Htet Aung Kyaw

Sep 17, 2008 (DVB)�Tomorrow, 18 September, is the 20th anniversary of the coup that ousted the socialist regime of U Ne Win and brought the State Peace and Development Council to power following the junta's crackdown on the "Four Eights" uprising.

Although there have been no tangible political improvements in the past 20 years, the way people think does seem to have changed. This shift in mentality could be said to be the most significant sign of progress in the past 20 years.

Ludu Sein Win, a veteran journalist in Rangoon who was jailed several times during the Ne Win era for his critical writings, agrees with Aung Khin. "Yes, we have more opportunity to speak out now. I had no opportunity to talk to the media during U Ne Win's Masala era. But now, there are many journals inside the country and you in the foreign media speak every day to Thakhins [veterans of the independence war], politicians, lawyers, activists, journalists � even farmers in the countryside," he said.

But a lawyer in Rangoon who has been a strident critic of the military regime says this is not enough. "Yes, people more criticise the government now than ever before. But how many people is that? I don�t think it�s more than 500 people, while there are another 50 million who are still afraid of the military," the lawyer pointed out.

"But at the same time, if you look at bloggers, the internet, websites and Irrawaddy publications, we have been looking at the weaknesses of the opposition almost constantly."

However, activist-turned-political analyst Aung Naing Oo says the opposition needs strong criticism. "We talk about the faults of the military government while ignoring the faults of the opposition. At the 20-year point, if we say the movement has not been successful for one year, two years, three years, 20 years, we need to think why it has not been successful," the former Student Army leader commented.

There is no shortage of questions, but the answers are harder to come by. No one can come up with a precise and commonly-agreed strategy for a final push after 20 years of sitting and waiting for outside help.

"Metta [negotiation] is not enough, armed struggle is also needed," said a Buddhist monk in Rangoon who was involved in last September�s Saffron Revolution. "We do not doubt the Dhamma but the Dhamma is not as useful as a bullet-proof vest when we are facing this brutal military," the monk added with a pained expression.

"We know the soldiers' mindset well � they never consider dialogue, only firepower," a former army official suggested. "Unless you have a strong, well-armed force, the SPDC will not care about you."

Of the many armed groups, including the All Burma Students� Democratic Front which was founded after the 8888 uprising, not one was ready to come to the aid of the monks during September's Saffron Revolution. "Armed struggle is not easy," the rebel leader said, citing the list of nearly 1000 casualties among his comrades while thousands of others have now resettled in Western countries.

"But I not sure who the donor would be for this project," he joked, alluding to the dependence of many organisations, including armed groups, on the donors' pocketbooks. "However, it would only be about five percent of the budget of the whole exile movement," he estimated.

Htet Aung Kyaw was one of the students involved in the 1988 uprising and is a former Student Army rebel. He is now working for the Oslo-Based Democratic Voice of Burma as a senior journalist.
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Singapore: Singapore Asks Burmese Activists To Leave The Country

Burmese Junta Warns Monks of Crackdown as Protests Widen

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/world/asia/25myanmar.html?_r=1&sq=Burma&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=7&pagewanted=all

BANGKOK, Sept. 24 — Myanmar’s military junta issued its first warning on Monday after a month of widening antigovernment demonstrations, saying it was prepared to crack down on the Buddhist monks who are at the heart of the protests.

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Buddhist monks, escorted on each side by hand-holding supporters, protesting Sunday in the wet streets of Yangon, Myanmar.

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A crowd of 10,000 protested in Mandalay on Saturday.

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Associated Press

Buddhist leaders spoke against Myanmar’s military rulers Sunday in Yangon, the largest city. About 10,000 monks attended.

Speaking on state television, the junta’s minister of religious affairs told senior Buddhist clerics to rein in the tens of thousands of monks who have marched through several cities in recent days.

If not, said the minister, Brig. Gen. Thura Myint Maung, unspecified action would be taken against the monks “according to the law.”

He said that the protests by the monks had been instigated by the junta’s domestic and foreign enemies, the same accusation that had previously been made against members of the political opposition. Any action against the monks would be extremely risky for the government because of the reverence in which they are held in Myanmar, the Buddhist nation formerly known as Burma.

The country’s rulers are also coming under increasing pressure from the United States, which has imposed sanctions on Myanmar for years, including a ban on all Burmese products. When President Bush, who has spoken out frequently on Myanmar, addresses the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, he will announce more sanctions, including financial restrictions against Myanmar’s leaders and a ban on visas for them and their families, said Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser.

Mr. Hadley said Mr. Bush would use his address to call on other nations to support the protests. “Our hope is to marry that internal pressure with some external pressure coming from the United States, the United Nations and really all countries committed to freedom to try and force the regime into a change,” he said.

The junta’s warning to the monks came at the end of a day when protesters filled the streets in greater numbers than ever, pushing their confrontation with the military government toward an unpredictable and possibly dangerous outcome.

In the main city of Yangon, formerly Rangoon, the monks who have led the protests for the past week were outnumbered by civilians, including prominent political dissidents and well-known cultural figures.

Setting out in the morning from the gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda, a crowd estimated by The Associated Press to be as large as 100,000 marched unopposed in separate columns through the city. Other protests were reported in Mandalay, Sittwe and Bago. Monks and their supporters have also marched in other cities in recent days.

Until now, the government remained silent and mostly out of sight, giving over the streets to the protesters with virtually no uniformed security presence in evidence.

For all the energy and jubilation of the crowds, Myanmar seemed to be holding its breath. As the demonstrations expanded from political dissidents a month ago to Buddhist monks last week to the broad public, the government’s options seemed to be narrowing.

The demonstrations proceeded under the shadow of the last major nationwide convulsion, in 1988, when even larger pro-democracy protests were crushed by the military at the cost of some 3,000 lives.

“We are in uncharted territory,” said the British ambassador to Myanmar, Mark Canning, speaking by telephone from Yangon after observing the crowds.

“These demonstrations seem to be steadily picking up momentum,” he said. “They are widely spread geographically. They are quite well organized. They are stimulated by genuine economic hardship, and they are being done in a peaceful but very effective fashion.”

The government may have been hoping that the demonstrations would simply run out of steam, but their rapid growth and the pent-up grievances that are driving them make that seem unlikely. With each day, the growing size of the crowds seems to attract even more participants.

Another possibility is the opening of some form of compromise or dialogue between the government and its opponents. But that is an option the country’s military rulers have never genuinely embraced.

Instead, they have jailed their political opponents, held the pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest and rejected the demands of the country’s marginalized ethnic minorities. When the challenges against them have seemed threatening, they have used force, as in 1988 or in 2003, the year the government unleashed a band of thugs to attack Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi when her popularity seemed to be getting out of hand.

Myanmar was alive on Monday not only with the heady energy of mass demonstrations, but also with rumors of an impending military crackdown. Exile groups with contacts inside the country have been reporting troop movements and warnings to hospitals to prepare for many casualties.

But political analysts said a number of factors that were not present in 1988 might now be constraining the government. The first is that the world is watching. Since 1988, Myanmar has become the focus of international condemnation for its abuses of human and political rights and its treatment of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years.

It has become an embarrassment to its nine partners in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a regional political and economic organization; some of the group’s meetings have been boycotted by the United States because of the inclusion of Myanmar. Using economic and political leverage, that association has been increasingly open in calling for reform in Myanmar.

The most significant constraint on Myanmar’s behavior may be China, its giant neighbor, which has supported it with aid and commercial ties, undermining the economic penalties imposed by Western nations.

“China wants stability here, and the way things are going is not really consistent with that,” said a Western diplomat reached by telephone in Myanmar.

Chinese businesses have invested heavily in Myanmar, which is a major source of raw materials — particularly oil and gas — and a potential link to seaports on the Andaman Sea.

China has said repeatedly that Myanmar’s troubles are its own internal affair, and last year it blocked an American move to place Myanmar’s violations of human rights on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council.

But it has recently taken small public steps to press for democratic reform in Myanmar. In June, it arranged a highly unusual meeting in Beijing between representatives of Myanmar and the United States at which the Americans pressed for the release of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi.

This month, as the demonstrations built in Myanmar, a senior Chinese diplomat, Tang Jiaxuan, told the visiting Myanmar foreign minister, Nyan Win, that “China wholeheartedly hopes that Myanmar will push forward a democracy process that is appropriate for the country.”

But with its population rising up against it in the strongest challenge of the past two decades, some analysts said, it may be too late to urge the generals to be calm.

“At this point, I think all bets are off and the Chinese will have no real influence on what they do,” said Dave Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with the international rights group Human Rights Watch.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from New York.

China Braces for Prospect of Changes in Myanmar

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By DAVID LAGUE

Published: September 27, 2007

BEIJING, Sept. 26 — As China publicly calls for stability and reconciliation in Myanmar, it is also preparing for the possibility that the mounting protests could lead to the downfall of the military junta heading its resource-rich neighbor, regional experts said Wednesday.

China is Myanmar’s most important trading partner, investor and strategic ally, and has consistently thwarted attempts to put pressure on Myanmar’s rulers, through sanctions or other measures. On Wednesday, China blocked an effort by the United Nations Security Council to condemn Myanmar. In January, China blocked a Council resolution condemning Myanmar’s human rights record.

But China has also maintained discreet links with opponents of Myanmar’s military rulers and tolerates the activity of some exiled opponents on Chinese soil, the experts said. And China has urged the junta to avoid a repeat of the violent crackdown on demonstrations in 1988 that led to extended periods of house arrest for the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

In a meeting with Myanmar’s foreign minister, U Nyan Win, on Sept. 13, Tang Jiaxuan, a member of China’s State Council and a former foreign minister, said the Chinese government hoped that its neighbor could restore stability and promote national reconciliation, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

“If Aung San Suu Kyi became the leader of Burma tomorrow, China would be the first country to roll out the red carpet,” said Bertil Lintner, an analyst of Myanmar politics based in Thailand. “But they wouldn’t like to see it happen.”

China, already stung by human rights advocates who have warned that its ties with Sudan’s repressive government could cast the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing as the “Genocide Olympics,” wants to avoid further damage to its reputation from Myanmar’s handling of political dissent, analysts and foreign diplomats in Beijing say. They also say China would prefer that the Burmese junta maintain stability in a nation that is an important supplier of raw materials.

Two-way trade between the countries increased 39.4 percent in the first seven months of this year over the same period in 2006, reaching $1.11 billion, according to official Chinese government customs figures.

Experts say China is eager to import energy from a country that has proven natural gas reserves of 0.54 trillion cubic meters, according to a 2007 statistical review of world energy.

China would also like to keep a pliant government in place to develop strategically important access to the Indian Ocean, according to security experts.

In an effort to expand its influence in Myanmar, China has become the junta’s biggest arms supplier and has extended discounted loans and development aid to the nation.

There have been reports that China wants to build a $2 billion oil pipeline from Myanmar’s coast on the Bay of Bengal to Yunnan Province in China that would allow the delivery of oil from the Middle East without passing through the Strait of Malacca, a waterway that could be easily closed during a period of international tension or conflict.

Officially, China maintains its customary diplomatic stance of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. “As a neighbor of Myanmar, we hope to see that its society is stable and its economy developing,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said Tuesday at a regular news briefing in Beijing.

But, analysts say, there is evidence that China has been hedging its bets on political developments in Myanmar. Mr. Lintner, the Thailand-based analyst, said Beijing maintained unofficial contacts with exiled Myanmar opposition groups in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries. Other experts agree that these informal contacts with exiles, along with recent official statements from Beijing calling for a peaceful settlement of differences among all groups in Myanmar, suggest that China has doubts about the junta’s survival.

“One day, they expect the military will no longer be running the place,” said Trevor Wilson, an expert on Myanmar at the Australian National University who was the Australian ambassador to Myanmar from 2000 to 2003.

“It will be political parties, maybe even the current opposition, running the place,” he said, “and China needs to keep open some channels of communication with them and not put them entirely offside.”

Despite China’s close economic and political ties with the junta, there are also signs that it is dissatisfied with some aspects of its performance. Mr. Wilson said senior Chinese diplomats in Myanmar had been bluntly critical of the junta’s poor economic management and its inability to stem the flow of illicit drugs across the Chinese border.

At times, political tensions in the early years of this decade led to the suspension of new Chinese loans to Myanmar, he said. Regional experts also noted that China had openly called on the junta to show restraint in dealing with the protests.

In his meeting this month with Myanmar’s foreign minister, Mr. Nyan Win, Mr. Tang, the Chinese diplomatic envoy, also said Beijing wanted Myanmar to move toward “a democracy process that is appropriate for the country,” Xinhua reported.

That did not mean that China wanted Myanmar to adopt Western-style democracy, analysts said, but it was a suggestion that the junta should move toward a settlement with its opponents.

 
Join Burma Supporters at Solano Stroll to parade and raise awareness about Burma/Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
on Sunday Sept. 14, 9 am in Berkeley, CA. More info: http://www.badasf.org/

Suu Kyi's party expresses concern for her health
Fri Sep 5, 6:07 AM ET
 
YANGON , Myanmar (AP) - The political party of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi urged Myanmar 's military government Friday to ensure her well-being as she continued to refuse food deliveries to protest her detention.
 
The National League for Democracy "expressed concern" that Suu Kyi has not accepted food delivered to her home for almost three weeks, the party said in a statement.
 
It did not say whether she was on a hunger strike, a question that has remained unanswered since the first mention of her refusal to accept food over a week ago.
 
The 63-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate has been held in detention by the ruling military junta for 13 of the past 19 years, mostly under house arrest, and relies on food delivered by her party for sustenance.
 
Friday's statement called Suu Kyi's action a protest, which had only been alluded to until now.
 
"She is refusing food supplies in protest against ... her unlawful detention under the security law," the party said.
 
Suu Kyi also wants greater freedom of movement for two female companions who live with her and help take care of the house, it said. They are currently not allowed to leave the compound.
 
She is also protesting that authorities have not allowed her to receive a monthly medical checkup by her physician as they earlier promised, it said. A doctor visited Suu Kyi on Aug. 17, but her previous checkup was in January, the party said.
 
"Her safety and well-being are the soul responsibility of the authorities who have unlawfully detained her," it said.
 
Suu Kyi's lawyer, Kyi Win, was allowed to meet with her for 30 minutes on Monday, and said she told him that "I am well but I have lost some weight."
 
Rumors of a possible hunger strike have circulated widely in Yangon , where Suu Kyi's isolation has only increased the mystique that surrounds her.
 
Similar hunger strike rumors spread in 2003 and in 1989, but proved untrue.
 
Supporters have speculated that Suu Kyi is frustrated over the United Nations' failure to bring about democratic reform in the country, which has been ruled by the military since 1962.
 
Suu Kyi canceled meetings with U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari during his six-day visit to Myanmar last month, and he left without seeing her.
 
U.N. envoys and other senior officials have visited the country nearly 40 times since 1990, and the U.N. General Assembly has passed numerous resolutions calling for change.
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The Nation - Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi refuses food for three weeks

Burmese Regime Fails To Cooperate - Download (MP3)
Burmese Regime Fails To Cooperate - Listen to (MP3)

 

Please join Protest Rally on the eve of Olympic closing to highlight China's role in enabling the Burma's brutal dictatorship in order to exploit Burma economically and militarily : Saturday, Aug 23, 2 pm at Chinese Consulate, 1450 Laguna St, San Francisco More info: http://www.badasf.org/8888/ChinaRally.htm

The Boston Globe: Commentary: Begging won't save Burma
Wall Street Journal: Benchmarking Burma
New Yorker: Drowning: Can the Burmese people rescue themselves? (Letter from Rangoon)
Washington Post: In Broken Economy, Burmese Improvise or Flee
Atlantic Monthly: Lifting the Bamboo Curtain
BBC: In pictures: Sketching Burma's cyclone
Epoch Times: Burma's ‘Blood Jade' Used in Olympic Medals?
Telegraph: Leading insurers Chubb and XL Capital quit Burma
UNC Chapell Hill: President Bush's Pre-Olympics Speech in Thailand
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Benchmarking Burma

The United Nations special envoy on Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, is expected to arrive in Rangoon in the next few days for another round of talks with the country's military regime. If his visit is to have any meaning, he must move beyond the U.N.'s traditional diplomatic niceties and make concrete demands for change.

Since 1990, U.N. envoys have made 37 visits to Burma. The Human Rights Council and General Assembly between them have passed more than 30 resolutions, and the Security Council has made two Presidential Statements. All of this has had little effect. Vague requests to the junta to engage in dialogue with democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, made without any deadline, have led nowhere. She remains under house arrest, just as she has been for 12 years.

So rather than more of the same, the U.N. must present the regime with specific benchmarks for progress, accompanied by deadlines. The first benchmark should be the release of political prisoners, who currently number over 2,000. Many are in extremely poor health due to bad prison conditions, mistreatment, torture and the denial of medical care. Mr. Gambari should insist that the junta release political prisoners before U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's visit to Burma in December. And Mr. Ban should be willing to cancel his trip if the junta doesn't comply.

Another important benchmark would be immediately ending the military offensive against civilians in eastern Burma, which has destroyed 3,200 villages and displaced more than a million people since 1996. The junta has destroyed twice as many ethnic villages as has the Sudanese regime in Darfur. Burma has the highest number of forcibly conscripted child soldiers in the world.

Setting such benchmarks with realistic deadlines would enable Mr. Gambari to evaluate the progress he is or isn't making. If the junta complies, so much the better. But if it misses the benchmarks, that would clearly signal the need for international action.

The international community could impose several powerful sanctions for failure to meet these benchmarks. One would be revoking the junta's credentials to represent Burma in world bodies like the U.N. The junta is an illegitimate government, having overwhelmingly lost elections in 1990 and proven itself negligent in its handling of Cyclone Nargis. According to the U.N., more than a million cyclone victims have still not received help. The U.N. also says the regime has been stealing millions of dollars of aid money through its below-market fixed exchange rates. The junta is unfit to govern, and there is a legitimate alternative in the form of the leaders elected in 1990 now living as a government in exile.

Beyond that, a universal arms embargo should be imposed through the Security Council -- and maximum pressure placed on China and Russia not to use their veto. Major financial centers such as Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as the European Union, should impose carefully targeted financial sanctions against the ruling generals' personal assets. And the international community should call the generals by name for what they are: criminals. The prosecution of Sudan's leader Omar al-Bashir and the capture of Radovan Karadzic have set a precedent. Burma's generals should be brought to account in the International Criminal Court or through another jurisdiction.

The U.N.'s credibility is on the line to an unusual degree in Burma, given the obvious illegitimacy of the regime and the obvious harm it's doing to its people. Mr. Gambari owes it both to the Burmese people and to the U.N. to try a different, and hopefully more productive, approach on this trip.

Mr. Rogers is advocacy officer for South Asia at Christian Solidarity Worldwide and the author of "A Land Without Evil: Stopping the Genocide of Burma's Karen People" (Monarch Books, 2004).

See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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Soldiers about to close off access to Rangoon’s Sule Pagoda, during the protests of September, 2007. Increasingly, dissidents are questioning the utility of direct confrontation with the government. Photograph by Christian Holst.

Related Links

Ask the Author: Submit questions for George Packer about Burma.

When night falls in Rangoon, the city’s spectacular decay—patches of black mold devouring the yellowed walls of colonial buildings, trees growing wildly into crumbling third-story terraces—nearly disappears from view. The tea shops fill up, locals crowd the bookstalls on Pansodan Road, and the city, which seems furtive and depressed by day, becomes a communal stage. In the Chinatown district, two men in an alley crank out schoolbooks with a hand-operated printing press. At a sidewalk fish market, women sell shrimp, scallops, and squid by candlelight, while two teen-agers nearby strum guitars. Further east, along the Rangoon River, in the old residential quarter of Pazundaung, the wooden houses are open to the street, like storefronts, revealing an old woman sitting on a couch, a living-room shrine strewn with votive candles, and two men laughing as they listen to a radio.

One such evening in June, I had dinner at an outdoor restaurant north of downtown with a young man I’ll call Myat Min. He grew up in a working-class township on the outskirts of Rangoon, the son of a mechanic and a woman who sold spices from Thailand. His father had been trained by British Air Force officers, and in the years after the 1962 coup, which gave control of the country to the Burmese military, he kept the family radio tuned to the BBC. Each evening, he ate fried noodles, listened to the news in English, and cursed the dictatorship.

Over the decades, the Burmese government has subjected its citizens to epic misrule, systematically destroying every institution of society except the Army, whose leaders have made staying in power their overriding goal. The streets of Rangoon and Mandalay are monitored by the secret police and by a group of armed thugs known as Swan Arr Shin—the Masters of Force. Dissidents are routinely tortured. The generals’ irrational economic policies have reduced one of Asia’s richest countries, once the world’s leading exporter of rice, to penury. Burma’s gross domestic product per capita is now less than half that of its neighbor Cambodia. Economic sanctions—a form of protest against the government’s human-rights abuses—have made the country even poorer.

Myat Min was not quite thirty when we met, with a dark, high-cheekboned face, but he had the manner of a much older, eccentric man who had seen too much of life and was too vital to be self-effacing, even if his repressive society demanded it. He had an unusually loud voice by Burmese standards, which drew looks in public, and a laugh that often couldn’t stop. The American expatriates in Rangoon called him Mr. Intensity. He wore only longyis, the Burmese sarong; he didn’t own any pants. “I hate modern life,” he said.

In 1995, when he was sixteen, Myat Min noticed a collection of stories by W. Somerset Maugham in a bookstall on Pansodan Road. He rented it (few Burmese can afford to buy books) and read the stories with such strong identification that he began calling himself Somerset. He moved on to Dickens, learning not just to read English but to speak it, sometimes with oddly Victorian cadences. I asked him why these British writers appealed to him. “All of the characters are me,” he said, with a boisterous laugh. “Neither a British nor an American young man living in the twenty-first century can understand a Dickens as well as I can! I am living in a Dickensian atmosphere. Our country is at least one or two centuries behind the Western world. My neighborhood—bleak, poor, with small domestic industries, children playing in the street, parents fighting with each other, some with great debt, everyone dirty—that is Dickens. I am more equipped to understand Dickens than modern novels. I don’t know what is air-conditioning, what is subway, what is fingerprint exam.”

In 1988, when Myat Min was ten, Rangoon and other Burmese cities filled with millions of demonstrators calling for an end to military rule. It was a revolutionary moment, and by far the most serious challenge to the reign of the generals; the protest led by monks last September is the only event that comes close. Myat Min’s older brothers disappeared from home for several months to join the uprising, and his father went looking for them every day. At the height of the demonstrations, Myat Min sneaked out of his house. He saw a mob of people, some of whom were carrying spikes on which the severed heads of informers—burned charcoal black—had been impaled. “Democracy!” the people shouted.

