Pictures of the aftermath of the Burmese cyclone

The stakes could not be higher today as Ban Ki Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, flies to South-East Asia in the hope of resolving the crisis over aid to Burma.

Success will open up aid routes to 2.4 million needy victims of Cyclone Nargis, and secure from the Burmese junta the biggest concession that it has made in years of fraught relations with the outside world. Failure will result in personal embarrassment, continuing misery in the Irrawaddy delta and even greater isolation for one of the world’s most isolated countries.

Only a day before his arrival tomorrow in Burma’s former capital, Rangoon, it was still not certain whether he would meet the man with the ultimate decision-making power: Than Shwe, the country’s senior general.

Even if he does, he faces the task of not merely negotiating over a few knotty details, but of reconciling two contradictory views of reality.

On the one hand, foreign aid agencies, including the UN World Food Programme and the International Committee of the Red Cross, regard the Irrawaddy delta as a disaster zone on the verge of a second catastrophe. They believe that about 2.4 million people have lost their homes or livelihoods; many are at the risk of epidemics in unsanitary refugee camps, and the country as a whole faces months of food shortages and destabilising price rises.

To read the state media and utterances of the generals, though, the problems caused by the cyclone are all but overcome. According to the junta’s mouthpiece, the newspaper New Light of Myanmar, the delta region has already sailed through the choppy waters of relief and entered the calm zone of rehabilitation. “Now I have breathed a sigh of relief for the victims,” a commentary in the New Light said yesterday. “All in all we have undertaken a historic task successfully.”

To succeed in his mission Mr Ban must attempt to save the face of the generals while getting into Burma international aid experts capable of seeing the cyclone stricken regions through at least six months of hardship and dependency. He must also contend with a notoriously opaque and stubborn leadership with a history of snubbing the UN, for which it has an ill-disguised contempt.

Since Cyclone Nargis struck on May 2, Mr Ban has made many attempts to speak to Than Shwe by telephone; the general has never been available. Mr Ban’s proposal has been developed over the past few days during visits by ministers and senior officials from Britain, the EU, Japan and the UN, and at a regional meeting on Monday.

According to the plan, the Association of South-East Nations (Asean), of which Burma is a member, will provide a framework for an aid mission, together with the UN. Led by fellow Asians, with whom the junta feels more comfortable, it will allow Western experts access to the stricken region which they are presently denied.

Optimists have several reasons for believing that the regime is making an effort to show a more acceptable face to the world and that there is hope of a compromise.

After two weeks of silence and invisibility, General Than Shwe has begun visiting the disaster zone, apparently in emulation of China’s President, Hu Jintao, after the Chinese earthquake.

Foreign governments, including Britain, are making an effort to curb their angrier sentiments about the junta’s indifference to its people: Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office Minister, who visited Rangoon at the weekend, was far more measured in his judgments than Gordon Brown had been the day before.

In 46 years of unbroken military rule, Burma’s generals have never shown signs of caring in the least what the rest of the world thinks of them. It would be remarkable if General Than Shwe has made the decision to accept large-scale foreign help and experts.

It is more likely, however, that he will use Mr Ban’s visit to promote the appearance of accepting international advice, while keeping firm control over the aid programme on his own terms. Asean has a history of appeasing Burma; an aid programme run by compliant and cautious South-East Asian appointees could end up being more of a frustration than a help to the experienced emergency experts the UN wants to bring in.

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