By Brian McCartan CHIANG MAI, Thailand - As the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bids to play a front-line role in the relief efforts in cyclone-hit Myanmar, members' respective bilateral policies towards the military regime promise to complicate and potentially undermine a collective and coherent group response.
Nowhere is that more clear than with Thailand, which has long maintained strong commercial ties with Myanmar's military government. Bangkok was notably the first capital to order the shipment relief supplies just days after the disaster first struck on May 2 and 3. Bangkok is now serving as willing host to a logistics
center for the United Nations and international humanitarian aid agencies responding to the cyclone.
United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon's request on May 19 to use Bangkok's former Don Muang international airport as a logistical hub for relief efforts was readily agreed to by the Thai government, although use had already begun a day earlier. Airport hangars have been provided to the UN's World Food Program to store supplies set for shipment to Myanmar, while the United States has used the large military airfield at U Tapao for its relief flights into Yangon.
Relief supplies are also being sent in convoys from the Thai border town of Mae Sot, sometimes in Thai Army trucks, and earlier this week a Thai medical team was the first foreign emergency team to gain access to the country. They have even been allowed to work in the Irrawaddy Delta region, the worst-hit area to which the junta has restricted foreign aid worker access.
Thailand has served as interlocutor between Myanmar's government and the UN and US to persuade the ruling junta to open its doors to international relief efforts. The reclusive government had earlier refused to allow in Western aid and still has not allowed Western aid workers into the disaster hit areas. While the Thai Air Force was able to broker a deal to let US Air Force relief flights in, other efforts have not been as successful.
But even while sending emergency supplies, providing support for relief efforts and acting as a liaison between the reclusive generals and the outside world, Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundarvej's government has simultaneously been busy cementing business deals and drawing up policies that threaten a harder line against the various exile opposition groups based in Thailand.
Samak eventually traveled to Myanmar on May 14, in a diplomatic bid to gain wider access for relief aid. During the visit, Myanmar state-run television showed clips of Samak being led around relief centers outside Yangon filled with blue tents, where he greeted refugees, checked out relief supplies and even watched television and joked with refugee children.
These spic-and-span camps have since been derided by opposition groups and critics of the junta's relief efforts as show pieces, while the great majority of the estimated two million people affected by the cyclone fight for their lives amid insufficient shelter, food and medicine. The World Food Program has estimated that only 30% of those affected by the disaster have been reached with any relief supplies.
Amid reports of theft of aid supplies, movement restrictions, and a general official neglect, Samak surprised many with his appraisal of the junta's relief efforts when he said on May 14 that "from what I have seen I am impressed with their management". He went on to say that the generals had given him a "guarantee" that there had been no outbreaks of disease or any starvation among cyclone survivors.
He notably failed to gain more access to disaster areas for the UN and other international relief organizations and said he was satisfied that the junta "have their own team to cope with the situation" and did not need foreign experts. Samak's counterintuitive remarks are hardly surprising given the commercial results of his previous trip to Myanmar in March 14 and a reciprocal official visit by Myanmar Prime Minister Thein Sein to Thailand on April 29, just days before the cyclone hit.
During his visit in March, Samak controversially agreed to disperse the remaining funds from a 4 billion baht ($125 million) EX-IM Bank of Thailand soft loan for communications equipment first initiated by ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's government. Thaksin is currently under investigation for alleged irregularities surrounding the government-to-government loan, which critics have said benefited his then family-owned company, the Shin Corporation.
The two governments also agreed to move ahead with the controversial Ta Sang dam project on the Salween River. Human rights and environmental organizations allege widespread abuses have clouded the project's development. Other infrastructure projects were also agreed, including the development of a deep sea port at Tavoy on the Andaman Sea in the Tenasserim Division of southeastern Myanmar.
During the April meeting, the port was further discussed as were agreements for Thai-invested contract farming of rubber and palm oil plantations in Myanmar. Thein Sein announced that around 100,000 rai (16 hectare) near Tavoy would be set aside as an industrial zone for energy related industries including petrochemicals and refineries.
Thailand is currently Myanmar's third-largest trading partner and largest energy importer and as of 2007 had paid-up investments of US$1.3 billion in the neighboring country, according to statistics from Thai Foreign Trade Department. Some contend, however, that those budding commercial deals have compromised Thailand's ability to play the role of honest broker between the junta and outside world in the wake of the cyclone crisis.
While on one hand playing an active role in providing relief to cyclone survivors, on the other Bangkok has made almost no public statements denouncing the regime's widely condemned, including by the UN and US, closed-door approach to accepting international aid and foreign relief workers. Instead, Samak's government took the rather tactless opportunity of an emergency cyclone-related meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the military regime for the Tavoy port and a separate road link project. The MoU was signed on May 19 by Thai foreign minister Noppadon Pattama and his Myanmar counterpart Nyan Win.
The big-ticket infrastructure project envisions expanding the current port at Tavoy and building a road linking it with Thailand's main port Laem Chabang outside of Bangkok. The expanded port will be able to accommodate larger vessels and cut days off the travel time of current shipments which must navigate around the Malay peninsula. Thai Transportation Minister Santi Prompat has said the port project will cost between 40 and 50 billion baht ($1.2-1.6 billion) and that another 100 billion baht ($3.1 billion) will be invested to develop the industrial zone.
According to the minister, PTT Plc, the Thai oil company has expressed interest in setting up an oil refinery in Myanmar and the construction of a pipeline to pump oil products to Thailand. Thai Foreign Minister Noppadon Pattama says the project will take five to six years to complete, while a construction survey is expected to be completed by the end of this year. Once built, Pattama said private Thai firms will be granted a concession to manage the port on an initial five year extendable contract.
The MoU also covers the construction of a 130-kilometer road to connect Myanmar's Tenasserim Division with and Thailand's western Kanchanburi province.
The cyclone may have by default brought a temporary reprieve for Myanmar's ethnic and political opposition groups, refugees, internally displaced persons and the nongovernmental organizations which assist them, while the junta redirects its military focus on maintaining stability in cyclone-hit areas. That could change soon, however, if reports hold true that Samak agreed to Thein Sein to step up monitoring of opposition groups active in Thailand in exchange for closer commercial ties.
According to people familiar with the policy shift, Thai authorities will be tasked with cracking down on the insurgent Karen National Union, which operates in remote border areas. Meanwhile known political opposition group leaders are to be closely monitored and their movements severely restricted.
Exile-run media groups long based in Thailand would also be monitored to determine whether their coverage was harmful to relations between the two countries. Cross-border movements would also be severely curtailed under the new hard-line policy, including the flow of food, medicine and other supplies sent by local and international relief organizations to villagers displaced by the ongoing armed conflict between the junta and rebel groups.
With the huge international attention now drawn to Myanmar and the region in the wake of the cyclone, the policy has not yet come into force. Already a planned forced repatriation of newly arrived Karen refugees in Thailand's Mae Hong Son province was averted by the UNHCR, who alerted the Thai government to the likely bad press coverage that would result if it forced back refugees during a time of crisis. Several NGO workers noted, however, that this could all change once attention shifts elsewhere, which is already starting to happen with the earthquake disaster in China.
Thailand's Myanmar policy will certainly benefit from ASEAN's now assumed front-line role in dealing with the cyclone disaster. Each ASEAN member has agreed to provide 30 medical personnel, of which the Thai medical team was the first to arrive. The UN, however, says this international response is still not enough to stave off disease outbreaks and that the country's doors need to be opened to all foreign experts to avert a wider humanitarian crisis.
Critics say ASEAN's intervention will only allow Myanmar's military regime to hide behind the group's long held non-interference policy in member states' internal affairs. Myanmar's intransigence has in the past tried the 10-member group's patience, but with this recent agreement ASEAN has once again provided Myanmar a buffer from international criticism.
That's clearly the preference of Thailand and a benefit to Bangkok's business interests.
Brian McCartan is a Chiang Mai-based freelance journalist. He may be reached at brianpm@comcast.net.
got it from here.
Cyclone Nargis
May the generations learn how to protect from the disaster...
May the generations learn how to work together as Burmese
Citizens, as we do now for the Cyclone Nargis's relief.
May the generations know the world is with us..........
May the generations know the darkness can't overcome the Light....
May the generations realize that they are part of history......
May the sky of Burma free from darkness cloud.
We shall not forget this sadness movement.
** You can almost find ever thing here and here about Cyclone Nargis relief works.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Thai ties bind Myanmar cyclone relief
Myanmar Junta Drops Ban on Cyclone Relief Workers (Update1)
By Ed Johnson May 23 (Bloomberg) -- Myanmar's junta dropped its ban on international aid workers carrying out cyclone relief operations in the country, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, after talks with military chief Senior General Than Shwe.
``He has agreed to allow all aid workers regardless of nationalities,'' Ban told reporters in the capital, Naypyidaw, according to the UN delegation. ``He has taken quite a flexible position on this matter.''
The military leader also agreed to allow the airport in the former capital, Yangon, to be used to distribute international aid, Ban said.
More than 130,000 people are dead or missing after Cyclone Nargis hit the southern rice-growing Irrawaddy River delta three weeks ago, sweeping away villages, crops and livestock. Myanmar's military, which has run the nation of 48 million people since 1962, barred international workers from the worst-affected areas and rejected offers of helicopters, trucks and aid from U.S. warships anchored off the coast.
The agreement on aid workers ``is going to help with our operation enormously,'' UN World Food Program country director Chris Kaye said by telephone from Yangon.
``We understand that they are going to be allowed to work in the delta,'' Kaye said. The agreement will help the WFP ``ramp up the scale of operations,'' he added.
More Aid
Ban arrived in the country formerly known as Burma yesterday to press the junta to grant international workers access to the delta and accept more aid.
``This is a significant step forward, and could be a turning point in the aid response,'' Brian Agland, CARE's country director in Myanmar, said in an e-mailed statement today.
