There is no end to the criminal behavior of Myanmar’s generals. Nearly three weeks after Cyclone Nargis killed more than 100,000 people, the junta’s refusal to open the country to international help is condemning many more thousands to malnutrition, disease and, unless something is done quickly, death.
The generals have now grudgingly agreed to allow their Asian neighbors to oversee distribution of foreign relief and granted the United Nations World Food Program permission to fly nine helicopters. Given the horrifying size and complexity of the disaster, that’s not nearly enough.
Most international disaster specialists are still banned from the storm-devastated area. So, largely, are the United States and France, which have ships loaded with heavy-lift helicopters, food, water, medicine, field hospitals and other supplies waiting in nearby waters.
The generals are similarly determined to subvert a donors conference set for this weekend in Yangon. State-run media claimed that the government has already met victims’ immediate needs and would now be moving into the reconstruction phase. Diplomats who attend the conference must make clear that until the junta opens up the country to a full relief effort, there will be no reconstruction help — and even after that, any rebuilding projects must be controlled by international organizations not the corrupt regime.
The international community has been walking a fine line, trying to cajole the generals, who only care about staying in power, into cooperating. That hasn’t worked, and more lives are lost every day. If the junta does not quickly open up its ports and airports, the United States and France must begin airdropping aid to victims. No one wants a confrontation, but the world cannot sit by while tens of thousands more people die.
We hope that the United Nations secretary general,
Ban Ki-moon, delivers that tough message when he visits
Myanmar this week. That is assuming the junta’s leader,
Senior Gen. Than Shwe, agrees to meet with him. So far,
he has refused to accept Mr. Ban’s telephone calls.
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DISPATCH FROM WAT MYON
In Myanmar, cyclone survivors live with the dead
May 20, 2008
WAT MYON, MYANMAR — They are living with the dead.
More than two weeks after Tropical Cyclone Nargis wiped away all but one of this village's houses, decomposing corpses still lie on muddy pathways, or are trapped in eddies along the shore of the broad Pyamaia River nearby.
The stench overpowers every corner of U Thon Tun's badly damaged home, where 25 survivors have taken refuge beneath a leaky roof patched with tarp. The wind and the rain, which pours down on them every day, cannot erase the sickly smell.
The villagers, all tenant farmers, want to get past their loss, go back to work and earn money again before another rice crop is lost. But their paddies are ruined, they have no seeds to plant, and there are no tools to work soil flooded by the sea.
Without any tools, the villagers say, they can't solve another pressing problem: the corpses that are fouling the river where they wash themselves each day.
Soldiers sent in to gather the corpses suddenly disappeared Sunday, and villagers say they heard that the troops were refusing to dispose of any more bodies, leaving survivors no choice but to live with them.
"It's not 10, it's not 100, it's thousands of bodies," said Thon Tun. "We gave up collecting corpses around here. It's impossible to bury them properly."
Local authorities have provided small rations of food, but not the seeds, equipment and water buffalo that villagers say they need to start planting by the end of June. The water buffalo died in the storm that thrashed the village and flooded the paddies that now cannot be planted without the help of the buffalo.
Meanwhile, saltwater is poisoning the soil and fresh water reserves. Yet villagers have no salt, which is essential to a healthy diet, for their meager meals. The Irrawaddy River delta produces most of the country's salt, but the factories were destroyed in the storm.
So Thon Tun, 56, and the refugees who depend on him have a lot of time to sit and think, to breathe in the inescapable smell, and to worry what fate they may be condemned to suffer because they survived, only to face an agonizing wait for help.
"I didn't die, but I feel dead," said Hla Ye, 70, staring blankly. "The people killed by the cyclone are lucky because they don't know anything about what came next. I wish I could join them."
She turned, placed her withered hands together and bowed her head in prayer to a small statue of Buddha, surrounded by bouquets of plastic flowers in a sitting room shrine. She struck a triangular bronze gong, suspended by string from the ceiling, ringing it the traditional three times to share her merit with the world.
