The Burmese regime is not to blame for the powerful cyclone that struck the Irrawaddy delta and Rangoon early this month, killing up to a hundred thousand people.

But it surely will be to blame for the further wave of deaths given the long delays in letting in aid for the survivors.

A century ago, the victims of such a catastrophe were on their own, but there are now well-established routines for getting help in quickly from outside. We saw them at work in the same region during the tsunami that killed at least twice as many people in 2004.

Nothing could be done for those who died in the first fury of the event, but relatively few died from disease, injuries, exposure or sheer hunger or thirst in the days and weeks that followed.

Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, the nations worst hit by the 2004 tsunami, are reasonably well-run countries that were able to help their own stricken citizens, and they had no hesitation in welcoming international aid as well. Myanmar (Burma) which got off lightly in 2004, is very different.

The question is: why?

What sane government would block the entry of foreigners bringing just the kind of help that is needed. People whose professional lives are devoted to disaster relief when at least a 10th of the country's people are living in the open, with little access to food or water?

The short answer is that the generals who rule Burma are ill-educated, superstitious, fearful men whose first priority is protecting their power and their privileges. They almost lost both during the popular demonstrations led by Buddhist monks last year, and they are terrified that letting large numbers of foreigners in now might somehow destabilise the situation again.

They are sitting atop a volcano, and they know it. But that is not really a complete answer, for it begs the question: why has Burma fallen into the hands of people like that not just for a few years, but for four and a half decades?

Thailand has the occasional short-lived military coup, Indonesia had its problems with Sukarno and Suharto, and Cambodia had the horrors of Year Zero, but no other country in the region has been misgoverned so badly for so long.

It seems incredible now, when neighbouring Thailand has four times Burma's per capita income, that at independence in 1948 Burma was the richest country in Southeast Asia. With huge resources, a high literacy rate, and good infrastructure by the standards of the time (due to the British empire's obsession with railways and irrigation projects), it seemed fated to succeed. Instead it has drifted steadily downwards, and is now the poorest country in the region.