Agland and other leaders of aid organizations will meet with Ban tomorrow to plan coordination of the relief effort.
Ban met yesterday with General Thein Sein, the nation's prime minister, who took issue when the UN chief said the disaster was too great for the junta to handle and that more aid was urgently needed, according to a UN statement.
After meeting the prime minister, Ban expressed frustration at ``the inability of the aid workers to bring assistance at the right time to the affected areas,'' according to the UN.
The junta estimates the cyclone may have caused $10.7 billion in damage to property and affected 5.5 million people, Ramesh Shrestha, the UN Children's Fund representative for Myanmar, said yesterday after meeting with U Soe Tha, the country's development minister.
Donors to Meet
Delegates from 31 countries have registered to attend a May 25 donor conference in Yangon sponsored by the UN and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. While the international community wants to focus on improving the aid effort, the ruling generals want money for reconstruction.
Shari Villarosa, the charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Yangon, will attend the conference, State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters yesterday in Washington.
The Bush administration has led international criticism of the junta for blocking the relief effort and for rights abuses, including the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The opposition leader, whose National League for Democracy won elections in 1990 that were rejected by the junta, has spent 12 of the past 18 years in detention and has been under house arrest at her home in Yangon since May 2003.
Pro-democracy campaigners are demanding that Suu Kyi, 62, be freed this month, saying the junta's legal authority to detain her will expire. Under the State Protection Law, the regime can only hold someone deemed a security threat for five years without trial or charge, according to the Burma Campaign U.K.
`Killing Thousands'
``Ban Ki-moon must meet with Aung San Suu Kyi and NLD leaders whilst he is in Burma,'' said campaign director Mark Farmaner in a statement. ``The UN failed to take action that the people of Burma called for to help restore democracy. Now the regime they left in power is killing thousands more through the denial of aid.''
The junta will hold a referendum on a draft constitution tomorrow in the areas worst hit by the cyclone, two weeks after the rest of the country voted. The charter was approved by 92.4 percent of voters with a 99 percent turnout on May 10, according to state media.
The junta says the referendum will pave the way for elections in 2010. The U.S. and opposition groups in Myanmar say the ballot was rigged and accuse the generals of trying to prolong their reign.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ed Johnson in Sydney at ejohnson28@bloomberg.net.
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Thursday, May 22, 2008
US, aid groups hope to widen small Myanmar opening
WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) - Myanmar's decision to allow a U.S. aid official to tour the Cyclone Nargis disaster zone marked a small opening by the military government, but real help for millions of victims requires more expert access, U.S. officials said on Thursday.
William Berger, head of a U.S. Disaster Assistance Response Team for Myanmar, had joined other donor government representatives and aid workers for a three-day Myanmar government-organized tour of the Irrawaddy Delta area.
"We see this as an opening, but it is not sufficient," said Ky Luu, director of foreign disaster assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
He told reporters that reaching all of the estimated 2.4 million people affected by the cyclone would require "tripling or quadrupling" aid experts and relief supplies.
U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Berger would use any meetings with officials of the former Burma to press for wider access for outside experts to assess needs.
"We're glad that he's able to at least go and make some small observations on the situation, but that certainly isn't the equivalent of him either being allowed in on his own or collectively with the DART team to do what they would normally do in this situation," he said.
While Berger visited Myanmar, the rest of his 10-member team of relief experts remained in Thailand awaiting visas, another official said.
U.S. emergency relief, which totaled $20.5 million as of Wednesday, would continue to flow to Myanmar through NGO partners and the United States would attend a weekend donors conference in Myanmar, Casey said.
But he added: "Before we can really offer any kind of additional assistance, we and other donors need some kind of independent assessment of the situation."
Myanmar's secretive ruling military has limited access by outside experts to the disaster zone since the May 2 storm and sea surge left nearly 134,000 dead or missing, but some foreign aid groups have been working with their local staff and community volunteers to reach victims.
"People are getting supplies to a fraction of the entire group of affected people -- about 25 to 30 percent of the affected people," said International Rescue Committee Chairwoman Anne Richard.
"We are getting people in but we have to get more experts in," she told reporters in Washington. (Reporting by Paul Eckert; Editing by Eric Walsh)
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Trauma risk for Burma aid workers
By Chris Hogg
BBC News, Bangkok
For the aid agencies who have struggled for more than two weeks to get relief supplies to the victims of Cyclone Nargis, there is now a new factor that could compromise their ability to operate effectively.
Their staff are exhausted.
What makes this disaster different from others before is the fact that those trying to deal with this emergency have had to rely so heavily on local staff.
Burma's initial decision not to allow foreign relief workers in, and to prevent foreigners already in Burma from entering the Irrawaddy Delta, meant the international relief organisations were forced to tear up the rulebook and instead do the best they could with the resources they already had in place in the country.
Many of these Burmese staff are experienced operators who know the area well, but the pressure on them has been relentless.
One Burmese relief worker working with Christian Aid said she has been working non-stop since the cyclone.
"How can we take a day off when we know how many of our fellow citizens our suffering?" she asked.
The charity says its local staff feel all the responsibility is on their shoulders. Another relief worker lost his wife and three sons in the cyclone.
"He has not stopped working since the cyclone struck," his colleague said. "He has thrown himself into helping others as a way of coping with his grief."
'Shocked and numb'
Experience from other disasters suggests that people who identify more readily with the victims are at greater risk of developing psychological problems.
The symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in one society might be quite different from those in other cultures, who might express stress differently
Dr Peter Salama,
Unicef
Local staff, likely to identify more readily with the victims than those from overseas, are more likely to have higher rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Those who deal with traumatic events like handling dead bodies also have a higher likelihood of developing psychological problems.
Research into the aftermath of the Kosovo war in 1999 suggests two groups of relief workers are most at risk of developing stress-related problems.
First time volunteers who may be wholly unprepared for the job, who do not know what to expect or who have unrealistic expectations of their ability to make an impact are the most at risk.
The other group is the more experienced experts from overseas, who travel from disaster to disaster and who as a result may have built up cumulative amounts of stress.
Doctors say those facing extremes of stress often change their behaviour in an effort to find a new internal equilibrium.
"People feel shocked and numb, fearful and anxious, sometimes helpless and hopeless," said Professor Richard Williams from the University of Glamorgan in South Wales. "They feel guilty. Sometimes they feel angry."
As well as emotional reactions, there are psychological reactions to look out for, like poor concentration or poor memory.
Some lose confidence. Others feel they have to be over-vigilant. People regress into less mature patterns of behaviour.
"The key here is not that you have bad reactions, it's how quickly you get over them," the professor said. "If these feelings persist for a few weeks then it's worth taking much greater notice of them."
Although there has been a fair amount of research in recent years into the effects of severe stress on expatriate relief workers in disaster zones, there has been less work done on how local staff are affected.
Other studies have suggested that in Asia stress often triggers psychosomatic disorders - people start to display physical symptoms.
"We will need to look out for this when trying to help staff working in Myanmar [Burma]," said Dr Peter Salama, Chief of Health at Unicef.
"The symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in one society might be quite different from those in other cultures who might express stress differently."
'Watchful waiting'
The Australian charity CARE International is already looking at how to support those of its staff who have been working in the delta for the last two weeks without a break.
A family sit in a tent on 20 May 2008 (Image: Unicef)
Survivors could also face stress-related difficulties, experts say
Its representative in Rangoon, Peter Newson, says they are aware these people will need a lot of psycho-social support.
"We have to be very careful, though, to tailor that support to the Myanmar [Burmese] culture in order to make it effective," he says.
That means encouraging them to talk to monks, to their families and to each other. In some cases writing down their experiences too.
"And that's not only important for our staff," Mr Newson said. "It will be important for the survivors in the delta too."
Dr Salama says when it comes to trying to reduce the stress on the front line staff, there are "common sense responses".
These include making telecommunications equipment available so it is easier to call home, setting up peer to peer networks so people can discuss with others what they have been through, teaching stress management techniques and creating a culture where people can talk more readily.
The doctors agree it is not unusual to experience some or all of the symptoms of severe or acute psychiatric trauma after dealing with a disaster like this.
But these days, according to Professor Williams, the approach that is often taken is to undertake what he calls "a month of watchful waiting or psychological first aid".
"We give people a lot of support, help them to return to a more normal set of arrangements as quickly as possible," he said.
"With that, most people will soon begin to recover and their stress levels will start to come down. If after a month they are still highly stressed then that is something to be taken more seriously."
As Burma agrees to allow more outside experts in from neighbouring countries, the pressure on the aid agencies' local staff should begin to ease.
But such is the scale of the disaster and the size of the task still to be done, the stress on front line staff and others will still be considerable for many weeks and months to come, making it all the more important that agencies have plans in place to recognise and deal with the problem.
Got it from here.
ေအာက္မွာထားမွာက ဒီစာကိုဖ်က္ျပီးေရး
Hollywood celebrities urge human rights in Myanmar
Stars including Will Ferrell and Jennifer Aniston call for release of the Southeast Asian country's Nobel-winning Aung San Suu Kyi and establishment of democracy there.
By Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 23, 2008
Dozens of Hollywood celebrities have joined together to call attention to the repressive military regime in Myanmar and the plight of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent more than a decade under house arrest.
In more than 30 public-service spots that are being released online daily this month, actors and artists including Will Ferrell, Sarah Silverman, Ellen Page and Sylvester Stallone call for Suu Kyi's release and the establishment of democracy in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
"A human rights crisis is happening right now in the Southeast Asian country of Burma," Ferrell says in the first of the series. "Every now and again a single person or event captures the imagination and inspiration of the world. This moment belongs to Burma and to Aung San Suu Kyi."
