Mary Dejevsky: The unexpected legacy of natural disasters

On 26 April 1986, a mighty explosion tore the roof off reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Three weeks later, with radioactive fall-out now affecting parts of Europe and North America, and large areas of Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia severely contaminated, the then Soviet leader called for an end to the official culture of secrecy. Within six years the Soviet Union was no more.

Some trace the collapse of the Soviet Union directly to the policy of glasnost, declared by Mikhail Gorbachev in the face of the outcry over Chernobyl. Even incomplete transparency, they say, quite simply left the system unsustainable. My own view – slightly different, but related – is that the effects of Chernobyl were too widespread, and global communications by now too diffuse, for a disaster of this magnitude to remain hidden.

If you accept this, then the governments in China and Burma could be in for a difficult time. In Burma, the military regime took weeks to admit the scale of the havoc wreaked by cyclone Nargis. Even when it belatedly came close to doing so, it postponed the arrival of foreign aid, and refused outright any assistance that involved foreign troops.

There are now reports that, even in a country sealed off from the world, bereaved families are starting to voice their anger against a military regime still insisting that it did a good job of disaster relief. Their discontent is also said to have reached Rangoon, where it resonates among the many who sympathised with the monks' protests last autumn. The repression unleashed then may not keep its power to generate fear for ever.

The approach of the Chinese authorities after the Sichuan earthquake was unusual, and admirable, in its openness. Foreign assistance was welcomed, and the welcome was extended to teams from the Japanese military – the first time Japanese troops had been in China since the end of the Second World War. Chinese themselves, some because of family ties, others out of pure altruism, hurried to the disaster zone to see what they could do. China's political leaders went, too, and, in another unprecedented move, declared a day of national mourning in memory of the dead.

These efforts to comply with the modern political canon, however, may not be enough to guarantee stability in the longer term. The Sichuan earthquake was, to be sure, treated as a national, as well as natural, disaster, and it is hard to see how any government could have rushed so much help so quickly to the stricken area. But two key pillars of the Beijing regime are now threatened by the aftershocks: the one-child policy and accelerated infrastructure development that sets out to transform nature on the grand scale.

It remains to be seen whether the dams will hold. Vast numbers of people are being evacuated. But it is the population policy that presents the greater challenge. For it is not enough for the Chinese government to say, as it has, that the rules will be waived for earthquake survivors. Whole schools were buried, and with them the individual hopes of all their parents. They had one chance to continue their line, and a natural disaster has left them bereft, its destructive effect exacerbated by shoddy workmanship, negligence and fraud. Never again will the government's promises be trusted. No wonder that officials have now called for media coverage of the earthquake to be curbed.

As with Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, the danger to the regimes in Burma and China derives less from immediate protest by disgruntled survivors than from an accumulation of discontent and distrust elsewhere. The danger stems from ordinary families, who will see only cynicism or impotence from the government, where once they had expected protection.

With Chernobyl, one detail horrified people above all others. It was that the authorities had allowed May Day parades to proceed in Kiev and other highly contaminated centres, even though many children were taking part and officials knew radiation levels to be dangerously high.

People who live under repressive regimes continually weigh up competing fears. First is the fear of officialdom and the power it has to destroy those who dare to oppose it. Then there is the visceral fear for their family, above all for the well-being of their children. After Chernobyl, the second easily outweighed the former. However cruel and arbitrary, successive Soviet purges could be explained by recourse to an ill-conceived greater good; disregard for the children – all the children – put Chernobyl in a different league. Exposed to flood, quake and cynical government indifference, millions of Burmese and many millions of Chinese could reach a similar conclusion.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk

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