In 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi, then just freed from a first six-year term under house arrest, called on the international community to press Burma’s military junta to honour the results of the 1990 election, in which her National League for Democracy won a landslide victory.

A decade on, Burma is subject to a patchwork of western sanctions, ranging from a European Union visa ban for regime stalwarts to a total US bar on Burmese imports.

Consumer boycotts have prompted some western companies to pull out of Burma, while campaigners have protested against travel industry efforts to promote the country as a holiday destination.

Yet humanitarian workers say western antipathy towards the regime has left Burma’s already neglected people worse off. Burma receives less humanitarian and development assistance per capita than almost any other troubled, impoverished country, including many with corrupt, repressive governments.

According to statistics compiled for a study by Britain’s Department for International Development on aid to “fragile states”, Burma received just Dollars 2 a head of overseas development assistance in 2002, compared with Dollars 50 for nearby communist Laos and Dollars 15 for Zimbabwe.

Pro-democracy activists have opposed efforts to step up aid for Burma. Some US congressmen attacked a decision by the Global Fund for HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria to provide Dollars 98m to fight the three diseases in Burma and sought to impose crippling restrictions to prevent the regime from deriving any benefit from the programme. In August, the Global Fund cancelled the grants, citing travel restrictions on foreign aid workers.

But many aid workers argue that Burma’s people can no longer afford to wait for a political breakthrough. “There is an absurd, disgraceful denial of assistance for 52m people,” says Guy Stallworthy, country director of the US-based Population Services International, one of 18 international non-governmental organisations working in Burma.

In September a group of former student leaders, many newly released from prison, called on the military, United Nations agencies, donor countries and independent civil society groups to work together to ease a crisis in health and education. “We deeply feel that our people are in need of humanitarian assistance from the international community,” Ko Ko Gyi, one freed student leader, told the Financial Times. “But donors need to focus on how to manage their aid effectively to reach the people in need.”