Myanmar has been ruled by military regimes for nearly all of the past 46 years. Suu Kyi's political party won a landslide victory in a 1990 election and she was slated to become the country's next leader, but the regime threw out the results and arrested her. Suu Kyi, who will turn 63 next month, is the world's only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Most recently, the reclusive regime has come under harsh international criticism for refusing to accept foreign aid for victims of Cyclone Nargis, which killed at least 78,000 earlier this month and left hundreds of thousands more without adequate food, water or shelter.
The Web-based celebrity campaign, called "Burma: It Can't Wait," began May 1 but has been overshadowed by the cyclone, which struck Myanmar two days later. Organizers hope to raise Myanmar's profile in the same way that activists have put Chinese control of Tibet and the Darfur genocide on the map.
Another goal of the project is to sign up a million new members for the U.S. Campaign for Burma, a Washington-based organization that promotes democratic change in Myanmar.
The videos can be found at uscampaignforburma.org.
Some of the spots are sketches that try to draw attention to the troubled nation by injecting humor, such as one featuring Jennifer Aniston and a recalcitrant Woody Harrelson, who refuses to leave his trailer. "I'm not coming out until Burma is free," he shouts.
Others are serious, such as one directed by Anjelica Huston in which comedian Eddie Izzard praises the young people of Myanmar who led protests against the regime last year. "We must use our freedom to help them get theirs," he says.
Huston said in an interview that she took part in the project to highlight the injustices of the regime. "I am particularly drawn to the idea of this small, extraordinarily beautiful country that has been suppressed in this terrible way for so long and the fact that the leader of the democratic party has been shut up under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years," Huston said.
The campaign has attracted such celebrities as director Judd Apatow, Argentine soccer great Diego Maradona, actor Joseph Fiennes, singer Sheryl Crow, action star Steven Seagal, actress Felicity Huffman and producer Norman Lear.
One 90-second video features Iranian artist Davood, who is shown in time-elapsed photography painting a portrait of Suu Kyi. Only at the end does it become clear that she is wearing handcuffs.
In another, "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" star Eric Szmanda and alumna Jorja Fox play a card game called "Forced Labor," in which he holds the cards of a Burmese soldier and she is dealt the hand of a civilian, who suffers rape, torture and murder.
"I don't think I like this game," Fox says.
"No one does," Szmanda replies.
Szmanda, who visited refugees along the Thai border and briefly crossed into Myanmar last year, said he was stunned by the heart-wrenching accounts of civilians who escaped the regime.
"Something came over me while I was there. I didn't feel a sense of pity, I felt a sense of urgency," he said. "I had a chance to meet a lot of former political prisoners who are now living on the border of Thailand. It's unbelievable what some of them had to do endure for nine or 10 years."
Actress Rosanna Arquette, who appears in a spot condemning the destruction of 3,200 villages by the regime, said she was moved to participate in the project because of the plight of Suu Kyi.
"She has done so much and she is still a prisoner," Arquette said in an interview. "And the world doesn't really know. There are no Americans there to help. It's really like a creepy secret."
Jack Healey, the former head of Amnesty International who helped raise that group's profile through celebrity concerts, had a key role in organizing the Burma project. He said one of his goals is to give Suu Kyi the kind of profile that Nelson Mandela had while he was imprisoned in South Africa.
"We want her to be the Mandela of her time," he said. "Maybe by the end we will all know who she is."
Fanista, a new "social commerce" shopping website, underwrote and produced many of the spots and offers customers a 10% rebate that they can donate to the U.S. Campaign for Burma.
In his spot, Stallone talks about his fourth "Rambo" movie, which was released earlier this year and casts the Myanmar dictatorship as the villain. The film depicts "atrocity de-mining," in which civilians are forced to walk ahead of the army at gunpoint to uncover hidden land mines. The regime banned the movie.
"While it is flattering to be part of a movie that is giving the Burmese people hope and it is cool to say 'I'm banned in Burma,' these people need real hope," Stallone says in the 80-second spot. "Let's do something we can be proud about."
ASEAN Warns Burma to Boost Confidence Ahead of Donors Meeting
By Ron Corben
Bangkok, Thailand
22 May 2008
The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) says that claims by Burma's
government that rescue efforts from cyclone Nargis were over was undermining international confidence with the total death toll still unknown. As Ron Corben reports from Bangkok the ASEAN chief's comments came as the United Nations secretary general met with Burma's Prime Minister in efforts to speed up relief efforts and ahead of a donors meeting on Sunday.Association of South East Asian Nations Secretary-General, Surin Pitsuwan, speaking to reporters Thursday, said claims by Burma's military that relief efforts were over and for reconstruction to go ahead was undermining international confidence.
Mr. Surin said international agencies were still saying the full extent of the disaster has yet to be "fully verified."
"This discrepancy is a confidence gap that has to be verified, that has to be reconciled because that is the gap that is going to create confidence or lack of confidence for the claim that the rescue and relief phase is over," he said. "The shared concern is we don't know the extent of the damage, we don't know the numbers of the dead, the numbers of the missing or the numbers of the displaced."
Burmese authorities say the cyclone that hit May 2 and May 3 killed an estimated 78,000 people, and that 56,000 others are still missing. Some 2.5 million people remain in need of critical aid and the United Nations says just 30 percent of those in need have received assistance.
ASEAN foreign ministers reached agreement this week with Burma for greater access for regional assistance. ASEAN and the U.N. formed the "coalition of the mercy" with the purpose of stepping up relief. Burma's military has been widely criticized for restricting access to international aid agencies to the worst affected regions.
On Thursday U.N. Secretary, General Ban Ki-moon, met with Burma's Prime Minister, Thein Sein, to press the military to open the country to greater access to international relief. Mr. Ban is due to meet with Burma's senior General Than Shwe Friday.
Mr. Ban's visit comes ahead of a donor's conference scheduled for Sunday. Burma says the total cost from the cyclone now stands at $11 billion.
Non-government aid organizations are calling on the international community to support the ASEAN initiative to assist Burma by way of the donor's meeting. Dr. Jermail Mahmood is president of Mercy Malaysia.
"ASEAN must know that it is not alone and it must know that it has the support from international aid agencies who have the experience behind them to play an active role in ensuring that the humanitarian response imperative comes first and beyond that the recovery and reconstruction as well," said Dr. Mahmood.
But human rights groups are concerned aid funds are accounted for and meet international standards amid fears of corruption. Debbie Stothardt, is spokeswomen for the rights group, the Alternative ASEAN Network. She says transparency and accountability will be foremost in donor's minds.
"What we need to see from the aid community is a very strong, united response not just a call for money but to actually insist that rules and criteria be adopted," she said.
Aid organizations say Burma is allowing more aid to be flown in planes carrying emergency supplies, including from the United States. But they say more relief is needed given the scale of the disaster.
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Ban Ki-moon to meet Burma leader
P.S: Please go to the original link if you would like to see a clip.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is to meet with Burma's military leader, Gen Than Shwe, after touring cyclone-hit areas of the country.
On a tour of the Irrawaddy Delta, Mr Ban flew over flooded rice fields and destroyed villages and visited a relief camp set up by the government.
Mr Ban said his mission was to urge the Burma's rulers to accept more aid.
About 78,000 people have died and another 56,000 are missing from Cyclone Nargis which struck on 2 May.
'Show camp'
"I am so sorry, but don't lose your hope," Mr Ban told a woman at the Kyonday relief camp in the Irrawaddy Delta.
A UN official privately called it a "show camp", says the BBC's Laura Trevelyan, in Burma with the secretary general.
"The United Nations is here to help you. The whole world is trying to save Myanmar [Burma]," Mr Ban said, looking into her blue tent.
Mr Ban told reporters he was "very upset" by the devastation he had seen.
"Many human lives have been lost, houses are destroyed, roads and streets are washed away, and all rice paddies flooded with water. I'm very much concerned. These farmers may lose their planting season," he said.
But in a meeting earlier with Burma's Prime Minister Thein Sein, Mr Ban was told that the relief phase of the aid operation was over and that the government was now focusing on reconstruction, a UN official said.
Mr Ban told the prime minister that the disaster was beyond Burma's ability to handle on its own and that foreign aid experts should be rushed javascript:void(0)
Publish Postin.
"The United Nations and all the international community stand ready to help to overcome the tragedy," Mr Ban is quoted as saying.
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UN chief tours still-flooded Myanmar delta
KYONDAH, Myanmar (AP) — U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon flew over Myanmar's flooded Irrawaddy delta on Thursday, where the ravages of a cyclone stretched as far as the eye could see: Villages were empty of life, flattened huts dissolved into vast areas of water and people perched on rooftops.
Nearly three weeks after the storm, life was grim even at a refugee camp showcased by Myanmar's junta during the carefully scripted tour.
"I'm very upset by what I've seen," Ban said, visibly shaken by the firsthand look at the devastation, even though the areas to which he was taken were far from those worst-hit by Cyclone Nargis.
Before his helicopter flyover, Ban had said he was bringing a "message of hope," to Myanmar's people following the May 2-3 cyclone, which claimed more than 78,000 lives, according to government figures, and left more than 56,000 missing.
Myanmar's military rulers have been eager to show they have the relief effort under control despite spurning the help of foreign disaster experts, and much of the tour was taken up by statistics-laden lectures to make that point.
The U.N. says up to 2.5 million cyclone survivors face hunger, homelessness and potential outbreaks of deadly diseases, especially in the low-lying areas of the Irrawaddy Delta close to the sea. It estimates that aid has reached only about 25 percent of victims.
The four-hour tour Thursday included two stops — one at Mawlamyinegyun, an aid distribution point stocked with bags of rice and cartons of bottled drinking water and the other at a makeshift camp where 500 people huddled in tents in the village of Kyondah, about 45 miles southwest of Yangon.
Still, the destruction in the region was relatively mild compared to Labutta and Bogalay to the south, where the Red Cross said rivers and ponds were full of corpses and many people have received no aid. Officials gave no explanation for why Ban was not taken to those areas, where most of the dead and missing were reported.
