After Nargis in Laputta

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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."
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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.
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Latbutta 6

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Labutta

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Burma Latest

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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
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