“I became interested in politics because of those scenes,” Myat Min told me. At home, his father said, “Aung San Suu Kyi is the new leader of our country. American troops will come liberate us.” But Suu Kyi—the daughter of the general who led Burma to independence, in 1948, and who became an accidental heroine to the protesters in 1988—was soon placed under house arrest, on the shore of Inya Lake, in the middle of the city. She has for the most part remained there ever since, in an isolation as profound as her country’s.

Myat Min decided to pursue his passion for English literature at Rangoon University; he dreamed of a life immersed in ideas, “like walking through the forest in the dead of night.” But by 1996, the year he enrolled, the university had almost ceased to exist. To prevent students from gathering in protest, the government repeatedly closed the main campus and began busing undergraduates to makeshift campuses outside the capital. The semester dwindled to ten days in the classroom, with assignments and exams handled through the mail. In order to maintain the illusion of a successful system, the government continued to pass large numbers of students, even though their base of knowledge was shrinking precipitately. Higher education in Burma, once the training ground of a skilled civil service, was destroyed.

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In Broken Economy, Burmese Improvise or Flee
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/15/AR2008081503655.html

 

People file in and out of the downtown passport office in Rangoon. Stalls outside offer passport candidates some of the more than 15 forms required for their applications. (The Washington Post)
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Lifting the Bamboo Curtain
September 2008 Atlantic Monthly

A SHAN REBEL on the Burma-Thailand border. (Photo by NIC Dunlop/Panos Pictures)

Monsoon clouds crushed the dark, seaweed-green landscape of eastern Burma. Steep hillsides glistened with teak trees, coconut palms, black and ocher mud from the heavy rains, and tall, chaotic grasses. As night came, the buzz saw of cicadas and the pestering croaks of geckos rose through the downpour. Guided by an ethnic Karen rebel with a torchlight attached by bare copper wires to an ancient six-volt battery slung around his neck, I stumbled across three bamboo planks over a fast-moving stream from Thailand into Burma. Any danger came less from Burmese government troops than from those of its democratic neighbor, whose commercial interests have made it a close friend of Burma’s military regime. Said Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej recently: the ruling Burmese generals are “good Buddhists” who like to meditate, and Burma is a country that “lives in peace.” The Thai military has been on the lookout for Karen soldiers, who have been fighting the Burmese government since 1948.

Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/burma

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Leading insurers Chubb and XL Capital quit Burma

The insurers, Chubb and XL Capital, announced their withdrawals in separate statements today.

It comes just three weeks after a Burma Campaign UK report, Insuring Repression, which highlighted the flow of billions of dollars from insurance companies to the Burmese regime.

US insurer Chubb, which has a UK operation, said it now "bars its member companies from maintaining an office in Burma, from directly writing insurance in Burma or providing insurance into Burma from outside the country" after conducting a review.

XL, which owns reinsurer XL Re and Lloyd's of London syndicate XL London Market, said its new policy mean it no longer "seeks to insure Burmese companies or operations of companies in Burma".

Johnny Chatterton, campaign officer at the Burma Campaign UK group, said the withdrawals were a "major embarrassment" to Lloyd's of London, which it accused of "failing to take the issue seriously" and not seeing "any problem with helping to finance Burma's brutal dictatorship".

The group's report claimed Lloyd's operators were helping to insure the military junta's state-owned airline Myanma Airways earlier this year and sharing the risk of its shipping interests.

A spokeswoman from Lloyd's of London said: "Unless there are relevant or appropriate sanctions in place, we cannot tell these companies where they can or cannot trade. As far as we are aware, there are no UK, European Union or United Nations sanctions in place."

The Association of British Insurers said it had no members operating in Burma and had written to its them seeking clarification earlier this year.

Maung Maung, general secretary of the Federation of Trade Unions Burma, said insurance companies were indirectly supporting the Burmese regime.

He said: "We welcome the news that XL and Chubb have pulled out, and will no longer help to fund the regime, but we strongly condemn all insurers that remain involved in our military junta run country."

"They help keep the generals in power, and condemn Burma's 50 million people to lives of poverty and fear. There is no excuse for the likes of Lloyd's of London being involved, they are helping to fund a brutal dictatorship."

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright
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In pictures: Sketching Burma's cyclone
BBC News - UK

See cartoons here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/08/asia_pac_sketching_burma0s_cyclone/html/1.stm
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Burma's ‘Blood Jade' Used in Olympic Medals?

A Burmese woman deals her Jade stones with a shopkeeper at the Jade market June 15, 2003 in Mandalay, Myanmar. The country generates a considerable income from the mining of precious stones mostly from the northern part of Myanmar. It's a government run monopoly and all visitors must buy stones from licensed retail shops. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Burmese democracy activists are imploring visitors to the Olympics to boycott merchandise made from “Blood Jade,” a name given to high-quality jade mined under oppressive and dangerous conditions in Burma and sold for export by the country's military Junta.

In a report entitled, “Blood Jade: Burmese Gemstones and the Beijing Games,” released by the All Kachin Students and Youth Union (AKSYU), as much as 90 per cent of jadeite (a variety of jade) sold in China comes from mines in Kachin State along the Burma-China border.

"In addition to being a major source of foreign currency, the military-controlled industry is plagued with deplorable working conditions, an HIV/AIDS epidemic and environmental destruction," said the report. "Thousands have lost their land due to the expansion of mining areas. Deaths from pit collapses and company vigilantism are commonplace."

Although both European countries and the United States have placed severe restrictions on the import of gems from Burma (also called Myanmar), China is currently the largest importer of the precious stone.

Used as a war commodity for years in Burma, today jade generates money for the military Junta. Official export figures place it as the third highest foreign exchange after natural gas and agriculture products, valued at roughly $647 million USD in the 2007-2008 fiscal year. This is up more than 200 per cent from 2006-2007 when exports were valued at $297 million.

Nearly a third of those exports go to China.

Earlier this year, Inter Press Service (IPS) interviewed an Asian jade buyer who was visiting Burma and was shocked at the Chinese dominance of the market.

“Almost all the buyers of some 300 people were Chinese. Most of them were from the mainland, with a few from Hong Kong and Taiwan…This was for two hours, towards the end of a day’s auction."

Describing the jade, the buyer said that "one was the size of a car and another the size of a big table and these were what the Chinese buyers were attracted to. The initial auction price for a chunk of rough jade the size of a chair was one million Euros (approximately 1.5 million USD). The average price of the smaller pieces was about 300,000 to 500,000 Euros."

The jade the Chinese buyers are reported as favouring is a white-colored, transparent variety sometimes called “bra-fleshed jade” or "Maw Seezar Jade" as opposed to colored jadeites. Experts suspect this is the same white jade used as a backing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics gold medals.

The Chinese regime claims that the jade is from China’s Qinghai province. However, the Jade from Burma's Phakant jade mines is said to be of a much higher quality than the nephrite jade from Qinghai. Burma’s jade is also considered the most sought after in the Chinese jewelery industry.

Workers in Burma's open-pit jade mines are often paid as little as $1 USD per day while forced to work 12 hour shifts or longer, sometimes at night and with little or no breaks.

"The mining companies belong to cronies of the junta. They care little about abusing the people, their rights, and even destroying the environment," said Naw Law, a researcher with AKSYU, in an interview with IPS.

President Bush's Pre-Olympics Speech in Thailand
By President George W. Bush
Reviewed by David T. Jones, co-author of Uneasy Neighbo(u)rs, a book on U.S.-Canada relations
Text and video: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/08/20080807-8.html

On August 7, during an official visit to Thailand, President Bush delivered what could be called a "State of Asia" speech.  In his 3,000 word address, Bush concentrated on our relations with nations of East and Southeast Asia (including an occasional mention of India, but not of Pakistan/Afghanistan). 

Noting that this was his last trip to the region as president, unsurprisingly Bush did a bit of self-congratulatory legacy burnishing.  Thus, he reviewed his administration's longstanding objectives:  reinvigorating alliances; creating new democratic partnerships; deepening economic ties; and cooperating on shared challenges.  With these objectives as the framework, he placed foreign policy accomplishments (and continuing action) in context. 

In the process, he noted U.S. trade with Pacific states had reached $1 trillion – and now was greater than trade across the Atlantic – and that trade agreements were expanding;  the United States had strengthened each of its five treaty alliances (Australia, Philippines, South Korea, Japan, and Thailand); and the region was cooperating against terrorism.  He recalled responses to natural disasters such as the 2004 tsunami and the recent cyclone in Burma.

Bush examined, but not in depth, the ongoing political issues with Burma and North Korea.  Predictably, he called for an end to "tyranny" in Burma and the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners.  He examined the threat from North Korean nuclear weapons, taking credit for creating the six-power talks with Pyongyang and the pledge by the North to dismantle its nuclear facilities and "give up its nuclear weapons," but noted that this declaration required verification.

Appropriately, Bush devoted more attention (27 percent of the speech) to China, its politico-economic circumstances, and human rights problems than to any other topic. (His host Thailand, including introductory and concluding pleasantries, got only 19 percent.)  Equally appropriately, his criticism was delivered prior to arrival in Beijing – public criticism of your hosts at their international "coming out" Olympics party would simply have been gratuitously insulting. 

Even so, the sour medicine of specific criticism of Chinese detention of political and human rights activists and Beijing's violations of human rights, notably freedom of religion, free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights, was somewhat buffered by rhetorical sweeteners.  Bush recognized Chinese free market economic reforms; he noted the continuation of the "one China" policy; he praised Beijing's cooperation on the six- power talks with North Korea; and commended joint efforts to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.  He did not mention Tibet, the Dali Lama, the Falun Gong, or any specific political prisoners.  (For its part, Beijing immediately rejected the president's critique – elements of which he repeated following attending church services on August 10.)

In short, the president delivered a solid "summing up" of our circumstances in East Asia.  It was largely ignored by the media; the Washington Post,which had editorially called for the president to address Chinese human rights abuses, ran its account on page A-15.
-----------------------------------

1. AP: Devastation in Burma is far starker than portrayed
2. Sunday Times: Agony of Burma’s dumped children
3. The National: Bush reiterates position on Myanmar by Larry Jagan
4. AFP, The Times: Comic who gave out cyclone aid charged
5. MySinchew: Burma In The Shadow Of The Olympics
6. IPS: BURMA: Expats Keep Democracy Hopes Alive
7. Cape Argus: Burmese imports horrify customer
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http://www.badasf.org/2008/cyclone-news.htm
Devastation in Burma is far starker than portrayed

Thousands get very little aid

By Associated Press  |  August 10, 2008

RANGOON, Burma - A rare bird's-eye look at Burma's Irrawaddy delta shows the devastation still left from Cyclone Nargis - broken levies, flooded farm roads, the shattered remains of bamboo huts, and trees strewn like matchsticks along the coast.

Conditions are far starker than reflected in assessments from Burma's government and in the optimism of some UN officials, the Associated Press has concluded from a review of data, a private flight over the delta, and interviews with victims and aid workers.

Three months after a disaster that claimed nearly 140,000 lives, thousands of villagers are still getting little or nothing from their government or foreign aid groups.

"We lost everything - our house, our rice, our clothes. We were given just a little rice by a private aid group from Rangoon. I don't know where the government or foreign organizations are helping people, but not here," said Khin Maung Kyi, 60, a farmer who lost six children to the storm.

Some areas have received help in the delta, Burma's rice bowl set amid a lacework of waterways. During a flyover, brand new metal roofs atop reconstructed homes glittered in the tropical sunlight, farmers in cone-shaped hats worked in green rice paddies, and gangs of workers struggled to remove debris from canals and repair broken embankments.

But progress is slow and behind where it should be.

"The situation in Myanmar remains dire," said Chris Kaye, who heads relief operations for the UN World Food Program in Burma, which the military junta refers to as Myanmar. "The vast majority of families simply don't have enough to eat."

Some grim recent statistics from foreign aid agencies working in the delta:

---------------------------------------------------

From The Sunday Times

August 10, 2008

Agony of Burma’s dumped children

Heather Mark, Rangoon

IN a filthy destitute village, half an hour outside Rangoon, three-year-old Than Than Nues was dumped days after Cyclone Nargis had ravaged her home in Burma’s Irrawaddy delta and made her an orphan.

The toddler, who lost both her parents when 12ft waves swept through their home in Bogalay, a coastal township, was carted off in a government lorry and handed over to strangers. Villagers, who struggled to feed their own families from their meagre rice paddies or from working in a factory on a daily wage of just 75p, were forced to provide for the extra mouths.

Last week underfed children played in the mud-filled main street, still trying to forget the traumatic night in May when they saw their closest relatives swept to their deaths.

“If she stays here her future is bleak. She’d be much better off with her older brother,” said U Saw Hein, the village leader, as his daughter bounced the child on her knee.

“We discovered that he’s 18 and working near Mandalay. He doesn’t know she’s alive. We really want to get them back together, but we barely have enough to survive on and the bus fare to Mandalay is £5. We just can’t afford it,” he said.

With the delta infrastructure destroyed there are no telephones - even if the desperately poor farmers could afford to call. The only way to reach people is to go and meet them.

Than Than Nues was one of several children found by The Sunday Times who had been displaced close to the devastated delta region. They had become separated from their families first by the force of nature, then by the price of a bus fare, and had little chance of being reunited.

In another bleak village half an hour from Bogalay, which Burma’s paranoid government keeps hidden behind military checkpoints, four-year-old twins Ma Nu Nu and Ma Su Su took shelter from a torrential downpour with other severely undernourished children.

There was no way to tell what memories the quiet little girls had of their mother who was wrenched from them during the cyclone, or of their father who was working near the Thai border, unaware that his daughters had survived.

Although the villagers knew where to find him, the cost of the three-day journey to the border was beyond their means. The best they could do was to care for the girls as if they were their own.

About 54% of the 138,000 cyclone victims were children. Aid agencies such as Save the Children and Unicef believe there could be as many as 2,000 children still separated from their families. In an effort to save them from being forced into crammed orphanages, the charities are setting up a tracing system to help to reunite them.

Out of 800 children officially registered by international agencies as “separated and unaccompanied”, 45 have been reunited with close relatives. The process could take up to two years.

“Entire families were swept away and it impacted on children more than anybody,” said Guy Cave, head of child protection at Save the Children in Rangoon. The tracing system, which was used after the Asian tsunami in 2004, registers lost children on a database and sends local workers to remote villages to track down surviving relatives.

The system has saved two sisters, Ma Thin Thin, 13, and Ma Lin Lin, 15, from being dumped in a grim state-run orphanage. They were an hour from home in Laputta township when the cyclone struck. They survived by clinging onto hay bales throughout the night, finding themselves stranded on a small patch of dry land the next day.

A boat took them to the Wakema shelter, where the girls were immediately registered as orphans.

Save the Children workers tracked down their parents in a village 1½ hours away, prompting their father to try to travel to the camp to collect them. He was stopped from travelling by the authorities and the girls were moved yet again to a shelter in Myaung Mya, four hours’ drive away. “We cried a lot when we were sent to Myaung Mya and separated from our father,” said Ma Lin Lin.

Meanwhile, Daw Su Myat, 38, their mother, had been mourning the loss of her children. “Around 20 of my close relatives died in the storm. I thought my two daughters were also dead,” she said.

“About six days after the cyclone we got news that they were alive and in a shelter. But we weren’t allowed to take them back and I was afraid that someone else would adopt them.”

After Save the Children intervened, the authorities relented and allowed the girls to return to their parents.

Tracking scattered families is further complicated by large population movements and unpredictable government decisions that force the closure of refugee camps or relocate people at random. Some villages remain flattened and young children often have no idea where they come from. Villages have not been identified by The Sunday Times for fear of government interference.

The charities say their main aim is to keep children out of the harsh, institutional life found in state-run or monastic institutions where children are crammed together on bamboo mats and forced to rise at dawn and beg on the street.

They face a race against time after a government decision to build six more orphanages in the delta region. In one institution in Rangoon, more than 20 children had arrived since the cyclone struck. Only two girls, aged 12 and 13, were orphans. The others have at least one surviving parent. A sad four-year-old boy sat in the corner. His mother had died and his father could not afford to keep him.

Aid workers described howa young girl was sent to an orphanage in the north of the country just a day before her parents discovered the village where she was taking refuge. It is not known whether they found her.

Aid agencies say they want to support families to allow them to keep their children at home. “I can’t stress enough that institutions should be a last resort,” said Christina Torsein, a child protection specialist with Unicef.

------------------------------------------------
Bush reiterates position on Myanmar

Larry Jagan, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: August 09. 2008 10:29PM UAE / August 9. 2008 6:29PM GMT

BANGKOK // In Beijing, George W Bush managed to raise the issue of Myanmar with Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, at their dinner on Friday evening, according to Chinese government officials. It seems the Chinese leader rebuffed Washington’s efforts to get Beijing to step up pressure on its neighbour’s military junta.

The Chinese position is clear – democracy and freedom in Myanmar, often referred to by its former name, Burma, are an internal matter – and they believe the generals are progressing on their own “road map to democracy”, having recently adopted a new constitution, with elections scheduled for 2010.

For most analysts, Beijing holds the only possible key to encouraging the military regime to make the transitional process towards democracy transparent, including holding free and fair elections. “We don’t trust the junta,” said Zin Linn, a leading spokesman for exiled dissidents.

“See what happened when the National League for Democracy [led by Aung San Suu Kyi] convincingly won the last elections in 1990 – they simply ignored the result and refused to hand over power,” he said. “The only way to avoid a repeat of that is for the international community, especially China, to play a critical role in supporting genuine democracy in Burma.”

Mr Bush is reported to have reiterated the US position in his short discussion with the Chinese president – including the immediate release of Ms Suu Kyi and eligibility for her party, the NLD, to run unhindered in free and fair elections in two years.

In a presidential election year, few will heed Mr Bush’s position on longer-term international issues. In deference to his hosts, the US president tried to make his clarion call for democracy and freedom before his visit to China. He did this in what was billed his last major policy speech on Asia, when he addressed diplomats, politicians and students in Bangkok last week, en route to Beijing.

“Tyranny in Burma must be brought to an end,” he told his audience. Then in a strongly symbolic gesture, he had lunch with a small group of Myanmar activists at the residence of the US ambassador to Thailand. “The American people care deeply about the people of Burma and dream for the day the people will be free,” he told them.

The dissidents who met the president were impressed. “It was great; he was relaxed and joked with us,” Win Min, an independent academic from Myanmar, now at Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand, said after the meeting. “He seemed to know a lot about Burma.”

Nevertheless, Mr Bush still cannot pronounce the detained opposition leader’s name and he has not mastered the name of Senior Gen Than Shwe, the military leader.

He never once mentioned him by name during the lunch discussions, according to the dissidents. “You notice I’m saying ‘general’ because it’s generally viewed as a one-man regime,” he told a group of Myanmar journalists that interviewed him after the lunch. But diplomats and observers are concerned that Mr Bush is blowing in the wind and will not have any effect – either in Beijing or Myanmar. “The cause of Burma’s freedom, democracy and human rights was poignantly served, but whether Mr Bush and his wife’s gestures will make any difference on the ground is doubtful,” according to Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a senior political analyst at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

“With six months to go, he’s a lame-duck president and cannot hope to affect things in Burma,” said Derek Tonkin, a political commentator and former British ambassador to Thailand and Vietnam. “As for the generals … things are going along quite well for them; there are no signs of serious opposition, and as military men, they have successfully completed the first four stages of their road map. They see absolutely no reason to change course.”

Some of the dissidents, who met Mr Bush in Bangkok, urged him to consider changing policies towards the junta.

“The US government should engage the Burmese generals for the long-term strategy of democracy and development on the country,” Aung Naing Oo, an independent analyst based in Thailand, told the president.

Mr Bush apparently remains convinced that US sanctions are working. “I think our strategy is the right strategy … I am trying to convince others to join us on the strategy. In other words, it would be better if we could all speak with one voice,” he told the journalists. Over lunch he was more considered: he told the activists that a change in policy now would reward the generals for having done nothing, according to Win Min.

Mr Bush acknowledged that what was needed was an international united front on Myanmar that included the US, Europe and Myanmar’s Asian neighbours. So far that has been virtually impossible, he conceded. “But it’s been difficult with some of the countries in the neighbourhood here, because we don’t share the same goals. My goal is democracy. Their goal is stability,” he said.

Mr Bush is certainly in the right place to start quiet diplomacy. China remains the key to future international efforts to mediate in Myanmar. Although China still supports the junta, Chinese leaders are worried about the future stability of the regime, according to Chinese diplomats.

Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, met Thein Sein, Myanmar’s prime minister, in Beijing before the Games. China hoped Myanmar could sort out its problems “through democratic negotiation”, he said after the meeting.

“China will continue to follow a good-neighbourly policy towards Myanmar, and work with the international community to help Myanmar overcome its difficulties,” Mr Wen was reported to have said.

This may not be as blunt as Mr Bush’s approach, but clearly the Chinese leaders are concerned about Myanmar’s economic woes and its political impasse.

After the Olympics, they may just heed international concern and even consider other strategic options to encourage change in Myanmar.
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Burma In The Shadow Of The Olympics

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http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24150937-401,00.html

Comic who gave out cyclone aid charged

From correspondents in Rangoon

August 09, 2008 03:23am

Article from:

1. Congress Bows to Big Oil in Burma: Chevron Can Continue to Drill Offshore
2. US removes oil giant from Burma sanctions
3. Burma aid lost to regime By Harvey Morris at the United Nations
4. UN Security Council to Discuss Burma
5. Mia Farrow Calls for Global Pressure at Olympics for Burma
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Congress Bows to Big Oil in Burma:  
Chevron Can Continue to Drill Offshore

http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/congress-bows-to-big

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) (WDCpix)

Caving to big oil demands, the Senate on Tuesday approved a plan that intensifies trade sanctions against Burma's military regime but abandons an earlier push to penalize Chevron, the last major U.S. company propping up the repressive junta.

The move marks a departure from an earlier House-passed proposal that would have eliminated a large tax break for Chevron, potentially prodding the company to divest its share in a controversial natural gas field off the coast of Burma. Supporters of the House bill had said it would help destabilize Burma's corrupt military leaders by slashing a vital source of their income.

"When the generals run out of cash," said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Cal.), who sponsored the House bill before he succumbed to cancer in February, "change will come to Burma."

