|
Nargis: World's worst response to a natural disaster
 |
|
Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong
In the weeks after Cyclone Nargis swept through lower Burma on 2 and 3 May 2008, bringing in its wake a tidal wave that submerged vast areas of the delta region and took with it what has ultimately an untold number of lives, it quickly became apparent that from the time of the cyclone's approach and in its aftermath, the response of the military regime was in fact the world's worst response to a natural disaster of any government in modern times.
Not only did the generals deliberately avoid contact with world leaders and international organisations desperate to offer assistance to the millions left in dire need of water, basic food and health care, not to mention longer-term relief but they also forged ahead with the charade of a referendum on a new constitution designed to extend their grip on power indefinitely. Government officials were instructed specifically to neglect the plight of the storm victims and continue their work to prepare for the referendum, which was merely postponed by two weeks in some townships, including holding public meetings where locals were ordered to attend or pay fines. And the twisted priorities that characterise dictatorship became further apparent when sailors who left their docked ships at the Thilawar Pier during the height of the cyclone were reportedly detained and charged with abandoning ship. The situation even became so absurd that the Secretary General of the United Nations was making phone calls to Senior General Than Shwe but he was refusing to receive them.
Realising that the government was not going to do anything to assist them, local people, and then those further away from the worst affected areas, began organising themselves. In Rangoon residents and monks cleared roads themselves and shared water and other essentials. Where soldiers were sent out to do some work, ridiculously they went into the houses in the area to ask people to lend knives and saws with which to cut. In the delta, thousands of homeless people gathered at monasteries and received assistance from monks, many of whom also took on impromptu relief coordinating roles.
The regime went beyond being obstinate to outright criminality when on May 9 it seized the World Food Programme's supplies in Rangoon and forced a planeload of supplies from Qatar to be returned to the country of origin. The taking of the supplies came as such a shock to a WFP spokesman that it was rightly described as unprecedented in modern humanitarian relief efforts".
|
Junta expels Qatar aircraft carrying relief supplies
Mizzima News, May 9, 2008
The obduracy of the Burmese military junta is inexplicable. On Thursday it sent back an aircraft from Qatar carrying relief material for cyclone hit victims. The aircraft was sent back from Rangoon's Mingalardon airport. The military aircraft from Qatar carried a team of 62 people along with relief material including medicines and landed at the Mingalardon airport, a source working in the airport said. They were sent away after officials from the Ministry of Home Affairs met them at about 9:15 a.m.," the source said. In a statement issued from Naypyitaw, the junta's Foreign Ministry said the government refused to allow the rescue and information team which came in the aircraft, therefore the government has ordered the aircraft to return. Myanmar (Burma) had no prior knowledge of the rescue, search and information team which came along with relief supplies. The government was only aware that the aircraft would come to hand over relief supplies," the statement said. We are not yet ready to receive such emergency rescue, search and information teams from foreign countries for the time being," the statement added. |
UN Suspends Aid Shipment to Burma
Wai Moe, The Irrawaddy, May 9, 2008
The UN announced on Friday that it has suspended all aid shipments to Burma, following the junta's seizure of all food and equipment of the World Food Program (WFP). WFP officials said they have no choice" but to suspend their aid efforts following the unprecedented seizure by the secretive military government. As a humanitarian disaster grows in the Irrawaddy delta, the junta has drawn worldwide criticism for its foot-dragging in allowing humanitarian aid to reach the survivors of the cyclone that wracked the country last week. Well-dressed Burmese army officers and soldiers were doing photo-ops on state media on Friday, shown delivering some basic relief items such as food and water to cyclone victims in a superior, condescending manner. Meanwhile, perhaps as many as 1.5 million people in the affected areas are hopeless and helpless... The junta's mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar, said on Friday that it will accept relief supplies, but no foreign aid workers or rescue teams. |
Emissaries who visited the country, like the prime minister of Thailand, demonstrated that some small gains could be made, and some concessions were obtained and a degree of international assistance has been allowed. However, it is paltry by comparison to the scale of the disaster and accompanied by persistent needless obstacles presented by the regime.
The world has proven itself incapable of coming to terms with a regime that is so odious that it places the small risk of its own position being undermined by letting in foreign assistance, or even talking on the telephone, over the basic needs of its citizens for water, food and medicine. The cost in terms of human lives on a vast scale was manifestly of no concern to it, and yet world opinion and political will proved unable to address this utter immorality.
|
For years there has been a hard debate among humanitarian aid workers and regional specialists about the merits or otherwise of engaging with Burma's government in order to reach the population. That debate is now in many respects irrelevant. There is no possibility of meaningful engagement with an administration that goes even beyond the denying of access to outside groups when millions of its people are in desperate need of help and to the point of robbing the UN. Although ways will be reopened and some methods found for work in the country under this government, at no time can it be forgotten as to what sort of administration it really is with which the world is dealing. |
 |
|
Senior General Than Shwe:
Voting, not helping |
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China and India need to be singled out for their belated and inconsistent approaches to a problem of such enormity right on their doorsteps. Collectively, they too must go down in history as having failed the people of Burma. Had the association and these two presumptive superpowers shown strong leadership and a determination from the start not to put up with any nonsense, things could have been different. But their inadequate and uncoordinated reactions belittled the disaster as well as its victims and left everything in the hands of the generals.
