Storm victims inside Burma -- copyright Citizen Journalist.
"Amazing weather forecast" clipping obtained from other Burmese dissidents, that is dated "Naypyidaw April 29. Underlined sentences say "Cyclone Nargis has not grown in strength perceptibly", "It is estimated that in the next 24 hours it will not increase in strength and will move slowly to the Northeast." At end it says "while winds are strong, wind speeds on water surfaces may blow from 40 to 45 mph." I was not able to confirm authenticity of this, but it looks like a clipping from a Burmese newspaper, which are all state owned and run and in any case, most rural people do not read newspapers.(A shorter version of this article is on Wild River Review at Large, May 2008.)
On Sunday official reports on the deaths caused by Cyclone Nargis in Burma started with the low estimate of “just three women died as they paddled their sampan on the river.” The tropical cyclone hit at 5 AM local time early Saturday morning and continued till 11 AM, with powerful winds of up to 150 mph.
Yeah, yeah, I thought, there they go again. I remembered the initially low estimate when the tsunami hit in December 2004. I saw then, on Boxing Day, an animated map on TV where the wave was shown lapping at the shores of all the countries in South Asia and S.E. Asia. It was just physically impossible that all the other countries such as Sri Lanka and Thailand would be so hard hit, and hardly any deaths in Burma! An airhead woman correspondent on a TV channel I can’t remember did not understand waves at all, let alone a tsunami. She spoke as if a wave were a solid wall moving through the water in one direction.
You bet, the numbers will go up, I thought to myself, in the voice of my redoubtable old grandmother, Snow Maiden, a real straight talking Moulmein woman, practical to a fault, who once asked her distant spinster cousin who had a tic, “How long have you been living here with us, Miss Blossoming Diamond? Eight months? Well, today is the day you leave. Go now.” She also regularly told guests who said, “I’d better go now,” -- “Good! Go, Go!” Of course she meant, “Go home before it gets dark,” or something like that.
With Cyclone Nargis, sure enough, the news has gotten worser and worser, as Alice in Wonderland might say.
Nargis is a beautiful word and means “narcissus” in Urdu. It was also the name of a famous Bollywood actress who was achingly beautiful, with a pale oval face, black arched eyebrows and plump arms. In one of the novels of Salman Rushdie, the woman who cooks, but cooks with rancor, turns out nargissi kofta, or deep fried meat balls encasing hard boiled eggs, otherwise known as Scotch eggs.
Something so beautifully named has caused a lot of death and destruction. We are only now starting to hear excruciating survivor stories. After the all time low estimate of three, it then went up to 350 and then 351, before it jumped to 10,000, then 22,000 and even 63,000 in an official release from the Burmese Foreign Ministry. U.S. Charge d’Affaires Shari Villarosa said yesterday that the death toll is likely to reach 100,000. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/07/myanmar.aidcyclone/index.html
This U.S. estimate is five times higher than the number given by the Burmese junta. Many countries including the United States have pledged millions in emergency aid, but the Burmese junta is still vacillating about granting entry visas to disaster assessment teams and aid workers, who are all set to go in Thailand and in Australia. We see planes being loaded in Brindisi, Italy. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said quite bluntly, “we would give more, except we don’t like the way the Burmese government does things.” Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy has always insisted that any humanitarian aid be monitored so that it gets to the people it was intended for. I can think of a number of notorious cases from my time in Burma till the early eighties, when I left on a scholarship. In one case the doctor in charge of leprosy medication took the medicines and sold them on the black market. The more powerful were more corrupt. The elder sister of Ne Win’s third (and fifth) wife Daw Ni Ni Myint, was said to have taken all the aid supplies from an earlier USAID aid shipment for a cyclone in Arakan State in the late 1960s. For this, for a while, Ne Win had a token separation. When they reconciled after the interim in which Ne Win married a descendant of former Burmese royalty, Yadana Nat Mè, at an official function Ne Win obviously told the government controlled press not to show her photograph. A small petite woman, she was then reduced to one small white hand sticking out from behind Ne Win’s big frame as she greeted some foreign dignitary at on official reception. (He also had a token separation with his second wife Kitty, who was alleged to have taken all the jewelry that Mogok gem merchants gave her for sale overseas.) Still, all that pales compared to the level of corruption in the so-called “open economy” after 1988. Someone connected to a junta insider told me that in those years Mercedes and other luxury cars would arrive from anonymous donors intended for the top generals and that their homes were “now full of junk, but expensive junk.”