Yet despite wide bipartisan support, the bill hit a stumbling block in the Senate, where several lawmakers objected to the Chevron provision. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.) was one such voice. She told Politico last month that forcing Chevron out of Burma would be "counterproductive," because "other countries are going to take it over and, most particularly, the Burmese government will take it over. So what is gained by doing this"

Many human-rights advocates say there is much to be gained, arguing that Chevron's presence in Burma has a symbolic value that leaves Washington no moral suasion in convincing foreign investors to quit supporting the junta. "Unless Chevron is out of there, the United States doesn't have the moral authority to tell other countries to get out," said Nyunt Than, president of the Burmese American Democratic Alliance, a non-profit group.

Faced with election-year time restraints, however, House and Senate negotiators removed the Lantos Chevron provision. In its place is language urging the oil giant to get out of Burma voluntarily -- something the company has said it will not do.

The House passed the compromise bill last week, and President George W. Bush, a vocal critic of Burma's regime, is expected to sign it into law shortly.

The international outrage over the Burmese junta has intensified over the last year following several high-profile episodes. Last fall, the junta orchestrated a violent crackdown on thousands of monks and other pro-democracy protesters. More recently, the junta barred most international aid in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which struck Burma's Irrawaddy Delta in May. Estimates place the number of dead at more than 130,000. These actions pushed Congress to install stronger sanctions.

With several proposals floating around Capitol Hill, the major sticking point became how to approach Chevron, grandfathered to operate in Burma under current sanctions. The debate set Feinstein and other Chevron supporters against some House Democrats, who were fighting to preserve the Lantos bill as a memorial to their deceased colleague. Lantos had been a fierce advocate for human rights and was the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress. He died of esophageal cancer in February, after nearly 28 years in the House.

The debate has also carried a hint of election year politics. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the likely GOP presidential nominee, sponsored a bill last year that would have required Chevron to sell its share in Burma's gas field, called the Yadana project. That position turned political convention on its head, with the Democratic Feinstein supporting the oil industry and the Republican McCain siding with human-rights advocates. McCain's office did not respond to several calls and emails requesting comment.

Feinstein, a member of the same state delegation as Lantos, had long been one of Washington's most vocal critics of Burma's repressive regime. In February, for example, she joined Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in sponsoring legislation to award the Congressional Gold Medal to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate who's been under house arrest for much of the last two decades. Yet, on the topic of Chevron, Feinstein has aligned herself squarely behind the San Ramon, Cal.-based company.

Her support has not gone unnoticed. During her last reelection cycle in 2006, Feinstein took in $11,200 from the company -- the third highest tally of all 535 members of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign watchdog group.

Feinstein spokesman Scott Gerber -- pointing out that the California senator was not directly involved the House/Senate negotiations -- referred questions to those who were.

Instead of targeting Burma's gas and oil industry, the compromise bill goes after revenues derived from gem sales. A 2003 law banned direct gem imports from Burma, where more than 90 percent of the world's rubies originate. But a loophole allows those imports to continue if the stones were processed elsewhere. The compromise bill would close the loophole.

The bill also requires the Treasury Dept. to submit a report detailing which international banks are harboring the assets of the regime's leaders. Additionally, the bill creates a special envoy charged with aligning Burmese sanction policies between the United States and other countries. For some human-rights groups, the absence of the Chevron provision is a minor defeat.

"For us, the meat of the bill is still there," said Jennifer Quigley, the advocacy coordinator for the U.S. Campaign for Burma.

Chevron, which owns 28 percent of the Yadana project, currently receives a large tax break for money it pays to the Burmese government. Marco Simons, the legal director of EarthRights International, estimated that the company takes in $100 million annually from the project, with roughly $30 million of that going to the Burmese junta. Simons said that eliminating Chevron's tax break might be an appropriate penalty for a company propping up one of the world's most abusive governments. But because another international company would likely swoop in to fill the void, he said, such a move would have little immediate effect on Burma's political situation.

"It wouldn't have affected the regime's bottom line whatsoever," Simons said.

But a number of human-rights advocates rejected that claim. Betsy Apple, director of the Crimes Against Humanity Program at Human Rights First, pointed to the sanctions targeting South Africa during the apartheid era, wondering what might have happened had the United States hinged its policies on those of other countries.

"It's a cop out," Apple said. "I think it's a pretext for taking no action at all."
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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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UN Security Council to Discuss Burma

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Mia Farrow Calls for Global Pressure at Olympics for Burma

American activist and actress Mia Farrow, right, looks on as Noble Peace Laureate Jody Williams speaks as during a news conference at Foreign Correspondents' Club in Bangkok, on Friday. (Photo: AP)

"If there is enough international pressure and if voices are raised loud enough, we can push China to change its position on Burma," Farrow told The Associated Press in Bangkok. "Using the Olympics Games as tool to effect change is important."

Bush, who plans to stay in Beijing for the first few days of the Olympics, said earlier this week he was "fired up" to watch some of the competition.

"I wish that (Bush) had not agreed to attend the Olympics, because that represents a missed opportunity for the United States to stand strong by its own principles," Farrow said. "A statement could have been made by skipping the opening ceremonies."

China is Burma's most important ally, providing economic, military and other assistance while Western nations shun the military-ruled country because of its poor human rights record and failure to restore democracy. China objects to Western criticisms of Burma's junta, saying conditions in the Southeast Asian country have improved since its violent crackdown on peaceful protests last September.

"China must use its unique position with Burma—its business alliance, its seat on the (UN) Security Council—not to protect Burma and its own interests, but to effect change and to improve human rights in Burma," Farrow said.

Farrow has campaigned around the world to urge China to help stop killings in Sudan's western Darfur region. China has been one of Sudan's biggest trading partners, buying oil from the African nation and selling it weapons.

Farrow held a news conference in Bangkok after visiting the Burma-Thailand border with a delegation from the Nobel Women's Initiative, a group founded by female recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The actress urged the United Nations and the international community to take action to protect women in Burma from sexual exploitation and abuse in areas hit by a devastating cyclone in May, which killed more than 84,500 people and left 54,000 missing, according to the junta.
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1. Reuter: Myanmar junta gang hits Suu Kyi birthday rally
2. The Nation: Who will save Burma's women and children? ( by Nilar Thein)
3. NY Times: The End of Intervention (by MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT)
4. The Irrawaddy: Burma’s Bureaucratic Abyss (by YeNi)
5. UPI Aisa Online: No show trials for Burma’s protestors
6. Telegraph: Plague of rats devastates Burma villages
7. NY Times: Burmese Endure in Spite of Junta, Aid Workers Say
8. The Scotsman: Burmese saved by survival instincts
9. Washington Post: Frustrated Burmese Organize Aid Forays
10. ABC News: 'Everything Is Gone, We Have Nothing'
11. Burma's Elected Representatives want Military Junta before the International Court of Justice
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/19/AR2008061900304_pf.html
Myanmar junta gang hits Suu Kyi birthday rally
By Aung Hla Tun
Reuters


Thursday, June 19, 2008; 4:47 AM

YANGON (Reuters) - Pro-junta thugs broke up a rally by supporters of Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi on Thursday, detaining three people among a crowd chanting for her release on her 63rd birthday, a senior opposition member said.

At least six truckloads of Swan-Arr-Shin, or "Masters of Force," gang members waded into the crowd outside the dilapidated headquarters of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) in the former capital, Yangon, one witness said.

"We saw some of them slapping and beating NLD members," the witness said. Senior NLD official Win Naing later told Reuters three people had been taken away.

Police cordoned off roads leading to the rally where the NLD members had shouted slogans demanding freedom for Suu Kyi and more than 1,300 political prisoners believed to be behind bars in the former Burma.

Suu Kyi's confinement in her lakeside home in Yangon was extended in May despite international pleas to the generals to end her latest stretch of detention, which began in May 2003.

The Nobel peace laureate has now been confined for nearly 13 of the past 19 years, with her telephone line cut and all visitors barred apart from her cook and occasionally her doctor.

ANNUAL RITUAL

Her birthday has become an annual ritual inside and outside Myanmar for campaigners seeking an end to the 46 years of military rule that have reduced a once-promising economy and country to an impoverished international pariah.

Every year, the NLD's ageing leadership releases birds and statements calling for Suu Kyi's freedom and a meaningful transition to democracy.

Every year, the junta ignores them -- as it does the protests and all-too-familiar statements of outrage and frustration that mark the day outside the country.

After Cyclone Nargis, which left 134,000 people dead or missing and 2.4 million destitute, campaigners are worried about the international community quietly shelving their icon's plight in a bid to get the junta to open up to outside aid.

"The U.N. is crawling on its knees before the regime, afraid to speak the truth in case it affects aid access deals which the regime is already breaking," Mark Farmaner of the Burma Campaign UK said last month.

Washington has imposed ever-tighter sanctions on the generals in a bid to force them into political rapprochement with the NLD, which won a 1990 election landslide only to be denied power.

The strategy appears merely to have driven the regime further into isolation, as shown by its complete distrust of U.S. offers of ships and military helicopters to ferry aid to Nargis victims in the worst-hit Irrawaddy delta.

Dozens of people protested outside the Myanmar embassies in Bangkok and Manila, where they carried roses, gift-wrapped boxes and placards.

In the Indian capital, where Suu Kyi went to school in the early 1960s while her mother was ambassador to New Delhi, police briefly detained more than 50 demonstrators who marched through the streets wearing black "Free Suu Kyi" bandanas.

(Additional reporting by Manila bureau)

(Editing by Ed Cropley and Sanjeev Miglani)
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Who will save Burma's women and children?

By Nilar Thein
Published on June 19, 2008

I woke up from a dream in the middle of the night. I was with my daughter, playing in a small garden.

We were playing hide and seek. I was looking at her from behind a tree. She was so beautiful, with the prettiest smile on her face, looking for me happily. I couldn't hide anymore. I wanted her to find me. I wanted to hold her in my arms and kiss her face gently. I started to show myself to her, but, suddenly I saw three men -with black coats and ugly faces - watching from the shadows near my daughter. I stepped back. I wanted to be found by my daughter, not by them. I still saw my daughter, still looking for me with her innocent smile. I didn't want to hide anymore. I wanted her to find me, but these men would take me away and put me in hell. Then I woke up, with tears on my cheeks.

I have been separated from my daughter for nearly ten months. A midnight knock at our door in August last year changed our lives dramatically. The military junta's security forces took my husband Kyaw Min Yu (also known as Jimmy) on the night of August 21, 2007. He is a leader of the prominent dissident group, the 88 Generation Students, comprising former student leaders and former political prisoners. He and other leaders were taken from their homes that night by the authorities. As a former student activist and a former political prisoner myself, I knew very well how my husband and friends would be treated in the junta's interrogation cells. Therefore, when they came back to arrest me, I went into hiding.

But I must continue to lead the 88 Generation Students with my other colleagues, so that Burma may realise its freedom, and find justice and democracy someday. I must avoid being arrested. However, there are so many difficulties and hardships in moving secretly from one hiding place to another, and I didn't want my daughter to share these hardships. Therefore, I decided to send my three-month-old baby to my parents. Now, I miss her so much.

My mind wanders to University Avenue, where "the Lady", Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has been detained under house arrest for so many years. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the world's only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize recipient, will have to spend her 63rd birthday today alone in detention. She will be missing her two sons, too. Her strength and determination helps me and many women in Burma stand up for justice. I thank her for being with us and leading our movement. She is a great reminder to the world that the military junta that rules our country forcibly separates mothers and children.

Coincidentally, the UN Security Council will hold a debate in New York today on "Women, Peace and Security". This debate is a discussion of UNSC Resolution 1325, which was passed unanimously in October, 2000. Resolution 1325 "Calls on all parties to armed conflict to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse, and all other forms of violence in situations of armed conflict." It also "Emphasises the responsibility of all States to put an end to impunity and to prosecute those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes including those relating to sexual violence against women and girls, and in this regard, stresses the need to exclude these crimes, where feasible from amnesty provisions."

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is expected to chair the debate, with many world leaders discussing the development of women, peace and security. Will they discuss Burma? Will they remember Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the women of Burma who are suffering all forms of abuse by the military junta?

Burma is now in the midst of two conflicts. One is the 50-year-old civil war, raging between the Burmese military and the minority resistance forces, predominately in the eastern part of the country. Burmese troops are raping with impunity tribal women and girls, some as young as eight years old. Burmese soldiers use women in conflict areas as porters to carry their military equipment and supplies during the day, and use them as sex slaves at night. Many women have been brutally killed to erase the evidence of these crimes.

The other conflict is a 20-year old war, waged by the Burmese junta against its own unarmed citizens, who are calling for freedom, justice and democracy. Women activists are beaten, arrested, tortured and then put in prison for many years. Many female activists are mistreated and sexually assaulted by their interrogators and jailers. Children are used as bait by the authorities to get their mothers arrested. Of the 2.5 million people severely affected by Cyclone Nargis - many of whom the military junta simply left to die through starvation and disease - at least a million are women and girls. Recently, a UN expert said that up to 35,000 pregnant women, all cyclone survivors, are at extreme risk of death. However, they will never receive any care from the military.

I hope that Secretary of State Rice and other leaders at the UN Security Council will give consideration to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the women of Burma during their debate. Resolution 1325 is a great development, but implementation and enforcement is still in question. When the government itself is the abuser of human rights and the perpetrator of rape and other forms of gender-based violence, who will protect the victims? Who will end their tragedy? Who will secure the joyful reunion of mothers with their children?

The appeasement policy of some bureaucrats is shameful. Effective and urgent action from the UN Security Council is necessary to help the women in Burma. No more debate. Take action. Please let me be happily reunited with my daughter.

nilar thein is a former student leader in the 1988 democracy uprising in Burma and spent more than nine years in prison.
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http://www.irrawaddy.org/opinion_story.php?art_id=12885

The IRREWADDY
COMMENTARY
Burma’s Bureaucratic Abyss

By YENI

Saturday, June 21, 2008

The Burmese military government’s recent moves to seal off access to the cyclone survivors in the Irrawaddy delta has proved, once again, how far Burma continues to sink into the sad image of a failed state.
 
On June 9 the Burmese generals imposed higher bureaucratic hurdles to prevent aid reaching cyclone victims, issuing strict new guidelines that instruct UN agencies and all other relief groups to first seek permission for travel and aid distribution from three separate government offices.
 
Foreigners working with relief agencies must now acquire official permits from each of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Social Welfare.
 
Burmese groups must also deal with local authorities, police and army checkpoints, and frequent requests for backhanded payments.
 
The Light Infantry Division 66 and Southwest Command have been handed the task of enforcing regulations and movement at ground level in the delta.
 
Meanwhile, soldiers continue to detain individuals "without permits" who brave taking aid to survivors of the May 2-3 storm. Prominent entertainer and political activist Zarganar, who became personally involved in leading relief operations in the delta, was arrested and imprisoned on June 4.
 
Likewise, Zaw Thet Hwe, a former sports journal editor, who was distributing aid to cyclone survivors, was arrested on June 14 and, on the same day, seven volunteer aid workers, members of a team known as “The Group that Buries the Dead,” were also arrested after being caught burying victims of Cyclone Nargis.
 
To date, the Burmese authorities have not confirmed where the detainees are being held and their respective families have expressed concern about their disappearances. 
 
Observers have suggested that their arrests are linked to a continuing trend by overseas Burmese and international supporters to send their donations to grassroots organizations led by respected, trusted persons inside Burma, such as Zarganar, and not to state-run charities.
 
The government mouthpiece New Light of Myanmar announced on June 16 that all local donations should be made through the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Subcommittee of the National Disaster Preparedness Central Committee and its district and township offices.
 
Many private donors said they are now discouraged from being involved in relief efforts due to the obstacles created by the military authorities.
 
As a result, Buddhist monks again find themselves playing a key role in civil society¬by acting as a conduit between private donors and those in need. Buddhist monasteries have been serving as places of refuge and care ever since the cyclone struck on May 2-3. Neglected by state agencies, cyclone survivors were usually able to find shelter, food, medical care and compassion in local monasteries.
 
As a further concern, it is widely feared that Burma's food security will be at risk if farmers in the delta can’t resume growing rice this year. The rice-planting season should have started by early June, when farmers in Burma typically plow their fields with water buffalo and prepare to plant new seeds for the October harvest. But time is running out, experts warn.
 
The Burmese regime’s incessant foot-dragging and bureaucratic obstacles are blocking the capacity for people in the delta to recover. Now there are real fears that a fresh stream of refugees will start seeking a better life in Thailand in the near future.
 
The regime's imprudent actions are leading an already impoverished country downhill into a socio-economic abyss.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/opinion/11albright.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

June 11, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor

The End of Intervention

By MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT

Washington

THE Burmese government’s criminally neglectful response to last month’s cyclone, and the world’s response to that response, illustrate three grim realities today: totalitarian governments are alive and well; their neighbors are reluctant to pressure them to change; and the notion of national sovereignty as sacred is gaining ground, helped in no small part by the disastrous results of the American invasion of Iraq. Indeed, many of the world’s necessary interventions in the decade before the invasion — in places like Haiti and the Balkans — would seem impossible in today’s climate.

The first and most obvious reality is the survival of totalitarian government in an age of global communications and democratic progress. Myanmar’s military junta employs the same set of tools used by the likes of Stalin to crush dissent and monitor the lives of citizens. The needs of the victims of Cyclone Nargis mean nothing to a regime focused solely on preserving its own authority.

Second is the unwillingness of Myanmar’s neighbors to use their collective leverage on behalf of change. A decade ago, when Myanmar was allowed to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, I was assured by leaders in the region that they would push the junta to open its economy and move in the direction of democracy. With a few honorable exceptions, this hasn’t happened.

A third reality is that the concept of national sovereignty as an inviolable and overriding principle of global law is once again gaining ground. Many diplomats and foreign policy experts had hoped that the fall of the Berlin Wall would lead to the creation of an integrated world system free from spheres of influence, in which the wounds created by colonial and cold war empires would heal.

In such a world, the international community would recognize a responsibility to override sovereignty in emergency situations — to prevent ethnic cleansing or genocide, arrest war criminals, restore democracy or provide disaster relief when national governments were either unable or unwilling to do so.

During the 1990s, certain precedents were created. The administration of George H. W. Bush intervened to prevent famine in Somalia and to aid Kurds in northern Iraq; the Clinton administration returned an elected leader to power in Haiti; NATO ended the war in Bosnia and stopped Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign of terror in Kosovo; the British halted a civil war in Sierra Leone; and the United Nations authorized life-saving missions in East Timor and elsewhere.

These actions were not steps toward a world government. They did reflect the view that the international system exists to advance certain core values, including development, justice and respect for human rights. In this view, sovereignty is still a central consideration, but cases may arise in which there is a responsibility to intervene — through sanctions or, in extreme cases, by force — to save lives.

The Bush administration’s decision to fight in Afghanistan after 9/11 did nothing to weaken this view because it was clearly motivated by self-defense. The invasion of Iraq, with the administration’s grandiose rhetoric about pre-emption, was another matter, however. It generated a negative reaction that has weakened support for cross-border interventions even for worthy purposes. Governments, especially in the developing world, are now determined to preserve the principle of sovereignty, even when the human costs of doing so are high.

Thus, Myanmar’s leaders have been shielded from the repercussions of their outrageous actions. Sudan has been able to dictate the terms of multinational operations inside Darfur. The government of Zimbabwe may yet succeed in stealing a presidential election.

Political leaders in Pakistan have told the Bush administration to back off, despite the growth of Al Qaeda and Taliban cells in the country’s wild northwest. African leaders (understandably perhaps) have said no to the creation of a regional American military command. And despite recent efforts to enshrine the doctrine of a “responsibility to protect” in international law, the concept of humanitarian intervention has lost momentum.

The global conscience is not asleep, but after the turbulence of recent years, it is profoundly confused. Some governments will oppose any exceptions to the principle of sovereignty because they fear criticism of their own policies. Others will defend the sanctity of sovereignty unless and until they again have confidence in the judgment of those proposing exceptions.

At the heart of the debate is the question of what the international system is. Is it just a collection of legal nuts and bolts cobbled together by governments to protect governments? Or is it a living framework of rules intended to make the world a more humane place?

We know how the government of Myanmar would answer that question, but what we need to listen to is the voice — and cry — of the Burmese people.

Madeleine K. Albright was the United States secretary of state from 1997 to 2001.

Plague of rats devastates Burma villages

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/2169388/Myanmar-Plague-of-rats-devastates-Burma-villages.html

By Nick Meo

Last Updated: 3:10PM BST 21/06/2008

After the fury of Cyclone Nargis, a new disaster looms in Burma: packs of rats that swarm through the hills once every 50 years have consumed everything in their path, reducing thousands of poor farmers to the verge of starvation.

The rat plague strikes twice a century, when the bamboo forests flower

Villagers believe the bamboo seeds are a rodent aphrodisiac

 

Burma's latest human disaster is unfolding almost unseen by the outside world in the jungle-covered mountains of Chin State, far to the north of the Irrawaddy Delta where 134,000 people died last month.

The plague of rats happens twice a century when bamboo forests produce flowers and seeds, then wither and die for five years in a phenomenom locally known as mautam or bamboo death. Villagers believe the bamboo seeds are a kind of aphrodisiac for the rodents, whose numbers explode until all the seeds have been eaten. Then they turn on villagers' rice stocks, stripping ripening corn and paddy in the fields and even digging up seeds at night after farmers plant them.

The regime's generals will permit no food aid or humanitarian workers into affected areas of the strategically important region in a repeat of their callous refusal last month to permit emergency aid sitting in foreign ships off Burma's coast to be distributed to cyclone survivors.

Exiled Chin leaders say that villagers who are too weak to flee over the border with India have already begun to die. They fear that thousands more now face a lingering death in the deep bamboo forests where most of the state's million-strong population of Christian tribal people live far from roads or towns.

The Chin, one of Burma's many minority ethnic groups, are under the brutal rule of occupying soldiers from the Burma Army who terrorise civilians and sporadically fight Chin guerrillas. The soldiers have made the food shortage worse by stealing rice and forcing villagers to work as conscripted labourers. Cheery Zahau, 27, from the Women's League of Chinland, met William Hague and Gordon Brown in London this week to ask for British help.

She said: "The reports that are trickling out to India are heartbreaking. They tell of dehydrated children dying of diarrhoea and the poorest and weakest being left behind as stronger villagers start to escape over the border to where there is food. We don't really know what is happening deep inside Chin State where there are no telephones or roads. We fear that thousands will die if no help is made available."

Villagers roast rats they catch on sticks, but that food source rapidly disappears when the rodents have eaten everything in the village and move on.