One effect of the cyclone is likely to be in the form of a vastly increased number of routine human rights abuses, although these are extremely difficult to document in the affected areas. Reports from around the country, not only from directly affected regions, indicate that arbitrary taxation has been on the rise on the pretext of cyclone recovery efforts. Forced labour is also reportedly increasing, as there is a desperate need to rebuild damaged infrastructure, which was in many places to begin with. There have been reports of children orphaned due to the cyclone being picked up and taken away in army trucks, ostensibly for special care.
Another effect is in the form of persons involved in the relief effort, taking up the slack left by the lack of either international or government aid, themselves being charged. Among them have been young men who assisted in cremating and burying the bodies of deceased persons, including a nationally renowned comedian, Zarganar, and the leader of the Human Rights Defenders and Promoters Group, U Myint Aye.
|
Constitution referendum amid cyclone exposes illegitimacy of Burma junta
Awzar Thi, Jurist Hotline, May 14, 2008
May 10 was supposed to be a big day for Burma's military, the day that it legitimated itself through the ballot box. On that day, millions of eligible voters were supposed to come and freely express their approval of a constitution that would guarantee the army a quarter of seats in parliament and reaffirm its role as the leading state agency in a discipline-flourishing" democracy, with a constitution of the generals, by the generals, for the generals.
That was the plan. In reality, the military's legitimacy has been decided upon by something else entirely. Cyclone Nargis not only obliterated hundreds of coastal villages and with them prospects for a trouble-free poll, but also any chance that the regime can now or at any time in the future obtain the credibility at home or abroad that the referendum was intended to secure for it. Never mind the widespread claims of vote rigging, bullying and miscounting. That the referendum was held at all, that almost two weeks on cyclone victims have received no help and are dying in makeshift huts of cholera, that rivers and fields are still full of bloated corpses and that officials are selling or hoarding relief supplies delivered from well-meaning donors abroad all speak to the regime's barbarity and its absolute want of legitimacy.
The junta's store of legitimacy, to the extent that it existed at all, was already greatly diminished by the events of September 2007. The putting down of the latest popular uprising was in some respects even more shocking than the crushing of protests in 1988, albeit less bloody, because this time around Buddhist monks were in the forefront of rallies. Not only do the majority of people in Burma venerate the monks but the generals too, in the absence of any singular unifying ideology of old, have used them as a central plank in the platform upon which they have stood for the last two decades. By pressing on since then and presenting themselves as pious leaders on a righteous path, the army leaders have instead consistently reminded the public of their sins rather than of any advertised virtues.
The other main element in the propaganda, leaving aside the state stability humbug, has been national development. New roads, bridges, dams, weirs, universities, schools, hospitals and crops are the stuff from which the military has sought to build a legacy. People can travel more easily, grow more plants more often, study harder and get better medical treatment than ever before. Or so the story goes, thanks to the government's benevolence. It is a story that was never true, but in the aftermath of the cyclone has been shown to be so horribly wrong that even the most skeptical of citizens has been shocked that the regime would stoop to the point of blocking international aid from starving villagers and stealing from the small amounts that it has allowed in. Even the most cynical of observers has been alarmed that boxes of supplies from Thailand have had the names of senior officers plastered over the top of the kingdom's labels, only to be taken back from dazed ostensible recipients anyhow after the television cameras had been turned off. And that is just a little of what has happened in the past week and a half, a week and a half in which the ruling clique has really shown its true colours, their unsurpassed ugliness.
