New Mandala

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• 1 ChrisIPS // May 23, 2008 at 2:34 pm

  ……you might want to post this insightful article from Friday’s New York Times put together from some people who got by the various Burma army checkpoints and traveled deep into the destruction and despair……
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  Junta Offers Showcase Camps, but Most Burmese Lack Aid

  THE NEW YORK TIMES - May 23, 2008

  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 Than 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.

• 2 ChrisIPS // May 24, 2008 at 6:04 am

  ………here’s a very insightful and interesting article based on direct sources inside the Burma disaster zone that appeared in the May 23rd Los Angeles Times describing:

  1. the elements that have been put together to make the “pretend” refugee camp that the UN Secretary General and other visiting dignitaries are being toured through, and,

  2. descriptions of how groups of actual refugees gathered in makeshift locations centered around monasteries and schools are been forcibly dispersed under a law banning groups of 5 people or more from gathering together.

  …….a few comments……….

  1. it seems impossible to believe that the generals are really Buddhist and accept the karmic/reincarnation belief system as their bad intent and actions will certainly result in this group of generals suffering through an infinity of future cycles as cockroaches, marsh larvae, dung beetles, etc.

  2. where are the younger generals with the courage, knowledge and skill to successfully act and overthrow the present group of geriatric generals who are imposing such a large amount of unnecessary suffering on their fellow citizens. Is it possible that any and all of the younger generals with courage, knowledge and skill have been shot?

  ….anyway, here is the the LA Times article……
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  Suspicion trumps aid in Myanmar: Ban Ki-moon visits Myanmar

  From a LA Times Staff Writer inside the disaster zone - May 23, 2008

  MOULMEINGYUN, MYANMAR — Among the hundreds of cyclone survivors who staggered through the doors of a monastery here, staring straight ahead and too traumatized to even blink, was one village’s last living man.

  The abbot was quick to care for the group, feeding refugees from rice stockpiled for students who, in better times, came to learn meditation and the wisdom of the Buddha.

  Within a few days, however, local officials barged into the monastery. They argued with the abbot and ordered stunned and frightened survivors to leave, said Pone Nya, an assistant to the abbot.

  “They were informed that if they continued to stay in this monastery they would be put in jail,” the 25-year-old monk said in an interview Wednesday.

  “These local officials told us the refugees are from all walks of life, good men, bad men and rebels,” Pone Nya added. “They said, ‘If those people live in the town for a long time, it’s dangerous for the town.’ My abbot absolutely hated those words.”

  But he was powerless. By May 13, just 10 days after Tropical Cyclone Nargis had washed away whole villages, 1,500 survivors had been evicted from the monastery, along with thousands more from six other relief camps in this Irrawaddy River delta town.

  On Thursday, the day after the monk spoke, officials brought U.N. Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon on a carefully orchestrated tour here. Myanmar’s minister for border areas, Thein Nyunt, told Ban that everyone had gone home because the water had receded. A tent remained as an apparent distribution center for bags of rice and noodles and cartons of drinking water.

  The effort to break up the relief camps so soon reflects the deep suspicion in which Myanmar’s military rulers, who have been in power for 46 years, hold their own people, even sick and hungry victims of a natural catastrophe.

  Survivors and volunteer aid workers describe similar moves in other areas. If displaced people aren’t ordered to leave relief camps, officials controlling aid make sure they get so little food and other support that going back to demolished homes seems a better option, said witnesses interviewed in several delta towns and villages.

  In a village near Yangon, the commercial hub, an official shutting down a relief camp in a state-owned restaurant said he was enforcing a long-standing ban on public gatherings of more than five people.

  Almost three weeks after the cyclone struck, the United Nations says its supplies of food, medicine and other goods have reached only 25% of those struggling against malnutrition, disease and daily rains.

  By describing the refugee evictions to a reporter in an area closed to people who might criticize the regime, Pone Nya risks being defrocked and jailed. But like many cyclone survivors, he is so angry about the ruling generals’ fumbling response and their refusal to allow a full international aid effort that he is willing to face that danger.

  He identified the local official in charge of clearing out the camps as Ko Khin Mg Win, who the monk said was a low-ranking employee of the state telephone company. Pone Nya said scornfully, “He’s not helping anyone. He’s just watching.”