In Mizoram State in India and the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, similar rat plagues in the last few months have also stripped fields bare after the flowering of the Melocanna Baccifera bamboo. Unlike Burma those governments have put work and food programmes in place to aid villagers.

Benny Manser, 24, a photographer from Aylesbury, slipped across the international border from Mizoram State last month to visit affected villages.

He said: "We saw stick-thin children and old women who hardly had the strength left to dig up roots to eat. Villagers were telling of vast packs of rats, thousands strong, which would turn up overnight out of the bamboo thickets and eat everything in sight."
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Burmese Endure in Spite of Junta, Aid Workers Say
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/world/asia/18myanmar.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Rapport, for The New York Times

Kyi Kyi Aye, 51, pumped water late last month from one of the few remaining wells in her town near Yangon, Myanmar, after a cyclone devastated the country.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: June 18, 2008

YANGON, Myanmar — More than six weeks have passed since Cyclone Nargis swept through the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Myanmar, leaving a trail of flattened villages and broken lives and arousing international sympathy that turned to anguish as the military government obstructed foreign aid.

Burmese saved by survival instincts
http://news.scotsman.com/world/Burmese-saved-by-survival-instincts.4210686.jp

SPECIAL REPORT FROM RANGOON

SEVEN weeks have passed since Cyclone Nargis swept through the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Burma, leaving a trail of flattened villages and broken lives and arousing international sympathy that turned to anguish as the military government obstructed foreign aid.
While it is estimated that the cyclone may have killed 130,000 people, the number of lives lost subsequently is much lower than at first feared, in part because of the resilience of villagers used to coping with a brutal junta.

Reports from Burma,ADVERTISEMENTobtained despite heavy media restrictions which don't allow this journalist to give their name, find relief workers continuing to criticise the government's secretive posture. They say the main problems include an obsession with security, restrictions on foreign aid experts, and weeks of dawdling that has left bloated bodies befouling waterways and survivors marooned with little food. But the specific character of the cyclone, the hardiness of villagers and aid efforts by private citizens have helped prevent further death and sickness, according to aid workers.

Most of the people killed by the cyclone, which struck on May 2-3, drowned. But those who survived were not likely to need urgent medical attention, doctors have said.

"We saw very, very few serious injuries," said Frank Smithuis, manager of the mission of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Burma. "You were dead or you were in OK shape."

The cyclone swept away bamboo huts throughout the delta; in the hardest hit villages, it left almost no trace of habitation. Some survivors carried away by floods found themselves many miles from home when the waters receded. But those who survived were not likely to be injured in the aftermath by falling rocks or collapsing buildings, as often happens during natural disasters, like the recent earthquake in China.

That appears to be the primary reason villagers were able to stay alive for weeks without aid. As they waited, the survivors, most of whom were fishermen and farmers, lived off of coconuts, rotten rice and fish. "The Burmese people are used to getting nothing," said Shari Villarosa, the highest-ranking US diplomat in Burma. "I'm not getting the sense that there have been a lot of deaths as a result of the delay."

The United States has accused the military government of "criminal neglect" in its handling of the disaster caused by the cyclone. Privately, many aid workers have, too.

But relief workers say the debate over access for foreigners and the refusal of the government to allow in military helicopters and ships from the US, France and Britain overshadowed a substantial relief operation carried out mainly by Burmese citizens and monks. They organised convoys of trucks filled with drinking water, clothing, food and construction materials that poured into the delta.

"It's been overwhelmingly impressive what local organisations, medical groups and some businessmen have done," said Ruth Bradley Jones, second secretary in the British Embassy in Rangoon, Burma's largest city. "They are the true heroes of the relief effort."

Aid workers emphasise that of the estimated 2.4 million Burmese seriously affected by the storm, thousands remain vulnerable to sickness and many are still without adequate food, shelter and supplies.

But their ailments are, for now, minor. Medical logs from MSF show that of the 30,000 people the group's workers treated in the six weeks after the cyclone, most had flesh wounds, diarrhoea or respiratory infections.

For several weeks after the disaster, the government prevented all but a small number of foreigners from entering the delta. Now a more comprehensive picture of the damage is being assembled by a team of 250 officials led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The officials plan to release their findings this week.

The number of people killed in the storm may never be known. The government has not updated its toll since May 16, when it said 77,738 people were killed and 55,917 were missing.

In a country that has not had a full census in decades, it is not even certain how many people had been living in the area before the storm. Itinerant people who worked in the salt marshes and shrimp farms were probably not counted among the dead, aid workers say.

But it is clear that in many villages, women and children died in disproportionate numbers, said Osamu Kunii, chief of the health and nutrition section of Unicef in Burma.

"Only people who could endure the tidal surge and high winds could survive," Kunii said. In one village of 700, all children under the age of seven died, he said.

With only minimal food supplies in villages, aid workers say, delta residents will require aid until at least the end of the year. The United Nations, after weeks of haggling with Burma's government for permission to provide assistance, is now using 10 helicopters to deliver supplies to hard-to-reach places and alerting relief experts at the earliest sign of disease outbreaks.

Still, the military government continues to make it difficult for aid agencies to operate. Earlier this month, the government issued a directive that accused foreign aid agencies and the United Nations of having "deviated from the normal procedures". The government imposed an extra layer of approvals for travel into the delta, effectively requiring that all foreigners be accompanied by government officials.
------------------------------
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/20/AR2008062003171_pf.html

Frustrated Burmese Organize Aid Forays
Ad Hoc Groups Formed In Cyclone's Aftermath, But Causes May Widen

Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 21, 2008; A01

RANGOON -- Seven weeks after huge swaths of Burma were savaged by a cyclone and tidal wave, a new and remarkable citizen movement is delivering emergency supplies to survivors neglected by the military government's haphazard relief effort.

The scores of ad hoc Burmese groups, many of them based here in the country's largest city, are not overtly political. But they are reviving a kind of social activism that has been largely repressed by successive military rulers here.

Defying roadblocks and bureaucratic obstruction, volunteers have reached devastated villages in many parts of the Irrawaddy Delta, dropping off food, drinking water and other essentials and bringing back photos that contradict claims in the state media that life is returning to normal.

Some members of the groups say they hope to keep working together when the cyclone damage is finally repaired and turn toward other activities that carry shades of political activism in this tightly controlled state.

With residents' frustration over the official relief effort mounting, pledges of support and donations to the National League for Democracy, the main opposition group in Burma, also called Myanmar, have doubled since the cyclone, according to a student leader of the league.

The storm, which came ashore on the night of May 2-3, killed an estimated 134,000 people and created severe hardship for 2.4 million more. The country's deeply xenophobic junta turned aside many offers of foreign help, agreeing to let in substantial numbers of international aid workers only after U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon flew to the country May 22 with a personal appeal.

By then, however, homegrown groups were already mobilized, working to offset the tragic shortcomings of the government operation.

Down a street lined with gold and ruby merchants, where dealers charm clients over tiny tables set with tea and chess, employees in the back room of a gem shop one recent morning were swapping evidence: photos of rotten government food handouts.

A week earlier, people in the shops said, more than a dozen local jewelers had loaded 100 bags of rice, 20 bags of beans, tarpaulins and blankets onto a truck donated by a supplier and set off at midnight for the storm-ravaged town of Labutta.

They returned with photos of homeless villagers lining up for tins of food at a makeshift camp, a tear-stained boy who, they said, had lost his entire family to the storm's fierce tidal surge, and rotten rice -- yellow, fist-size chunks of it, piled like rocks in bags donated by the government-affiliated Myanmar Red Cross.

"When I saw what they were being fed, I was shaking I was so angry," said a shop assistant, 26, narrating each photo as she passed it to a customer.

The informal organizations are often based on occupation. Artists, doctors, students and the gem dealers have formed separate groups. In other cases, the groups are made up of friends coming together to help.

A 27-year-old lawyer trainee said he and five friends were furious when they tried to distribute supplies around the ruined town of Bogalay about a week after the cyclone but were turned away by local authorities who told them they needed a permit.

"They say they are giving these things to the people, but we know they aren't," he said, pointing at a photo in the state daily newspaper, the Mirror, that showed a relief camp with neat rows of tents and tables laden with food. "We know not to believe them."

In the weeks immediately after the cyclone, a doctor recounted, he closed his private medical clinic for twice-weekly trips to the delta with others. There, they noticed local officials shooing away desperate children, many of them orphaned or suffering storm-related trauma.

So the doctors, four of whom are pediatricians, tried to entertain the children to keep their minds occupied. They held a sanitation workshop after noticing that there were no visible efforts to instruct people in basic hygiene.

"The Ministry of Health is trying, but they're not effective, not organized," the physician said.

Like many other residents, the doctor can't afford to take many more days off work, but he still meets with the group every week. He said he hopes to translate the momentum of its cyclone relief work into other efforts, operating under cover of medicine.

"I'm not political; I'm a community-based activist," the doctor said, when asked how his group could keep working and turn from cyclone relief to other activities, such as organizing debates on health care.

"Now we're seeing the time of civil society. Now thousands of small groups are helping any way they can," said a magazine editor, who pooled funds with other journalists and artists in the hope of purchasing 1,000 shortwave radios so delta survivors could receive uncensored foreign news broadcasts. In the end, the group could afford only 50 but managed to distribute them in villages.

The back page of the Mirror and the New Light of Myanmar daily tells readers that "everybody may make donations freely . . . to any person or any area." But nearly a dozen people interviewed offered firsthand or secondhand tales of confiscation or obstruction by local authorities.

A surgeon said he and his group of medical and psychology students were prevented from handing out food at a monastery near the town of Dedaye to about 1,000 refugees who had been sheltering inside. A general there wanted to be seen to hand out the food first, the surgeon said.

A lawyer said he had set out on a relief trip to the delta town of Kyunpangong with five friends, but every box of goods they brought was opened and searched in front of them.

"If I had the chance, I'd occupy the whole delta and put up a sign to the authorities that reads 'Don't come here,' " said a Rangoon monk who is active in medical work. "So many people are waiting to get aid from the government, but they're having to rely instead on private donors."

In five relief expeditions to the delta or ravaged areas around Rangoon, he said, he saw military troops and police patrolling roads or monitoring checkpoints but not once helping survivors.

Since the cyclone, three people have been arrested on charges of taking photographs of the cyclone-ravaged areas and sending them to foreign news sites, and one person for marching to the offices of the U.N. Development Program to complain about government neglect, according to a lawyer monitoring their cases.

Though some private groups are keeping up their relief efforts, others are running out of steam -- and money.

Under monsoon skies one recent afternoon, porters loaded a boat berthed in Rangoon with rattan baskets of cloth, children's pajamas and bags of rice. It was sailing to the delta under the auspices of a prominent Buddhist abbot. On its previous trip, the owners had offered the boat for free. This time, said a monk directing the loading, the owner was charging.

Nearby, in a single-room apartment, 16 current and former university students crowded around a surgeon who was writing notes on a blackboard in preparation for another crack-of-dawn trip to the delta.

Later the surgeon remarked: "I think the government made a huge mistake. If they were seen to care, people would have forgiven them for the past 20 years."
---------------------------------------------------------------

http://upiasiaonline.com/Human_Rights/2008/06/18/no_show_trials_for_burmas_protestors/9582/
No show trials for Burma’s protestors

By Awzar Thi
Column: Rule of Lords

Published: June 19, 2008

 

U Ohn Than holds a solitary protest in front of the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, Burma, on Aug. 23, 2007. His sign calls for U.N. intervention in Burma, among other things.

Hong Kong, China — Nearly a week ago, the Asian Human Rights Commission issued an appeal on behalf of U Ohn Than, who is imprisoned in Kanti in upper Burma. The 60-year-old was among the few who protested last August against the government’s unannounced dramatic increase in fuel prices, precipitating the historic monk-led revolt in September.

Ohn Than went out alone, standing opposite the U.S. Embassy in the center of Rangoon with a placard that called for United Nations’ intervention and pleaded for the armed forces and police to join in efforts to topple the junta.

His protest did not last long. Within a few minutes an unidentified vehicle pulled up and a group of men threw him inside and drove away. For the public, that was it. For Ohn Than, it was only the beginning.

Ohn Than was not taken to a police station, as required by Burma’s penal code, but to a special army barracks that was used to house thousands, similarly detained without charge or procedure, in the coming days and weeks. He was kept there, a non-detainee in a non-prison.

Several months later, at the end of January, Ohn Than was finally charged with sedition, which requires that the prosecutor prove that Ohn Than had provoked “hatred or contempt” for the government, or had attempted to “excite disaffection” toward it.

Under other circumstances, this may be a difficult task, but Ohn Than was tried in a closed court, unable to present witnesses, and was denied a lawyer, making the prosecutor’s job less onerous.

Still, Ohn Than did his best to argue a case, cross-examining nine witnesses, all of them state officials and government thugs, and asking questions that were consequently struck from the record when the judge found them impertinent.

In his defense, Ohn Than said that he had not intended to incite hatred toward the state and pointed out that the wording of his silently-held placard was simply calling for democracy instead of dictatorship, and for the armed forces to uphold their dignity by siding with the people.

He also noted that a government-backed group had held a rally near the same spot in February. None of the hundred or so that had gathered had been charged with any offence. He had assumed that he had the right to do as they did.

In the end, it seemed Ohn Than’s words were of no import. The judge skipped lightly over the facts and handed down the required sentence.

Dictators have long relied upon pliable judiciaries to deal with political opponents or former allies, and in this respect Burmese courts are unremarkable. Still, whereas in many countries the courts have been used for rehearsed public performances of justice, it is not the case in Burma.

In Moscow, show trials under Stalin were highly scripted; in Beijing, the Gang of Four trial was an important part of a public and political catharsis. In each case, the performances were paramount. The law mattered little.

What is striking about the trials in Burma today is that neither the performance nor the law matters. They go on without fanfare or outside interest for no purpose other than the illegal imprisonment of persons who were already illegally imprisoned, without anyone to witness their parodies of justice other than the performers themselves.

Ultimately, it is this lack of audience that makes these trials particularly disturbing. Unable to operate with integrity, Burma’s courts do not even serve as a locale shaping and exhibiting state propaganda. Their judgments, having been stripped of both coherence and relevance, are disinterested in the police’s attention to the law, the presence of the prosecutor’s evidence, or the defendant’s defense. There is no sound, no fury, and no significance.

The significance of U Ohn Than’s case, then, is its absence. For a few fleeting moments, Ohn Than was visible on the streets outside the embassy. There was no other opportunity: no television camera recorded his testimony to the court; no newspaper declared in print the passing of his life sentence. His was the role of an actor in an uncelebrated farce, a farce repeated daily.

--

(Awzar Thi is the pen name of a member of the Asian Human Rights Commission with over 15 years of experience as an advocate of human rights and the rule of law in Thailand and Burma. His Rule of Lords blog can be read at http://ratchasima.net)

---------------------------
http://abcnews.go.com/story?id=5027778

'Everything Is Gone, We Have Nothing'

Five Weeks After Cyclone Nargis Struck Myanmar, a Reporter Finds the Burmese Still Desperate for Help

Reporter's Notebook
YANGON, Myanmar, June 9, 2008

The following dispatch was written for ABC News by a journalist who has been inside Myanmar. Out of concern for the reporter's safety, we are not revealing the author's name.

This photo taken on May 25, 2008 shows a cyclone-affected family living in temporary accommodation sheltering from the rain in the Shwepoukkan area of Yangon.

(Khin Muang Win, AFP/Getty Images)

Downed trees line the streets, their massive roots shooting into the air and their trunks blocking traffic. Repair crews trim large branches that have fallen into the streets. Piles of refuse sit untouched in front of dilapidated commercial buildings. And the city's proud pagodas show damage from the storm, their golden spires bent toward the earth, snapped in half by powerful winds.

Indeed, the deadly effects of cyclone Nargis, which tore through Myanmar more than a month ago, are clearly on display here in Yangon, the country's largest city. More than 134,000 people are estimated to have died in Myanmar, also known as Burma, and more than a million survivors remain, many of whom still lack proper food, water and shelter.

Foreign journalists are prohibited from entering this repressive country, which is ruled by a hardline military regime. But I'm posing as a tourist, reporting surreptitiously on the state of the country in the wake of the world's worst natural disaster since the 2004 Asian tsunami.

But unlike the tsunami, when the world saw the damage thanks to open media coverage -- and when governments throughout the region allowed relief groups to provide aid unfettered -- Myanmar's junta has allowed only limited access to the hardest-hit areas. Some say the government is blocking aid outright -- or simply confiscating it.

The isolated leadership, fearful and paranoid of outside influences, has been reluctant to allow access. That's why today, more than a month after the disaster, people here -- people who had little to begin with -- now have nothing at all.

I've made my way to the outskirts of Yangon, to a region in the northeast called Dagon Myothit. As my taxi driver and I bounce along the rutted road in his ancient sedan, I begin to see lines of wooden shacks that were pummeled by Nargis.

Some dwellings lack roofs altogether. Others have walls that have crumbled under the weight of the storm. Some houses are flooded and muddy water laps through the single-room dwellings.

All around, residents simply mill about. The ones who are lucky enough to have funds to purchase supplies have patched up their roofs with blue tarpaulins. But many houses remain as damaged as they were when the storm first hit.

We come to a particularly hard-hit area: the road is pure mud, and most of the homes are either washed away entirely or are barely standing. "Hello, welcome, would you like to interview me?" a man says. A hunched fellow with white hair, perhaps 60 or 65 years old, approaches me. "Look, everything is gone," he says. "We have nothing. Come talk to us."

He leads me to an open-air building where people have gathered to escape the sprinkling rain. He is a former English teacher.

People gather and begin telling me their stories. One woman says her house is gone. Children stare at me, expressionless. A man with spiky black hair shows me his shirt, which is soaking wet. "He says he's wet from the rain, since he has no roof," the old man says.

We walk toward the man's house -- or what's left of it. It's simply a tiny wooden frame. The floor is wood. The man gestures toward it, "I have nothing," he says. "I have nothing." Another man tells me that his house has similarly been destroyed, and that two of his four sisters have perished in another part of the country.

Many of the villagers sleep in a nearby school at night. The woman who runs the school says they shelter some 980 people every evening.

The villagers say an international aid group gave them the equivalent of $50 per household to rebuild, but they've used that money for food and water. Other people in Yangon tell me that the government refuses to give them donated aid, or makes villages buy it.

Dagon Myothit isn't even the hardest-hit area of Myanmar. The delta, in the south, has been ravaged, with more casualties and more damage.

Back in the taxi, on the way back into the city, my driver tells me that ever since the harrowing night of the cyclone, he's afraid to go to bed. "There was water up to my chest, but I lived," he says. "Now I can't sleep at night."

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

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Demand for the international relief teams be reached in the Irrawaddy delta and bring the Burmese Military Junta before the International Court of Justice

The United Nations, the foreign governments and the people of Burma have already known that about 150,000 people life have lost and 2.5 million lives have been remained in despair and desperate due to the deadly Cyclone Nargis which was caused on May 2, 2008, beginning at 6.00pm that stormed in from Haing-gyi Island to the Irrawaddy delta. Any where in the world, one could see that within 24 hours to 48 hours of such natural disaster, the relief workers, helicopters, vehicles and other necessities supports are involved actively immediately. But, according to the updated news media--radio broadcasting, video and photo records-- the cyclone victims in Burma did not receive adequate aids that left the victims stay in shortage of food, drinking water, shelter and communicable deceases are assuming the condition worsen in Burma, and it is hoped that all have known about this.

It is witnessed that the reason that cause the condition worsen of the cyclone victims in Burma is not because of the ignorance from international communities; but because of the Burmese military junta's lack of responsibility for its citizens, intentional ignorance, and concealing the facts and continue to work on to stable its power as a priority, and thus delaying and blocking in receiving all the incoming aids.

For such intentional acts of the Burmese junta which resulted in killing a group of people, created in a condition of genocide and is crime against humanity, therefore, it is earnestly urged the United Nations that mandate the "responsibility to protect" by sending the international relief forces and by bringing the junta before the international court of justice. The following are the evidence and items that explain in details.

Evidence (1): Although the Burmese Junta has received the news early regarding the cyclone nargis coming-in, they informed the false news to the public and they did not inform the people to relocate in advance.

It is learnt that regarding the cyclone nargis, since April 26, 2008 the weather forecasting department of India sent some kind of information to the directorate of weather forecasting of Burma. On April 28, the cyclone nigris began. On April 30, according to B. P Yadav, the spoke person of the Indian weather forecasting department, it is informed to the Burmese authority before 48 hours that there could be the cyclone with the possibility of 120 miles per hour that could come across the Irrawaddy delta.

On April 27, 2008, Dr. Bhichit Rattakul, director of Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, which was founded after the Tsunami in 2004 in Thailand, has informed to the Burmese authority that the cyclone nargis will be stormed in to Burma.

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According to Mr. Tun Lwin, the director of Burma' weather forecasting department, mentioned in Burma's Today website (Burmese news website), that he has sent to the United Nations with his own signature that the Burmese junta has already known about the would-be cyclone nargis since May 1, 2008 at about 5:30pm. As of the letter on May 1 at 5:30pm after, it is mentioned that after the report at 9pm within the 24 hours the cyclone will be getting in to nearby Pathein Township. The letter which wrote before 7am on May 2 mentioned that according to the weather forecast which made at 6am on May 2 that the cyclone was about to happen in Haing-gyi Island, with 60 miles per hour -- with central speed 120 miles and with the possibility of raising the water up to 10-12 feet.

Although the military junta has received the news early on the weather forecasting and its warning from the neighborhood countries and the department concerned director Mr. Tun Lwin, in the state-run national newspaper the news with regard to the cyclone are falsely mentioned. For example, the newspaper which was published on May 1, on the weather forecast of "Nay-Pyi-Daw May 30" it is mentioned that "according to the weather forecast and measure at today Myanmar standard time 5:30pm, the cyclone which is happening in the ocean of Bangladesh, is heading to the South-West of Pathein which is 480 miles distance away to ocean. That cyclone has not been forceful during the period of 6 hours and gradually moved to the North-East. And, that cyclone has not been forceful during the period of 12 hours and continued to slowly moving to the North-East…" Due to the cyclone, there will be raining shatteringly in Arakan State, Mon State, Karen State, Kayah State, Irrawaddy Division, Rangoon Division and Pegu Division and raining in a few particular places of Tanninsari Divisiona and Shan State. There could be some storms, raining and cause big wave. While raining hard, the storm speed could be 40-45 miles per hour. It was the false news, indeed.

