Three Days of Mourning

China has declared three days of official mourning for its dead. The country has mustered hundreds of thousands of emergency relief workers, experts in various fields of disaster relief, medical personnel, and soldiers of the Peoples' Army in a gargantuan effort to respond to the dreadful earthquake disaster which befell Sichuan Province.

Apart from the dire emergency involved in rescue attempts, caring for the sick and the injured, there are ongoing repeat shocks. Adding to the potential for further disaster, from displaced earth in great slides, from cracked dams and damaged nuclear plants. From threats posed by the after-effects of the upheaval; polluted water, flood potential, water- and insect-borne disease; real threats of potential health epidemics.

But China has responded to its peoples' dire travails. In a manner to equal and even outdistance that seen by other governments whose resources, experience and material wealth should have advantaged them. Despotic, dictatorial, totalitarian China; human-rights-abusing China, capable, eager and determined to demonstrate its own humanity.

Virtually absent in Burma's governing junta. Burma, Myanmar, also declared three days of mourning for its victims of the devastating cyclone that slammed into the Irrawaddy Delta. It has finally, reluctantly, assented to an international aid effort put forward by its Southeast Asian neighbours.

Almost three weeks post-Cyclone Nargis, junta leader Than Shwe is on his second tour of the disaster zone. Lest anyone have doubted that the members of the junta survived the disaster. In that country, an estimated 133,000 have been identified as dead - or missing. Still, a full-scale international relief operation is simply out of the question.

The compromise with ASEAN, Burma's neighbours - so anxious about the state of Burmese citizens coping with their struggle to survive - will permit of the immediate entry of medical teams from that source, none others. Other, eager-to-help international disaster aid workers still to be kept at arms-length.

That, despite that an estimated 2.4 million Burmese remain in desperate need of help. India, Bangladesh and China will also be permitted to send in aid workers. All those countries distressed and anxious to help the people of devastated Burma, while their leaders remain content to leave the survivors to their own desperate devices.

Those observers who have managed to elude Burmese authority report an unbelievable situation of dire need. Hunger and thirst haunt the survivors. Corpses are rotting everywhere, contaminating the area, laying the potential for dread and deathly disease among the survivors. If they don't starve first, typhoid or cholera may take them out of their misery.

A despicable regime whose flagrant incapacity to aid its desperate people, and whose unwillingness to permit other countries entry to its closed borders to undertake the responsibility they have eschewed, requires some kind of international intervention - sovereign determinism be damned.