As if the Burmese haven’t suffered enough.

After having to endure dictatorship for decades and on the heels of the military junta’s crackdown last fall, the citizens of Burma have been dealt another massive blow—this time by nature.

Not that the regime’s incompetence didn’t contribute to the death toll (almost 100,000 people killed, by the latest estimate, with 1 million homeless). Apparently, the Indian weather service had warned the government days before the cyclone hit that a big one was coming. The military is efficient only about brutalizing its people.

And it is still letting politics get in the way. The junta has stated that it will accept help from only “friendly countries.” (Given the regime’s few friends, this doesn’t leave too large a list.) And some U.N. aid workers have been made to twiddle their thumbs awaiting visas to enter the country, while others have been denied visas on a technicality, leading the U.N. official in charge of the relief effort to criticize the government.

In its response to the calamity, the Burmese regime is demonstrating even more evidence of it being one of the worst governments on Earth. Ever since the military took over way back in 1962, the nation has been led down a path to isolation, ruination, and extreme repression. The most infamous act that the junta committed was the slaughter of hundreds, perhaps thousands, in a crackdown on nationwide protests in 1988.

“There are regimes that attract more negative attention than the Burmese dictatorship of today, but there are few that are as universally condemned, or that have shown such a consistent talent for immiserating their own people,” writes John Lanchester in The New Yorker.

The Burmese government seems to playing true to type, not letting such even such a massive tragedy get in the way of its agenda. It is still planning to go ahead with a May 10 vote on a new draft constitution (with a two-week postponement in the affected areas) that it claims will give birth to democracy in the country. If only. The whole process is a sham, as Human Rights Watch points out.

“You can’t hold a free and fair referendum when you deny every basic right to your people,” says Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch. “The generals expect the Burmese people to just shut up, follow their orders, and approve the draft constitution without any discussion or debate. That’s not exactly how democracies are born.”

If any good comes out of this awful tragedy, it is that it may hasten the end of the regime. Similarly large catastrophes in Nicaragua in 1972 and Mexico in 1985 shook the foundations of the ruling governments.

“In our limited conversations with the Burmese people that we have been able to contact inside Burma, they are very, very angry … at the military regime,” Jeremy Woodrum of the U.S. Campaign for Burma told Amy Goodman. “Look, they weren’t warned about this cyclone coming at all. I mean, there was a couple articles in the back pages of newspapers, but people were left completely unprepared.”

Let’s hope that the cyclone sweeps away the junta in its aftermath.