WHEN disasters strike, political leaders in most countries know they will be judged at home and abroad by how quickly they respond to meet their people's needs.

Following an enormous earthquake centred in China's Sichuan province on May 12, the Beijing government's emergency response planners moved swiftly into action. And Premier Wen Jiabao was on the scene within hours.

The military men who rule Myanmar, on the other hand, have hardly stepped outside their bunkers since a cyclone devastated the country's lowlands on May 3. What they have chosen to do - and not to do - reveals much about how they maintain power.

Governments that fail to react quickly to calamity usually pay a price. An inadequate state response to an earthquake in Kashmir in 2005 drained much of what was left of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's political capital, and the country's military took much of the blame.

That's one reason why Mr Musharraf, who must now share power with an elected prime minister and a hostile Parliament, can no longer count on the army to back him in a tight spot.

After Hizbollah pushed Lebanon into war with Israel in 2006, it was Hizbollah, not the Lebanese military, that appeared first on the scene with food and medicine to ease the suffering. Mr Fouad Siniora's government took a black eye, and Hizbollah played hero.

This phenomenon is, of course, not limited to the developing world. The Bush administration's catastrophically slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 dealt its popularity a blow from which it has not recovered.

In Myanmar, the cyclone's destructive power inflicted deeper wounds than most outsiders realise. Reports from the low-lying Irrawaddy delta suggest major roads, bridges and airstrips were washed away, preventing emergency relief supplies from reaching those who needed them most.

Foreign aid agencies estimate that more than 100,000 people have died. A million more face starvation and disease if help is not delivered soon. It will take time before the true scale of death and destruction is known.

But we do know that early international attempts to provide Myanmar with relief supplies failed, largely because the government of Senior General Than Shwe rushed to confiscate them. Why would the generals do this, even as the desperate were dying?

Because they have staked their legitimacy on claims that they alone can provide for Myanmar. They use official media every day to tell the people that their country does not need foreign help. International relief supplies might prove them wrong - and foreign aid workers might tell Myanmar's people that they deserve better from their government.

In short, the junta seized the aid containers for the same reason Mr Kim Jong Il's regime insists that foreign aid shipments reach North Korea's needy via its own trucks: Mr Kim wants the credit.

He wants a public demonstration of his power to meet his people's needs, because if he were forced to admit that his government relied on outsiders to deliver his people from their misery, he might no longer seem quite so indispensable a tyrant.

When disaster strikes countries such as North Korea and Myanmar, foreign aid is sometimes welcome, but foreign aid workers are not.

Will Myanmar's government pay a price for its cruelty? Probably not. In fact, the generals' political control, established in 1962, will likely remain as solid as Mr Kim's.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest in Myanmar and the country's decimated opposition poses little threat to the regime.

Few countries have as firm a grip on national and local media, which provides its captive audience - at least those with electricity - with a steady diet of images of smiling citizens gratefully accepting shipments of food, water and medicine unloaded by soldiers from crates stamped with the generals' names.

Yet, world pressure on the junta to admit relief workers must continue, because the scale of the humanitarian disaster extends well beyond the Myanmar government's ability to respond - and because the storm's secondary damage may spill across the region.

At a time of spiralling global food inflation, the cyclone slammed directly into an area that accounts for about two-

thirds of Myanmar's rice production - and in the heart of harvest season.

Myanmar is South-east Asia's fourth-largest rice producer. If rice storage facilities have been destroyed and if roads and other infrastructure cannot be rebuilt in time for the June planting season, other countries in the region, particularly Indonesia and the Philippines, could face food shortages that are even worse than expected.

That's why Myanmar's disaster is not simply its own problem. Outsiders will not change the generals' bunker mentality, but relief groups and foreign governments must do all they can to ensure that, no matter whose name is on the aid containers, badly needed supplies reach the cyclone's victims - and efforts to rebuild roads and bridges are well under way before the crisis crosses the border.

The writer is president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

TRIBUTE MEDIA SERVICES

KNOCK-ON EFFECTS

Myanmar is South-east Asia's fourth-largest rice producer. If rice storage facilities have been destroyed and if roads and other infrastructure cannot be rebuilt in time for the June planting season, other countries in the region, particularly Indonesia and the Philippines, could face food shortages that are even worse than expected. That's why Myanmar's disaster is not simply its own problem.