The residents of Rangoon witnessed that after the cyclone nargis stormed in to Haing-gyi Island they have had a chance to see the warning of the cyclone from the television. By the time of knowing of such warning, the cyclone affected areas such as Laputta and other places have been already wiped out by the storm and the water wave.

Moreover, although the news on the cyclone warning was being informed before 48 hours, the military junta neither gave any protection nor provided the safety for those people who resided in the affected areas, neither for the emergency nor the assistance for the immediate relocation, said the local people.

It is assumed that by broadcasting the truth news of the cyclone would create people gathering and thus disturbance to the referendum which was set to held on May 10, which was the main plan of the junta. The military junta is always afraid of people gathering. Therefore, the junta could have been made the false news on the cyclone. In other words, therefore, according to the above mentioned, it is assured that the military junta has made it in order to confirm and held their plan-constitutional referendum by intentionally ignoring the facts and the lives of hundreds of thousands of the cyclone victims. Due to such failed to release the truth news on cyclone and neglect to provide the emergency relief and relocate the cyclone victims, about the lost of about 150,000 people lives and has caused 250,000 people lives despair and

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homeless were rather because of the military junta's lack of responsibility and international ignorance than the natural disaster was the main cause.

Evidence (2): Despite the relief works are not immediately activated, the constitutional referendum was held by force without any postponement

When the natural disaster happened anywhere in the world, within 24 to 48 hours the relief workers try to reach the affected areas, to discover the dead body, to save who are in danger, provide the safety and shelter camps for those who are survived; but in case of Burma the military authority has neither provided nor assisted anything to the cyclone victims for someday. The scenes have been seen in the media in which the cyclone victims narrated their sad stories and share their experiences to the reporters. The residents of Rangoon and other cyclone survivors from different places of Irrawaddy could see the appearance and artificial greetings of the Prime Minister Lt. General Thein Sein, and his fade encouragement in the television on May 4 and 5.

On the next days, only the pictures of the soldiers who were cutting off the uprooted trees, cleaning the streets and the army generals roaming around the city have been broadcasted, and the acknowledgement or coverage of the relief works are not mentioned. The soldiers cleaned the streets for the convenient of driving through the military vehicles and then the rest of sanitation works are done by the local people and monks on the basis of self reliance. The cyclone survivors were survived by the assistance and donation from the local people at the very beginning stage.

The Burmese junta was not only providing anything to the cyclone victims, but also did not postpone its constitutional referendum and held forcefully on May 10 as they have planned. Only the cyclone affected areas in the towns in the Irrawaddy and some places in Rangoon have been postponed to May 24. With regard to that tragedy event, the U.N secretary general Mr. Ban Ki-moon expressed that "it is very a sad thing for the people of Burma for such tragedy event. At the same time, it is recorded of the ruling military junta's decision to hold for the referendum." The military junta has been trying to work on the planed referendum for the stability of their power instead of providing the emergency relief effectively that caused the victims whose lives are lost and miserable due to the shortage of food and drinking water daily. Therefore, it is assured that several local victims live have lost even after the cyclone because of the ignorance and lack of responsibility by the Burmese military junta.

Evidence (3): The refusal of the international relief workers; misusing the international aids and switching the donated materials with the bad quality product

While 2.5 millions of the cyclone victims are terribly suffering and hungry for food, drinking water and sheltering, those who relief workers and humanitarian assistance have had to wait for such a long time for the approval from the military authority. Until May 8, the cyclone victims did not receive any assistance from any foreign governments, including the United Nations, except for the aids that donated directly through the local people. Since the U.N has not been so satisfied with the junta' administration over the relief fund and other aids which were donated by the foreign countries, the U.N has asked the military authority to be delivered the aids to the victims by the U.N itself. But the military authority has refused it.

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While there was a debate going on between the military authority and the foreign governments over the humanitarian aids, the military authority refused to accept the World Food Program (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) of which the relief airplane had already arrived in the airport in Rangoon on May 8 and 9, respectively. But, interestingly, the food packages which are sealed with the WFP logo are found in market in Rangoon on May 12. It is witnessed that the donated food from foreign countries such as biscuits, dry noodle from Thailand are switched with the products of the military government.

There was a meeting, of Rangoon division regiment light infantry on May 7, between Army General Myint Swe and rice traders regarding the assistance for the cyclone victims. After the meeting, it was found that the good qualities of rice which are donated from the international community are switched with local rice which are bad quality and delivered it to the victims.

On May 17, two weeks after the cyclone nargis, the military authority announced that the list of dead toll was 77738, 55917 people were still missing and 19359 people wounded. In the meantime, French Navy--Le Mistral (which was 13 miles distance from seashore), the U.S's 3 Navies led by USS Essex ( 60 miles distance) and Britain Naval--HMS Webminster (12 miles distance) were stand by to assist the victims.

But the military authority refused to those relief navies. Although the relief navies of the U.S. and British had already returned back, the relief workers are being disturbed and blocked by the military authority by any means.

Such acts of refusing the international humanitarian aids and misusing the donated materials are obstacle to reach to the victims. In comparing, that an innocent person who is shot by the AK-47 gun or an obstacle to the humanitarian aids that caused hunger to death may be basically implied to the U.N.' "Responsibility to Protect". Therefore, it is demanded that the international humanitarian aid forces be intervened in Burma immediately.

Evidence (4): Pending the relief by receiving the U.N Secretary General and the People of Burma dwindling hopes on the United Nations

Taking this tragedy event as an opportunity while people are suffering from the cyclone nargis, and instead of providing the relief emergency as the priority, the military authority have been attentively working on the constitutional referendum. The military authority somewhat concerned the raising death tolls and at the same time they were aware of the relief navies, which were approaching near the delta. It created them the fear of the intervention made by the International Community based on the ground of humanitarian. Therefore, the U.N Secretary General was allowed to stop by some of the affected areas immediately.

Priority to his visit to Burma, although the U.N Secretary General Mr. Ban Ki-moon has been trying to reach to the Snr. General Than Shwe by telephone three times there was no response at all. And, Snr. General Than Shwe did not pay attention to the

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cyclone victims. He has been made the so-called visit to the cyclone affected areas on May 19-20, just before Mr. Ban Ki-moon arrived in Burma. According to the military-run national television channel, it is realized that Snr. General Than Shwe had been greeted to the fake cyclone victims. It was a make-up show.

While Mr. Ban Ki-moon arrived in Burma, he trip was planed and brought to meet with the fake cyclone victims. It was a deception. Snr. General Than Shwe gave a promise to Mr. Ban Ki-moon that the international humanitarian aids will not be restricted and will be allowed to work freely in Burma. But, since after Mr. Ban Ki-moon went back there were no freedom of movement for the international relief workers and instead they are being disturbed by the soldier, police and members of USDA.

In reality, the military authority neither wanted any humanitarian assistance which would lead by the United Nations nor was the reason that they had allowed Mr. Ban Ki-moon, but because to lessen the pressure from the international community. Whenever the U.N intervened on whatever of the Burmese junta's inhumanly acts, for almost 20 years now, that the Burmese people have been felt some kind of dejected. Therefore, the cyclone victims were not so warmly feel well because they assumed that hindered the intervention by the international humanitarian forces, realizing the visiting schedule for the Mr. Ban Ki-moon was a trap.

There are some certain reasons why Burmese people are not happy (dwindling hopes) with the United Nations. It was because, as of the responses from the United Nations, that in every political movement in Burma after 1988 the Burmese people really hoped that the positive actions from the United Nations on Burma would be reached. But it is seemed weak and inactive.

In April 2000, former U.N Secretary General Kofi Anan appointed Mr. Razali Ismail as U.N special envoy to Burma. Mr.Razali had been to Burma 12 times. Although he had engaged a trust building and dialogue between Aung San Suu Kyi and the military junta two times, later he became the puppet of the junta and his mission was not successful. Moreover, the Burmese people distrusted on Mr. Razali as he had been associated personally with the junta for his own business and other joint ventures.

While Mr. Paolo Sergio Pinheiro who is the representative of the U.N Commission on Human Rights to Burma, visited the Insein prison in Burma and met with some political prisoners, the military intelligence secretly tape recorded him. For the U.N had failed to take action on such improper act on the U.N' mission and activities has caused the Burmese people's hope on the U.N become less and less.

Mr. Kofi Anan appointed Mr. Ibrahim Gambari, after Mr. Razali resignation, for U.N special envoy to Burma. Although Mr. Gambari had been visited five times to Burma, there were no effective efforts for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and political prisoners. He was incapable of creating the substantive dialogue between Aung San Suu Kyi and the military junta. He rather became the puppet that sank in the traps of the junta. Again, therefore, this is the reason that the Burmese people lack of trust on the U.N special envoy on Burma.

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The people in Burma were so hopefully expected as they heard the news that Mr. Gambari would come to Burma during the people demonstration against the junta in September 2007. But nothing particular response came out of Mr. Gambari visit and after his returned to U.N. The torture and killed by the military junta has still been remained. The U.N action on Burma was so weak, also this time.

The U.N. should be working on as one of the main tasks in following the promise of Snr. General Than Shwe to Mr. Ban Ki-moon which was given on May 23 that "all international relief workers will be allowed to Burma." But that agreement does not seem to be materialized. For Burmese people, it is meant that the visit of Mr. Ban Ki-moon to Burma supported the military authority's plan as it's blocked the international intervention on Burma on the ground of humanitarian aid in which was the Burmese people's hopes. Therefore, the Burmese people are not happy with his visit to Burma.

On the other side, the U.N's initiative and mediation could be considered that delayed in receiving the emergency relief by the needy victims or supported the junta's intentional ignorance on the cyclone victims. Therefore, it is earnestly demanded that the U.S, Britain, France and Germany which could effectively support and provide the relief assessment in Burma should immediately send the emergency relief forces to Burma.

Evidence (5): In the condition of Genocide and Crime against Humanity and other concerns

(5.1) Human rights violations

There was a report on human rights on cyclone victims which was published by Amnesty International after a month of the event. In that report, it is mentioned that the cyclone victims were evicted from the shelter camp by force, restriction on traveling, in order to build the polling-booth the cyclone victims are evicted by force from the shelter camp, also from the monestary, which mentioned such cases of 30. Some of those cases were as following.

On May 23 in Shwe-pauk-kan Township, the cyclone victims were evicted by telling them that the school will re-open soon and thus were given 7000 kyats to some people. On May 19, there were 30 people fear to drown due to the boat capsize, all of them were cyclone victims as they were forced to return back in Bo-galay Township. Beginning from May 19, the victims were forced to relocate in Myoung-mya, Ma-Oo-bin, Phra-pon, Laputta Townships. In Kawh-mu Township, some cyclone victims who were asking for the aids were prohibited.

(5-2) Threatening to local donators and arresting the vehicles

In the early stage, the cyclone victims were mostly survived by the support of the local community. Later, those individual and local donator's works were disturbed and blocked by the military authority. On May 25, about twenty vehicles which were returned back from Pathein Township, who helped the cyclone victims, were arrested by the military authority on the ground that they had broke the laws.

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Because of such restrictions for traveling and for the voluntary relief works, the numbers of the cyclone survivors who were died of communicable deceases were increased and also shortage of food and nutrition. In addition, Zaganar the comedian who has been devotedly working on the relief was recently arrested by the military authority without any reason.

(5-3) The cyclone surviving orphanage children are forced to recruit to Army

The UNICEF built over 50 camps particularly for the cyclone surviving children. However, according to the local relief workers in Laputta, Phra-pon and Bo-galay Townships, those surviving children who are inaccessible to the camps were taken to the army recruiting center. "According to the Radio Free Asia news on June 5, some of the children, who are orphanage age between 14-15 years, are disappeared. It is assumed that they were sent to regiment infantry no. 66."

(5-4) International Relief Workers

Snr. General Than Shwe promised that the relief experts from foreign countries will be allowed to travel freely in Burma when meeting Mr. Ban Ki-moon. In contrast, in preparing to travel to the Irrawaddy delta from Rangoon, the foreigner relief workers are experiencing with different layers of red tape bureaucrat of the military authority that created the relief workers feel uncomfortable, said Mr. Ky Luu.

Similarly, the Radio Free Asia also reported that "It has been over 35 days. There are still bureaucrat that slows the process and preparation to travel to the delta. As we know, about 50% the cyclone survivors do not receive yet the humanitarian aid.

(5-5) The cyclone victims are forced to labor

While the cyclone victims were terribly suffering and were in dire need of food and drinking water, the military authority forced to labor them for making airfield for landing the military helicopter in the villages in the Irrawady delta. Such the army infantry regiment no.66 which is stationed at Ka-don-ka-nih village of Bo-galay Township was not helpful but rather the cyclone victims were suffered because of the force labor. Moreover, while the parents were searching for their missing children and other relatives they were asked to work with a very few minimum wages, said one witness of the relief worker.

(5-6) Starving and deceases are spreading because of lack of relief assessment

One of the local people from Maw-gyan Township from Irrawaddy mentioned that some people are died of dysentery, diarrhea and related deceases as the results of the people there had to eat the wet and polluted rice.

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Maung Pho Nge, 7 year and Daw Tin Yee, age over 50 years died of diarrhea who resided at Ka-na-soh village, and in Myint-to, Shwe-zin-yaw, Paung-hin-choung villages the people were suffering from the diarrhea widely, the Voice of America (VOA) reported on June 9, 2008.

Right after a week ago of the cyclone nargis, Action against Hunger (Action Contre la Faim--ACF) stated that the cyclone survivors were suffering from the shortage of nutrition and food. Those survivors had to find out their own food and also to cook for it. About 75% people there had to consume polluted water, 96% of their toilets were destroyed.

(5-7) The death bodies are not buried well and the crime rate may increase

It is found that the cyclone survivors were searched for the lost one. The death bodies were ordered to throw away, not allowing anyone to approach the death body. For those who wanted to find out the body of their relatives or dear one had to find out secretly at night time.

Out of many, more than fifteen cyclone victims were shot to dead by the soldier in Bo-galay Township. The soldiers took away the jewelleries from the death bodies. Now many death bodies are floating around Ta-Thon district of Mon State and also at the seashore. Some of the rotten death bodies remained in the wells and canals. The decease will spread widely soon. The victims who are most suffering are in the areas of where the ethnic Karen nationalities are inhabitant.

In 1990s, where there were the conflicts and combats between the Karen nationalities and the military authority in Bo-galay, the military authorities cruelly tortured and killed several innocent Karen people. It is obvious that when this tragedy event of cyclone nargis stormed in to Irrawaddy delta where these Karen people are living, the military authority had intentionally ignored to provide the emergency relief for the cyclone victims. Such ignorance could be considered in a condition of genocide. For the military junta, it could be an unfinished combat and revenge.

Our demands

All in all as mentioned above, despite the emergency relief was in dire needed, the military junta has been keeping and continuously working on the stability of its power as the first priority than providing any assistance to the cyclone victims. One could clearly see that the military junta has created, blocked and tried to control the humanitarian aids and its workers, and hide the cyclone victims so that the international community cannot find them.

The military authority's lack of responsibility and intentional ignorance, concealing the facts and reality, dedicated to the stability of power, controlling and blocking the humanitarian aids and its workers imply "crime against humanity" and set in a condition of genocide.

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Therefore, we earnestly would like to urge that the United Nations must response to such condition under the mandate of "responsibility to protect" for those cyclone victims, by sending the international emergency forces to Burma and bringing the military authorities before the international court of justice.

Sd/-

Respectfully requested,

Under the mandate of the Elected People's Representatives

Of the 1990 general elections

Date: 16^{th June, 2008}

Distribute to:

1. United Nations and all its Agencies

2. International Governments

3. Human Rights Associations

4. News Agencies

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1. NLD: Special Statement
2. HRW: Concerned Governments Should Press for Zargana's Release
3. Mizzima News: Junta shuts down pro-opposition monastery
4. Washington Post: Burma Gives 'Cronies' Slice of Storm Relief
5. East-Asia-Intel.com: Burma cyclone impacting world food supply; forced evictions make post-cyclone hell worse
6. REUTERS: Cyclone raises tuberculosis risks in Myanmar: WHO
7. AFP: Cyclone dead' wash ashore on distant Burma beach
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National League for Democracy
No. 97 (b), West Shwegondine Street
Bahan Township, Yangon

10 June 2008

Special Statement 13/06/08
(Unofficial Translation)

1.      In accordance with the Pyithu Hluttaw Election Law and the authorities’ promises after the 1990 General Election in Burma, “the Union of Myanmar Draft Constitution,” for which a referendum was conducted in Burma on 10 and 24 May 2008, was drafted illegally.   As per the Pyithu Hluttaw Election Law, the Members of Parliament elected in the 1990 General Election by the people of Burma were legally responsible for drafting the constitution.   Instead, “the Union of Myanmar Draft Constitution” was written solely by handpicked representatives and associates of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).  Officially and legally elected Members of Parliament, let alone citizens, were prohibited from reviewing or discussing the content of this constitution.  The drafting process did not provide any opportunities for political parties, ethnic nationality groups, or democratic organizations to review or critique the constitution.

2.      The above mentioned facts directly contradict the following laws and statements issued by the authorities:

a)      Section 3 of the Pyithu Hluttaw Election Law, issued with the Law Number 14/89 by the authorities on 31 May 1989, states that: “Hluttaw [Assembly] must be formed with the Hluttaw representatives who have been elected.

b)      Paragraph 12 of Statement 1/90, issued by the authorities on 27 July 1990, states that: “Section 3 of the Pyithu Hluttaw Election Law requires Hluttaw to be formed with the elected representatives of the Hluttaw from the respective constituencies.  According to this provision, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) will be held responsible for convening the Hluttaw.”

c)      Paragraph 20 of Statement 1/90, issued by the authorities on 27 July 1990, states that: “under the present circumstances, the representatives elected by the people are those who have the responsibility to draft the constitution for the future democratic state.”

3.      Prior to the referendum, the draft constitution’s content was not explained to or discussed with voters through State media sources, such as the daily newspaper or radio and television programming.  The draft constitution was not for sale or available for people to read and study it throughout many State and Division townships.  The draft constitution was issued without collecting or incorporating people's recommendations and requests and solely for approval. More importantly, the authorities held the referendum one month after releasing the draft constitution, which provided an extremely short timeframe for people to study the entire constitution.  Authorities systematically managed this process so that they could gain support for the draft constitution through injustice force.  

4.      During the fourteen (14) year National Convention period, the Chairman of the Working Committee of the National Convention determined and detailed the principles for the constitution.  This same person then became the Chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee and drafted the constitution based on the principles he established.  This same person then became the Chairman of the Referendum Convening Commission, allowing him to commit unjust and biased acts.  Other members of the Referendum Convening Commission had also participated in the National Convention or in the constitution drafting. This process was not fair or acceptable for the people.  The Referendum Convening Commission was not an independent organization but instead was completely influenced by the SPDC.

5.      Authorities violated their own Referendum Law and Technical Law by using blackmail, threats, cheating, misinformation, coercion, and persuasion to obtain votes supporting the constitution.  Authorities also disregarded the principle rule of a referendum: a secret voting system.  According to reports and documents submitted to the headquarters by State, Division, Township, and Ward/Village Organizational Committees, important facts are as follows:

a)      Authorities at all administrative levels as well as their supporting organizations had the right to organize people and propagate information freely.  However, NLD members were restricted and harassed.  NLD pamphlets and statements were seized, and NLD members were interrogated, threatened, and arrested using Law Number 5/96 and Referendum Law.

b)      Advanced voting ballots were distributed by each polling station, and the results were fixed and controlled to secure supporting votes.  Advanced voting ballots were collected from civil servants, workers, civilians and Cyclone Nargis victims, which violated the provision in the Referendum Law that only granted advanced voting privileges to people who had to travel, were sick, were disabled, or were elderly.

c)      People who wanted to vote against the constitution faced many threats from authorities including but not limited to: a three year prison sentence and a 300,000 kyat fine, trial, confiscation of their farms and their businesses, being fired from their jobs, being expelled from school, and being required to report how other people voted.

d)      Police officers in uniform and members of organizations supported by authorities were present at various polling stations.

e)      Police officers permitted voters who wanted to cast “Yes” votes and prevented voting by people who wanted to cast “No” votes.

f)        Voters were forced to vote using pre-marked “Yes” ballots.

g)      One family/household member was required to cast votes on behalf of the entire family/household

h)      One person representing the authorities cast votes on behalf of a large group of people formed by the authorities.

i)        Polling station and Referendum Commission staff cast “Yes” votes for some voters.

j)        Commission members cast additional “Yes” votes in the ballot boxes.

k)      Some polling stations closed early and prior to 4:00pm, which was prohibited by the Referendum Law.

l)        The people were prevented from seeing the counting of “Yes” votes, “No” votes, and invalid votes at all levels of the commissions.

m)    At some polling stations, “No” votes were burned or destroyed

6.      Section 23 of Chapter 9 of the Referendum Law states that: “after the Referendum, the Commission must announce the Referendum result by combining and accounting for votes by all eligible votes at all locations.”  However, the Referendum Commission declared the result on 15 May 2008 by issuing Statement Number 10/2008, which stated that: “The result of the previous referendum was 92.4 percent supportive votes.”  This statement disregarded the Referendum Law, as it was announced before the referendum was held for the people living in the forty-seven (47) Townships affected by Cyclone Nargis. 

7.      The record and list of eligible voters was collected before Cyclone Nargis.  However, that list was no longer valid after the storm devastated the seven (7) Irrawaddy Division Townships on 2 and 3 May 2008 and left thousands of people dead and missing.  The Cyclone also destroyed many national identity cards.  The authorities did not revise their list of eligible voters; thus, the “Yes” votes in Irrawaddy Division cannot be vindicated.

8.      The referendum does not represent the real will of the people, as it was neither free nor fair.  A constitution is a contract between the ruler and the ruled.  In this respect, because the referendum is not representative of the people’s free will, its results are automatically nullified according to international law and standards.  A contract cannot be ratified based on unlawful acts.

9.      The Referendum Convening Commission issued Statement 12/2008 on 26 May 2008 and declared the referendum’s result approving ‘the Union of Myanmar Draft Constitution.’  The State Peace and Development Council issued Statement 7/2008 on 29 May 2008 declaring that ‘the Union of Myanmar Constitution’ was approved.  However, these declarations were not legal or lawful, as the referendum violated provisions in the above mentioned laws and statements.  The National League for Democracy, mandated by the people during the free and fair 1990 General Election in accordance with the Pyithu Hluttaw Election Law, does not accept ‘the Union of Myanmar Constitution.’ 

