and peacefully, the monks began to march, in their saffron robes. At first, the Junta reacted slowly, doing little more than firing on protesters and carrying out beatings.

Then, late last year the monks stepped things up, withdrawing all ministry from members of the military. That is, they began refusing to pray for or with members of the Junta.

Six months later thousands of monks are officially listed as ‘missing’, monasteries are patrolled by government troops and at least one eyewitness claims to have seen injured protesters being burned alive in a crematorium on the outskirts of Rangoon.

Why haven’t we heard about it? For the same reason thousands are being left to die this week. Because Burma is a shut shop.

The ruling generals allow no information in or out and since the nation largely only deals in heroin and rubies, the rest of the world has so far struggled to care.

A natural disaster as big as Cyclone Nargis, however, is a little hard to ignore and therefore very inconvenient for governments like the Myanmar junta.

For a long time worldwide aid agencies have been looking for an excuse to get ‘in country’, they were hoping this would be their chance - but it’s not looking good.

Earlier, I mentioned the Tsunami of 2004. Following that disaster, Myanmar’s generals made the World Food Program wait two weeks before its workers could even visit the affected areas.

Almost four years later, Indian meteorologists were warning of Cyclone Nargis as early as April 26. As predicted, the cyclone made landfall in Myanmar on May 2 — which, by the way, was the eve of World Press Freedom Day. How’s that for tragic co-incidence?

Despite the repeated warnings from India, the people of Burma were completely unprepared for the catastrophic winds of Nargis, simply because they never even knew they were coming.

Internet is banned in Burma. All television and radio is state-owned and controlled by the government. Censorship is so deliberately slow that daily papers cannot operate.

A French disaster expert has called the junta’s refusal to accept help for its people a crime against humanity. He says: “It’s like they’re taking a gun and shooting their own people.” The French government is calling on the UN to enact the 2005 resolution “responsibility to protect” and just barge into Burma, taking aid to the people without the government’s permission.

In the past week tonnes of medicine, food and shelter materials have been flown to Burma, for all we know, it lies rotting on the docks.

Foreign experts in sanitation, nutrition and medicine have either been prevented from entering the country or turned back by armed police when they try to move out of Rangoon.

As we go to print, there are claims of another cyclone heading directly for the Irrawaddy Delta.

The world finally does care what happens.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, is that the people of Burma will never know how much.