The ballot boxes from May 10, and those from the remaining 47 townships where the vote was postponed to May 24, will be both full and empty: full of little papers that will one way or another be taken as an endorsement of the army's continued rule, but empty of substance and devoid of meaning. The referendum was not a sham, as so many commentators and political opponents have said so many times in recent weeks. It just wasn't anything at all. Whatever it was supposed to be it was not; whatever it was supposed to decide has been decided elsewhere: a great cost for absolutely nothing. |
|
Homeless couple hit for speaking against referendum
RFA, May 7, 2008 (AHRC summary)
The day before Nargis made landfall, officials were out in villages in Rangoon Division, including Kyanbin, Tarpa and Kwinbauk, handing out imitation referendum ballots with green ticks and details of the voter on the back. After the cyclone, on May 5 a group of officials led by a local fire chief named Thaung Htun assembled people in Hlaingthayar and (or) Shwepyithar industrial areas on the outskirts of Rangoon, and amid the wreckage insisted that the assembled people support the draft constitution. When a person present couldn't contain his anger and yelled that there was no way he would support the military government, Thaung Htun hit him. Then when the man's wife said that he had shouted out not from hatred but from depression that their house had been destroyed in the storm, Thaung Htun hit her too. She was taken to the Shwepyithar outpatients department where the wound had to be stitched up. |
A crying baby and a sigh
DVB, May 11, 2008 (AHRC summary)
A woman who sighed while in a queue to vote in the constitutional referendum on Saturday, May 10 was threatened with three days' jail and a fine. The woman, Ma Thaung Le (a.k.a. Ma Yi Myint) was waiting to vote at polling station no. 1 in Zigone town, Pegu Division around 2:30pm when she sighed out loud. The ward chairman and police accused her of disrespecting the process and detained her, throwing the polling station and surrounds into uproar. According to one person, she sighed because of the crying of her 3-year-old daughter whom she had left at home to come and vote. People begged the officials not to arrest her, as she survives from day to day by selling bean sprouts and could not afford to be away from her child. Finally, the ward chairman, U Tin Ohn, settled the matter with a payment of 10,000 Kyat (around USD 8), which was collected among the locals as Thaung Le has no money. |
Zarganar (a.k.a. Ko Thura), a famous comedian in Burma who took the lead in relief efforts among members of the arts and entertainment industry, had his house searched and was taken away at the start of June. According to information that the Asian Human Rights Commission pieced together from a number of sources, around seven police led by the Rangoon Western District police chief together with the local council chairman came to Zarganar's house in Rangoon just before 8pm on June 4 and went inside saying that they just wanted to search it. After they recovered a computer, some VCDs of the cyclone damage as well as the new Rambo movie (the story is situated in Burma) and the wedding video of the junta leader's daughter they said that they would also take Zarganar with them for a short while", meaning around a couple of days". They also took around USD 1000 of money for the cyclone relief effort.
 |
Zarganar has been working constantly on cyclone relief since May 7, and had given numerous interviews to overseas-based radio stations and other media about his work and the needs of the people. He had also ridiculed state media reports about the cyclone aftermath and in an interview with the Thailand-based Irrawaddy News service published on May 21, Zarganar said that many cyclone survivors didn't want the UN Secretary General to visit for fear that security would be tightened and that they might get sent away in order to make the temporary resettlement camps look good for the VIPs.
According to Zarganar's sister, he had used all his own money for the cyclone victims and had sold his and his wife's mobile phones (which are expensive in Burma) to fund the work. He had organised over 400 volunteers to work in some 42 villages that had been neglected since the cyclone struck. Following Zarganar's arrest, the group's relief efforts also were halted. |
|
Zarganar |
At the end of July, Zarganar and former sports magazine editor Zaw Thet Htwe, who had also been working hard for cyclone victims, were brought into the closed court within the Insein Prison for the first time and like so many of the people accused over the September 2007 protests, charged with violating section 505(b) of the Penal Code for causing public alarm. The families of the two were not informed that they would be brought on that date and charged.
Zarganar has in total been charged with seven offences under section 505(b), 295 (defiling a place of worship with intent to insult religion), and under the Illegal Associations Law, Video Law and Electronic Transactions Law: the same categories of offences as those listed against Nay Phone Latt (see 'Ten case studies in illegal arrest and imprisonment, this edition of article 2, case no. 9).
|
Cyclone relief no laughing matter
Awzar Thi, UPI Asia Online, June 5, 2008
On the night of June 4, a group of police officers came to a house in suburban Rangoon, searched it and took away one of the occupants. But the person they took is not a wanted robber, murderer or escapee. He is a comedian.
Although Zarganar is famous in Burma for his antics on stage and screen, he has not been joking much lately. Instead, he has been at the front of local efforts to get relief to where it has been needed most since Cyclone Nargis swept through his country a month ago.
Zarganar, whose adopted name means pincers", has thrown everything into the relief effort, organising hundreds of volunteers in dozens of villages to help in giving out food, water, clothes and other basic necessities to thousands of people.
His sister told Voice of America that he had sold his and his wife's mobile phones to use the money for the work, and that as the monsoon is setting in they had just purchased seeds to distribute in order that villagers who have nothing to plant might at least grow vegetables and stave off hunger.
He has also been a vocal critic of the government response to the cyclone, constantly pointing to the shortfalls in assistance and needs of survivors.
The odor [of death] sticks with us when we come back from the villages," Zarganar told The Irrawaddy news service on June 2, a full month after the cyclone struck.