As per the decision in the meeting of the Central Executive Committee held on 6 June 2008.

Central Executive Committee
National League for Democracy

Yangon  
(Unofficial Translation)
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Human Rights Watch
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/06/13/burma19130.htm

Burma: Free Celebrity Activist Critical of Aid Response
Concerned Governments Should Press for Zargana's Release

(New York, June 13, 2008) – Burma’s military government should immediately free detained activist Zargana and permit him to continue distributing aid unhindered to communities affected by Cyclone Nargis, Human Rights Watch said today.

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To arrest one of Burma’s most famous public figures for talking to the media at the time he was distributing aid shows the Burmese government is more concerned with controlling its citizens than assisting them.
Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch
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Zargana, a famous comedian and social activist in Burma, was arrested on June 4 after giving interviews to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the exile magazine The Irrawaddy about shortcomings in the government’s aid efforts and the slow response by United Nations agencies.

“To arrest one of Burma’s most famous public figures for talking to the media at the time he was distributing aid shows the Burmese government is more concerned with controlling its citizens than assisting them,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Countries genuinely concerned about Burma should be pressing the government for Zargana’s immediate release.”

During his arrest, officials searched Zargana’s house, seizing foreign currency and videos of the cyclone and the September 2007 protests in Rangoon. He is reportedly being held and questioned at an interrogation center in downtown Rangoon. Zargana’s network of more than 400 volunteers had reached some villages affected by the cyclone and had been distributing urgently needed food aid.

Zargana, the performing name of Maung Thura, was previously detained for a year following the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma. In 1990, the authorities jailed him for four years for making political speeches, and they have routinely harassed him by banning some of his movies and performances. For instance, the health ministry stopped a planned public health benefit involving Zargana and others on World AIDS Day on December 1, 2006 at a clinic for people living with HIV.

Police arrested Zargana again in September 2007 for publicly supporting the protests by monks, and detained him for 20 days. During his detention in 2007, Zargana was initially detained at the City Hall, but authorities subsequently moved him to Thanlyin, the Government Technical Institute, and then Insein Prison. Upon his release, Zargana told Human Rights Watch about the experience. He believed he was moved frequently to keep him out of contact with other prisoners. In Insein Prison, Zargana was held in solitary confinement in the so-called “War Dog” compound. The compound, which has nine cells, has been used for holding other prominent political prisoners such as activist from the ’88 Generation student movement, Than Tin, and National League for Democracy member, Myint Soe.

Zargana’s cell in 2007 was cramped (7 feet by 7 feet), poorly ventilated, isolated and guarded by some 30 dogs. Zargana slept on a thin mat on the floor. The iron bar door was covered with a large steel plate with only a small opening at the bottom of the cell. Zargana could not see or hear anything. A 40-watt light bulb in the room came on infrequently throughout the night, attracting mosquitoes. Burmese authorities held Zargana there for eight days, and did not permit him to bathe until the fourth day of his detention. There was no toilet or water – Zargana had to relieve himself on a tray. When it became full, he tried to urinate under the door, but the dogs tried to bite him.

Upon his release, Zargana spoke with foreign journalists and was subsequently re-detained for several days.

On October 28, 2007, the authorities compelled him to sign a pledge stating he would not talk to the media as a condition of his release. It is widely believed that authorities are holding Zargana for breaking this pledge in speaking to the BBC. Human Rights Watch expressed concern that Zargana could be subjected to the same deplorable prison conditions now, and urged governments to press the Burmese authorities to immediately release him. Zargana’s family has been unable to visit him since his arrest. It is unclear if the authorities have filed any charges against him.

In 1991, Zargana received the Hellman/Hammett Prize, given by the Fund for Free Expression, a committee organized by Human Rights Watch.

Since the visit of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the international pledging conference on May 25 in Rangoon, the Burmese government has eased visa restrictions for personnel from UN agencies and international humanitarian agencies to permit them to enter Rangoon. However the government has been inconsistent in its approach to aid, allowing some aid and workers into the Irrawaddy Delta region while blocking others, including some Burmese individuals and groups (http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/06/12/burma19124.htm).

“The outrageous arrest of Zargana, for speaking the truth about government hindrance of aid to cyclone victims, makes a mockery of the claim that handing out of a few visas is a ‘breakthrough,’” said Adams.
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Junta shuts down pro-opposition monastery

Mizzima News
Saturday, 14 June 2008 18:05

The Burmese military junta authorities sealed a pro-opposition Buddhist monastery in Rangoon yesterday.

The township chairman and security forces arrived at the Sasana Theikpan monastery compound of Chauk Htut Gyi pagoda, Bahan Township on Friday morning and told monks they would close the monastery until an official announcement by the new head of monastery was made.

Security forces told the monks that they had come with an order from the Rangoon military commander Brigadier General Hla Htay Win.

"They locked the door of the monastery with a lock they brought with them at 5 p.m. yesterday," a monk from Sasana Theikpan told Mizzima.

The monk believed that it was a ruse and he did not expect the monastery to be reopened. Three monks of Sansana Theikpan are taking temporary shelter in two nearby monasteries.

The former head of the Sasana Theikpan monastery died recently and dozens of pro-democracy opposition activists attended the funeral service on June 7 even as the authorities monitored the funeral service.

About a hundred pro-government civil militia of the Swan Arr Shin and members of Union Solidarity Development Association were standing by to crackdown, activists told Mizzima.

Buddhist monasteries were raided and some were sealed during and after monks led a mass uprising against the government in September 2007.

Sasana Theikpan and Sasana Gonye were among the monasteries raided by security forces in Bahan Township. The latter has been shut down since the raid.
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Burma Gives 'Cronies' Slice of Storm Relief
On Magazine's List of Junta's Chosen Tycoons Are Some Facing U.S. Sanctions

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2008; A16

Just seven days after Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma last month, the ruling military junta parceled out key sections of the affected Irrawaddy Delta to favored tycoons and companies, including several facing sanctions from the U.S. Treasury, according to a Burmese magazine with close ties to the government.

Some of the most notorious business executives in Burma, including Tay Za and Steven Law, also known as Tun Myint Naing, were given control of "reconstruction and relief" in critical townships, under the leadership of top generals. Tay Za was identified by Treasury as a "regime henchman" this year when it slapped economic sanctions on hotel enterprises and other businesses he owns.

All told, more than 30 companies and 30 executives are to divide up the business in 11 townships in areas affected by Nargis, according to the report.

The document in the magazine is dated May 9, a time when the United Nations, aid groups and many countries were pleading with the Burmese government to allow access to affected areas in the aftermath of the storm, which killed as many as 130,000 people and left 2.5 million without homes. Despite promises of greater openness, the Burmese rulers have continued to impose restrictions on aid relief, including new and onerous identification requirements for aid workers, according to reports from the region.

The document, which includes the cellphone numbers for many of the executives, was published in the Voice, a weekly journal published by Nay Win Maung. A translation was provided by BIT Team, a group of India-based Burmese who try to promote information technology in the xenophobic country.

Nay Win Maung is a son of a military officer and was brought up among Burma's military elites, giving him good connections to military insiders. His magazines can access government-related news and exclusive information.

"The Treasury is targeting the regime's cronies, and the regime wants its cronies to get the money," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "They see it as an opportunity to profit from the international community's compassion. But these are not experts in providing relief; they are experts in running guns and drugs and making a lot of money."

Efforts to reach Burmese representatives in Washington last night were unsuccessful. The cellphone number listed for Steven Law in the Voice was answered by an associate who said he was not available.

While some of the executives awarded contracts are well known to human rights activists and financial-crime experts, others are less prominent, potentially making the document a guide to the individuals currently in favor with the military leadership.

The government estimated it needed more than $11 billion in reconstruction aid shortly after the May 2-3 cyclone, a figure that met with a cool reception at an international donors conference in Rangoon three weeks ago. Burma, also known as Myanmar, is rich in natural resources, but much of the country is desperately poor. The junta has enriched itself with natural gas fields that bring in about $2 billion in annual revenue, as well as trade in jewels, heroin, amphetamines, timber and small arms.

Some of the conglomerates given business in the delta, such as Law's Asia World and Tay Za's Htoo Trading, were also tasked with building the country's new capital at Naypyidaw, more than 200 miles from the old capital of Rangoon. With little notice three years ago, the junta uprooted the capital to a remote area, requiring massive construction of new government buildings, hotels and housing for civil servants.

Much of the country, in fact, is a forced labor camp, with more than 60 prisons, labor camps and detention centers, according to a report this year by the Burma Fund, an anti-government activist group. People forced into construction are paid minimal wages, if at all.

Hlaing Sein, an officer with the London-based Burma Campaign UK, said that Htoo Trading, which was given control of Heingigyum and Ngaopudaw townships, forced cyclone victims to work for 800 kyat a day, roughly 70 cents, in order to meet a government order to reopen schools by June 2. But a quart of water in the delta now costs the equivalent of $1.50, she said.

The Treasury sanctions against Tay Za, Law and other junta cronies -- and some of their companies -- freezes their assets and prohibits all financial and commercial transactions by U.S. entities with the designated companies and individuals, as part of an effort to break up their financial networks. The Treasury has released detailed charts about the financial links among the junta and Tay Za, Law and related associates.

Tay Za, whose businesses include timber, palm oil and aviation, is said to be close to Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the junta leader, in part because of his habit of hiring the children of powerful generals. The Bangkok Post recently reported that though no public warnings were made about the approaching cyclone, air force fighters and private passenger planes from Bagan Air -- believed to be a joint venture between Tay Za and Than Shwe's family -- were moved the evening before the storm from Rangoon airport to Mandalay, which was not in its path.

Friday, June 13, 2008 East-Asia-Intel.com
Burma cyclone impacting world food supply; forced evictions make post-cyclone hell worse

The military officers who have run the Burmese (Myanmar) economy for the past half century has little to show for their efforts. Endowed with vast raw materials and agricultural resources — the latter made Burma in colonial times the world’s No. 1 rice exporter — the economy has fallen to almost subsistence levels.

The effects of Cyclone Nargis in early May have not only added new misery for the country’s 50 million people but have negated rice exports needed by neighboring countries and contributing to the global food crisis. The storm hit hardest in Burma’s main rice-growing region in the isolated Irrawaddy Delta, where some 2 million people were driven from their homes and farmland.


Locals gather in front of a damaged monastery in Laputta, Burma, on June 9, 2008. AP

Now comes word from human rights organizations that the military is driving displaced villagers from temporary camps set up in the continuing heavy monsoon rains, and is attempting to get them back on their salt water-logged fields to begin the recuperation of the paddy.

Human rights groups say that forced evictions — involving churches, monasteries, schools and other public buildings — are putting lives at risk and flouting international principles of humanitarian relief. Amnesty International reports 30 cases since May 19 of forcible removals of thousands of people who sought temporary shelter.

The force of the storm was so great that local stocks of food were destroyed. The few foreign refugee workers the regime has permitted to enter have described heart-rending stories of many displaced villagers trying to capture a few grains of rice out of inundated areas filled with decaying human corpses and animal carcasses.

The regime has permitted only minimal outside aid. And much of that, apparently, has been diverted to the military itself. Four American naval vessels that happened to be in the region on exercises when the storm struck waited for several weeks before gaining permission to enter the Delta area with small boats carrying water, emergency food and emergency items. The generals apparently fear exposure to foreign aid would strengthen opposition forces and their leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of a founding father of the post-colonial nation and political prisoner for more than a decade.
Humanitarian organizations, including the UN World Food Program, were operating in Burma before the cyclone struck, providing food aid to half a million people in the country where one in three children are chronically malnourished. The fear now is that the damage to the area known as the country's "rice bowl" will make a bad situation a lot worse.

Burma’s plight is already impacting world food supplies. The World Food program said that it was not yet known whether Burma would be able to meet its commitments to supply Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. If Burmese exports disappear — as now seems possible — the domino effect on Asia neighbors would be fierce. The International Rice Research Institute warned that, with the year’s second harvest imminent, weather patterns in Asia would come under unprecedented scrutiny: the freak damage caused by the cyclone will now exacerbate that.

The price of rice had already trebled across Asia this year, hitting a record $25.07 per 100 pounds on April 24. Some local market prices have risen tenfold in the past year. Several governments — including those of China and India — responded by imposing export bans. Rice is currently trading around $20.96 per 100 pounds.

If the worst conditions prevail, Burma, with a rickety food economy and impoverished population, could become a net importer of rice.
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Cyclone raises tuberculosis risks in Myanmar: WHO
 

A family look for traces of their house, on a marooned embankment, in the village of Pay Kunhnasay in the Kawhmu township May 30, 2008. (REUTERS/Aung Hla Tung)

Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – + By Laura MacInnis

 

June 10, 2008

GENEVA (Reuters) - The cyclone that devastated Myanmar last month forced many tuberculosis sufferers to stop their treatment, triggering fears of drug-resistant strains spreading, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.

more stories like this

Myanmar had 83,000 cases of the highly contagious disease in 2006 causing 6,000 deaths, according to the WHO's most recent figures for the diplomatically isolated country whose army rulers were initially reluctant to let in foreign aid workers after Cyclone Nargis hit on May 2.

The storm killed up to 134,000 people, left 2.4 million destitute, and destroyed many of the health centers which handed out antibiotics.

WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said experts from the United Nations agency would travel to cyclone-affected areas this week to track down tuberculosis patients who lost access to their drugs since the May 2 storm.

"They will go to the hospitals and health centers, look at the records, look how many people were on treatment, and then try to trace them in villages and camps," Chaib said, calling the hiatus resulting from the storm "a serious issue."

"Tuberculosis is a life-threatening disease. Interrupting a course of six-month treatment can have an effect on creating resistance to tuberculosis drugs," she said.

Any pause in a course of antibiotics can give the bacterium causing tuberculosis a chance to mutate and build up immunity to standard medicines. Drug-resistant strains can require patients to take an expensive and arduous course of pills and injections, and some types are virtually untreatable.

Even before the cyclone, the weak health system and pervasiveness of fake drugs in Myanmar were seen as potential triggers for drug-resistant tuberculosis.

While no cases of "extensively drug-resistant" or "XDR" tuberculosis have been confirmed by the WHO in Myanmar, aid workers from Medicins Sans Frontieres last year reported cases among migrants from Myanmar in neighboring Thailand, raising concerns that it may already exist in the secretive state.

Chaib said authorities in Myanmar had worked hard with the WHO in recent years to fight the respiratory disease, which spreads through the air and kills about 1.5 million people worldwide every year.

In addition to tracking patients and helping them resume treatment, WHO staff deployed to Myanmar's cyclone-affected region will also seek to bolster general health services for those displaced by the storm.

The WHO is appealing for clean water and sanitation supplies to help reduce the risks of water-borne diseases among cyclone survivors. With the monsoon season coming, the U.N. agency said it was also critical for Myanmar to take steps to prevent malaria and other diseases spread by mosquitoes.

(Editing by Caroline Drees)

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'Cyclone dead' wash ashore on distant Burma beach

Posted Sat Jun 14, 2008 8:27pm AEST

About 300 bloated and decaying corpses, apparently victims of Cyclone Nargis, have washed up on a beach in eastern Burma more than one month after the storm, a local official said.

The bodies had been found in the last week on the beach near Mawlamyine, across the Gulf of Martaban, more than 160 kilometres east of the devastated Irrawaddy delta, the official said.

More than 133,000 people were killed or are missing after the cyclone struck six weeks ago. Many were washed out to sea as a tidal surge wiped out their villages.

"About 300 dead bodies have been cremated in the last week, after they floated into Kyaikkhami and Setse beaches. They were all decomposing. Most of them appeared to be women," the official said.

"Some fishermen saw these dead bodies on the beaches and informed the authorities.

"We decided to cremate them for the sake of the environment."

Residents said that many people had moved away to avoid the grim scenes of bodies washing onto the beaches.

The descriptions recalled the devastation in the delta last month, when victims' bodies were left rotting on roadsides and floating in rice fields, where in many cases they laid for weeks.

- AFP

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TimesOnline: Burma: Than Shwe 'ordered troops to execute villagers'
BOSTON GLOBE: Cruelty and silence in Burma
VOA News: Amnesty Accuses Burma of Human Rights Abuses Since Cyclone Nargis
IPC News: BURMA: Nargis Victims Forced From Camps
FoxNews: U.N. Says Burma Forcing Cyclone Victims From Camps With No Aid
Irrawaddy: Massive Forced Evictions in Refugee Camps
ABC News: UN rights envoy pushes Burma on prison killings

