Aid restrictions imposed by Western governments had reduced international assistance to approximately $3 per person per year, compared with $9 per capita in Bangladesh, $38 in Cambodia, $49 in Laos, and $22 in Vietnam.10 The junta did little to help. The government’s coffers were improving from their bankrupt state in the early 1990s, but next to nothing was spent on education and health care. In 2000, the World Health Organization had ranked Burma’s health care at the very bottom, below Angola, the Central African Republic, and even the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.