By contrast, Kyondah — which has electricity and clean water — is somewhat of a showcase and was selected for visits by senior junta members, foreign embassy officials and international aid organizations last week.
At the camp, the secretary-general was given a detailed explanation by Maj. Gen. Lun Thi of how Kyondah, formerly a cluster of seven villages with a population of 5,228, has expertly handled relief efforts. The village had 122 dead and missing, he said.
He displayed charts saying the camp had 300 bags of rice, 64 boxes of instant noodles, 1,500 eggs, 12,000 bottles of drinking water and 1,240 pieces of preserved meat. Also listed were napkins, steel bowls, blankets, T-shirts, tarps and men's and ladies' underwear.
While the general spoke, Ban sat in the front row of an elaborately constructed sitting room where bowls of fruit and soda were served. Ban ate and drank nothing.
Once the lecture was over, Ban strode into the camp, stopping at tents to look in on the homeless families, some with children as young as a day old.
"The whole world is trying to help Myanmar," he told one family in the camp, where inhabitants had cooking pots and blankets that appeared to be new stacked neatly in their tents. Some smiled at him, but said little.
An idea of the storm's destructive force was more obvious from the air.
The two helicopters carrying Ban's party flew over seemingly endless fields surrounded by flood waters, villages with destroyed houses, rivers swollen past their banks, people huddled on rooftops or in makeshift tents, or moving around in boats.
In some areas, the flooding stretched as far as the eye could see, with people living in damaged homes that looked completely cut off.
So far, no one at the U.N. has ventured an estimate of how long the delta is expected to remain submerged. But on Thursday, Ban said he expected the relief operations to be needed for at least six months.
The question of pumps and levees, and whether they could be used to make the flooding less extensive, is an issue U.N. officials say they might raise at a regional aid conference Sunday.
Much of the area is normally planted with rice, but the water level is far too high for that and the paddies are inundated with damaging salt water, U.N. officials said.
The monsoon, bringing seasonal rains, is part of the normal cycle, but doesn't usually cause flooding in the delta, they said.
Heavy rains have followed the cyclone, bringing more flooding and hardship to survivors, but Ban expressed hope the rain might also cleanse the rice paddies of the salt water.
"I praise the will, resilience and the courage of the people of Myanmar. I bring a message of hope for the people of Myanmar," he said.
U.N. officials traveling with Ban said they were discussing with Chinese authorities whether Ban could tour the earthquake zone in Sichuan after leaving Myanmar. The officials requested anonymity, citing protocol.
Such a trip would give Ban a chance to compare the two countries' responses and urge China — Myanmar's biggest ally — to put its weight behind opening the flow of aid workers.
Ban tried to keep political issues off his plate.
Activists called on the U.N. chief to meet with detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and seek her release. The Nobel Peace prize laureate has been confined to her Yangon villa for most of the last 18 years and her current period of detention is due to expire Monday. But a meeting with Suu Kyi was not on Ban's official itinerary.
In a meeting earlier Thursday with Prime Minister Lt. Gen. Thein Sein, Ban stressed international aid experts should be rushed in because the crisis is too much for Myanmar to handle alone, according to a U.N. official at the talks.
"The United Nations and all the international community stand ready to help to overcome the tragedy," Ban said.
Thein Sein said the relief phase of the government's operation was ending and that the focus had shifted to reconstruction, according to the U.N. official at the talks who requested anonymity for reasons of protocol.
U.N. official Dan Baker said junta leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe would meet with Ban on Friday at Naypyitaw. Ban earlier said Than Shwe had refused to take his telephone calls and did not respond to two letters.
Yangon citizens did not seem optimistic that Ban's visit would make a difference.
"Don't just talk, you must take action," said Eain Daw Bar Tha, abbot of a Buddhist monastery on Yangon's outskirts. "The U.N. must directly help the people with helicopters to bring food, clothes and clean water to the really damaged places."
got it form here.
For Cyclone Victims, Private Aid vs. a Showcase
HLINETHAYA RELIEF CAMP, Myanmar — The 68 blue tents are lined up in a row, with a brand-new water purifier and boxes of relief supplies, stacked neatly but as yet undelivered and not even opened. “If you don’t keep clean, you’ll be expelled from here,” a camp manager barked at families in some tents.
The moment, at what has been billed as a model camp for survivors of Cyclone Nargis, captured a common complaint among refugees and aid volunteers: that the military junta that rules Myanmar cares more about the appearance of providing aid than actually providing it.
As a result of heavy international pressure, the junta has embarked on a campaign to show itself as responsive and open to aid as China has been in the wake of the earthquake that killed tens of thousands in Sichuan Province. On Thursday, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, arrived in Myanmar, as United Nations officials said that, nearly three weeks after the cyclone that left 134,000 dead or missing, they were finally seeing some small improvement.
The first 10 helicopters loaded with supplies from the World Food Program arrived Thursday. But of the 2.4 million survivors, United Nations officials say, only 500,000 have received any aid to date.
Mr. Ban received guided tours of apparently well-run government camps like this one for survivors, presenting one vision of the junta’s response to its people and the outside world. But interviews with survivors and Burmese breaking rules to help them suggest a different story: of a government that seems to have assisted little and, at times, with startling callousness, has even expelled homeless refugees from shelters that the junta needs for other purposes.
This relief camp in the western outskirts of Yangon, the country’s main city, made headlines in Myanmar’s state-run press when the junta’s leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, showed up there on Sunday to inspect the government relief effort.
A few days after the general’s inspection, the camp’s tidy blue tents were still set up but bottles of cooking oil inside many of them remained in their boxes. Pots and pans still bore their brand-name stickers.
The camp’s sole “medical” tent, identified by a Red Cross flag, held neither patients nor medicine. Its desk was staffed by two teenagers in uniform. Police officers armed with rifles guarded the entrance, where a new water purification tank donated by a local company was on prominent display.
Just a short ride down a potholed road, a striking divide is evident, one between the model relief camp and the continuing plight of many victims.
In the village of Ar Pyin Padan, a few minutes’ walk from here and just an hour’s drive from the center of Yangon, 40 families who lost nearly everything they owned crowded a rundown two-story school building. They had pushed desks together to serve as makeshift beds.
Here, deliveries of relief supplies are so infrequent that the refugees say they draw lots to get a small share whenever a donation comes in. For drinking water, one said, the township authorities “threw some medicine” into a nearby pond and told the villagers to drink from it.
Now the authorities are allowing no more refugees into the school. Instead they are trying to evict those who are already there so that the building can be used as a balloting station on Saturday. Despite the devastation and misery left by the cyclone, the junta is pressing ahead with voting in the two hardest-hit administrative divisions, Yangon and the Irrawaddy Delta, to complete a referendum on a new Constitution intended to perpetuate military rule. The Constitution was already overwhelmingly approved in other parts of the country.
“They want us to move out,” said one man in the school shelter. “But we have nowhere to go. Maybe if I had four or five sticks of bamboo, I could rebuild my house and start over but they don’t even give us that. So please donate to us. We need urgent help.”
He called the blue tents a short distance away beyond the rice paddies a “V.I.P. camp” — hastily constructed and occupied by villagers tutored to receive visiting junta generals or envoys from the United Nations.
In the past week, the state-run news media have given lavish coverage to General Shwe and other generals visiting areas devastated by the storm. At the same time, some critics say the junta has been obstructing attempts by Burmese to deliver assistance to isolated villages.
“The government is not really interested in helping people,” said U Thura, a dissident comedian who has been jailed four times in the past two decades for his outspokenness. “What they want is to show to the rest of the country and the world that they have saved the people and now it’s time to go back to business as usual.”
Mr. Thura and other volunteers have been lugging relief goods into remote villages in the Irrawaddy Delta over the past two weeks.
“Only a very small percentage of the victims get help at government-run camps,” he said in an interview. “Those fortunate enough to live near roads and rivers also get help. But people in remote villages that are hard to reach don’t get anything. To make it worse, the people in the Irrawaddy Delta have traditionally been antigovernment, so the junta doesn’t like them.”
“Even if they die,” he said, “the generals won’t feel sorry for them.”
For these outlying villagers in the delta, occasional visits by people like Mr. Thura have been virtually the only help they could get. But even people like the ones much closer to Yangon, like Ar Pyin Padan, do not appear to be faring much better.
“If they don’t get help soon, so many of them will die,” said a 36-year-old Yangon resident who has made four private aid runs into villages near Hpayapon, a delta town. “It’s hot when the sun shines and cold when it rains. When you see the villages, you just wonder how these people sleep at night in the rain. They have no shelter to speak of.”
“They are still so stunned by what had happened to them that they show no emotion,” he said. “They don’t even thank us when we give them food. They just accept the help with no expression in their faces.”
He said that during their aid runs he and his friends saw people with pneumonia, cholera and diarrhea. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the private aid deliveries that his group conducts are prohibited.
Mr. Thura and other aid runners said they were hampered by reinforced military checkpoints as well as by roads washed away and streams clogged with storm debris. Those who reach towns with aid are told that such goods must be distributed through the authorities. Many groups like Mr. Thura’s break away and head deeper into the delta on their own.
“We usually drive from Yangon in five hours, switch to a boat and travel four more hours and then we carry whatever we can — rice, noodles, energy drinks, medicine, gaslights — on our backs and walk,” he said. “You really need helicopters and boats to help these people.”
One of his recent trips took him to a village called Mangay. The village, whose name means “gaze at” in Burmese, was a sorry sight, he said. Once a prosperous community of 1,000 families who supplied dried fish throughout Myanmar, Mangay was virtually wiped out: 700 families were left homeless and 500 people were reportedly dead or missing.
Mr. Thura said more than 400 people were making donations for his aid runs as a way of helping the victims directly. Still, his five teams of renegade aid runners, who often use Buddhist monks as scouts, could only manage to deliver 6.5 million kyats, about $6,500, of relief a day into 32 villages.
The aid runners are coming under increasing pressure from the government.
