All sovereign states are expected to fulfill certain responsibilities. Needless to say, a just and honorable regime is desirable, but it's not necessarily obligatory for a government to be successful. What is required is the basic security and protection of the lives of the citizens, and in this respect the military junta that governs the Union of Myanmar has failed in its charge. In the week and a half since Cyclone Nargis made landfall in Myanmar's Ayeryawady division May 2, the junta has grudgingly accepted only the most limited trickle of aid from foreign countries and has refused to grant visas to foreign aid workers, even as the death toll rockets well past 100,000. Over a million more have been wounded, displaced or otherwise affected by this cyclone, the eighth-deadliest in recorded history. The Burmese government's stonewalling is not merely another failure in the execution of a host of governmental duties; it is a sign of the junta's continued assault on the basic human dignity of their people.

Myanmar's junta is, by all indications, completely unprepared to handle the incredible scope of the destruction dealt by Nargis, but its lukewarm-sometimes even hostile-response to aid offers is not surprising so much as it is disappointingly in-character.

Myanmar made headlines late last year during the Saffron Revolution, when a bunch of Buddhist monks throughout the nation protested the junta's rule. In 1990 the predecessor to the current junta annulled the results of an election it did not favor, refused to step down and carried on as usual. And in the midst of the current crisis, it has diverted already-scarce funds and resources essential to the relief effort into running a constitutional referendum to perpetuate its rule. Now, over a week after the cyclone, only one in 10 victims has received any sort of aid, and much of this aid has been altered so as to appear as if it had come from the junta government itself and not from its actual country of origin.

The number of victims here needs repeating. Labutta township, an administrative subdivision, reported that it alone had suffered some 80,000 dead. In the Irrawaddy Delta town of Bogale, another 10,000 have been reported dead. The death toll will undoubtedly rise. The United Nations estimates that the storm had "severely affected" as many as 1.5 million people. Imagine such a proportional devastation visited upon the United States-as many as 8 million people "severely affected," the equivalent population of New York City and more than the entire population of Massachusetts. Imagine a proportional five or six hundred thousand dead, the equivalent of Boston.

The Burmese junta has made itself into a farcical caricature of what a government should be at the expense of the lives and dignity of its citizens. It has taken money meant for relief and funneled it into faux elections, and it ignores the plight of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians out of fear of external influence or, worse, out of willful and premeditated negligence. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has declared, "A natural disaster is turning into a humanitarian catastrophe of genuinely epic proportions in significant part because of the malign neglect of the regime."

What does all this add up to in Myanmar? Unfortunately, not much. The international community, particularly the United Nations, cannot force the junta to accept aid any more than it can force nations to abide by General Assembly resolutions. Burmese autonomy is not going to be challenged in the name of saving the citizens of Myanmar, if only because such a challenge would worsen an already horrific abridgement of basic human rights and freedoms. The nations of the world cannot withhold aid either, lest they make a bad situation far worse.

Until the junta comes to its senses and accepts aid and commits to improving the living standards of its citizens-or until it's overthrown from within-nothing will change. But the day Myanmar can rededicate itself to the cultivation of human decency and the guarantee of basic security to all its citizens is the day a new page can be turned in Southeast Asia and the day the country can present itself as a member in good standing of the family of nations.