Many of us are concerned about Burma. We were concerned when democracy was yet again suppressed by the military dictators. We were concerned when the monks protested against the junta and were brutally attacked. And we’ve been concerned that the junta is obstructing relief to those effected by the recent cyclone, tens of thousands of people dead, even more still at risk of disease and starvation.

I am surprised, however, that no one has compared this situation to the one in Nicaragua after the great Managua earthquake. You may remember it as prompting the relief flight that killed baseball great Roberto Clemente. You may not know the eerie parallels.

Nicaragua was ruled by a military dictatorship. As relief supplies rolled in after the earthquake, the military stole significant amount of the aid. The regime didn’t rebuild Managua, it was still a wreck when the Sandanistas overthrew the dictatorship. The new rulers set up schools and began to rebuild, as much as they could while confronted with an illegal war by proxy waged by the US.

There are important questions here. Did the confiscated aid help prop up a corrupt regime? Did the civil war take longer to come and longer to win because of the aid?

I don’t have the answers. I just remember how bad Managua still looked over a decade later. And I remember listening to those who suffered under the old regime, suffered during the civil war.

What a moral dilemma! We give aid, it gets confiscated by the regime, but some might get through… but we help prop up a brutal junta. We don’t give aid, maybe the liberation of Burma comes sooner, but there will be deaths, more from the disaster, maybe less from the civil war.

In the end, only one nation can force the junta’s hand. Only China can bring sufficient pressure on the Burmese generals. And China, with its own disaster and its own track record of genocide, has no interest in this affair. And yet we will consumes untold millions of dollars in Chinese goods this week. It does make you wonder…