Twenty of Mr. Thura’s team members have received calls from the police warning that they will be punished if they continue their work. On Sunday, he said, his photographer, U Kyaw Swar Aung, was arrested and has not been heard from since. He had been traveling around the delta making videos of dead bodies, crying children and villagers who went insane after the storm and distributing them as DVDs.
Meanwhile, Mr. Thura said the government seemed less focused on aid than on making sure there were no more scenes like those to film. In one place, he said he saw a pile of floating bodies clogging the narrow mouth of a stream after they were dumped into the water by soldiers on a cleanup operation.
“Then the soldiers used dynamite to blow up the bodies into shreds,” he said.
Got it from here.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Charity worker’s Burma mission
May 20 2008 by Katie Norman, South Wales Echo
A CHARITY campaigner is today poised for emergency deployment to disaster-struck Burma.
Jessica Camburn, left, who works for Save the Children, is heading to Burma to support the team of international emergency workers who are trying to ease the devastating impact of Cyclone Nargis.
The Burmese government says at least 78,000 people have died because of the cyclone on May 2 with a further million people homeless. However, the United Nations has put the death toll at 216,000, with around two million homeless and 220,000 missing.
Jess, 29, from Adamsdown, Cardiff, has been called up to travel to Burma at short notice to help develop funding proposals for projects helping children fighting for survival. She is due to fly out today.
She said: “It’s hard to find the right words or even know how to feel about this.
“The scale of this emergency is difficult to comprehend, despite the news reports that we are getting from Myanmar (Burma). I don’t think I’ll really be able to understand the situation until I’m out there.”
Jess, who is originally from Edinburgh, has worked for Save the Children for four years. She has previously worked in Uganda and spent a year training to be part of Save the Children’s General Emergency Standby Team. Her first two-month mission was to war-torn Afghanistan last year, but this is her first rapid-response call-out.
She said: “To be honest I never thought I would get the call to join the Myanmar team because it was proving to be difficult to get visas for international staff.
“However, it seems that finally visas are being granted and I was asked how quickly I could get my passport to London.”
Save the Children’s 500-strong workforce in Burma has spent the last week distributing food, clean water, shelter, blankets, cooking materials and oral-rehydration solution to treat diarrhoea.
Wales’ leading international aid charities have joined forces to launch an emergency DEC Myanmar (Burma) Cyclone Appeal, which has already raised £8m, but more cash is urgently needed.
To donate, call 0870 6060900 or visit www.dec.org.uk.
katie.norman@mediawales.co.uk
I got it from here.
World Bank won't lend to Myanmar, cites old debts
INGAPORE — A top World Bank official says the bank won't give financial aid or a loan to cyclone-hit Myanmar because of its outstanding debts.
Managing Director Juan Jose Daboub says the World Bank is working with Southeast Asian countries by providing technical support to assess damages in Myanmar and to help them to plan rehabilitation efforts.
But he says it is "not in a position to provide (financial) resources to Myanmar" because the military-ruled nation has been in arrears with the World Bank since 1998.
His comments Tuesday come ahead of an aid donors' conference in Yangon on Sunday to pledge funds for Myanmar.
The country has said that losses from the recent Cyclone Nargis exceeded $10 billion.
Flags at half-mast as U.N. aid envoy presses Myanmar
By Aung Hla Tun
YANGON (Reuters) - Flags across Myanmar flew at half-mast on Tuesday for the victims of Cyclone Nargis as the U.N.'s top aid envoy pressed the military government to allow foreign helicopters to fly in supplies to survivors.
The army declared three days of mourning after a visit by 75-year-old junta supremo Than Shwe to the stricken Irrawaddy Delta on Monday, his first since the cyclone struck two weeks ago, leaving nearly 134,000 dead or missing.
Diplomats, aid workers and some citizens took it as a possible sign the reclusive leadership had woken up to the scale of the catastrophe and would allow in more international aid.
U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes told reporters he had discussed the use of helicopters with Prime Minister Thein Sein, who had said his government would consider it. Myanmar has allowed relief flights to deliver supplies to Yangon but baulked at any aerial access to the delta.
"Myanmar's government is very grateful for the U.N. and international support," Holmes said at a news conference.
Asked whether U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would meet Senior General Than Shwe when he visits Myanmar on Thursday, Holmes said: "I think he will".
The bespectacled Senior General, who has run the country since 2005 from a bunker in a new capital 250 miles (390 km) north of Yangon, was shown on state-run TV touring hard-hit towns.
"The old man must have been shocked to see the real situation with his own eyes," one retired government official said in Yangon, the former capital where torrential rain is causing more flooding and misery for storm victims.
he government's toll stands at 77,738 killed and 55,917 missing, although the United Nations says that could rise dramatically if the 2.4 million people left destitute by the May 2 cyclone do not get a lot of aid quickly.
Until the last few days, the junta's attention appears to have been on a May 10 referendum on an army-drafted constitution that is meant to precede multiparty elections in 2010. The vote was postponed to May 24 in areas worst-hit by the cyclone.
JOINT PLEDGING CONFERENCE
The top general's visit also coincided with moves by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member, and the U.N. to convene an aid pledging conference on Sunday in Yangon and work on a bigger aid delivery plan.
"There are obviously some in the military who see how enormous this is, and how enormously wrong it could go without further support," one Yangon-based diplomat said.
Across the Southeast Asian country, flags flew at half mast from government buildings and a few private buildings amid growing criticism of the slow and insufficient measures mustered by the military.
But the New Light of Myanmar, the junta's main mouthpiece, quoted Than Shwe as saying the government "took prompt action to carry out the relief and rehabilitation work shortly after the storm".
The onset of the monsoon season is making life even more miserable for those in need.
Some donors returning from the worst-hit areas on the outskirts of Yangon said the authorities were handing out leaflets telling people not to hand donations directly to victims, but to do it under their management.
"There were victims waiting in the torrential rains along the road for donors to come," one man said.
The leaflets said the handouts might make victims "lazy and more dependent on others", people who were given them said.
"One young man felt very sad to see what was written in the leaflet," one woman said. "He murmured 'what are we supposed to do if we don't depend on donations in this situation?'."
The diplomatic effort to deliver more aid and expertise has picked up a little pace, but the World Bank said it could not provide financial aid to Myanmar because it has made no debt repayments since 1998.
The United States and France have naval vessels waiting in waters near Myanmar ready to deliver supplies.
Although there is little detail of how ASEAN will carry out what it called an aid "mechanism", Western governments and relief groups know it is the only option acceptable to the generals.
"It's a face-saving way to get them to admit outside help, but we'll have to wait and see if it works or if it's fudge," one humanitarian official told Reuters.
Historically the military in the former Burma has been suspicious of foreign interference. That distrust has deepened since the wave of international outrage and tighter sanctions following last year's crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.
(Additional reporting by Ed Cropley)
Got it here.
Myanmar Mourns Victims of Cyclone
BANGKOK — Myanmar began three days of national mourning for cyclone victims Tuesday, one day after agreeing to let its Southeast Asian neighbors help coordinate foreign relief assistance following the devastating Cyclone Nargis more than two weeks ago.
The supply of aid and the entry of relief workers from countries outside the Southeast Asian bloc will continue to be limited, said Singapore’s Foreign Minister George Yeo after an emergency meeting in Singapore of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, which includes Myanmar. But the move was taken as a signal that Myanmar’s reclusive military rulers had bowed somewhat to international pressure to allow more outside aid.
“We will establish a mechanism so that aid from all over the world can flow into Myanmar,” Mr. Yeo said.
“Myanmar is also prepared to accept the expertise of international and regional agencies to help in its rehabilitation efforts,” he said at a news conference Monday. Referring to the continuing limits on help from countries outside Southeast Asia, he said, “We have to look at specific needs — there will not be uncontrolled access.”
Since the cyclone, which struck Myanmar on May 3, Western nations and major relief groups have expressed alarm about Myanmar’s refusal to allow in large-scale shipments to the estimated 2.5 million victims in need of aid.
Myanmar has permitted a small flow of aid from several nations, including the United States. But relief officials say that this amounts to only 20 percent of the needed supplies. Without more aid, they say, many more people may yet die of disease and starvation.
In an echo of China’s public response to its earthquake disaster, Myanmar lowered flags on Tuesday to begin a three-day mourning period for the tens of thousands of people who lost their lives in the cyclone. China observed an official silence Monday for those who perished in the quake just one week earlier.
International pressure continued to build on Tuesday from several directions after the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, warned Monday that the ruling junta could be guilty of “crimes against humanity” if it continued to restrict the supply of aid into the country.
In New York, the human rights group Human Rights Watch Tuesday urged the United Nations Security Council to insist that “aid deliveries and humanitarian workers be given unfettered access” to Myanmar.
However, despite the international criticism, Myanmar’s foreign minister, Nyan Win, was quoted by Reuters as telling reporters that there had been no delay in accepting aid. “We always welcomed international aid,” he said.
After failing to receive a reply to letters and telephone calls made to the military junta, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations was to travel to Yangon, Myanmar’s main city, this week in hopes of meeting the country’s leader, Senior General Than Shwe.
On Sunday, state-run television broadcast the first public video images of the general since the cyclone, showing him meeting ministers involved in the rescue effort and touring some affected areas.
The United Nations under secretary for humanitarian affairs, John Holmes, toured the Irrawaddy Delta region by helicopter on Monday, according to Michèle Montas, Mr. Ban’s spokeswoman.
Mr. Yeo, the foreign minister, said Asean would work with the United Nations at the conference in Yangon on Sunday to coordinate aid deliveries. He said Myanmar had agreed to allow in medical teams from any of its nine neighbors in Asean. Thailand has already sent a contingent of more than 30 medical workers.
In addition, Myanmar has allowed in 50 medical workers from India. China’s official news agency, Xinhua, reported that a team of 50 Chinese medics arrived in Yangon on Sunday night.
