By TESS BACALLA
AS though curtailment of basic liberties and state-induced violence amid massive poverty are not enough, tens of thousands of people who suffered the wrath of the worst disaster to have hit Burma (officially called Myanmar) still feel a sense of palpable neglect by their ruling military junta.
“No major rehabilitation efforts by government are in place while farmers and fishermen (affected by Nargis) are still fleeing their villages in search of alternative livelihoods,” said Maung Soe (not his real name as are all other names cited in this article), a native of Burma who works for a Thailand-based nongovernment agency that for many years has been extending assistance to poor communities in his country of birth, often done clandestinely.
Exactly a year ago today, Burma was ravaged by a powerful cyclone that swept across its former capital (Yangon) and the Irrawaddy Delta at a speed of up to 120 miles per hour. It began on the night of May 2 and lasted till around noon of the following day, leaving tens of thousands of people dead and hundreds of thousands others homeless and without livelihood in its wake.
On top of devastated houses and vital infrastructure, the resulting death toll was simply staggering by anyone’s standards: officially declared, nearly two weeks after Nargis hit, at 78,000 by the military government, which is known to put a tight lid on any information that will cast it, or the nation in its grip, in a bad light. International organizations like Red Cross and the United Nations, however, placed the number of casualties at between 100,000 and 128,000. Nargis, based on aid agencies’ estimate, affected some 2.4 million people.
The junta’s refusal to grant entry to foreign aid workers is widely believed to have added to the death toll. Warnings of the impending disaster should have significantly scaled it down.
Remnants of Nargis
Today, the cyclone-damaged areas have been cleared of rubble and debris, but life for many victims still reeks of the remnants of a disaster that to the outside world became a show window of the government’s xenophobia. Many still live in temporary shelters and lack of access to food and clean water persists. The few aid organizations that are allowed to operate in Burma today still have to contend with government restrictions on their movement, which means they can only work in state-prescribed areas.
Min Thaw, who lives in the disaster-hit Pya Pone district of the Irrawaddy division, said food is scarce, there is no electricity, and water supply remains a problem in his area. He said their drinking water comes from a pond. Whatever food that comes his way from kind-hearted souls (some of whom he does not even know) is often shared with his neighbors for whom hunger pangs have become a staple of daily life.
Once dubbed the “rice bowl of Asia,” the Irrawaddy Delta was flooded with salt water that came rushing in at the height of Nargis, rendering a greater part of it unsuitable for farming. Many water buffalos used for plowing also perished in the cyclone.
“We can’t even start farming,” Min Thaw said in his native language. Even if the rice paddies had not been inundated with salt water, farming would be virtually impossible. “We have no seeds, no fertilizers,” he said.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Nargis destroyed 85 percent of seed stocks.
Now reduced to salt-contaminated wastelands, the Delta registered the highest deaths as a result of the cyclone. Reports abounded of entire villages having been washed away by Nargis. Min Thaw said all 145 or so families in his village lost their homes to the disaster. In Bogale, located around 7 miles south of Yangon, 90 to 95 percent of houses were destroyed while some 10,000 people were believed to have died.
Even in the Yangon division, which suffered fewer casualties and devastation than the Irrawaddy Delta, more than 50,000 village folk in three of its towns lost their houses and had to camp out in schools, churches, monasteries and mosques, according to reports sent to Maung Soe’s Thailand-based NGO, whose name he would not let this writer identify in this article.
The FAO said 70 percent of Burma’s population depends on agriculture for their livelihood. More than 783,000 hectares—or 60 percent—of rice paddies in the affected areas were destroyed by Nargis.
Survivors’ endless woes
Tin Swe considers himself fortunate to have survived last year’s cyclone along with his wife and three-year-old child. He had never swum faster than he did on that fateful night when strong winds that accompanied heavy rains lashed against his house, and the rising tide of water appeared ready to swallow him and his wife and his child at a moment’s notice.
He and his family managed to reach the only place of refuge he could find—a coconut tree that by dint of a miracle remained standing against the massive onslaught of storm water. Together they held on to the tree for two days until the water receded. “We lived on coconut juice for two days,” he recounted.
For days on end, Tin Swe and other surviving victims of cyclone Nargis waited for emergency relief to come to them. But government was more concerned about keeping its hold on power, said Myint Aung, also a resident of Yangon, than securing the well-being of its people that had heretofore been driven to a level of poverty considered the worst in the Southeast Asian region and long reduced to a life stripped of virtually all fundamental freedoms. Aid organizations estimate that one in three Burmese lives in poverty.
