THERE'S A JOKE THAT Mandalay comedy troupe the Moustache Brothers tell about the tsunami of 2004. For once, Burma was spared, and the joke is about why. Three corrupt Burmese generals die and for their crimes are reborn as lowly fish. When they see the deadly wave coming, they tell it to turn back from Burma: "We already ruined it."

Two weeks after the cyclone, I got an e-mail from the sunburned diplomat. "Somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000" had died, she wrote. She'd spent 15 days trying to organize relief efforts. There were more than 200,000 survivors at that point still in dire need of aid, and maybe 1.5 million more were affected—numbers that would swell to more than 2 million. Plagues were coming.

In another country, like Thailand, there would have been deaths as well. But there would also have been roads, bridges, emergency services, houses of cement, a measure of accountability, and information about the coming storm. In Burma, the generals guaranteed that there was virtually none of that.

Burmese citizens who tried to distribute aid had their cars impounded; refugees waiting for help along the few roads were scolded by the army for daring to beg. It took UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon two weeks to get any Burmese leader on the phone. Weeks into the disaster, the junta finally allowed him to visit Naypyidaw; he returned with clenched teeth to announce "progress." Aid flights did eventually begin to flow in large numbers—the U.S. delivered water containers for some 187,000 people and plastic sheeting for almost two million, purification equipment and medical supplies, ten Zodiacs for navigating the delta, and 75,000 mosquito nets. But at first, most aid went no farther than the Rangoon region, and NGOs claimed that the military stole some of the best supplies for itself. Many people were forced to go back to their destroyed villages with only a piece of that American plastic sheeting and a stick to hold up their new "tent." The government told people to be "self-reliant" and eat frogs.

The people I met in Burma all survived, it seems. The barefoot diplomat talked to newspapers worldwide under her own name. The Moustache Brothers tried to hold a fundraising concert for victims but were rebuffed for their cracks about the generals; another comedian, called Zarganar, was arrested for distributing aid. Ma Thanegi e-mailed that even the generals could not keep the crescendo of bad news at bay.

She underestimated them. After weeks of hiding, Than Shwe finally appeared, once, to stroll through a "show camp" for refugees near Rangoon, where he announced that relief efforts were now over. When foreign donors produced $150 million in funding for relief projects, Than Shwe demanded $11 billion. It would be farce if it were not so cruel.

The Burmese merely suffered. An NGO contact wrote that the generals have "holes where their hearts should be" and described a Rangoon taxi driver angrily demanding an invasion by "Britain or Germany," since the UN would do nothing. A Burmese contact said that Britain and the United States should arm the ethnic insurgents in remote corners of Burma so they could blast the generals out of power. French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Doctors Without Borders, briefly called for a forced entry to deliver relief supplies, but realpolitik soon asserted itself and the U.S. and French warships sailed away. For their own reasons, China and the nations of Southeast Asia insisted on "non-interference" in Burma's internal affairs. The junta went ahead with the May 10 election in most parts of the country, evicting refugees from schools and temples to create polling stations. And as I write, a month after the cyclone, the generals have announced the one statistic they care about: Exactly 92.48 percent of Burma's cowed and beaten voters chose to keep the iron fist.

The cyclone should have blown down this house of Tarot cards. Maybe it still will. The only effective internal relief force in Burma was the monks, who led truck convoys into the delta and sheltered, fed, and consoled the victims of Nargis at village temples all over the devastated area, claiming their unambiguous position as the real leadership of Burma. Another attempt at a Saffron Revolution, a louder, angrier, and more desperate uprising, seems inevitable in time.

For today, the generals are getting away with it, again. As Alan Rabinowitz told me before the storm, "They couldn't care less what the U.S. or the West does or doesn't do."

In that sense, San-Zarni Bo was right. I got out of Hell on the first of May. It must have been my lucky day.