‘wOw Friend’ Adelle Lutz, an artist and Burma activist, is reporting from Bangkok, Thailand, on the post-cyclone situation in Burma.

I am in Bangkok, Thailand. It is three o’clock AM and I cannot sleep. There is a sticky heat and these determined mosquitoes refuse to go away. Questions also keep buzzing around my head: How can international agencies and governments work with a lawless Burmese junta? Should the international community offer aid without politicizing this mess and scaring off the generals? How to help the people without entrenching these guys forevermore? Can’t some gajillionaire buy them off, send them golfing and free the people? But then what of the crimes against humanity?

The junta has always been this bad. The generals see Burma as a country of slaves — fifty-three million slaves — as disposable as factory-farmed animals. The Burmese people might as well be chickens with their beaks cut off and their wings clipped.

They move them around in bulk. Take hauntingly beautiful Bagan for instance. This ancient royal capital with thousands of the Buddhist religious monuments called stupas covers an area of some 16 square miles. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, so that thousands of very poor people were forcibly displaced and moved out of sight. The Burma Campaign UK report says that "many were given just 10 hours’ notice and little compensation for the destruction of their homes." Haunting and haunted; thanks for the fab photo opportunities, junta.

Burma has one million internally displaced persons — think refugees in their own country — known as IDPs. They blow them up in bulk. I visited the Mae Tao Clinic while in Mae Sot, on the Thai Burma border. There, Dr. Cynthia Maung has created a clinic that looks after more than one hundred thousand patients a year. Besides sick IDPs straggling over the border, refugees or migrant workers, there are the victims of land mines. On the wall of the prosthetics workshop was the production schedule — one for gangrene, one for a machine accident, all the rest for people who had been blown apart. Burma has more land mines than Cambodia. And with whom is this country at war? Not with any neighbors. They use the land mines against their own.

They steal childhood in bulk. The world’s largest child army is in Burma. They alarmingly continue to steal food in bulk. Since the horror of Cyclone Nargis, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Ministry Secretary R.A.D. Ratnayake of Sri Lanka has said that his country is “importing 7,000 ton of rice from Myanmar and is hopeful 43,000 tons of rice would also be brought from that country in the near future” so his country can insure a solid supply of the grain if world food shortages continue.

The list of egregious crimes goes on and on — forced labor, rape, political prisoners by the boatload; and now mass murder, through knowing neglect and refusal to follow through with disaster relief to devastated areas.

This country needs a mass exorcism. But as with all superstitious hooey, the world doesn’t need any more of it. The junta is superstitious. In 1987, top-gun Ne Win, the first narco-dictator, broke the bank overnight when he changed the whole treasury system, at a soothsayer’s urging, to base it on the number nine. (It is impossible to make these things up.) More recently, the capital was moved from Rangoon to the mountains for the same reason: the soothsayer.