  But rather than risk direct criticism of top military leaders, the monk quoted a song by Mar Mar Aye, a leading pro- democracy singer who lives in exile in the U.S. The song honors protesters killed and arrested last fall when the military crushed the biggest demonstrations against the regime in almost 20 years.

  “There’s a pain in my heart,” the monk sang quietly. “We will never forget that pain until doomsday.”

  With those two, brief lines, he made reference to what many here are too frightened to say publicly: Anger over the military government’s handling of the cyclone’s aftermath could set off a new wave of protests against a regime seen as deeply corrupt and bitterly coldhearted.

  “They were telling refugees to leave in the middle of the night,” Pone Nya said. “They had to go back to their own villages on foot with flashlights.”

  His anger rising, the young monk took his biggest risk by declaring: “This military government is cruel.”

  Businesspeople and other wealthy residents of this town about 20 miles northwest of Bogale welcomed the villagers.

  A group of 400, the first to arrive two days after the storm on May 2-3, were the only people left from a village that doesn’t exist anymore. Private donors immediately gave money, food and other aid to care for them, Pone Nya said.

  Local officials were almost as quick to put pressure on the abbot to kick them out, but he argued with them for days.

  “The abbot told them he didn’t care if they reported him to higher-ups,” his assistant recalled. “He said, ‘Let’s see which is stronger, your report or my power.’ ”

  During another angry encounter, the abbot wagged his finger in the face of three officials, and used a traditional phrase predicting they would be killed in a way reserved for the most evil: “You’re going to die in a lightning storm,” he shouted, Pone Nya said.

  He later apologized, and pleaded for permission to keep the camp open, the assistant said.

  “He said, ‘I have enough food. If you don’t want to spend money, I’ll take care of them,’ ” Pone Nya recalled. But that argument failed too, leaving the refugees with two options: return and rebuild homes with what they could salvage, or move north to camps still open in the town of Wakema.

  Several said they didn’t want to move far from the land they farm because they feared being ordered to give up homes that they hope to rebuild.

  U Tin Sein, a rice farmer who lives more than 50 miles west of here in Daung Kaung, a village near the town of Labutta, said that last year the regime evicted farmers in the western state of Rakhine to consolidate small paddies into larger farms for sale to Chinese investors.

  As U Tin Sein spoke, 32 men were searching for any scraps of splintered homes that could be salvaged.

  They left their wives and children in a relief camp because they were tired of getting just enough food from authorities to survive. The corpse of a child, bleached white by the sun and river water, lay next to the shore, wearing only pajama shorts decorated with cuddling cartoon figures.

  There were 130 houses in the village before the storm. Not a single one is still standing.

  About 300 of the 536 people who lived there are still alive. Alone on the horizon, surrounded by debris, scattered clothes and broken trees, is the shell of a Buddhist monastery.

  Most of the roof is gone, so the men share the few dry spaces during the daily monsoon deluge. They plan to rebuild a single house for neighbors to share while they rebuild the village together.

  As hard as that will be, the men say, it’s better than living in a camp where the government provided just two cups of rice each per day, and some instant noodles. Just twice in more than two weeks there, they said, they got a supplement of tinned tuna.

  As the men made their way back to their village by boat this week, they came across a larger vessel carrying U.N. aid through the delta’s vast network of rivers and channels. The crew waved to them to pull alongside and gave them 500 pounds of rice, enough to feed their village for five days.

  They had no idea when, or where, they would get more food when that ran out.

  Relief distribution in the area’s 14 villages is controlled by a man the returning residents identified as Ko San Way, in the village of Kan Yin Koung. They asked him three times for help, and each time got nothing, the men said.

  They suspect he is hoarding the aid for his own village.

  “When we tried to meet with the top guy,” said Ko Saw Nai Win, 31, “he just disappeared.”

• 3 jonfernquest // May 26, 2008 at 5:13 pm

  Thanks for this reference. The Wikipedia page you cited is really worth reading. It certainly shows that on both sides (government, opposition) there are a multiplicity of actors, standpoints, and interests, and is thus an antodote to the essentialism that pervades almost all reporting on Burma.

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