--------------------------------------------------------   From The Times June 7, 2008 Burma: Than Shwe 'ordered troops to execute villagers' General Than Shwe is referred to as the ’Great Father’   Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia Editor The leader of the Burmese junta, Than Shwe, personally ordered the murder of scores of unarmed villagers and Thai fishermen, according to a senior diplomat and military intelligence officer who defected to America. Aung Lin Htut, formerly the deputy chief of mission at the Burmese Embassy in Washington, described to a radio station how 81 people, including women and children, were shot and buried on an isolated island after straying into a remote military zone in the southeast of the country in 1998. After one general hesitated to kill the civilians, fearing that the commander who had given the order was drunk, he was informed that it came from “Aba Gyi” or “Great Father” – the term used to refer to Senior General Than Shwe, the head of the junta. A few days later troops from the same military base captured a Thai fishing boat that had strayed close to Christie Island in the Mergui Archipelago. The 22 fishermen on board were also shot and buried on the island. “I was a witness to the two incidents in which a total of about 81 people were killed,” Mr Aung Lin Htut, formerly a major in military intelligence, told the Burmese language service of Voice of America. “All of them were unarmed civilians.” In 46 years of military rule in Burma, there have been numerous reports of grave human rights violations but few have been attested by so well placed a source as Mr Aung Lin Htut. They come at a time when General Than Shwe and his regime are coming under scrutiny, after their refusal to allow a full scale relief operation for the victims of Cyclone Nargis. The French Government has said that it comes close to being a “crime against humanity”, and last week Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, called it “criminal neglect”. If a tribunal like the ones established for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia is ever created for Burma, then Mr Aung Lin Htut will doubtless be called to give evidence. He sought asylum in the US in 2005, along with six members of his family, after a purge against the country’s prime minister and intelligence chief of the time by General Than Shwe destroyed the careers of a generation of intelligence officers. Given the control of information in Burma, his account is impossible to verify. But it has credibility because it is the first time since his defection that Mr Aung Lin Htut has made any public comment on his former masters. In May 1998 he was stationed on Zadetkyi island, a frontline base close to Burma’s maritime border with Thailand. The commander of the base was Colonel Zaw Min, who is now Minister for Electric Power and general secretary of the Union Solidarity and Development Association, the junta’s grassroots organisation. A unit led by the colonel landed on Christie Island and found 59 people living there to gather wood and bamboo, in violation of Burmese law. The order came back from headquarters that they were to be “eliminated”. Myint Swe, an air force general, said that he was a religious person, and that the matter should be handled delicately. He said that he was very concerned by the timing of the elimination order – just after lunch, a time when General Maung Aye, now the number two in the junta, was usually drunk. ------------------------------------------------------------------- GLOBE EDITORIAL Cruelty and silence in Burma June 6, 2008 MORE THAN a million victims of the May 2 cyclone in Burma are still without food, water, shelter, and medicine. Yet the ruling junta refused 15 requests to let the USS Essex and three support ships in the Bay of Bengal deliver aid to uprooted villagers. Finally, tragically, the four ships steamed away from Burma on Thursday, along with 22 helicopters and four amphibious landing craft that are ideally suited to bring relief supplies directly to stranded survivors. "Should the Burmese rulers have a change of heart and request our full assistance for their suffering people," Admiral Timothy Keating said, "we are prepared to help." Keating and his 5,000 sailors were eager to take on a mission of mercy, one that the American public would be sure to support and all of Asia would appreciate. What the admiral has learned - and what the rest of the world has witnessed in the past five weeks - is that the Burmese generals who deny life-saving succor to their people can have no change of heart. They are heartless. This is the gist of a report this week from Amnesty International decrying the junta's forcible evictions of cyclone survivors from schools and monasteries where they had taken shelter. It is the basic message of a United Nations report lamenting "a serious lack of sufficient and sustained humanitarian assistance for the affected populations." The crucial lesson of these alarms is that today a million people in Burma are endangered not by the vagaries of nature but by the cruelty of a military dictatorship. In other words, the cause of all that unnecessary suffering is political. Nobody should know this better than the other nine countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Yet ASEAN officials speak blithely about issuing a report on relief and recovery - at a meeting more than two weeks from now. Enough dithering. ASEAN should use its influence to push the junta to stop letting Burma's people die.  ---------------------------------------------- Amnesty Accuses Burma of Human Rights Abuses Since Cyclone Nargis Amnesty International says Burma's military government has been forcibly moving people out of the temporary shelters they moved into after Cyclone Nargis. As Ron Corben reports from Bangkok, Amnesty also raise doubts that Burma's military is standing by agreements with the United Nations to allow more international assistance into the country. People affected by cyclone Nargis wait to board boats prior to travel back to their devastated villages in Labutta, in the southwest Irrawaddy Delta, Burma, 03 Jun 2008 A new Amnesty International report says that since May 20, Burma's military government has stepped up efforts to remove cyclone survivors from temporary shelters such as schools and monasteries. The report says the survivors are forcibly returned to their homes, even if those homes no longer are standing. The United Nations says 550,000 people had been living in temporary shelters since the storm. The Amnesty report specifies at least 30 cases of forcible displacement but Amnesty officials say the actual figure could be higher. The cyclone that came ashore on May 2 killed 78,000 people and left 56,0000 missing. More than two million survivors need aid, but the United Nations estimates at least a million have received none at all. Benjamin Zawacki is a researcher with Amnesty International. He said Thursday that Burma's government failed to assist cyclone victims in part because it focused on holding a constitutional referendum. "It's refusal to deploy resources toward the victims of the cyclone and rather deploy toward holding a constitutional referendum - as well as its refusal to accept international aid and assistance - this is the pre-eminent human rights concern in the context of the cyclone - it continues to be so today," said Zawacki. The international community has condemned Burma's failure to provide aid to the storm's victims and its decision to block international relief supplies and disaster workers. After meetings with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Burma has agreed to allow in more aid workers. On Thursday, a team of 200 relief workers from ASEAN nations began arriving. USS Essex and the Essex Amphibious Ready Group steam in formation in the Andaman Sea, 23 May 2008 However, it has rejected aid from other sources, including the U.S. and French navies. Four U.S. ships have sailed away from Burma's coast after the government refused their help for three weeks. Zawacki says Burma's government, known as the State Peace and Development Council, continues to obstruct aid. "Amnesty certainly doesn't see the situation as one in which a bridge was crossed and then burned behind them and suddenly things have changed exponentially," he said. "No. I think things have indeed changed - things have indeed opened up but the obstruction and the negligence on the part of the SPDC has in fact continued one month on into June. It's simply taking different forms." Amnesty called on the international community to address the human rights dimensions of the disaster. Media reports Thursday confirmed the arrest of a popular Burmese comedian, Maung Thura, better known as Zarganar, soon after he had returned from distributing aid in the storm area. Other Burmese report having been detained by soldiers, and their goods taken away, when they tried to take private donations to the cyclone's victims. ---------------------------------------------------------------- BURMA: Nargis Victims Forced From Camps By Marwaan Macan-Markar BANGKOK, Jun 6 (IPS) - A global human rights lobby slammed Burma’s military regime for driving survivors who have endured untold hardship since last month’s powerful cyclone into further misery. Villagers making a shelter for a house in the Poeshangyi village in the Day Da Ye township. Credit:Moe Yu May/IPS The junta in Burma, or Myanmar, has forced cyclone victims out of temporary shelters, confiscated aid, and come in the way of assistance to the victims from local community groups and Burmese citizens, revealed Amnesty International (AI) in a report released this week in the Thai capital. "We are talking of thousands of people who have been forcibly displaced," Benjamin Zawacki, AI’s Burma researcher, told IPS. "They [the junta] have been targeting monasteries and schools. Most of the people forcibly displaced came from monasteries and schools." The orders to evict the victims from the cyclone shelters have come from the military regime and the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a civilian body created by the military to enforce its policies, even by force. "Both have been giving out orders; in some cases with 48 hours notice, some, 24 hours, some were asked to move immediately," Zawacki added. The over all trend is that the people have been pushed "further and further south, into the delta," Zawacki said during a press conference to launch the report. "But there is no distinct pattern." Cyclone Nargis struck Burma’s populous Irrawaddy Delta in the early hours of May 3, killing between 130,000 to possibly 300,000 people, and affecting between 2.5 million to 5.5 million people. The country’s worst natural disaster hit an 82,000 square km area that has the highest population density in the South-east Asian nation. On May 11, "cyclone survivors staying in four monasteries in Bogale, Irrawaddy Division, were made to leave by the authorities and the USDA. Many of them were forced into military trucks to Maubin, while others were simply told to go back to their villages on their own," AI’s report reveals. On May 19, in Labutta -- also one of the worst hit townships like Bogale – "local authorities forced large numbers of people aboard boats in an effort to return them to their villages in Myaungmya and Maubin townships and elsewhere," according to AI. "Beginning on or just after 19 May, authorities forcibly relocated people out of Myaungmya, Maubin, Pyapon, and Labutta, where they had been originally relocated, further south back to their original villages." "Amnesty International has been able to confirm over 30 instances and accounts of forcible displacement by the [military regime] in the aftermath of the cyclone, but anecdotal evidence from numerous sources strongly suggests a much higher number," the report adds. A similar heavy-handed approach by the junta has been on display in the distribution of aid. "Until 26 May, the [military regime] blocked all international assistance to the delta," the report notes. "Amnesty International has confirmed over 40 reports or accounts of soldiers or local government officials confiscating, diverting or otherwise misusing aid intended for cyclone victims." AI’s revelations have raised questions about the effectiveness of U.N. agencies working in a country that has been under an oppressive military grip since a 1962 coup. After all, the forced displacement of cyclone victims by the junta violates the U.N. guiding principles on internal displacement. But the world body has not ignored the concerns about forced displacement of survivors in the cyclone-affected areas, says Richard Horsey, spokesman for the U.N. Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). "The U.N., including OCHA, has said that any forced removal of people is a clear violation of international law and is unacceptable." "We are aware of reports of forced movement of people to camps and away from camps. We are also aware of camp closures," Horsey told IPS. "But these movements of people need to be verified. The important question is where they are being moved to." And given the occasion to do so, the U.N. has raised its concerns with senior officials in the regime. "There have been discussions with the authorities about the forced movement of people," Horsey added. "It was also discussed twice on May 31 and Jun. 2 during meetings [involving representatives from the regime, the U.N. and a 10-member regional bloc -- the Association of South-east Asian Nations].’’ AI’s revelations confirm the new wave of troubles that have struck the area since the cyclone -- much of it triggered by the junta’s disregard for the victims or its reluctance to ease its totalitarian grip on the country. This week, the U.N. revealed that only half of the victims have received aid a month after the disaster. And efforts by U.N. agencies and international humanitarian groups to get experts familiar with post-disaster needs into the delta have also been met with resistance from the regime. Only 20 U.N. and other foreign aid workers have been given permission to enter the delta since U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon got a commitment from the junta during meetings in late May for greater access. In fact, one international agency that appears to have overcome some of the hurdles, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors Without Borders), confirmed that the worst was far from over for the cyclone survivors in the delta. "Till now, the support is inadequate… The emergency phase is not over," says Michel Permans, of MSF International. "There are a lot of small [cyclone-hit] villages that are almost forgotten." ----------------------------------------------------------------- U.N. Says Burma Forcing Cyclone Victims From Camps With No Aid Friday , May 30, 2008 RANGOON, Myanmar  —  The military government in Burma, also known as Myanmar, is removing cyclone victims from refugee camps and dumping them near their devastated villages with virtually no aid supplies, the United Nations said Friday. In an aid agency meeting, the U.N. Children's Fund said eight camps earlier set up by the government to receive homeless victims in the Irrawaddy delta town of Bogalay had emptied as the mass clear-out of victims was stepped up. "The government is moving people unannounced," said Teh Tai Ring, a UNICEF official, adding that authorities were "dumping people in the approximate location of the villages, basically with nothing." Camps were also being closed in Labutta, another town in the delta, a low-lying area which took the brunt of Cyclone Nargis nearly a month ago. About 2.4 million are homeless and hungry after the May 2-3 cyclone hit Burma, also known as Burma. • Click here for photos. Centralizing the stricken people in the centers made it easier for aid agencies to deliver emergency relief since many villages in the delta can only be reached by boat or very rough roads. Aid workers who have reached some of the remote villages say little remains that could sustain their former residents: houses are destroyed, livestock has perished and food stocks have virtually run out. Medicines are nonexistent. The UNICEF official said that some of the refugees are "being given rations and then they are forced to move." But others were being denied such aid because they had lost their government identity cards. A senior U.N. official in Bangkok, Thailand, said he could not confirm the camp closures but added that any such forced movement was "completely unacceptable." "People need to be assisted in the settlements and satisfactory conditions need to created before they can return to their place of origins," Terje Skavdal, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters. "Any forced or coerced movement of people is completely unacceptable." There had been previous reports of forced removals, but on a scattered basis. In some cases, people were reportedly sent away ahead of visits by foreign dignitaries, and in others people were sent from schools that were to be used as voting places during a recent national referendum on a new constitution. People were also cleared out of some Buddhist temples where they had taken shelter, but in those cases apparently had been transferred to official refugee camps. Human rights and aid groups also complained Friday that Burma's military government was still hindering the free flow of international help for victims. Some foreign aid staff were still waiting for permission to enter the Irrawaddy delta while the regime continues to review entry requests for 48 hours, the groups said. One foreign aid worker attending Friday's meeting said that in practice it took at least four days to obtain permission from the Ministry of Social Welfare to travel to the delta. "The longer you want to stay, the longer it takes," he said, declining to give his name for fear of government reprisals. "The Burmese government is still using red tape to obstruct some relief efforts when it should accept all aid immediately and unconditionally," the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement. The International Red Cross was waiting for permission to send 30 of its foreign staffers into the delta. The regime has also barred naval vessels from the United States, France and Great Britain from entering Burma's waters, leaving them to wait offshore with their loads of humanitarian supplies. The French have been forced to dock in Thailand and turn over the relief goods to the United Nations for onward shipment into Burma. "By still delaying and hampering aid efforts ... the generals are showing that, even during a disaster, oppression rules," Human Rights Watch said. While welcoming millions of dollars from the international community for cyclone relief, Burma lashed out at donors for not pledging enough. State-run media decried donors on Thursday for only pledging up to $150 million — a far cry from the $11 billion the junta said it needed to rebuild. The isolationist government agreed to allow foreign aid workers in after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe last weekend. But delays continue, Human Rights Watch said. Burma's government says the cyclone killed 78,000 people and left another 56,000 missing. The country's xenophobic leaders are leery of foreign aid workers and international agencies, worrying they could weaken the junta's powerful grip. The generals also don't want their people to see aid coming directly from countries like the U.S., which the regime has long treated as a hostile power. In Singapore on Friday, Sen. Joseph Lieberman said regional superpowers India and China should exert their influence over Burma's military junta to push it toward democracy. Lieberman, who is in Singapore to attend a security conference, said he and other senators have met with the ambassadors of the two countries in Washington to convey this message.   Massive Forced Evictions in Refugee Camps By AUNG THET WINE / RANGOON Thursday, May 29, 2008 Burma’s military government has been forcibly evicting tens of thousands of refugees who lost family members, houses and property during Cyclone Nargis, which struck Burma on May 2-3. Most of the evictions have occurred in temporary shelters in Rangoon and Irrawaddy divisions.  This photo taken on May 25 shows cyclone-affected families sheltered from the rain, living in temporary accommodation along a road in the Shwe Pauk Kan area of Rangoon. (Photo: AFP) Authorities closed down several temporary camps in Rangoon on May 23, including a camps in Shwe Pauk Kan in North Okkalapa Township where 3,000 refugees were staying in temporary blue tents; tent camp No 16 Quarter of North Dagon Myo Thit at the junction of the township Peace and Development Council PDC office and Nat Sin Road bus-stop; and a camp at State High School No 2 of Dala Township. "They closed the Shwe Pauk Kan refugee camp during the evening,” said a resident of No 16 Quarter at Shwe Pauk Kan. “They forced the people to return to their homes and gave them 10 pyis of rice and 7,000 kyats (US $6.5) to each refugee. The authorities took the tents." A pyi is close to 0.25 liter. The Rangoon Division PDC issued an order that all refugee camps in Rangoon division be closed prior to May 24, said one source, who asked to remain anonymous. "They also shut down the camp in Dagon North No 16 Quarter by this order,” he said. “The authorities are also planning to shut down small temporary shelters in schools and monasteries." Authorities reportedly told refugees at No 2 State High School in Dala Township they had to leave because the school would reopen June 2. "I went there to donate some snacks to children, and they were not there anymore,” said a volunteer donor. “The neighbors said they were forcibly evicted.” Local authorities at Dala Township reportedly told refugees the emergency has now ended, and refugees must return to their villages where they should wait for assistance from the government. Refugee sources said the Padan Camp in Hlaing Thar Yar Township, a site visited by Srn-Gen Than Shwe, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other diplomats, would be closed in the near future. "There are about 10,000 refugees in the camp at inner Padan village. I have heard the camp will be demolished soon," said a refugee from inner Padan village, living at State Middle School No 7 in Hlaing Thar Yar Township. He said refugees haven't received enough food and are still waiting for outside contributions of rice. "A family is provided with two sacks of rice, two tins of cooking oil and a set of pots and pans. However, they are told not to touch the rice, oil and cooking utensils. It is for show when the authorities come and visit the site. We have to wait for other contributions for our daily food." A refugee in his 30s said most people had no where to go when they were evicted. "It is impossible to go back to inner Padan village, since the land owner would not hire us to work the land,” he said. “The land is close to the river and the flood hasn't drained yet since the cyclone hit. Water is still 2 to 3-feet deep in our village." Sources in the Irrawaddy delta said thousands of refugees from Phyapon, Myaung Mya, Bogalay and Laputta townships also have been evicted from shelters. "There were 45 camps in Pyapon Township previously but now only three remain, said a source familiar with the relief effort. Starting on May 21, refugees were told they should wait in their villages for the government's reconstruction plan and were provided with small portions of rice and 10,000 kyats ($ 8). The remaining refugees at Myaung Mya camps lack sufficient food and water, the source said. . "Most of the refugees are sheltering at the No 933 Rice Mill compound, and there are almost 3,000 refugees,” said a resident of Myaung Mya.  “These people are waiting daily for outside donors to give them rice. This camp will be closed soon." The camp at No 16 High School in Myaung Mya has been closed and authorities sent the refugees back to their villages in Laputta by trucks and boats. "It is inhumane and cruel, forcing the refugees to leave without proper assistance, just saying the relief period has ended and promising reconstruction efforts,” said one relief worker. “It is like sending people to their death." Copyright © 2008 Irrawaddy Publishing Group | www.irrawaddy.org   UN rights envoy pushes Burma on prison killings Updated June 7, 2008 13:36:35 Burma has denied reports that its soldiers shot dead a number of prison inmates during last month's cyclone. In his report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Burma expert Tomas Ojea Quintana says soldiers had killed some inmates of Insein prison. The killings allegedly happened when the soldiers were called in to control some 1000 inmates who had been forced inside a hall after ithe prison's zinc roofs were torn off by cyclone Nargis. A Thailand-based rights group said at the time soldiers and police had killed 36 prisoners to quell a riot at the notorious facility. While not citing any death figures, Mr Ojea Quintana is calling on the authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the allegations. -----------------------------------------------------------

June 4 News

Dear All,

Now that the US Navy ships have left the area while the regime continues to impede aid to the survivors despite its promises. As the world's pressure on the regime eases, the regime has arrested the leading social activists Zarbanar last night (Read his very reveling interview on June 2nd about his experience in the delta and the situation below). This is a sign that the regime is attempting to tightening the screws against little aid operations it allows due to pressure in Burma. Soon, it will most likely go after the monks who have been praised greatly for pulling off very effective relief efforts while the regime falters.

As the experts are saying the survivors will need help up to a year, the regime has already forced many out of the shelters back to their villages where there is no food, water and shelter. Even after a month has passed, many villages have received little or no help.  

The brutality of the regime and the hardship that the survivors are going through is unimaginable. Now, the world has witnessed enough of the regime's tactic and attitude. It goes like this: When the pressure mounts, the regime is always quick to make promises, but they are only skin deep and only to be broken as soon as the pressure eases. We must therefore keep the pressure on the regime to save many lives in Burma.

Thanks,
Nyunt Than
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Irrawaddy: Zarganar's Relief Role  (June 2)
VOA News: International Agencies Regret US Decision to Abort Burma Mercy Mission
NY Times:     Myanmar Rulers Still Impeding Access  (June 3)
Irrawaddy Special Report: One Month after Cyclone Nargis (June 4)
NY Times:    Monks Succeed in Cyclone Relief as Junta Falters  (May 31)
Irrawaddy:  Monks Stepped In Where the Authorities Failed  (June 4)

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The regime arrested Zarganar last night. Below is his interview on June 2nd.

http://www.irrawaddy.org/interview_show.php?art_id=12448

Zarganar's Relief Role

Monday, June 2, 2008

Zarganar, a popular Burmese comedian and social activist, has been heavily involved in volunteer disaster relief aid in the cyclone-damaged areas. An estimated 400 Burmese involved in the entertainment world joined together to do volunteer work in the delta.

Question: Can you talk about the situation on the ground since the cyclone struck Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta?

Answer: We started our [volunteer] emergency relief work on May 7, and we are still working. I have been to all the townships struck by the disaster, except Nga Pu Taw.

There are 420 volunteers in our group. We divided our volunteers in groups to work more effectively. The places we go to are usually places nobody has been to yet. We have been to 42 such villages, most under the administrative area of Dedaye Township. Three of these villages are large village tracts where the paddy [rice] purchasing center was located.

We went to three large village tracts in Bogalay Township. They hadn't received aid not only from the government, but also from UN agencies. No NGOs had reached there yet.

Q: What did you see there? What do they need at this moment?

A: I can give you an example. There was a large village tract called Ma Ngay Gyi, where 1,000 families used to live and 700 houses were demolished totally. The other 300 houses left remnants of house-poles and floors. In total, 221 people died in the village and 300 are missing. Nobody knows where they are.

We arrived there on May 22 and until that day, and we saw bodies floating in streams. Survivors there received 7 tins (measurement with condensed-milk-tin) of rice from authorities and an instant noodle pack from some independent donors. Apart from that, they received nothing else. That was the scene we saw 20 days after the cyclone.

On May 28, we went from Bogalay to Tin Maung Chaung, Kyein Su, Hteik Chaung Kyi, Kan Su and Shwe Bo Su villages. The villagers there had received no assistance as well. They had almost no clothing and almost all the children were virtually naked.

In numbers, there were 542 households there and all the houses were heavily damaged. There was a small pagoda left on high-ground. The villagers gathered themselves on the platform of the pagoda and sleep together. There were no UN or NGOs there yet, and they had received nothing. Our private group gave them what we had. The most horrible thing was that they had no water to drink and collected water when it rained. We gave them 10,000 bottles of drinking water.

Q: Has any of the international aid that the regime received reached those areas?

A: There are temporary shelters in Laputta and Bogalay Townships. Some people can stay in tents in those shelters with four or five people to a tent. The people staying there eat rice and rice gruel. Those people receive some assistance, but they are few in number. The people in the villages get no assistance.

Q: The UN said only 25 percent of the storm survivors have received assistance up to last week; do you think that estimate is correct?

A: It's fairly correct. Only a few people can access these shelters. The other survivors are stranded on islands and in distant villages with hardly accessible roads. They usually rely on boats for transportation.

I would like to share a sad story with you. I met an old lady who had 11 family members and 10 of them died in the storm. I saw many people like her. I saw many traumatized people on the delta islands. Only boats can get in there.

Q: You saw many people suffering trauma and depression?

A: I see three types of people suffering trauma. One type is very violent, and sensitive. They are angry, and I can't say anything to them. They are aggressive all the time.

The second type is people crying and moaning all the time. They think about what happened again and again, and they repeat what happened over and over.

The third type is silent—no talking, very little movement.

We gave people yellow beans and lablab, along with a blanket and mosquito net. We gave a pack of these things to each survivor, and many didn't even appear to acknowledge it. They showed little interest, as if they thought it would be better to die.

Q: How was your experience with the local authorities? Any problems?

A: At the beginning, we took risks, and we had to move forward on our own. Sometime we had confrontations with the authorities.

For example, they asked us why we were going on our own without consulting them and wanted us to negotiation with them. They said they couldn't guarantee our lives.

We said we'd take our chances on our own. Later after the Natural Disaster Prevention and Protection Committee (NDPPC) said private donors could contribute, we faced fewer problems.

After that announcement, well-off traders from Chinatown and gold traders from Mogul Street joined the relief work. It is better now since the survivors can receive more assistance. These rich traders can't go to remote areas, and we try to help them deliver aid to remote villages. For instance, they can drop the assistance in Bogalay and our actors' group takes it to villages.

Q: The Myanmar Alin newspaper said survivors in the delta don't need foreign ai. They can survive on locally grown vegetables and edible fish and frogs. It says the Irrawaddy delta can prosper again next year with vast golden fields of paddy.

A: I have no idea whether they can catch edible fish and frogs. We renamed the Irrawaddy River and Bogalay River by the color of the water. The rivers are a chalky white color. We call it the Nargis color. There are many dead bodies and cadavers of cattle floating in the rivers. We call that the Nargis odor.

The odor sticks with us when we come back from the villages. Nobody can stand it, and causes some people to vomit. How could people find edible fish and frogs in that environment?

Q: Have many of the bodies have been properly buried?

A: I returned returned from five villages in the Bogalay area on May 28. I couldn't take videos and photos in those villages because there were so many bodies, at least 40 bodies. That was after about 1,000 corpses were burned, I think. I believe some NGOs like AZG and some Christian organizations helped cremate bodies.

Q: Most of the people in the delta are Karens. How is their situation?

A: In Bogalay and Dedaye districts there are Karen villages and most of them are Christians. I like these Karen. When I arrived in their villages, I saw some organizations were already there. They appointed some local Karen leaders to go to Rangoon, and they organized meetings with doctors and other professionals. They are taking a part in their reconstruction effort.

They came back to some villages with relief items like material for shelters, food and utensils. I believe they have already been given some vegetable seeds like morning glory, amaranth, rosells and fertilizers that can be used on any kind of soil.


Q: When do you think the area can start to recover its agricultural potential?

A: In many areas, I think rice will be unworkable for a long time, but vegetables can grow. We need to start working with the people on how to recover the land and work their crops.

There are only 15 days left in the rice planting season. We have talked to private companies and Thai professionals about how to resume the agricultural works with small machinery.

A small mechanical plow, called Shwe Kywe, costs 1.4 million kyat. We have selected the Kyun Nyo Gyi village tract for a pilot project. About 5,514 people live there. Thai professionals said the agricultural work could be resumed. We will try to start the work with 18 small plows. We've received 10 plows from donation.

Q: Is any assistance coming from northern and central Burma?

A: Of course, many people come to assist. For example, 10-wheel trucks from Namti, Myit Kyi Na and Lashio arrived with aid. They brought 200 tanks of cooking oil and other supplies. The Christian group from Lashio came with 10 trucks. They are Shan.

Q: How is Rangoon now?

A: We are also reaching out in Rangoon as well.
Our group left this morning to Dala, Kwan Chan Kone, Kyi Myin Daing and Nyaung Wine on the other side of the river. The situation there is not as bad as in delta. However, the houses were damaged, and we do need to assist them as well. Psychologically, they are not as traumatized as the people in the delta.

Q: What do you want to say people living outside of Burma?

A: There are many things we can't do alone. People can help us a great deal. For instance after the tsunami in Thailand, professionals arrived immediately and built houses for the survivors in a short time. We can't afford such assistance, and it is a very vast area. It would be better if international assistance could help with this.

Q: What is the UN able to do?

A: I am not happy with the UN. It doesn't seem able to reach many of our people. The UN and NGO staff must work under the eye of the regime. That's a problem. Why are they so concerned with the government's endorsement of their relief work? They should have taken more risks.

Even if they can't go without permission, they could assist volunteers like us who are willing to go to the villages. There are a lot of groups like us assisting refugees. Many people have received nothing from the UN and NGOs. The UN and a lot of professional organizations send their aid to the compounds of the local township authorities.

Q: What happens with the people who are waiting for food on the roads?

A: Actually, they have to beg as they are starving. The authorities said don't give out food to people on the roads, but they are starving. The scenes are not that chaotic. I didn't see people robbing each other for food.

Q: The US says some relief work could be done with their amphibious boats. They are willing to help. Do you think they are still needed a month after the cyclone?

