ASEAN, Indonesia and Myanmar | Forcing help on Myanmar | Economist.com

ASEAN, Indonesia and Myanmar | Forcing help on Myanmar | Economist.com: "THREE long weeks after a cataclysmic cyclone struck Myanmar, something approaching an international relief effort is at last under way. The grotesque reluctance of the ruling junta to allow foreigners to help the desperate Burmese has shredded whatever vestige of respect it enjoyed internationally. It had long lost it at home. The decisive push into a more co-operative stance seems to have come in private from China and in public from the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the regional club that admitted Myanmar in 1997 and has been silently ruing the decision ever since."