Then she sought solace in a deep puff on a long cheroot, rolled in an old scrap of newspaper. As she brooded, the sky over the delta darkened.
Lightning strikes and booming thunderclaps shook the wooden walls as rain and wind thrashed the region for several hours Monday.
"What we really want is to go back to work in the fields, but we can't do that," said Zaw Zaw, 28, whose only clothes are a pair of camouflaged shorts and a dirty T-shirt with the slogan "Keepin' It Real."
"We have to worry about where we'll get food, and clothes, and water. We're farmers. We know that next year is going to be worse if we don't start planting soon."
The seawater that washed away most of the village, killing 25 of its 45 residents, also soaked more than 900 pounds of rice seed. It's now worthless.
Local officials have provided small rations of rice, chicken-flavored instant noodles and cookies that don't provide the nutrition that the United Nations and other agencies say as many as 2.5 million survivors need for a long struggle ahead.
The steady rainfall provides drinking water, and the villagers saved 10 gallons of diesel from the storm to power a small pump, which they hope will drain their reservoir of seawater enough for them to fill it with fresh water again.
Save the Children, one of the most experienced foreign aid agencies in Myanmar, estimates that 30,000 children in the delta region were malnourished before the cyclone hit and could be starving in two to three weeks if adequate help doesn't arrive.
The military regime that rules Myanmar, also known as Burma, says that at least 78,000 people have died and that 56,000 others are missing since the storm's 120- to 150-mph winds ravaged the country's south in early May.
Ignoring intense pressure, the regime has refused to open the disaster zone to a massive international relief effort supervised by foreign aid workers. Officials here remain suspicious that foreigners would serve as spies. As a result, the military government has allowed only a limited number of relief flights, including several carrying U.S. aid. Most of the supplies are being distributed by the Myanmar authorities.
The government has closed the hardest-hit Irrawaddy Delta area to foreigners, except for about 160 Asian aid workers. The few foreign journalists that are here must work undercover, and the regime has ordered partially independent news media to report only official details of the relief effort.
Tight censorship has spawned a new industry: cyclone DVDs, which show the corpses, suffering survivors, and other realities of the storm's aftermath that the regime doesn't want its people to see.
The videos are selling well in urban markets, and people with access to the Internet and shortwave radio broadcasts are also hearing how hard the generals have resisted offers of foreign aid.
That includes 1,000 tons of food and shelters for 15,000 people sitting on a French naval vessel, waiting off the country's southern shore. The regime refuses to let the ship enter Myanmar territory because France won't hand the supplies to the Asian nation's military to distribute.
The resulting anger is growing in a sensitive year for the regime. This summer marks the 20th anniversary of a student-led uprising that the regime crushed, killing thousands of protesters.
The generals are used to shrugging off foreign criticism, and despite the scope of the current disaster, they have provided a tepid response to U.N. pleas for a full-scale relief operation. Military ruler Senior Gen. Than Shwe has refused to take U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's phone calls, or reply to two letters from him.
Ban plans to leave for Myanmar today, and the government says he will be given a tour of the delta region. Foreign diplomats were taken on a similar tour over the weekend, and they said they were shown model camps to support the regime's claim that it has the situation under control.
Survivors who went to collect their food rations near here Monday said local officials told them they would only be fed for two more months, and then they would be on their own. It's a warning in keeping with recent government speeches insisting that people must be self-sufficient.
But even if aid deliveries suddenly improved, and farmers got the seeds and equipment they needed, the first harvest wouldn't come until six months after they start preparing the fields and seedlings, they said.
As survivors here continue to wait for help, one of the few things that makes them smile is the name of what was once their village: It means "the pig gone with the water." Legend has it, villagers say, that the fast-moving creek next to their homes has washed away a lot of pork over the generations.
Nargis' storm surge was so powerful, said one man, that a wave at least 10 feet tall swept him five miles from home. It killed so much livestock that survivors are thinking of renaming the village Koway Myon: "the water buffalo gone with the water."
The joke ends there.