For Nargis victims like Tin Swe, the worst part was not surviving the cyclone by the skin of their teeth but enduring the sense of abandonment by the government, which persists to this day, a full year after the unprecedented disaster hit this country of more than 47 million population.
The state’s blatant lack of concern for its people became evident in the immediate aftermath of Nargis. Just a month after the cyclone struck, there were already reports of homeless refugees belonging to the Pwo Karen sub-ethnic group being forcibly sent out of the government-provided makeshift facilities where they had sought shelter and back to their villages that by all accounts still bore the ugly footprints of the disaster. Allegations of public personnel selling relief goods or discriminating against certain villages, particularly those belonging to the Karen ethnic group, which has been fighting for independence from Burma for decades, were not uncommon.
“More than 500,000 people including 200,000 children are still living in makeshift tents,” Andrew Kirkwood, director of Save the Children in Yangoon, said in an interview with Mizzima, a New Delhi-based media group dedicated to reporting about one of the most reclusive states in the world.
Back channels
In the days and weeks following Nargis, the repressive regime refused to grant access to foreign aid organizations seeking to extend badly needed assistance to despondent victims who had just about given up on a government that could not even warn them of a looming disaster yet kept itself busy promoting the referendum on the draft Constitution that was scheduled for May 10, 2008.
“The only thing that was broadcast over the radio on Friday was the propaganda for the bogus referendum next Saturday,” said Irrawaddy magazine editor Aung Zaw in a report by Spiegel Online International. The military junta made no bones about hiding its desperate efforts to ensure a successful referendum when, according to the New York Times, it evicted refugees seeking shelter in schoolhouses so they could be used as polling sites.
Amid sorely limited relief goods reaching the hands of the suffering victims of Nargis, the government was actively urging people to go out and vote “yes” in the said referendum in an apparent bid to ensure its continued stay in power even after 2010, when the first promised election since the military took over the reins of government in 1962 will be held to install what many perceive will be a puppet civilian government.
Widespread perceptions of government’s lack of concern for the victims of the May 2008 disaster are not without basis. Recently, six relief workers were sentenced to jail terms of two to four years, reported Mizzima. Their crime: helping cyclone victims.
It was precisely to avoid incurring the ire of the government that Maung Soe’s nonprofit group used back channels (the details of which he would not publicly disclose) in bringing in massive amounts of relief goods, which included mosquito nets, food packs and medicines. One of his fellow workers, who prefers to remain anonymous, said they were able to help hundreds of people that even international NGOs could not reach, owing to severe restrictions imposed on them by state authorities.
Government’s apparent ineptness in dealing with a post-disaster situation was matched only by the quick, efficient and sustained action with which it deployed soldiers to crack down on the thousands of monks that took to the streets of Yangon in 2007 in an act of defiance. Any sign of protest is dealt with an iron hand—the same hand that barred foreign aid workers from entering cyclone-hit areas in Burma. This is the same ironclad hand that restricts access to basic provisions, the lack of which keeps Nargis victims in the throes of survival.
In denial
Yet, Burma’s military government will not admit to any wrongdoing or abandonment of even the most rudimentary duties to its citizens. It has taken action where it is needed, or so it claims.
A recent editorial of the state-controlled The New Light of Myanmar broadsheet painted a delusional image of the government, saying it has built the necessary facilities “to avert heavy losses” should another disaster strike. Communication systems have been installed along the coast as an early warning device while “high-raised roads (sic) are to built near the villages to be able to take shelter (sic) in the face of a storm,” said the editorial. “Mangrove forests are to be established along the coast as they can defend the seaside regions against storm winds and tidal waves,” it added.
This is the same regime that has claimed to have made great strides in providing the country with a reliable supply of electricity. Yet, the country remains in the dark, literally, save for Nay Pyi Taw, the administrative capital of Burma, where the military regime, otherwise known as the State Peace and Development Council, is based. Win Thein, who lives in Yangon, the country’s major city, said they only get three to four hours of power supply daily. This has gone on for as long as he can remember.
The junta is believed to be reserving much of the country’s energy supply for military and emergency uses—yet another sign that in this benighted land, everything takes a back seat to preserving the military’s grip on power, not least of which are the suffering cyclone survivors’ most urgent needs.
Maung Soe refuses to be cowed into fear or lulled into resignation to the state of affairs in his country. Today, he is back in Burma, doing the kind of work that he hopes will bring a modicum of relief to his suffering fellowmen, which he knows he can never expect from the present government.