Bangkok - Myanmar has a long history of concealing disasters from the outside world, both natural and man-made. Combining misadventure with mismanagement, Cyclone Nargis has proved itself the perfect Myanmar storm, probably killing over 100,000 people with its 200 kilometre-per-hour gales and brutal four-metre tidal surge, and leaving another 1.5 million homeless.
Nargis is the most serious natural disaster to have hit Myanmar - as Burma was officially renamed by the military in 1989 - in its recorded history. A severe storm in the 1920s killed fewer than 3,000 people.
While the military can hardly be blamed for a natural disaster, it can be held to accountable for mishandling the disaster management.
The regime is already reaping a storm of international criticism for stymying the flow of aid to needy victims by monopolizing the distribution and refusing to grant visas to foreign aid workers to facilitate the relief programme.
Downplaying disasters or completely ignoring them is nothing new for this regime.
The State Peace and Development Council, as the junta styles itself, misled the international community over the severity of the tsunami which struck on December 26, 2004, claiming more than 230,000 lives in the region, mostly in Indonesia.
According to the junta, only 64 people died in much the same part of Myanmar affected by Nargis. Agencies now believe that ten times as many people may in fact have died in the 2004 catastrophe.
For example, a World Food Programme employee compiled evidence that at least 200 Myanmar fishermen drowned at sea.
In May the same year, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) noted that the most ferocious storm in 30 years had struck along the coast of Rakhine (or Arakan) State in the Bay of Bengal - an area further north and more remote than the presently affected region. The storm sank dozens of vessels, killed at least 140 people and left an estimated 18,000 people homeless.
The junta requested 220,000 dollars in food and assistance at that time, and took responsibility for relief disbursement.
Characteristically, this natural disaster was not mentioned in the state-controlled media.
It is fires, however, that are the more common disasters in Myanmar, and they come each year as surely as the dry season.
The flimsy wood, split bamboo and leaf thatch materials which most Myanmar people use to build their houses - and which provided so little protection against Nargis - are also highly combustible.
These fires are barely noticed in the wider world. One example was the Great Fire of Mandalay in mid-1981, which occurred soon after Thingyan, the traditional Myanmar new year.
The disaster received a few paragraphs from international wire services, but with no indication of its true magnitude or cause.
Mandalay is Myanmar's northern capital and second largest city after the former capital of Rangoon, now officially renamed Yangon. About one sixth of the city was burnt to the ground in 1981, leaving the best part of 100,000 people homeless.
Officially, nothing had happened, so there was no way of guessing how many people died. One person interviewed in June, weeks after the disaster, knew personally of 14 dead.
Apart from the temples and charitable individuals, there was no domestic fallback - no insurance, no disaster preparedness, no emergency funds. And, with the exception of a small donation from the Vatican, the Mandalay victims received nothing in the way of foreign assistance.
The Great Fire of Mandalay may not even have been the most serious that year. During Thingyan, when Myanmar people exuberantly splash each other with water to ring in the new year and keep cool, a kitchen fire ran out of control in Taungdwingyi, Magwe Division, and burned down the entire town.
Dating from the 9th century, Taungdwingy was home to 100,000 people. Its pride was an important museum containing irreplaceable palm leaf manuscripts. Surprisingly, the Taungdwingyi fire did make the local Myanmar press - probably because the censors were away from work celebrating Thingyan. But with no independent foreign correspondents based in Yangon, the story died in Myanmar.
According to the townsfolk, an elderly monk had prophesied the Taungdwingyi fire weeks before it happened. One of the town's pagodas was being regilded in some way that was, he warned, inappropriate, and thus inviting disaster.
Even the buildings set slightly apart from the town around the base of the pagoda had been burned out. There was nothing, apart from the pagoda itself, that had not been incinerated. Locals said that about 20 people died in the disaster.
The Great Mandalay Fire was a bit different. It started in a black market fuel shop, and its spread was greatly accelerated by other fuel dumps dotted throughout residential areas built mostly of wood.
One of the great perks for the Myanmar military and civil servants has always been selling their fuel allowances on the unregulated black market.
When a smaller blaze erupted in Mandalay in early 1984, the authorities at least obtained some foreign assistance. Possibly they weren't so directly culpable on that occasion.