Nobody can stand it, and it causes some people to vomit. How could people find edible fish and frogs in that environment?" he asked, in response to an editorial in a state-run newspaper that survivors did not need foreign aid as they could catch and eat small animals instead.
Although perhaps the most outspoken, Zarganar is not the first person to be detained over the cyclone response¡Xor the lack of it.
In mid-May, at least eight journalists from local periodicals who were doing their best to gather news and report on the tragedy without running afoul of the censors were held overnight at an army camp in the delta. They were released, but not before being threatened and having their digital photographs deleted.
Back in Rangoon, the reporters' editors were also told to stop covering the extent of damage and instead publish articles on rebuilding efforts. The warnings had the desired effect. Journals that were the week before packed with images of hungry, tired and frightened people sheltering in monasteries instead concentrated on the setting up of emergency camps and delivery of supplies.
Meanwhile, authorities continue to constrain and prevent domestic donors from getting where they want to go.
At the end of May, some blocked a bridge into Rangoon and impounded vehicles that were returning from taking goods to the needy.
Monks who tried to deliver food from other parts of the country also found officials interfering with their every move, wanting to make it appear that they were the ones responsible for the largesse.
And international agencies have corroborated reports from many areas of people being evicted from temporary facilities and being told to go back to homes that they no longer have.
Zarganar has a home, but he is nowhere to be found in it tonight. Not for the first time, he is in a cell somewhere, awaiting news of what will happen next.
The last time he was released, after getting involved in the monk-led September 2007 protests, he was in good humour, punning about the regime's hypocritical religious rites and the dogs that kept him awake while being held in an army barracks.
He may not find so much to laugh about this time. The scale of the ongoing disaster and the urgency with which relief is still needed seemed to have been too much even for Zarganar's big funny bone. His customary deep laughter was absent from interviews he gave in the days before being taken away.
Burma's new constitution may insist that nobody can be held for more than a day without going to a court or being charged, but as Zarganar knows full well, the gap between what is said and done in his country is far too large for such words to be taken seriously, although that is no laughing matter either.
The volunteers may have to do their best without him for a while. There is no guarantee that Zarganar will be home after two days, or any time soon after that. |
|
Similarly, 57-year-old U Myint Aye and two other members of the Human Rights Defenders and Promoters (HRDP) group were in early August taken away as a consequence of their cyclone relief work. A group of police and officials came to Myint Aye's house at around 4pm on 8 August 2008 and after searching it for over two hours and taking some documents and other items they told Myint Aye to go with them for a short while. The group included Police Captain Kyaw Sein of Rangoon Division Police (intelligence), Special Branch personnel, the chairman of the ward council and another council official. |
 |
|
U Myint Aye |
Myint Aye did not come back that night as promised. The next afternoon, another team led by the chief of police in Kyimyindaing Township came to the house and asked for some sets of clothes for Myint Aye, indicating that he would be detained for some time. They told his family not to worry and to ask for any help if they need it; however, as in other cases like this they did not give any details about where they had taken Myint Aye or why.
Although Myint Aye's house was itself affected in the storm he instead had gone promptly to the worst-affected areas and was by May 6 among the first people to have gone into the delta and begun reporting to overseas-based media about the lack of any assistance. After a few days in the delta he told one Thailand-based group that
The refugees' suffering here is great. We have bought and distributed as much rice grain as we can. HRDP Bogalay residents have taken charge. We can't distribute it to one (victim) by one. We'd get trampled by the crowds. We give three bags of rice to a monastery to cook, the next day, another three bags. So far we've distributed over 70 bags a little at a time like that."
Myint Aye's detention followed that of another two members of the HRDP group. Myo Min, who lives nearby, was taken on August 6 and Ko Thant Zaw Myint was taken on August 7. The arrests coincided with the visit to the country of the new United Nations special expert on human rights in Burma.
At time that this edition of article 2 was going to press, it was reported in the state-run media that Myint Aye is to be charged with allegedly organising bombings in Rangoon and for receiving money from abroad for that purpose.
Over the last two to three years many members of the HRDP group have been arrested, including Ko Thiha, whose case is also mentioned in this edition, convicted of sedition (Penal Code section 124A) and upsetting public tranquility, section 505(b), sentenced to 22 years in prison; Ko Myint Naing, 40, Ko Kyaw Lwin, 40, U Hla Shein, 62, U Mya Sein, 50, U Win, 50, and U Myint, 59, the Hinthada 6", sentenced to four to eight years for upsetting public tranquility (Penal Code section 505(b)(c)) and Ko Min Min, 30, residing in Pyi Township, sentenced to three years' imprisonment for illegal tuition (for the cases of the Hinthada 6 and Ko Min Min see, 'Burma, political psychosis and legal dementia', article 2, vol. 6, nos. 5-6, October-December 2007).
Posted on 2008-09-24
|
|