U.N. Leader
Aims to Get More Aid in Myanmar
“Aid in Myanmar should not be politicized,” said Mr. Ban, as he stopped in Bangkok on Wednesday. “Our focus now is on saving lives.”
But the opening offered by Myanmar appeared to be a narrow one. Some analysts said the ruling generals were conceding only enough to defuse international pressure in the wake of the May 3 cyclone.
Suspicious of foreigners bearing relief supplies, the government has so far barred any major flow of aid from the United Nations and Western donors.
On Wednesday it said it would not allow delivery of aid from United States Navy vessels waiting offshore.
Mr. Ban is scheduled to meet the leader of the military junta, Senior Gen. Than Shwe. General Shwe had previously not responded to Mr. Ban’s messages or taken his telephone calls.
Mr. Ban was also scheduled to attend a meeting on Sunday of international donors in Yangon, where he hoped to help coordinate aid, along with Myanmar’s neighbors in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean.
Myanmar agreed this week to let Asean to coordinate a relief program and send in medical workers.
That opening falls far short of the huge relief operation that the United Nations says is needed to help an estimated 2.5 million victims who face shortages of food and water and a growing threat of disease.
The official government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, said Wednesday that the country would not accept relief supplies carried by the American vessels that are waiting, along with French and British vessels, outside its territorial waters.
“The strings attached to the relief supplies carried by warships and military helicopters are not acceptable to the Myanmarese people,” it said. “We can manage by ourselves. Myanmar has many good neighborly countries.”
The United States has insisted that it has no ulterior motive in offering disaster relief and has promised to withdraw its helicopters and personnel after deliveries have been made.
“They are really fearful that the United States is involved in regime change as it has said from 1990 on,” David Steinberg, an expert on Myanmar at George Washington University in Washington, said of the junta. “As a member of Asean, they feel they can control the situation.”
He said the motives and methods of the junta have not changed over the years. When it is under pressure, the junta offers promises and calibrated concessions, but holds its ground.
“The overwhelming motive is to keep power,” Mr. Steinberg said, “and in order to do that you take off bits and pieces of pressure as you see the need. But you don’t help people if you are going to jeopardize your superior role.”
A Burmese exile magazine, The Irrawaddy, which is based in Thailand, took the analysis a step further on Tuesday, saying: “The Burmese junta is still in the driver’s seat. Asean, the U.N. and the rest of the world are — again — being manipulated by the oppressive generals.”
In Washington, the United States ambassador to Asean, Scot Marciel, said at a Congressional hearing on Tuesday that “the door must be opened far wider and rapidly to prevent a second catastrophe” of further death.
Myanmar has set the death toll in Cyclone Nargis at about 78,000, with nearly 56,000 missing, but the United Nations and relief donors believe that at least 100,000 have died.
“Without an adequate and independent assessment of the situation and current needs, as well as a commitment by the regime to provide the necessary access, a pledging conference is unlikely to produce the results we seek,” Mr. Marciel said.
Speaking in New York before his departure, Mr. Ban said that he hoped to set up a “logistics hub” in Myanmar or nearby, and that the United Nations and Asean could join in coordinating relief efforts.
He said the government had given permission for nine helicopters from the World Food Program to ferry aid to survivors, a significant softening of its blanket rejection of United Nations aid workers.
“Further similar moves will follow — including expediting the visas of relief workers seeking to enter the country,” Mr. Ban said. “I am confident that emergency relief efforts can be scaled up quickly.”
He said a major increase in aid was urgent. “This is a critical moment for Myanmar,” he said. “We have a functioning relief program in place, but so far we have been able to reach only about 25 percent of Myanmar’s people in need.”
In its commentary rejecting American aid, The New Light of Myanmar vented its concerns about foreign donors, saying they were a greater threat than the cyclone.
“Our country is going through a variety of stormlike plots and intrigues that are much severer than Nargis, and they are endless,” it said.
“They are none other than envy storms, criticism storms and rumor storms created by certain Western countries and national traitors at home and abroad who are showing negative attitudes toward our nation and our people.”