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Although many survivors of the cyclone have yet to receive any aid, there have miraculously been no reports of the expected outbreaks of disease.
Meanwhile, the junta’s State Peace and Development Council continues, seemingly wilfully, to exacerbate the difficulties faced by cyclone survivors as the international community wrangles with its own inaction.
At a meeting in Kyoto, the G8 foreign ministers accused Burma’s rulers of worsening the actual death toll by obstructing foreign aid. Urging the further involvement of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the positive influence of China, the G8 ministers also pledged to encourage and incentivize any signs of progress toward a civilian government in Burma. Yet such words seem to ring hollow as the humanitarian operation limps on.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has reproached the international community for its failure to take decisive action with regard to the humanitarian and political crises in Burma. In an interview with CNN, Rice criticized the U.N. Security Council for its inability to act and the futility of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine if it couldn’t be applied in the situation in Burma.
The Burma Campaign U.K. has condemned the charity Save the Children for delivering aid from the British government’s Department for International Development to the military regime. A parliamentary statement revealed that Save the Children gave materials to the SPDC despite a U.K. ruling prohibiting the distribution of British aid through the regime due to the risk of it being stolen or used for propaganda purposes.
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that stipulates that U.S. agencies similarly avoid passing humanitarian relief through the military junta.
The regime’s controversial operating guidelines demanding approval for all aspects of aid distribution have been dropped. Following a meeting of the Tripartite Core Group, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has announced that U.N. agencies and international nongovernmental organizations will return to the operating guidelines in effect before June 10.
The plight of Nargis survivors continues as the regime tightens its restrictions on refugees, however. Thousands of survivors set out for Thailand in the wake of the cyclone, but the authorities are sending anyone found bearing documents identifying them as residents of the cyclone-afflicted region back to their towns or villages.
Monasteries in the town of Myawaddy on the Thai border have been warned to refuse shelter to anyone from the cyclone-devastated region. The regime is simultaneously cracking down on the smuggling of economic migrants into Thailand and Malaysia.
The crisis facing farmers in cyclone-affected parts of the Irrawaddy delta is being compounded by the lassitude of the oxen and water buffaloes donated. These critical animals are proving to be suffering from extreme stress, whether because they endured the cyclone or have had to travel for several days to get to the delta. As the planting deadline draws closer, the lack of effective draught animals is striking another blow to the desperate delta region. To add insult to injury, an outbreak of the devastating foot-and-mouth disease has struck townships affected by the cyclone.
Farmers who bought farming equipment and seeds on credit from the government have nowhere to put their equipment to use as the authorities have seized thousands of acres of privately owned land in Bogalay. The farmers who survived the cyclone have been lumbered with a debt of about 1.5 million kyat to be repaid within three years, lost their crops and profit from last year and have had all hopes of planting this season’s crop snatched away.
The Htoo Trading Company, known for its close links to the junta, has promised to build new houses for the farmers whose land has been seized and for villagers who have been forced to leave the area.
Concerns over the use of forced labour in the wake of Nargis are apparently vindicated as it is reported that the authorities are demanding laborers to work for extremely low pay cultivating land seized in the affected region. Villagers in Kyauk Tan township, Rangoon, have been forced to work on the reconstruction of a dam damaged in the cyclone in order to receive aid materials donated by private donors.
The All Burma Federation of Student Unions has expressed concern over its seven members arrested while clearing corpses from the Irrawaddy delta. The seven men are being held in Bassein prison in what the ABFSU has called the government’s “cold-blooded crime” in sabotaging private aid work. The whereabouts of detained donors Zarganar and Zaw Thet Htway are still unknown.
A journalist from Ecovision, Eint Khaing Oo, arrested as she covered cyclone victims requesting aid from international NGOs in Rangoon, is due in court on July 2, accused of selling information to foreign-based Burmese media organisations.
The junta is clearly determined to suppress honest coverage of the cyclone. People in Arakan State are being threatened with punishment if known to have watched a VCD of the storm and its aftermath. And a Korean journalist was deported after she visited the offices of the NLD to obtain information regarding cyclone victims.
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(Khin Ohmar is coordinator of the Asia Pacific Peoples' Partnership on Burma, based in Thailand. She can be contacted at appartnership@gmail.com. Her blog may be found at http://apppb.blogspot.com.)