So Kouchner and all of us Burmese dissidents have a strong point. Today (May 8th, 2008) there are reports that the junta has let in aid planes from six countries. One foreign diplomat is said to have called that "delivering aid with an eye dropper." So far, I have only seen on TV (from official Myanmar TV) rows of fat generals and their cohorts “supervising” the unloading of boxed supplies from planes, but we have not seen anything actually delivered. There is only one foreign correspondent (from CNN) in Burma right now. Everyone else has been denied an entry visa, including Anderson Cooper. The Irrawaddy reports that inside Burmese say “we only see the army on TV, nowhere else.”
Washington DC based U.S. Campaign for Burma is starting a letter writing campaign so that there is a U.N. Security Council resolution and aid can be sent to Burma whether the Burmese authorities agree or not. Bernard Kouchner also suggested going in without waiting for the junta’s permission. Condoleeza Rice said sending aid is “not a matter of politics.” http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080507/ts_nm/myanmar_cyclone_dc
The Thai government has started flying in emergency water and other supplies, and has promised to send a planeload a day, it is uncertain for how long. Burma experts such as Dr. Sean Turnell of Macquarie University, Sydney’s Burma Economic Watch predict longterm food shortages. From the inundated areas in satellite photos, it would certainly seem so.
Before and after satellite photos: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/08/myanmar/index.html
I don’t think in this case the Burmese authorities are exaggerating, in fact the junta is now literally out of its depth in this human disaster of humungous proportions. I do know from experience that the Burmese military government is “expert” at manipulating data. Since the coup by the late General Ne Win that put them in place in 1962 and the Moscow trained chief economist (later relieved of his duties) the late U Ba Nyein, they have had an obsession with control and figures. Burma’s famous clowns have always joked of htan pin or “toddy palm surveys” in which you climb on a toddy or sugar palm and then count. In this case, satellite images have shown a disturbing high percentage of flooded areas post-Nargis compared to photographs taken before Nargis, which have inundated the land and changed the Irrawaddy Delta area and Burma’s southern coastline drastically. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/07/myanmar.aidcyclone/index.html#cnnSTCText
In the seventies, former graduates of the Institute of Economics in Rangoon were visiting and told me that they “fixed” the population figures to get a nice looking 3 % annual growth rate. I can still feel my jaw dropping. In the fifties, the head of the Central Statistical Department told us how the foreign experts wanted to see if there was enough bamboo forest for raw material for a paper factory, so they flew him over a bamboo forest. After some time the Burmese asked if he had seen enough, the foreign expert said “yes” and the plane flew back to Rangoon. But after the factories were set up, the entire bamboo forest bloomed and then died, as is the nature of bamboo. The factories were stuck without raw material.
In 1988, the Burmese government retracted its being awarded the Shah Reza Pahlevi prize from the U.N. for literacy programs, saying it was only “monastic education literacy” in order to have Burma demoted from a less developed nation to a least developed nation, in order to qualify for more international aid. This is widely recognized as one of the tipping events which set off the mass pro-democracy movement, which brought Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, to the forefront and which continues mobilizing and speaking out under severe duress to this day.
Last year, in September, the military regime beat, killed and imprisoned many monks who were peacefully demonstrating and chanting the metta suttra, in what is now known as the Saffron Revolution. The junta has been s-l-o-w-l-y dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on a document it calls a “constitution” for fifteen years, and May 10 was scheduled to be the date of a countrywide referendum. Up till Monday, the junta was insisting that it would go ahead but it does not seem as if it will be able to.
Survivor stories -- http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=11823
Burmese Americans are having a hard time finding ways to send aid. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080507/ap_on_re_us/myanmar_helping_out
A food drop is not a good option. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080508/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_myanmar
I remember seeing bags of rice burst into the flood waters from “food drops” in Bangladesh.
I’d like to conclude by saying that aid needs to go in and go in fast. Already bloated corpses are floating in the water, which is salt water, so water purification tablets cannot be used. The United States and the Bush administration and Burmese exile communities overseas and international volunteers should play a leading role in both the delivery and monitoring of emergency aid as well as long term structural changes. Tropical storms are likely to grow more severe worldwide due to global warming, but in Burma the disaster has been much exacerbated by the military junta’s years of neglect of physical infrastructure and civil society. One dissident mentioned all the forests that have been felled, making Rangoon much hotter these days. All the junta has known is how to enrich themselves and how to hang onto their own power. This has to end.
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Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) is a Burmese writer and Burma analyst in exile.