A: I believe they are necessary. We provided some survivors with radios and asked them to listen to the news, to keep in contact with the world. They were happy with that news, but now they feel sad and desperate because the ships aren't allowed to come. They feel alone and abandoned.
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International Agencies Regret US Decision to Abort Burma Mercy Mission

By Ron Corben
Bangkok
04 June 2008

Corben report - Download (MP3)

United States naval ships with relief supplies for cyclone victims in Burma are leaving the area, because the Burmese government refused their help. As Ron Corben reports from Bangkok, international agencies trying to help more than two million storm survivors regret the loss of the navy's resources.

The USS Essex , center, and the Essex Amphibious Ready Group steam in formation, in the Andaman Sea, 23 May 2008 (photo released by U.S. Navy)
The USS Essex and several support vessels are leaving the seas near Burma after spending three weeks trying to deliver aid to the survivors of Cyclone Nargis.

The French navy also has given up efforts to send in aid and is heading away from the Bay of Bengal.

Burma's government has rejected offers to use other country's military helicopters to carry relief supplies.

Instead, in the past week the World Food Program received two helicopters from Africa, but aid experts say that is not enough.

WFP spokesman Paul Risley says it is unfortunate that U.S. Navy helicopters will not be available to bring aid across the Irrawaddy Delta.

"And this is truly unfortunate because these helicopters represented immediate heavy lift capacity in the area and would have been a standard operating procedure for the U.N. for relief agencies in responding," he said.

Military helicopters from several nations played a vital role in relief efforts in Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami. They also helped in the aftermath of a cyclone that hit Bangladesh last year.

Burma's state media say the government rejected the U.S. military aircraft because it feared an invasion, despite U.S. assurances that wanted only to provide aid.

This aerial view shows a devastated town, with many roofs missing, in the Irrawaddy Delta region, Burma, 06 May 2008
The cyclone that hit a month ago left more than two million people in need of food, shelter and medical care. The storm killed 78,000 and left 56,000 missing.

International donors have condemned the Burmese government's roadblocks to relief efforts. U.S. officials say the delays may have cost "tens of thousands of lives."

The United Nations and ASEAN recent reached an agreement with Burma to allow international aid workers more access to the areas worst hit by the storm.

But U.N. officials said Wednesday relief efforts need to expand rapidly, since just one point three million people had gotten any sort of assistance.

The Irrawaddy Delta is Burma's main rice-growing region, but U.N. officials said Wednesday that 60 percent of the paddy fields were damaged in the storm. About 16 percent are too badly damaged for the next planting season, in July.

The WFP's Risley says international food aid to the hardest-hit areas could last a year.


"In a situation such as this it would be very typical for the World Food Program to continue providing food rations through general deliveries for families and farmers in the delta area, certainly through the next six months, certainly through the next harvest. It is likely that harvest will not be able to take place for an entire year," he said.

U.N. officials say few farmers have returned to their land because they have no food, shelter or farm tools. In addition, roads throughout the region remain unusable.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/world/asia/03myanmar.html?_r=1&scp=12&sq=Burma&st=nyt&oref=slogin

 Myanmar Rulers Still Impeding Access

Atlas Press, for The New York Times

Burmese displaced by the cyclone meeting with a monk last week at a monastery where they had taken refuge in Bogale.

By SETH MYDANS
 

Published: June 3, 2008

BANGKOK — One month after a powerful cyclone struck Myanmar and 10 days after the ruling junta’s leader promised full access to the hardest-hit areas, relief agencies said on Monday that they were still having difficulty reaching hundreds of thousands of survivors in urgent need of assistance.

Over the past week, they said, the door has opened slightly and a number of foreign experts have been allowed to travel to the Irrawaddy Delta, which bore the brunt of the May 3 storm. A modest flow of food, medicine and other supplies has begun to enter the delta by truck and barge.

But the agencies said that travel permits for international experts were limited and irregular and that dozens of relief workers remained stranded in the country’s main city, Yangon.

“Several have been able to make essentially day trips to work with our field staff there,” Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program, said. “But access remains a continuing challenge.”

A spokesman for the United Nations disaster relief agency said on Monday that as of two days before, 15 foreign experts representing United Nations agencies were in the delta.

Analysts of Myanmar, formerly Burma, said they feared that the junta was playing a game of hints, promises and deception, which it has used over the years to deflect criticism from abroad.

“In all these crises that the Burmese face, there always is the teaser to take the pressure off the government,” said Josef Silverstein, an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University.

“They seem like they are going to cooperate, and just as soon as comment dies down, anything that is going to be useful dies with it,” he said. “Look back at the ‘saffron revolution,’ when they made all kinds of promises about what they were going to do and nothing happened.”

He was referring to a peaceful uprising, led by monks, that was crushed in September. The junta’s promises included a dialogue with the democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but Myanmar’s rulers dropped the idea after international attention had moved on, and last Tuesday it extended her house arrest for a year.

In Geneva, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, who is leaving her position, said the world’s failure to press Myanmar more strongly on human rights issues made it easier for the junta to keep out cyclone relief.

“The obstruction to the deployment of such assistance illustrates the invidious effects of longstanding international tolerance for human rights violations,” she said.

The United Nations estimates that 2.4 million people were severely affected by the cyclone and said last week that 1.4 million of those remained in desperate need of food, clean water, shelter and medical care. The government says 134,000 people died or are missing.

International relief agencies have complained strenuously that the junta is barring foreign aid and foreign relief workers from the worst-affected areas and that it is endangering survivors.

After a 10-day delay, the junta allowed the first of 10 helicopters from the World Food Program to carry supplies from Yangon into the delta. The other nine were en route to Myanmar, Mr. Risley said.

He also said barges and smaller craft were delivering supplies to hard-hit areas.

The government has allowed American aircraft to land with relief materials but has barred American workers from leaving Yangon Airport to deliver them. It has turned away American, French and British ships loaded with supplies.

Some news reports from Myanmar have said the junta was beginning to force survivors out of shelters and back to the devastated countryside.

According to the independent group Human Rights Watch, thousands of displaced people have been evicted from schools, monasteries and public buildings.

“The forced evictions are part of government efforts to demonstrate that the emergency relief period is over and that the affected population is capable of rebuilding their lives without foreign assistance,” the organization said on Saturday.

Anupama Rao Singh, regional director of Unicef, warned after a visit to the Irrawaddy Delta that any resettlement would be premature, even if it was voluntary.

“Many of the villages remain inundated with water, making it difficult to rebuild,” she said. “There is also a real risk that once they are resettled, they will be invisible to aid workers. Without support and continued service to those affected, there is a risk of a second wave of disease and devastation.”

The government of Myanmar also said it would reopen schools with the start of the new term this week, though many school buildings were destroyed and many teachers were swept to their deaths. Unicef said that more than 4,000 schools serving 1.1 million children were damaged or destroyed by the storm and that more than 100 teachers were killed.

“I think the generals are doing what they do best, taking charge of everything, trying to keep themselves in complete control,” said U Aung Naing Oo, a Burmese political analyst who lives in Thailand.

Trucks of rice, beans, onions, clothes, tarpaulins and cooking utensils, donated from all over Myanmar, pulled into his International Buddhist Missionary Center in Yangon from early morning on. Each day, shortly after dawn, a convoy of trucks or a barge on the Yangon River departs for the delta, loaded with relief supplies and volunteers.

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Related

Weeks After Cyclone in Myanmar, Even Farmers Wait for Food (May 26, 2008)

Donors Press Myanmar to Let Aid Workers In (May 26, 2008)

Times Topics: Myanmar | Cyclone Nargis

Sitagu Sayadaw sat on a wooden bench in his field headquarters as people lined up to pay their respects. Villagers came to present lists of their most urgent needs. Monks from outlying villages came asking for help to repair their temples. Wealthy families from towns knelt before him and donated bundles of cash.

However, like other senior monks here, he must strike a careful balance. He has the moral duty to speak out on behalf of his suffering people, but in order to protect his social programs and hospitals, which provide free medical care to the destitute, he must try not to anger the government, which views such private undertakings as a reproof.

Nonetheless, speaking at his shelter as an afternoon monsoon rain drummed against the roof, Sitagu Sayadaw sounded frustrated with the government.

“In my country, I cannot see a real political leader,” he said.

“Gen. Than Shwe’s ‘Burmese way to democracy?’ ” he said, referring to the junta’s top leader. “What is it?”

He defended the monks’ uprising last September, saying the government’s failure to provide “material stability” for the people undermined the monks’ ability to provide “spiritual stability.”

Among monks interviewed in the delta and Yangon, there was no sign of imminent protests.

Still, a 40-year-old monk at Sitagu Sayadaw’s camp who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of official retribution said that “monks are very angry” about the government’s recent move to evict refugees from monasteries, roadside huts and other temporary shelters, even while the state-run media are filled with stories of government relief efforts. “The government doesn’t want to show the truth.”

A young monk in the Chaukhtatgyi Paya monastery district in Yangon predicted trouble ahead. “You will see it again because everyone is angry and everyone is jobless,” said the monk, who said he joined the September “saffron revolution” and had a large gash over his right eye from a soldier’s beating to show for it.

A monk from Mon State in southern Myanmar, who was visiting the delta to assess the damage and arrange an aid shipment, said, “For the government, these people are no more than dead animals in the fields.”

The simmering confrontation between the pillars of Myanmar life was evident at the village level after the cyclone.

Shortly after the storm, a monk in Myo Thit, a village 20 miles from Yangon, walked around with a loudspeaker inviting victims to his monastery and asking people to donate. The monk had to stop, villagers said, after a township leader affiliated with the government threatened to confiscate the loudspeaker.

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http://www.irrawaddy.org/article1.php?art_id=12498
Irrawaddy Special Report
One Month after Cyclone Nargis

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By AUNG THET WINE / LAPUTTA

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

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Just as relief efforts were beginning to take hold in Laputta—although serious problems still exist—the Burmese authorities have forced tens of thousands of refugees to return to their home villages.

Based on numbers provided by local officials, as many as 30,000 refugees were sent back to the area of their homes during the past week. Of the estimated 40,000 refugees that lived in Laputta previously, only about 10,000 remain.

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They are living in better established camps on the outskirts of the city, where they receive shelter, sufficient drinking water, food and other relief supplies on a daily basis.

Reports also indicate that drinking water, food and other relief material are beginning to reach some refugees who have been sent back to their villages.

Many refugees are now returning to Laputta to pick up food and other relief aid from international agencies located there. Many refugees also are receiving diesel fuel to power vehicles or boats. However, many refugees lack transportation to return for relief supplies.

Serious logistical problems remain in terms of distribution drinking water, food and survival material to refugees in more rural areas. Local doctors report many people are suffering from diseases such as diarrhea and malaria, and many others have psychological problems.

Medical doctors in Laputta said sending the refugees back to their home villages so quickly was a misguided policy, denying them badly needed relief supplies and medical services.

Local Laputta authorities ordered about 40,000 refugees living in 49 temporary shelters, including camps at Thakya Mara Zein Pagoda, No 1 and No 2 State High Schools, and other temporary shelter sites, to move to shelter camps on the outskirts of town, called Three-mile camp on Laputta-Myaung Mya Road, locally known as the golf course; Five-mile camp and the Yantana Dipa Sport Ground camp.

During the past week, Laputta, authorities transported tens of thousands of refugees back to their home villages, most of which are destroyed or badly damaged. The refugees were transported on a daily basis by private companies that have been awarded reconstruction contracts. The companies include Ayer Shwe Wah, Max Myanmar, War War Win and Zay Kabar companies.

"Until May 18, there were about 40,000 refugees in total in camps in Laputta. Starting on May 20, they were sent to camps situated out of town and since then most refugees have been returned to their home areas," said an officer of the Laputta Township PDC, who asked that his name not be disclosed.

“There are now about 650 families from 22 cyclone-affected villages living at the Yadanar Dipa Sport Ground,” he said. “The camp population is 2,609. The camp population at Three-mile and Five-mile camps now totals about 10,000. The figures are not constant, and the refugees are being sent back daily."

Refugees in the camps on the outskirts of Laputta are provided with tents and other shelter material donated by the governments of Britain, Japan and international aid agencies. They have access to safe drinking water from distilling machines. Food is distributed by the UN World Food Program (WFP), UNICEF, and nongovernmental organizations, including the Adventist Development and Relief Agency Myanmar [Burma] (Adra-Myanmar) and other organizations.

"For rice, we receive a sack of rice for four families for three days, which is from the WFP,” said a refugee at Three-mile Camp. “The rice is good to eat. The government also provides some rice. One person receives two tins (measured in a condensed milk tin) of rice for three days. We also receive cooking oil, salt and beans from other organizations. For drinking water and water for other use, we can collect it from the distilling machines set up at the front of the camp."

Camp refugees now have regular access to health care at medical clinics operated by Holland-MSF, Marlin, Malteser International, UN agencies, the Myanmar Medical Association and the Burmese Ministry of Health. Diarrhea and other diseases are minimal in the camps, sources said.

However, many refugees already sent back to their villages are living under very different and difficult conditions.

“They don't get proper assistance for food, drinking water and shelter and no health care is available to them,” said a doctor with an international health agency in Laputta.

“Many of them are suffering from diseases such as diarrheas, malaria, typhoid, hepatitis, plus psychological distress and depression.”

"When I went out to villages, I found some cases of diarrhea and typhoid. I see six or seven patients out of maybe 60 villagers. Some suffer from hepatitis, jaundice, pneumonia and malaria. Most of these diseases are caused by lack of safe water."

Many refugees are suffering from depression, he said, and mental health specialists have yet to arrive in Laputta.

He criticized the forced return of refugees to their villages.

"It is certain these refugees will contract some diseases by sending them back without proper preparation,” he said. “It’s also impossible for health services to access all these villages. What we can try to do is just contain diseases to prevent an epidemic."

When the refugees were returned to their villages, the authorities provided them with a sack of rice, a tin of cooking oil and 20,000 kyats ($16).

A family of refugees at the jetty in Laputta who were on their way back to Gway Chaung village in the Yway village tract said they were required to sign a consent form saying they were voluntarily repatriated.

"They asked us repeatedly to go back,” said the man. “They told us repeatedly to work our way out of a beggar-like life by relying on donations and food from others.”

A refugee living at the Yadanar Dipa Sport Ground said they were told that if they returned home they would not be accepted back in a shelter camp. He said he was returning to his village, Thin Gan Gyi.

A 60-year-old man at Three-mile Camp said he wanted to return home, but he worried about how he would eat. He had no other option if the authorities forcibly evicted him, he said. 

A UNICEF officer in Laputta said repatriated refugees face renewed problems of safe drinking water and adequate food and other supplies. They are told to return to contact UN organizations and other relief agencies for assistance, he said.

"We are receiving representatives from villages,” he said. “They tell us their needs and problems such as lack of drinking water, lack of rice, and ask us to provide pumps to take the salt water from the drinking ponds. They need to make the ponds ready to receive fresh rain water.

A WFP supervisor said, “We are now getting more than 20 representatives a day from various villages. They get some drinking water, rice sacks and diesel for boats, as much as they can carry when they go back. Some villagers are coming to us almost daily."

Staff with the UN and international organizations worry that only a limited number of returned refugees are making contact with relief agencies, since many don’t have adequate transportation. Likewise, relief organizations don’t have adequate transportation to reach the villagers.

Compounding the problem is the monsoon season, which begins this month.

Sources note that villagers reach out to UN agencies and international organizations, and they hardly share their needs or complaints with local Burmese authorities.

For example, a representative from the Pyin Salu Sub-township was in Laputta specifically to ask for a water-pump from the Adra-Myanmar [Burma] agency to reconstruct a water reservoir pond for drinking water. His village received just enough drinking water and people relied on seawater for cooking and other purposes.

A village representative from Hlwa Sar village who was receiving relief supplies from the WFP in Laputta on May 31, told The Irrawaddy, "Almost all of the storm survivors believe in the UN and other international agencies. They don't go to our authorities. The main reason is we don’t trust them."
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URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/world/asia/31myanmar.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q26partnerQ3DrssnytQ26emcQ3Drss&OP=4f5111c5Q2FQ3APQ7D-Q3AUQ7CQ24f.Q7CQ7CxNQ3ANvvRQ3Av0Q3An(Q3APQ7C.Q3BUQ3ACfbCQ3An(gQ5DC6gC.sQ3CxgQ3B

Monks Succeed in Cyclone Relief as Junta Falters

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: May 31, 2008

KUN WAN, Myanmar — They paddle for hours on the stormy river, or carry their sick parents on their backs through the mud and rain, traveling for miles to reach the one source of help they can rely on: Buddhist monks.

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With little help from the government, refugees were fed by a monastery near Yangon.

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Weeks After Cyclone in Myanmar, Even Farmers Wait for Food (May 26, 2008)

Donors Press Myanmar to Let Aid Workers In (May 26, 2008)

Times Topics: Myanmar | Cyclone Nargis

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A monk organized relief donations this week for people left homeless by the cyclone. This monastery, outside of Yangon, has become a temporary shelter.

At a makeshift clinic in this village near Bogale, an Irrawaddy Delta town 75 miles southwest of Yangon, hundreds of villagers left destitute by Cyclone Nargis arrive each day seeking the assistance they have not received from the government or international aid workers.

Since the cyclone, the Burmese have been growing even closer to the monks while their alienation from the junta grows. This development bodes ill for the government, which brutally cracked down on thousands of monks who took to the streets last September appealing to the ruling generals to improve conditions for the people.

The May 3 cyclone left more than 134,000 dead or missing and 2.4 million survivors grappling with hunger and homelessness. This week, some of them who had taken shelter at monasteries or gathered on roadsides were being displaced again, this time by the junta, which wants them to stop being an embarrassment to the government and return to their villages “for reconstruction.” On Friday, United Nations officials said that refugees were also being evicted from government-run camps.

The survivors have little left of their homes and find themselves almost as exposed to the elements as their mud-coated water buffaloes. Meanwhile, outside aid is slow to arrive, with foreign aid agencies gaining only incremental access to the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta and the government impounding cars of some private Burmese donors.

In a scene the ruling generals are unlikely to see played out for themselves, a convoy of trucks carrying relief supplies, led by Buddhist monks, passed through storm-devastated villages in the delta this week. Hungry children and homeless mothers bowed in supplication and respect.

“When I see those people, I want to cry,” said Sitagu Sayadaw, 71, one of Myanmar’s most respected senior monks.

Village after storm-hit village, it is clear who has won people’s hearts. Monks were among those who died in the storm. Now, others console the survivors while sharing their muddy squalor.

With tears welling in her eyes, Thi Dar, 45, pressed her hands together in respect before the first monk she saw at the clinic here and told her story. The eight other members of her family were killed in the cyclone. She no longer had anyone to talk with and felt suicidal. The other day, word reached her village that a monk had opened a clinic six miles upriver. So on Thursday, she got up early and caught the first boat.

“In my entire life, I have never seen a hospital,” she said. “So I came to the monk. I don’t know where the government office is. I can’t buy anything in the market because I lost everything to the cyclone.”

Nay Lin, 36, a volunteer doctor at the clinic, one of the six emergency clinic shelters Sitagu Sayadaw has opened in the delta, said: “Our patients suffer from infected wounds, abdominal pains and vomiting. They also need counseling for mental trauma, anxiety and depression.”

While the government has been criticized for obstructing the relief effort, the Buddhist monastery, the traditional center of moral authority in most villages here, proved to be the one institution people could rely on for help.

The monasteries in the delta that are still standing have been clogged with refugees. People who could help went there with donations or as volunteers. Monasteries that served as religious centers, orphanages and homes for the elderly have also become shelters for the homeless.

The interdependence between monks and laypeople is age-old. Monks receive alms from the laity and offer spiritual comfort in return. In villages without government schools, a monastic education is often the only option.

“The monks’ role is more important than ever,” said Ar Sein Na, 46, a monk in the delta village of That Kyar. “In a time of immense suffering like this, people have nowhere to go except to monks.”

Kyi Than, 38, said she traveled 15 miles by boat to Sitagu Sayadaw’s camp.

“Our village monk died during the storm,” she said. “Monks are like parents to us. The government wants us to shut up, but monks listen to us.”

Faced with the deadliest cyclone to hit Asia in 38 years, senior monks have organized their own relief campaigns.

Every day, their convoys head down delta roads. A leading figure in these efforts is Sitagu Sayadaw, whose name invariably draws a thumbs-up sign here.

“Meditation cannot remove this disaster,” he said. “Material support is very important now. Now in our country, spiritual and material support are unbalanced.”

http://www.irrawaddy.org/highlight.php?art_id=12500
Monks Stepped In Where the Authorities Failed

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By SAW YAN NAING

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

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More than 800 monks prayed for the victims of Cyclone Nargis on Tuesday at a Rangoon ceremony in which one senior cleric criticized the regime’s response to the catastrophe.

Pyinya Thiha, a senior monk at Thardu monastery in Rangoon’s Kyeemyindine Township, accused the junta of exacerbating the plight of the cyclone survivors by thinking only of its own interests and placing restrictions on the delivery of aid. He called on the regime to allow international aid workers access to the cyclone-devastated areas.

 

Buddhist monks walk to a monastery to have lunch in Twantay, 30 miles southwest of Rangoon. More than 800 monks prayed for the victims of Cyclone Nargis on Tuesday at a Rangoon ceremony. (Photo: AFP)

About 100 nuns and more than 500 members of the general public attended the prayer ceremony, in Thardu monastery.  

Pyinya Thiha said the junta was guilty of a “double injustice” in its approach to the catastrophe. “The current situation is not important for them [but] it is very important for the survival of the people now in trouble.

“It is necessary to see human beings with the eyes of a human being. They [the junta] should not see human beings as animals.”

Aid for the cyclone survivors should take priority over everything else, Pyinya Thiha told The Irrawaddy.

Monks would do “whatever we can for the victims,” he promised. The monks of the Thardu monastery distributed relief supplies daily in Rangoon Division’s Hlaing Tharyar and Kyeemyindine Townships, and prayed every evening for the cyclone victims.

Monks had already delivered relief supplies—from food to mosquito nets—to about 200 villages in the Irrawaddy delta, he said.

Monasteries throughout the Irrawaddy delta and Rangoon division had taken in refugees from cyclone-hit areas. Monks had also helped clear up the cyclone damage.

One Hlaing Tharyar Township resident, Tin Yu, said the authorities didn’t dare prevent the monks from helping cyclone survivors, some of whom were still sheltering in monasteries, despite official pressure to leave. The assistance provided by the monks had been “very encouraging.”
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