Mr. Yeo said the Myanmar government estimated losses at $10 billion in the cyclone, which swept through the Irrawaddy Delta and Yangon.
Myanmar has raised its official death toll to 78,000. The United Nations and the Red Cross estimate that the toll is more than 100,000, and that it might be as high as 138,000.
Representatives of United Nations relief agencies said that some of their supplies were getting into Myanmar but that the authorities were still severely limiting delivery and withholding many visas from foreign relief experts.
The United Nations World Food Program said it had managed to deliver food aid to just 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need.
The United States and France have naval vessels just outside Myanmar’s territorial waters, and are prepared to deliver supplies directly to affected areas along the coast, but they have not received clearance from the government.
In a column in the French newspaper Le Monde, Mr. Kouchner said the United Nations should intervene by force, or would be guilty of cowardice in the eyes of the world.
“What we need to bring is hand-to-hand, heart-to-heart help, not donor conferences with all their bowing and scraping,” he said later in an interview with French radio. “In the meantime, people are dying.”
Mr. Yeo rejected the idea of delivery by force. “That will create unnecessary complication,” he said at the news conference. “It will only lead to more suffering for Myanmar’s people.”
Seth Mydans reported from Bangkok and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Got it here.
Diplomatic Licence: France vs Britain helping Burma
By South-east Asia correspondent Karen Percy
Burma is mourning the dead from the cyclone which struck 18 days ago and claimed the lives of 133,000 people, lowering national flags to half mast.
The junta is starting to open up to the outside world, inviting the Association of South East Asian Nations to oversee an expanded aid effort.
It is also inviting representatives from 29 countries to visit and see the devastation for themselves, ahead of a donors' meeting that is scheduled for the weekend.
United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki Moon will arrive in Burma tomorrow and on Thursday he will be taken to the Irrawaddy Delta.
Already Burma has agreed to allow about 300 medical officers from ASEAN nations to enter to provide assistance.
The three-day mourning period is one of the first demonstrations of public grief since the tropical storm ravaged swathes of the nation 18 days ago, leaving about 2.4 million survivors in need of aid.
Flags in front of Rangoon's City Hall fluttered at half mast in the light morning rain, but there was no minute of silence or a public ceremony, leaving many people unsure how to mark the occasion.
"We didn't know about this news. How are we meant to show our grief for storm victims?" said Mya Mya, a 43-year-old flower seller who is sheltering in a public school after the storm destroyed her home.
"So far we haven't got any supplies from the government. We just got some supplies from private donors, so that's why I have to work for my family."
A 45-year-old taxi driver said: "I just found out this morning, but I also don't know how I am meant to show my grief."
- ABC/AFP
got it from here.
Starvation threatens in once fertile Myanmar
YANGON, Myanmar (CNN) -- Farmer U Han Nyunt stands on some of the most fertile land in the world -- and fears that he will starve to death.
Acres and acres of rice fields surround him. Once they were his source of livelihood. Now they lie submerged and useless, after a devastating cyclone tore through Myanmar in early May.
Cyclone Nargis claimed more than 130,000 lives and left more than 2 million homeless, the U.N. says.
Now a second catastrophe awaits if new rice is not planted in the coming weeks -- potentially inviting a massive food shortage.
"We are all going to die here," Nyunt said. "But not because of the cyclone. We will die because we have no food."
The low-lying Irrawaddy Delta, which bore the brunt of the storm, is known as Myanmar's rice bowl region and produces up to 60 percent of the country's crop, the U.N .Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates.
By the time the storm hit, farmers had harvested their dry season crop.
"But the problem," says Concepcion Calpe, a senior economist with the FAO, "is that a lot of it was still in the field and it was completely wiped out."
Farmers tried to salvage some of the yield by drying it, but the country has entered its rainy season -- and downpours have dampened that prospect.
Calpe's organization estimates that 200,000 tons of rice may have been damaged by the cyclone.
She says the government has enough rice in its reserves to offset the loss. The challenge is to deliver it to hard-to-reach areas.
"The problem is not of supply," she says. "It is now a problem of logistics because you have to reach people and provide some minimum supply of rice."
The bigger worry for aid groups is what lies ahead.
With the rainy season here, farmers will need to plant in the next two months if they stand any hope of a second yield.
Salt from the cyclone flooding has seeped into the soil, preventing planting in some areas altogether, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.
"No rice will grow here for a very long time," said Han Nyunt. "The soil is dead because of the flood water that the storm brought.
"We are trying to dry the seeds in the sun," he said. "But it is hopeless. Once the seeds have started sprouting like this, we can't plant them anymore. All we can do is feed them to the animals." Video Watch footage on aid bottleneck »
There is also a lack of animals to help plow the crop.
A boat trip down the delta's rivers revealed bloated carcasses of water buffaloes, the main farming animals in the area.
Soon after its independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar -- then known as Burma -- was the world's largest rice exporter.
But decades of economic policies by the ruling military junta, which came into power in 1962, stripped it of the title. Still, it produces a significant amount.
This year, the secretive junta had granted private companies licenses to export excess rice to Myanmar's neighbors.
The government had expected to export about 600,000 tons. And aid groups had hoped that the delivery would help mollify the recent global panic over scarce rice.
Now, however, it is unlikely that Myanmar will be selling rice to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or other countries.
People in Myanmar consume about 44 pounds of rice every month, compared with 15 pounds in Asia as a whole, according to the FAO.
Yet there may be one silver lining in the cyclone's dark cloud: the same rainfall that prevents farmers from drying their harvest will also, with time, wash away the salinity from the soil.
Calpe was optimistic the fields could recover in time for a healthy, albeit slightly smaller, rice yield.
The USDA estimates Myanmar's rainy season rice yield at 10 million tons.
But to achieve that, farmers -- homeless and hungry -- need help.
Aid agencies have struggled to gain access to the country, and only a limited number of relief flights have landed. The regime has indicated it would like supplies but not international aid workers.
The message may slowly be sinking in.
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Even as it began a three-day mourning period Tuesday for the victims of the cyclone, Myanmar agreed to let its South Asian neighbors send medical personnel and an assessment team to the country.
Myanmar's decision to accept aid from its neighbors came after an emergency meeting in Singapore of the 10 countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Got it here.
Myanmar cyclone: plan to beat Burmese block on Western aid
By David Blair and Thomas Bell
Last Updated: 8:37PM BST 19/05/2008
An international relief operation designed to help victims of Burma's cyclone, exploiting loopholes in the regime's ban on Western aid, should begin soon, Britain said.
Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Asia, returned to London after visiting Burma and neighbouring countries. A relief effort led by the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean), in co-operation with the UN, had been agreed, he said.
"It was clear that the Burmese had more confidence in their Asian neighbours than they did in a Western-directed operation," said Lord Malloch-Brown.
Aid from Western countries will go to Burma's neighbours, from where it will be transferred to the devastated areas of the Irrawaddy Delta.
This "Asean-UN" approach was the "best show in town and we're putting our eggs in that basket," said the minister. But he added: "We can't afford to have this snagged up in Burmese delays."
If this method failed, Lord Malloch-Brown said that other options remained open.
Western aid agencies and Burma's military regime hold diametrically opposing views on the scale of the crisis. Foreign relief workers think that between 1.5 million and two million people need help – and only 500,000 are being reached at present.
But Lord Malloch-Brown said that when he met Burmese ministers "their insistence was 'what crisis? All the emergency needs are met and what we need from the Asean nations is assistance for the recovery phase'."
The minister said this was a "panglossian view", adding that a "needs assessment" should be completed before a donors' meeting on Monday.
Meanwhile, Burma's generals have followed China and belatedly announced three days of national mourning. General Than Shwe, the junta leader, appeared on television for the first time since the cyclone struck. State radio boasted that the regime had spent £1 million on aid.
got this from here.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Myanmar Agrees to Allow Aid Efforts by Neighbors
BANGKOK — Myanmar agreed Monday to let its Southeast Asian neighbors help coordinate foreign relief assistance for cyclone victims, bending to international pressure to allow in some more outside aid, Singapore’s foreign minister, George Yeo, said.
“We will establish a mechanism so that aid from all over the world can flow into Myanmar,” Mr. Yeo said, speaking at an emergency meeting in Singapore of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, which includes Myanmar.
“Myanmar is also prepared to accept the expertise of international and regional agencies to help in its rehabilitation efforts,” he told a news conference.
But he said the entry of aid workers from countries outside the Southeast Asian bloc would continue to be limited. “We have to look at specific needs — there will not be uncontrolled access,” Mr. Yeo said.
Since the cyclone, Western nations and major relief groups have raised alarm about Myanmar’s refusal to allow in large-scale relief shipments to the estimated 2.5 million survivors in need of aid after of the May 3 cyclone.
Myanmar has permitted a small flow of aid from several nations, including the United States, but relief officials say that this amounts to only 20 percent of the needed supplies. Without more aid, they say, many more people may die of disease and starvation.
Myanmar’s limited concession Monday came as international pressure continued to build from several directions, with the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, warning that the junta could be guilty of “crimes against humanity” if it continued to restrict the supply of aid into the country.
However, despite the international criticism, Myanmar’s foreign minister, Nyan Win, was quoted by Reuters as telling reporters that there had been no delay in accepting aid. “We always welcomed international aid,” he said.
After failing to receive a reply to letters and telephone calls made to the military junta, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was due to travel to Yangon this week in hopes of meeting the country’s leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe.
More than two weeks after the cyclone, General Shwe emerged from the isolated capital, Naypyidaw, and was shown on Myanmar state media for the first time in public Monday, meeting ministers involved in the rescue effort and touring some affected areas. In addition, the government announced that a three-day mourning period for the cyclone’s victims would begin Tuesday, The Associated Press reported. State television announced that the national flag would be flown at half-mast, beginning at 9 a.m.
