The Cadre at Beijing is directly responsible for the intransigence and vacuum in Burma. The original Cadre blocks direct intervention and refuses to permit the French advocacy to take control. The Cadre has no answers and looks for none.
In Ravaged Myanmar, Aid Goes Underground
May 23, 2008
KYAUKTAN, Myanmar -- It has been more than two weeks since Cyclone Nargis lashed this riverside town, blowing away Ma San's house and all her possessions.
The Wall Street Journal
Dozens of children -- some wearing sunblock on their faces -- crowded along a riverbank earlier this week at the Pariyatti monastery to look at a body floating in the river, the refugees' source for water for cooking and washing.
Since then, she and about 100 newly homeless neighbors have camped on the crowded ground floor of a nearby Buddhist monastery. "I lost everything," said 54-year-old Ms. San, as hard rain pounded uprooted tree trunks outside. "And if it were not for the monks, by now I would be dead."
Myanmar's military junta has been criticized world-wide for restricting international aid to the cyclone's victims as it fails to cope with the disaster's fallout itself. But as a visit to Myanmar's storm-ravaged areas shows, an informal network has now sprung into action to try to fill this vacuum -- with Buddhist monks, Internet-savvy activists and pro-democracy students providing shelter, clothing and food to survivors like Ms. San.
The country's isolationist junta, subject to U.S. sanctions since it crushed a pro-democracy movement two decades ago, fears that an uncontrolled influx of Western aid workers might undermine the regime's stranglehold over Myanmar's 53 million people. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon arrived in Myanmar on Thursday, meeting with Prime Minister Thein Sein in an effort to nudge open channels for foreign aid. (Please see related article.) Yet for now, it is the grass-roots relief effort, fueled by widespread revulsion at the junta's handling of the disaster, that is emerging as a powerful and insidious challenge to the ruling generals.
The impromptu relief work has already greatly enhanced the prestige of Myanmar's Buddhist clergy, which includes some 500,000 monks and remains the only large organized force independent of the regime. Storm-relief efforts have also provided a new rallying point for pro-democracy activists, silenced by last September's bloody crackdown on protests in Myanmar's main city, Yangon.
The volunteers say their motivations for relief work are purely humanitarian. But in a country as tightly controlled as Myanmar, any independent campaign inevitably acquires political overtones. Many of those helping the survivors are openly critical of the regime, circulating photos and compact discs that capture the horror of the tragedy and the frequent absence of government response. They include several young activist-bloggers who circumvent Myanmar's tight restrictions on Web access, venting their fury on antiquated computers in dim Internet cafés around Yangon.
'Obstacles to Aid'
"The people are very angry," said the head of one large Yangon-based aid organization involved in the independent relief operations. "They don't understand why the government is throwing up so many obstacles to aid."
The regime has begun to acknowledge this discontent. "Internal and external saboteur groups are making malicious remarks and slanderous accusations, and driving a wedge among the people," the government's mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, said in a comment published Wednesday. "They did destabilize the nation to a certain degree."
Truckloads of soldiers in full battle gear have appeared on Yangon streets this week, amid rumors that monks may stage a demonstration to coincide with the visit by Mr. Ban, the U.N. chief. Another possible rallying point comes Saturday, when Myanmar's leaders plan the second round of a referendum to approve a constitution that would further entrench their rule over this country, previously known as Burma.
Associated Press
Buddhist monks, doling out tarps near Yangon on Saturday, have stepped in as Myanmar's rulers curb relief efforts.
In power since 1962, Myanmar's military regime, headed by Senior General Than Shwe, is deeply suspicious of the outside world. The country doesn't allow roaming by foreign cellphones and blocks access to Web mail services including Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, and to hundreds of sites it deems politically sensitive. Since 2005, the ruling generals have ensconced themselves in a remote new capital city, Naypyitaw. The regime's mantra, repeated daily by state media, is "to oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges and holding negative views."
The leadership's initial response after Nargis struck on May 2 was to minimize the extent of the catastrophe. The official count of the dead and missing has since swelled to 134,000, far exceeding the toll of this month's earthquake in neighboring China. The U.N. estimates that some 2.5 million cyclone-displaced Burmese need shelter and food.
Prodded by international criticism, the ruling junta is now allowing relief supplies, including those from the U.S., to be delivered to Yangon's airport. It has also issued some visas to foreign relief experts.
But even those Western aid workers who managed to come to Myanmar are still prohibited from entering the cyclone's epicenter in the Irrawaddy Delta, except on brief helicopter tours that the junta organized for visiting dignitaries. Western reporters have generally been refused journalist visas. Visitors who are discovered to be practicing journalism face deportation or arrest.
Such curbs mean that aid convoys chartered by Buddhist monks and Yangon volunteers are often the only ones reaching those most in need in the delta, a low-lying labyrinth of mangrove swamps, inlets, rice paddies and villages perched on levees.
Monks of Yangon's Chaukhtatgyi Paya monastery, home of a giant reclining Buddha statue, say they returned outraged from one such convoy -- two busloads of food, clothes and medicine -- that trekked to the delta town of Hpayapon.
"The officials only think about themselves and their own families," said the monastery's assistant principal, U Ti Lawka, who says he traveled with the convoy and is now organizing another. "People we have seen have no food, they are under rain with no shelter and no clothes. They have been neglected."
