"It is certainly not a classic case," said Edward Luck, the U.N.'s special advisor on the responsibility to protect. "While lawyers can argue whether neglecting hundreds of thousands of people is a crime against humanity, the member states by and large are very uncomfortable applying it to this situation."
The U.N. already faces examples of governments' neglect of their people and obstruction of outside help in places with food shortages or ongoing violence such as Darfur, Zimbabwe and North Korea. Humanitarian workers operate under strict limitations on how long they can stay, where they can travel and what they can publicly say.
"What you've got to do is keep pressuring the regime, and have neighboring countries do it too," Luck said. "In Myanmar, they've been opening up inch by inch, though we wish it would be mile by mile."
"If Myanmar's authorities and foreign agencies start cooperating," said a former U.N. official familiar with Myanmar who did not want to be named, "it could be a turning point for both sides: for the government in terms of accepting and learning to work with the international aid community, and for some Western governments in accepting that sometimes you have to work with this regime if you really want to help."
When diplomats and disaster do succeed in cracking open the door, sometimes it stays open. Aceh province in Indonesia and some Tamil Tiger-controlled areas in Sri Lanka were closed to foreigners before the 2004 tsunami.
Aid workers came in, and the crisis became a catalyst for peace after a three-decade-long war between Aceh separatists and the Indonesian government. In Sri Lanka, most humanitarian groups left after a cease-fire failed. But some aid workers remain in Aceh, where nearly 170,000 people died.
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maggie.farley@latimes.com
