Cyclone Nargis survivors face new battles under General Than Shwe

From The Times
May 2, 2009

Passengers carry supplies onto a boat in the fishing town of Labutta on the Ayeyarwady River


The human survivors were still coming to terms with their shock and grief when they began to notice it: one after another, the water buffalo, which ploughed the fields and fertilised the ground, were starting to die.

“They suffered from the shock, too,” said Aung Moe, a farmer in the village of Bantoung Khaung. “For six or seven months, they were slow, sad, we could not make them work. And they began to die gradually.”

When the dead creatures were examined, their stomachs contained a brick of muddy earth. “They drink the cyclone water,” Aung Moe said. “And the water is so muddy.”

It is a year today since Cyclone Nargis struck southern Burma, passing straight through Bantoung Khaung. Looking at the village today, it is hard to recall the scale of the disaster. The corpses have been cleared from the creeks and trees; the smashed houses have been replaced with neat, fragile shelters of bamboo and palm.

RELATED LINKS
Burma: world's longest war nears its end
Why it is not easy to impose help in Burma
Beneath the surface, though, the physical and psychological trauma is profound — and it is felt in changes to the natural world as much as the human.

The people of the Irrawaddy delta are no longer dying but they are communities on life support. They have roofs over their heads but most are so flimsy that it would take less than a cyclone to blow them away again. They are supplied with enough food aid to fend off hunger and disease but many are still unable to support themselves. Their buffaloes — the lumbering tractors of the paddy fields — have died and there is no money to replace them.

Even if these problems were solved they would still face an enemy as implacable and destructive as the surging tidal water and raging winds: the Burmese junta, which condemns its people to poverty by its stubbornness and greed.

However much physical reconstruction has taken place, one thing has not changed: the people’s latent fear of their Government.

From Rangoon, the largest city in Burma, it is an eight-hour drive, followed by a one-hour journey by boat, to Bantoung Khaung. Foreign journalists are barred from Burma and an elaborate subterfuge is required to gain the necessary documents and pass through the checkpoints on the road to Labutta, which is the closest town.

Once there, police and military intelligence make suspicious inquiries. Local people and even international nongovernmental organisations and United Nations agencies are afraid to give on-the-record interviews (all names in this article have been changed).

They have good reason: 21 people are serving prison sentences, from 2 to 35 years, on charges associated with taking aid into the Irrawaddy delta. It is this which sets Cyclone Nargis in a different category from a natural disaster such as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004: it was quickly caught up in the politics of one of the cruellest, most stubborn dictatorships in the world.

About 140,000 people were crushed or drowned by the storm, which pounded the low-lying delta with winds of 135mph (215km/h) and waters 12ft (3.5m) high. Almost immediately offers of help came in from across the world but the Government of General Than Shwe refused to allow nonBurmese aid workers into the area.

After three weeks of international pressure, the junta unexpectedly gave in and allowed foreign aid — and aid workers — to come to the disaster area. There was no secondary disaster of mass deaths due to starvation, disease and exposure but a visit to a village such as Bantoung Khaung reveals how far the stricken area is from full recovery.

The biggest problem is the lack of clean water. The village used to thrive on its 51 wells, which produced clean, fresh water. “People from the other villages would come here for our water,” Soe Min Myat said. “But now they are all salty.”

The villagers have drained the wells and painstakingly dug out replacements, but in vain. The problem suggests a sinister possibility: that the force of the cyclone permanently altered watercourses in the area, forcing salt into the groundwater. The residents rely on deliveries of purified water brought in by boat, which is the only way to gain access to the village.

The salt has washed through the fields, harming their productivity. “To plant rice we only needed a buffalo and a knife,” Soe Min Myat said. The farmers of Bantoung Khaung have neither, and the rice planting, which should take place in July, is in doubt.

They used to have 1,600 water buffaloes; 60 of them have survived. Animals brought in from other parts of the country died because they were unaccustomed to the climate, and the mechanical tillers provided by aid workers are unpopular with the farmers, who have used buffaloes for centuries. There is not enough seed, and no money to buy it.

The salt factories and rice mills that used to provide income and employment have been washed away. In previous years the farmers borrowed money from wealthy dealers as an advance on their crop — but they are in debt from last year when lending was never repaid because the cyclone washed everything away.

“There’s no employment and no food,” said Chris Kaye, of the UN World Food Programme, which is feeding 190,000 of the 480,000 people in the Labutta district.

Even the generosity of the outside world appears to have given out. Only two thirds of the appeal for $477 million (£320 million) was raised — compared with $12 billion for the victims of the 2004 tsunami. Funds for road building, shelter and other infrastructure are in short supply, because of the aversion of foreign governments to being seen to help the military regime rather than its victims.

There is gross inconsistency in this: General Than Shwe’s compatriots receive only $2.80 per head in foreign aid, compared with $55 for Sudan and $49 in the communist dictatorship of Laos, which neighbours Burma.

In recent weeks the junta has shown signs of revoking the few freedoms that it yielded in the delta. The fast-track process for applying for visas for aid workers has been brought to an end. Permission to fly the World Food Programme’s helicopter, which has done invaluable work in surveying damaged areas and transporting officials, may not be renewed. Outside the delta, in areas wholly unaffected by the cyclone, Burmese remain among the poorest people in the world.

The estimated GDP for the country is barely half that of developmental disaster areas such as Cambodia and Bangladesh and almost one third of children under 5 are malnourished. The Government’s spending on health and education combined is less than 1 per cent of GDP — compared with an estimated 40 per cent for its armed forces.

This is the true tragedy of the Burmese: however much is done for the survivors of the storm, they remain in the grip of the far greater disaster of their rulers.

Waves of destruction

138,400 deaths due to Cyclone Nargis

54% of victims were children

2,000 children orphaned

2.4m villagers affected by the cyclone

£320m target for the United Nations emergency appeal

£150m raised after six months

£211m raised so far

£6.7m lost by the UN in an exchange-rate scam led by the junta

130 tonnes of aid sent to Burma by the Red Cross

350 tonnes of medical supplies distributed by the World Health Organisation

21 political prisoners arrested for helping victims without permission

Source: Times archive