The tsunami and Myanmar

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been following the news about the disaster in Asia and I’ve seen very little about Myanmar. I don’t know much about this particular country except that they have horrible human rights and they seem to pop up a lot in GD “Which country should the US invade next?” type threads. So obviously not a very nice part of the world. But they share the same coastline as all the nice countries that got hit and they lost some people (at least 90 IIRC). That brings up a few questions:

Who lives on the beach in Myanmar?
How is their government responding to the disaster?
Are they getting the same amount of aid as the other countries? Or any at all?

I don’t imagine foreign journalists have free reign in Myanmar but somebody must have some idea what’s going on there…

2

You might be able to access this article. (It’s a subscription site, tho’.) Apparently the Myanmar government thought they could handle everything themselves, then realised things were more grim. The tsunami has affected 30,000 there. The local Red Cross has had an offer of help accepted.

3

I’ve been wondering about this too.

Wikipedia has this brief article on the subject- they point out that Myanmar, not having the coastal development of Thailand or Sri Lanka, may not have been affected as badly. Geographical factors (the orientation of the coastline, the shielding effect of offshore islands) may have also mitigated the damage.