Burma junta focuses on vote amid misery
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 04:20:00 05/12/2008
RANGOON—Desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis poured out of the Irrawaddy delta on Sunday in search of food, water and medicine and aid workers said thousands of them would die if emergency supplies did not get through soon.
Despite alarm bells from the international community, the military government of Burma (Myanmar) kept its focus on the holding of a national referendum to ratify a new constitution. Critics said Saturday’s vote was aimed at nothing more than solidifying the generals’ 46-year grip on power.
“Unless there is a massive and fast infusion of aid, experts and supplies into the hardest-hit areas, there’s going to be a tragedy on an unimaginable scale,” said Greg Beck of the International Rescue Committee.
Burma’s reclusive military rulers are accepting aid from the outside world, including the United Nations, but they have made it clear they will not let in the foreign logistics teams needed to transport the aid into the inundated Irrawaddy.
The junta has insisted on handing out all donated supplies on its own. With roads blocked and bridges submerged, however, reaching isolated areas in the hard-hit delta has been made all but impossible.
The military has only a few dozen helicopters, most small and old. It also has only about 15 transport planes, few of which are able to carry massive amounts of supplies.
Instead of stepping up relief efforts, the junta set up polling stations close to Buddhist temples and schools, which had been transformed into makeshift refugee centers for women, children and the elderly—some of the 1.5 million people clinging to survival.
Human rights groups have bitterly accused the junta of neglecting the disaster victims in going ahead with the referendum, which critics have described as a sham.
The New Light of Myanmar, the junta’s main mouthpiece, carried a front-page photograph of military supremo Than Shwe and his wife casting their ballots in Naypyidaw, the remote new capital he built in 2005.
In a story that made no mention of the cyclone tragedy, the newspaper said some places had to extend voting hours. “The referendum was held successfully … with massive turnout of the citizens,” it said.
As state television on Sunday showed pictures of generals voting in the referendum, the junta turned relief efforts into a propaganda campaign. Some of the names of generals were scribbled onto boxes of foreign aid before being distributed.
Long lines of refugees
Not far from the polling stations, long lines of refugees formed outside government centers where minuscule rations of rice and oil were being distributed.
The scenes are the same across the Irrawaddy delta, the former “Rice Bowl of Asia” where as many as 100,000 people are feared dead in the worst cyclone to hit the continent since 1991 when 143,000 people died in neighboring Bangladesh.
In the delta town of Labutta, where 80 percent of homes were destroyed, authorities were providing just one cup of rice per family per day, a European Commission aid official told Reuters.
“We have 900 people here, but we only have 300 lunch boxes. We gave it to the women and children first. The men still have not had any food,” one woman said at a relief center in the town of Myaung Mya, 100 kilometers west of Yangon (Rangoon). “More people are coming in every day,” she said.
Preventing outbreaks
The lives of 1.5 million people in the affected areas are at great risk of contracting cholera or diarrhea unless a tsunami-like aid effort is mobilized, the international agency Oxfam said on Sunday.
“In the 2004 tsunami, 250,000 people lost their lives in the first few hours, but we did not see an outbreak of disease because the host governments and the world mobilized a massive aid effort to prevent it from happening,” Oxfam’s regional director for East Asia Sara Ireland told reporters in Bangkok.
“We have to do the same for the people of Myanmar,” Ireland said.
Nargis is one of the region’s worst disasters since the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami that hit a dozen countries along the Indian Ocean.
The government’s official death toll from the May 2 cyclone stands at 23,350 dead and 37,019 missing. Most of the victims were killed by the 4.5-meter (15-foot) wall of sea water that slammed into the delta.
UN appeal for aid
The United Nations has appealed for $187 million in aid, even though it is still not confident the food, water, medicines, bedding and utensils flown in will make it to those most in need because of the junta’s reluctance to admit international relief workers.
The World Food Program (WFP) on Sunday said it was now moving aid down to its field headquarters in Labutta using trucks provided by its longtime partners in Burma, including the Red Cross.
The WFP has flown in seven shipments of aid, and an eighth was due to land on Sunday, WFP spokesperson in Bangkok Marcus Prior told Reuters. The agency reported its food shipments had been briefly impounded on Friday at the Rangoon airport.
Referendum delayed
The junta has delayed by two weeks the holding of the referendum in the worst-hit areas, including Rangoon, Burma’s largest city and former capital which has a population of five million.
There is little doubt about the final result of the referendum which, according to the junta, is part of a seven-step “roadmap to democracy” that is supposed to culminate in multiparty elections in 2010 and bring an end to five decades of authoritarianism.
The generals spurned offers of UN monitors. In the run-up to the vote, military-run media pumped out a relentless barrage of propaganda, telling the country’s 53 million people that it was their “patriotic duty” to approve the charter, which enshrines the military’s hold on power.
“I voted yes. It was what I was asked to do,” 57-year-old U Hlaing told Reuters in the town of Hlegu, northwest of Rangoon.
Vote denounced
Even before Nargis hit, various groups opposed to military rule and foreign governments led by the United States had denounced the vote as an attempt by the military to legitimize its decades-long grip on power.
The last national election was held in 1990 and was won by the political party of democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in a landslide. The result was never recognized by the junta.
Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
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