At the military checkpoints that stud all roads to the delta, he said, soldiers were instructed to confiscate cameras that can document the disaster's scope. The monks in the convoy hid their camera, snapping photos of decomposing corpses -- human and bovine -- caught in riverside shrubs. Laminated, the photos have been passed across the monastery and to devotees.
Vendors have also appeared on Yangon streets peddling bootleg compact disks with footage smuggled from the worst-hit parts of the delta. These CDs, sold in defiance of authorities and commanding double the price of counterfeit Hollywood blockbusters, show bloated cadavers and villagers with grotesque wounds who express sullen dismay at being left without assistance.
This contrasts with the tone of reports in state media. Newscasts by the government's TV monopoly focus on generals in wide-brimmed green hats handing out boxes of food to bowing, smiling subjects. Monks, if shown at all, are seen receiving aid rather than distributing it. "Rescue and relief efforts have been nearly completed," the New Light of Myanmar announced earlier this week. "A tremendous national task has been implemented successfully."
Bribes at Checkpoints
Independent relief workers, who say they often have to pay bribes to cross army checkpoints into the delta, accuse Myanmar's military of hoarding a large portion of international aid shipments and reselling some of the rest. At Yangon's markets, shopkeepers sell Singaporean condensed milk and Thai dry noodles that some say came from relief shipments.
A blogger and independent relief activist who identified herself as Htaike Htaike helped deliver eight truckloads of privately gathered aid to the delta town of Bogalay last week. She says she found shops there stocked with U.N.-provided vitamin-rich biscuits selling for 600 kyats, or 55 cents, apiece. "The soldiers sold the biscuits to the shops, and the shops are making money," she said.
The government has issued a statement angrily denying any misappropriation.
Convoy to Bogalay
The convoy that Ms. Htaike shepherded to Bogalay was financed by a $40,000 donation from a private Burmese businesswoman and organized by several fellow bloggers, convoy members say. They operated under the aegis of a Yangon Buddhist abbot, Thidagu Sayadaw, who is seen as an opponent of the regime. It brought medicine, clothes and -- crucially for the delta's many monks -- purple robes for clerics left without them by the cyclone. A second shipment, to another part of the delta, left by hired boat on Tuesday, organizers say.
Some of these aid caravans are funded by foreign aid organizations that don't have Burmese staff and are therefore unable to reach cyclone survivors themselves. Convoys are often put together with almost conspiratorial secrecy, as relief workers fear publicity may bring government retribution and disrupt the flow of supplies. One Yangon businessman ferries food to areas near the city by night to make his effort less visible to authorities.
Many of these independent aid workers return to Yangon distraught by what they've seen in the delta. "The only food people have received from the government there is four stale and rotten potatoes per family," Ms. Htaike said. "How can you live on that?"
That's four more potatoes than the government aid that reached Ms. San and other inhabitants of the Pariyatti monastery in Kyauktan, a town about one hour's drive southeast from Yangon. The cyclone wasn't nearly as lethal here as in the Irrawaddy Delta, where entire towns were flattened by wind and giant storm waves.
Unlike the delta, proclaimed a closed military area after the cyclone, Kyauktan and neighboring villages are relatively accessible to foreigners.
Fishermen Lost at Sea
U Oatama, Pariyatti's deputy abbot, estimates that about 50 people from the neighborhood around the monastery were killed by the storm, most of them fishermen who had been at sea in small wooden boats. But more than 100 locals, including Ms. San, had their homes blown away by the wind, crushed by falling trees or lost to landslides. These survivors have all been offered shelter and food by the monastery, which normally houses 10 monks and faces a popular shrine perched on a nearby island.
Men, women and children sleep without privacy on the floor, under a large papier-mâché white elephant, a revered symbol in Burmese Buddhism. Water for cooking and washing comes from the muddy river that laps in the back of the monastery. With a foreign visitor present earlier this week, dozens of children crowded the shore, holding their noses and staring at a human body that floated up.
Still, refugees say they're grateful, as the other option would be to remain in the mud under near-constant rain, without roofs over their heads. "The monastery is the only place we can depend on," Ms. San said.
Mr. Oatama says refugees were initially fed from the monks' rice stocks. These ran out after three days. "The government gave us nothing, nothing in aid. We feel we are abandoned," he says. A rare moment of government attention came in the form of two men who followed the foreign visitor throughout the neighborhood and, identifying themselves as policemen, instructed him not to come back.
So far, private food donations are keeping the monastery's inhabitants alive. In one such improvised relief mission on a recent afternoon, two Yangon university students drove up to the monastery, offloading clear plastic bags with the survivors' first meal of the day -- two hard-boiled eggs and two small buns per person. As the monks kept the surging crowd at bay, the bags were snapped up by hungry women and children. Some immediately stuffed the bread into their mouths.
"We've eaten nothing since last night," said 42-year-old Win Htay as she clutched her ration close to her chest. "This is the only thing that we get."
Now, Pariyatti's monks say, the government is pressuring them to oust the refugees by the end of this week. The reason: On Saturday, the monastery will serve as a voting station for the second round of Myanmar's constitutional referendum. In the first round, held on May 10 in areas unaffected by the cyclone, the regime says 92.4% of voters supported the plan that would solidify the junta's authority.
"The monks want to help the people, but the government doesn't allow it and wants us to leave the monastery," says Daw Ohmar Kyi, a 63-year-old who sought refuge in Pariyatti after her home was destroyed. "We are trying to think of where we can go if we are expelled from here. So far, there's nowhere else."
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