State-run television showed General Shwe visiting a refugee camp, checking supplies, patting the heads of babies and shaking hands with survivors. Some of the cyclone victims, surrounded by neat rows of blue tents, clasped their hands and bowed as the general and other senior military officials walked by.
While accepting a limited amount of help, the government has insisted that it can handle the disaster on its own. The televised images were part of a broad propaganda campaign by the government to show its citizens and the outside world that it is in control of the situation.
Mr. Ban has called for a “high-level pledging conference” to deal with the crisis and for cooperation between the United Nations and Southeast Asian countries in overseeing aid delivery.
Mr. Yeo said that Asean would work with the United Nations to hold such a conference in Yangon on May 25 to coordinate aid deliveries. He said that Myanmar had agreed to allow in medical teams from any of its nine neighbors in Asean. Thailand has already sent a contingent of more than 30 medical workers.
In addition, Myanmar has allowed in 50 medical workers from India. China’s Xinhua news agency reported that a team of 50 Chinese medics arrived in Yangon Sunday night.
Mr. Yeo said the Myanmar government estimates losses at $10 billion in the cyclone, which swept through the Irrawaddy Delta and the country’s main city, Yangon, early on the morning of May 3.
Myanmar has raised its official death toll to 78,000.
Representatives of United Nations relief agencies said that some of their supplies were getting into Myanmar but that the authorities were still severely limiting delivery and withholding many visas from foreign relief experts.
The United Nations World Food Program said it had managed to deliver food aid to just 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need.
The United Nations and France have naval vessels just outside Myanmar’s territorial waters, and are prepared to deliver supplies directly to affected areas along the coast, but they have not received clearance from the government.
In a column in the French daily Le Monde, Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, said the United Nations should intervene by force, or be guilty of cowardice in the eyes of the world.
“What we need to bring is hand-to-hand, heart-to-heart help, not donor conferences with all their bowing and scraping,” he said in an interview with French radio. “In the meantime, people are dying.”
Mr. Yeo rejected the idea of delivery by force. “That will create unnecessary complication,” he said at the news conference. “It will only lead to more suffering for Myanmar people.”
On Saturday, Myanmar’s powerful neighbor and ally, China, said that other countries must show “due respect” to Myanmar in its handling of the disaster within its borders.
“Myanmar is a sovereign country,” said Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, at a briefing. “In the end, rescue and relief work will have to rely on the Myanmar government and people.”
Seth Mydans reported from Bangkok and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Got it from here.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Starvation warning for Myanmar's children
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Thousands of children in Myanmar will starve to death in two to three weeks unless food is rushed to them, an aid agency warned Sunday as an increasingly angry international community pleaded for approval to mount an all-out effort to help cyclone survivors.
art.survivor.
A cyclone survivor reacts after receiving donated clothing and sheets in Myanmar's capital, Yangon.
The United Nations said Myanmar's isolationist ruling generals were even forbidding the import of communications equipment, hampering already difficult contact among relief agencies.
A U.N. situation report said Saturday that emergency relief from the international community had reached an estimated 500,000 people. But the regime insists it will handle distribution to victims of Cyclone Nargis.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has been unable to sway Myanmar's leaders by telephone, said he was sending U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes to Myanmar this weekend.
Holmes was expected to arrive Sunday evening in Myanmar's largest city, Yangon, said Amanda Pitt, a U.N. spokeswoman in Bangkok, the capital of neighboring Thailand.
"He's going at the request of the secretary-general to find out what's really going on the ground, to get a much better picture of how the response is going and ... to see how much we can help them scale up this response," Pitt said. Details of the visit, she said, were still being worked out.
The U.N. report said all communications equipment used by foreign agencies must be purchased through Myanmar's Ministry of Posts and Communications -- with a maximum of 10 telephones per agency -- for US$1,500 (euro960) each. Importing equipment is not allowed.
State-run radio said the government has so far spent 20 billion kyat (about US$2 million; euro1.3 million) for relief work and has received millions of dollars (euros) worth of relief supplies from local and international donors. It said the government was distributing assistance promptly and efficiently to the affected areas.
Aid agencies were not convinced.
Save the Children, a global aid agency, said Sunday that thousands of young children face starvation without quick food aid.
"We are extremely worried that many children in the affected areas are now suffering from severe acute malnourishment, the most serious level of hunger," said Jasmine Whitbread, who heads the agency's operation in Britain. "When people reach this stage, they can die in a matter of days."
International outrage mounted over Myanmar's handling of the disaster.
Britain's prime minister accused authorities in the country, also known as Burma, of preventing foreign aid from reaching victims and said the military regime cares more about its own survival than it's people's welfare.
"This is inhuman," Gordon Brown told the British Broadcasting Corp.
In one town near Yangon, tired and hungry refugees stood in the baking sun beside flooded rice paddies, demolished monasteries and thatched huts. With the arrival of each vehicle carrying precious food and water, they jumped with excitement and surged ahead to get a share. Video Watch villagers struggle to find food, clothing »
At least they were getting something.
"The farther you go, the worse the situation," said an overwhelmed doctor in the town of Twante, just southwest of Yangon, Myanmar's main city. "Near Yangon, people are getting a lot of help and it's still bad. In the remote delta villages, we don't even want to imagine." The doctor declined to give her name, fearing government reprisal.
The government flew 60 diplomats and U.S. officials in helicopters to three places in the Irrawaddy delta, the hardest-hit area, on Saturday to show them progress in the relief effort.
The diplomats were not all swayed.
"It was a show," Shari Villarosa, the top U.S. diplomat in Myanmar, told The Associated Press by telephone after returning to Yangon. "That's what they wanted us to see." Video Watch an analyst compare Myanmar's disaster response to China »
A French navy ship that arrived Saturday off Myanmar's shores loaded with food, medication and fresh water -- a potentially lifesaving cargo -- was given the now-familiar red light. France's U.N. ambassador, Jean-Maurice Ripert, called it "nonsense."
"We have small boats, which could allow us to go through the delta to most of the regions where no one has accessed yet," he said. "We have small helicopters to drop food, and we have doctors."
The USS Essex, an amphibious assault ship, and its battle group also have been waiting to join the relief effort. U.S. Marine flights to Yangon from their makeshift headquarters in Utapao, Thailand, continued Saturday -- bringing the total to 500,000 pounds of aid delivered -- but negotiations to allow helicopters to fly directly to the disaster zone were stalled.
Myanmar's state-run television, which has repeatedly broadcast footage of generals reassuring refugees calmly sitting in clean tents, announced Friday that the cyclone death toll had nearly doubled to 78,000 with about 56,000 missing.
Aid groups say even those estimates are low.
The international Red Cross says the death toll alone is probably about 128,000, with many more deaths possible from disease and starvation unless help gets quickly to some 2.5 million survivors.
But seeing that help gets to the victims does not appear to be a top priority for Myanmar's rulers. The military, which took power in a 1962 coup, has even barred foreigners from traveling outside of Yangon, putting up a security cordon around the city. Myanmar has been slightly more open to aid from its neighbors, accepting Thai and Indian medical teams, which arrived Saturday. The 32-member Thai team was expected to travel to the delta in the coming days, said Dr. Surachet Satitniramai, director of Thailand's National Medical Emergency Services Institute.
The Indian team consists of 50 doctors and paramedics from the Army Medical Corp., said Indian Air Force spokesman Wing Cmdr. Manish Gandhi. He could not immediately say if they would be allowed to go to the delta.
I got this from here.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
As cyclone refugees wait, Myanmar refuses aid
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Myanmar's junta kept a French navy ship laden with aid waiting outside its maritime border on Saturday, and showed off neatly laid out state relief camps to diplomats.
The stage-managed tour appeared aimed at countering global criticism of the junta's failure to provide for survivors of Cyclone Nargis, which left at least 134,000 people dead or missing.
The junta flew 60 diplomats and U.N. officials in helicopters to three places in the Irrawaddy delta where camps, aid and survivors were put on display. The diplomats were not swayed.
"It was a show," Shari Villarosa, the top U.S. diplomat in Myanmar, told The Associated Press by telephone after returning to Yangon. "That's what they wanted us to see."
The relief group Save the Children UK warned that thousands of children could die of starvation within two or three weeks unless more aid gets into the country quickly.
"With hundreds of thousands of people still not receiving aid many of these children will not survive much longer," the charity said in a statement. "Children may already be dying as a result of a lack of food."
Meanwhile, a French navy ship that arrived Saturday off Myanmar's shores loaded with food, medication and fresh water was given the now familiar red light, a response that France's U.N. ambassador, Jean-Maurice Ripert, called "nonsense."
"We have small boats which could allow us to go through the delta to most of the regions where no one has accessed yet," he said a day earlier at U.N. headquarters. "We have small helicopters to drop food, and we have doctors."
The USS Essex, an amphibious assault ship, and its battle group have been waiting to join in the relief effort as well. U.S. Marine flights from their makeshift headquarters in Utapao, Thailand, continued Saturday — bringing the total to 500,000 pounds of aid delivered — but negotiations to allow helicopters to fly directly to the disaster zone were stalled.
Britain's prime minister accused authorities in Myanmar of behaving inhumanely by preventing foreign aid from reaching victims, and said the country's regime cares more about its own survival than the welfare of its people.
"This is inhuman," Gordon Brown told the British Broadcasting Corp. in his strongest criticism yet of Myanmar's authoritarian government.
Brown said a natural disaster "is being made into a man-made catastrophe by the negligence, the neglect and the inhuman treatment of the Burmese people by a regime that is failing to act and to allow the international community to do what it wants to do."
Britain's Ministry of Defense said it had dispatched a Royal Navy frigate to the area "as a contingency." The HMS Westminster broke away from an exercise with the French and Indian navies, a ministry spokesman said, speaking anonymously in line with military policy.
The spokesman said the ship carried a crew of 98 and was equipped with a communications facility, a Merlin helicopter, two sea boats, a doctor and a paramedic. The spokesman added that crew members are all trained in disaster relief.
