Myanmar's government has begun to ease restrictions on the flow of aid to cyclone victims but it has also lied to survivors, telling them that aid supplies from foreign sources have come from the military regime
Contrasting vividly with the rapid response of Chinese officials (who, admittedly, represent a much larger, richer, institutionally better-equipped country, albeit one whose government has tended to control the information flow about large-scale public-health or disaster issues in the past), the military junta that rules Myanmar is still dragging its feet about letting foreign aid workers in more than a week after a cyclone devastated that Himalayan nation. "Myanmar's generals are ruled by paranoia," Canada's Globe and Mail notes. "While the people plead for food, the junta is handing out TV sets," Britain's Independent reported last Friday.
A news report in today's Globe and Mail notes: "To the outside world, the reaction of Myanmar's military regime to last week's...cyclone seems not just obscene, but inexplicable. Instead of rushing to help its desperate people, the regime of General Than Shwe all but shut off the country from foreign assistance while pushing ahead with a referendum on a new constitution. But to those who know the regime, its reaction is perfectly in character. Myanmar's government is among the most xenophobic in the world, deeply distrustful of outsiders and all they represent. So the idea of letting foreign-aid workers and even foreign soldiers into the country, if only to deliver aid, fills its leaders with dread."
The United Nations has estimated that, so far, only about a quarter of the cyclone's survivors have received any assistance
This past Sunday, a Deutsche Presse-Agentur/Bangkok Post news report pointed out that a senior, Thai-government official was on his way to Myanmar to urge its military dictatorship to allow foreign relief workers in to help the mountainous country's suffering people. The day before, "the junta [had] reached a new level of cynicism, pasting huge labels on aid packages from Thailand to claim the help [had come] from [Myanmar's] top generals, rather than [from] the Thai people. The regime plastered names of the top generals on the aid boxes as part of the propaganda and intimidation campaign it is running to back its referendum seeking to perpetuate the 46-year military control of the country." Within Myanmar, state-run television "continuously ran images of elaborate ceremonies [in which] top generals - including the junta leader, Senior Gen[eral] Than Shwe - handed out boxes of Thai aid disguised...to appear [as though] it [had come] from the junta to survivors of the tragedy. One box...bore the name of [Lieutenant General] Myint Swe, a rising star in the government hierarchy, in bold letters, overshadowing a smaller label...." Barely visible, that smaller label read: "Aid from the Kingdom of Thailand."
Although some relief aid has managed to trickle into Myanmar, as of this past weekend, the United Nations was estimating that only about a quarter of the Myanmar cyclone's survivors had received any assistance. (This morning, in the U.S., National Public Radio reported that Myanmar's military regime has been keeping the best incoming aid supplies for itself and has been handing out rotten food instead.) This past Sunday, a BBC report quoted British Foreign Minister David Miliband, who said: "A natural disaster is turning into a humanitarian catastrophe of genuinely epic proportions in significant part because of what I would describe as the malign neglect of the regime." Myanmar's government claims that nearly 28,500 people have died as a result of the recent cyclone, but international aid organizations have estimated "that 100,000 have died and [have] warn[ed] that this figure could rise to 1.5 million without provision of clean water and sanitation....The U.N., which has launched a $187 [million]...appeal for aid, says survivors in the worst-affected areas urgently need food, shelter and medical aid." (BBC)
Writing in Britain's Times, op-ed columnist Simon Jenkins has deplored "the silence from our saber rattlers" as Myanmar's "dying cry out to be saved." He asks: "What are we waiting for? Where now is liberal interventionism?"
Jenkins writes that, in the aftermath of the recent cyclone, hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar might be "condemned to death by one thing alone," namely "the viciousness of a dictatorship more concerned with its pride and xenophobia than with the well-being of its citizens. Like Soviet regimes of old, [Myanmar's] government would rather pretend that disasters have not occurred than admit it cannot handle them....I have opposed many of the macho military interventions conducted by the West over the past decade. Their justifications have been obscure, their motives mixed and their morality situational, especially those aimed at 'regime change.' Those in Afghanistan and Iraq had the additional defect of built-in failure."
Jenkins admits that "the airlifting of supplies from offshore vessels to stricken areas [within Myanmar] would indeed be an offense against the sovereignty" of the country. However, he argues, such an "intervention would not constitute an attack on a government or occupy its territory. Indeed it would be occasioned strictly because of the lack of government in a particular territory. It would be to save the lives of people abandoned to their deaths by their rulers."
