Government efforts to provide aid to the tsunami-devastated areas of Sri Lanka and Indonesia’s Aceh province could carry significant political implications for these regions, which have seen some of Asia’s fiercest insurgencies, analysts say.

Any political impact in Thailand, which has been racked by a Muslim insurgency in the south, will be tempered by the fact that the disaster area is on the south-west coast, far from the Malay-speaking areas in the south-east.