Myanmar's media, which has repeatedly broadcast footage of generals reassuring refugees calmly sitting in clean tents, announced Friday that the death toll from Cyclone Nargis had nearly doubled to 78,000 with about 56,000 missing.
Aid groups say even those estimates are low.
According to the international Red Cross, the death toll alone is probably about 128,000, with many more deaths possible from disease and starvation unless help gets quickly to some 2.5 million survivors of the disaster.
But seeing that help gets to the victims is not the first priority of Myanmar's rulers. The military, which took power in a 1962 coup, says all aid must be delivered to the government for distribution and has barred foreigners from leaving Yangon, putting up a security cordon around the country's main city.
Myanmar has been slightly more open to aid from its neighbors.
It has accepted Thai and Indian medical teams, which arrived in Yangon on Saturday. The 32-member Thai team was expected to travel to the delta in the coming days, said Dr. Surachet Satitniramai, director of Thailand's National Medical Emergency Services Institute.
The Indian team consists of 50 doctors and paramedics from the Army Medical Corp., said Indian Air Force spokesman Wing Cmdr. Manish Gandhi. He could not immediately say if they will be allowed to go to the delta.
With the monsoon season coming, Myanmar was bracing for a long haul ahead.
Though patches of hot sun broke through Saturday, heavy rains since the cyclone have hampered relief efforts. Despite the overabundance of water in the flooded delta, shortages of water that is fresh enough to drink grew more severe by the day.
Access to regular supplies of safe drinking water and proper sanitation is essential for preventing waterborne diseases like cholera. Malaria and dengue fever outbreaks also will be a major concern in the coming weeks after mosquitoes have time to breed in the stagnant water.
In one town, tired and hungry refugees stood in the baking sun beside flooded rice paddies, demolished monasteries and thatched huts awaiting food and water. With the arrival of each vehicle carrying precious supplies, they jumped with excitement and surged ahead to get a share.
They were among the lucky ones — aid was actually coming.
"The further you go, the worse the situation," said an overwhelmed doctor in the town of Twante, just southwest of the country's largest city, Yangon, helping a locally organized relief effort there.
"Near Yangon, people are getting a lot of help and it's still bad," said the doctor, who refused to give her name for fear of being punished by the regime. "In the remote delta villages, we don't even want to imagine."
Myanmar gov't keeping out aid for cyclone victims
By The Associated Press
YANGON - Despite signs everywhere to the contrary, Myanmar's military government tried yesterday to show the world that all was under control, leading diplomats on their first tour through the Irrawaddy Delta, where more than 130,000 people were killed or are still missing after the May 2-3 cyclone.
The junta flew 60 diplomats and United Nations officials in helicopters to three places in the delta where camps, aid and survivors were put on display.
Authorities said they have almost finished carrying out relief work and are moving toward reconstruction and rebuilding.
The underlying message was that they welcome international assistance but there is no need for foreign personnel.
The diplomats were not all swayed.
"It was a show," Shari Villarosa, the top U.S. diplomat in Myanmar, told the AP by telephone after returning to Yangon. "That's what they wanted us to see."
A French navy ship that arrived yesterday off Myanmar's shores loaded with food, medication and fresh water - a potentially lifesaving cargo - was given the now familiar red light, a response which France's UN ambassador, Jean-Maurice Ripert, called nonsense.
"We have small boats, which could allow us to go through the delta to most of the regions where no one has accessed yet," he said.
The USS Essex, an amphibious assault ship, and its battle group have been waiting to join in the relief effort as well.
U.S. Marine flights to Yangon from their makeshift headquarters in Utapao, Thailand, continued yesterday - bringing the total to 500,000 pounds of aid delivered - but negotiations to allow helicopters to fly directly to the disaster zone were stalled.
According to the International Red Cross, the death toll alone is probably about 128,000, with many more deaths possible from disease and starvation unless help gets quickly to some 2.5 million survivors of the disaster.
But seeing that help gets to the victims does not appear to be the first priority of Myanmar's rulers.
The military, which took power in a 1962 coup, says all aid must be delivered to the government for distribution and has barred foreigners from leaving Yangon, putting up a security cordon around the country's main city.
got it from here.
Karel Vervoort: Air drops work. Burma needs them now
A proven method of releasing small, life-saving parcels can bring instant relief to the junta's neglected people, if the will is there
Sunday, 18 May 2008
It is 15 days since Cyclone Nargis hit Burma's Irrawaddy delta. Officially, 78,000 people have died (with another 55,000 missing), but NGOs estimate the figures will go a good deal higher yet. The UN admits it hasn't a clue how bad things are. Offers of help for the 2.5 million people affected have come from all over the world, and aid organisations have done their valiant best to bring assistance. The situation is dire. There is nothing more certain than that corpses lying around in stagnant water will give rise to disease, yet that is precisely what the few images we have been allowed to see have shown us.
Yesterday, one account, from 60 miles south of the capital, reported the dispossessed lining the road: "Without clothes or shoes, the thousands of men, women and children could only stand in the mud and rain of the latest tropical downpour, their hands clasped together in supplication at the occasional passing aid vehicle. Any car that did stop was mobbed by children, their grimy hands reaching through a window in search of bits of bread or a T-shirt." A Burmese volunteer commented: "The situation has worsened in just two days. There weren't this many desperate people when we were last here." Yet the backward-looking junta in Rangoon will accept aid only on its own terms, refusing to allow foreign humanitarian workers into the country and insisting – despite having little experience – on distributing aid itself. This is not mere protection of national sovereignty but, when thousands are dying as a direct result, a paranoia-inspired crime against humanity.
So what are we in the comfortable West to do? Either we can ignore the problem, an option made easier for our politicians by a comparative lack of public pressure (thanks to the media being largely shut out of Burma). Or our governments can press on, cynically or otherwise, seeking to persuade the Burmese government that we mean them no harm and only want to help, a state of affairs that has produced monotonously unchanging news bulletins for 10 days. Or we can be a great deal more proactive, and do something that might help the image of international interventionism, so damaged by the Iraq adventure. A more muscular approach might involve, say, air drops of food and other supplies.
Should we do it, and would it work? To the "should we?" question, the answer is almost certainly yes. Admittedly, without prior approval from the Burmese government, we would be invading its airspace, something not to be undertaken lightly. Would the (insufficient) aid that is getting through on the ground be cut off in retaliation? Would foreign planes be shot at by the military? Would the Chinese get drawn in, with the possibility of a quite unpredictable escalation? I will return to these concerns below. But the "should we?" question is answered by reference to the New York declaration in September 2005, marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nations. There it says that the international community, through the UN, "has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity". This "responsibility to protect", surely, makes the case unambiguously. The UN, as we know, is notoriously bad at reaching agreement, but the principle stands.
So to the question "would it work?" There are problems, admittedly, but none of them insurmountable. Dropping large quantities of anything at random can be ineffective, as well as dangerous to those on the ground. Aid can fall into the wrong hands – either black marketeers or those with military muscle.
But there is a way of distributing aid from the air in small packages and across a wide area that overcomes these problems. It allows individual parcels, weighing up to 5kg, to be scattered widely, minimising the chances of them being monopolised and misused. The idea is to provide survival packs, containing enough food, water, anti-malaria pills and water purification tablets to keep one person alive for one day.
Fifteen years ago, I gave a presentation in London on what I and my personal staff were doing within Nato to develop ways of using military assets in international disaster relief. I showed videos on the low-altitude bulk food gravity drop system that we were then using in Africa in the Belgian air force. At that meeting, a man called Geoff Woodford told me he had been thinking about another system of air-dropping food without parachutes, which he called Snowdrop. He told me that he had done initial tests in South Africa using C130 planes. Having seen a video of these tests, I immediately saw that his system would complement the one we had been using in the Belgian air force. He and I came to an agreement whereby we would develop the system together, without our paying him for the patent. There were a good few teething problems, but we carried on, anxious to find a way of dropping aid on top of people, on top of houses, without causing damage, even in complex emergencies. After 10 years of tests and investment, we had perfected a way of doing it. By 2003 it was declared "operational" in the Belgian air force by the Minister of Defence, and we had developed a system that could be used with any aircraft with a back door. It can drop from any altitude. We did it up to 12,000 feet, but it can be done up to 24,000 or even higher, provided there is oxygen for the crew. It can be done by stealth, at night.
The question is, why has Snowdrop (in which, I should say, I have no financial interest) not been used in Burma? In theory, if the food arsenals were in place, aid could have been dropped within 24 hours of the cyclone. One stumbling block is the lack of political will. We have been reluctant to offend the Burmese government, preferring the softly, softly approach of trying to persuade it to change its stripes. This morning, though, Gordon Brown said an air drop could not be ruled out, although the British would have precious few C130s available and have no experience with Snowdrop as perfected by the Belgians. Ludicrously and scandalously, there has been a dispute over the ownership of the patent. The United Nations World Food Programme began implementing its own Snowdrop programme, declaring on their website that they had devised the system themselves.
But herein lies the problem. Geoff Woodford subsequently filed a complaint insisting that the patent was his, and asserting ownership of the intellectual property. I know whose side I am on. Since then there has been an impasse. A highly effective system exists that should now be in use in Burma. Many actual "experts" do not even know of its existence. When John Holmes, the UN's humanitarian affairs officer, meets Burmese officials this week, the idea of such a drop should be on the table. Nobody doubts that aid is best provided with the collaboration of the host government, but a form of it can be given even without that co-operation. There is even a half-way house. A deal could be done with Rangoon to allow officials to fly on board the planes, as happened when we did a drop in Ethiopia. A member of the military checked everything that went on board, everything that was dropped, and knew exactly where we were flying. That would allay fears of military or covert action, and satisfy the Chinese. With imagination, these things can be done. We don't have to sit on our hands.
Major General Karel Vervoort is a former head of Training and Support Command in the Belgian Air Force
I got it from here.
