Mon, Jan 10, 2005 page9

• The politics of disaster

  Burma has retained tight control over information about tsunami damage and published a suspiciously low death toll. This is just the latest example of a corrupt government worsening the suffering of its people in a time of disaster

  • THE OBSERVER
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  According to its military junta, Burma is a lucky country. Perhaps in compensation for the years of tyranny and degradation the army has brought, the gods decided that it should be spared. Readers who studied the maps of the Indian Ocean carried by every newspaper and television station last week can't have missed the grim, little boxes filled by terrible figures: Indonesia, 80,000 dead and rising; Sri Lanka, 27,000 and rising; India, 11,000 and rising, Thailand, 4,000 and rising. Yet when the eyes flitted to the top right corner they saw that Burma had only a few dozen dead to mourn.

  Indeed, for the first three days, the official version was that Burma had survived without a scratch. The uniformed gangsters who run the kleptocracy, ravish its forests and murder its citizens, expressed their heart-felt sorrow and decent regret at the news from the rest of the region, but made no mention of the waves taking Burmese lives. A meteorological officer from Rangoon explained the miracle. The border with Thailand may only be 240km north of the devastated hotels of Phuket, but Burma was fortunate to have a coastline which rose from shallow seas. These drained the tsunami of its power before it reached land. The enfeebled waves washed ashore with more of a splash than a roar.

  

  ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

  The line sounded plausible, but couldn't hold. In the surreal way of tyrannies, the Burmese dictators were asserting that there had been no loss of life at the precise moment when the rulers of the neighboring dictatorship of China sent them their public condolences for the loss of life.

  Three days after the tsunami hit, the hacks on the New Light of Myanmar, the junta's mouthpiece, admitted that 43 people had died and 25 were missing. Few believed them.

  Ever since Dec. 26, opponents of the regime who produce the Democratic Voice of Burma Web site have been receiving leads from scattered sources. An anonymous naval officer told them that a military installation on Coco Island in the Indian Ocean had been washed away. Magye Island in the Gulf of Bengal may also had been swamped, other sources said. There were reports of the Maubin University building being torn apart, possibly by an earthquake which hit after the waves, of fishermen never returning from the sea and of villages losing dozens of inhabitants. One rumor doing the rounds says that 500 died in one district alone, and it sounds plausible. Like everyone outside the military, the opium barons and the Chinese plutocrats who have bought up much of the country, the inhabitants of the coastal districts are desperately poor. Their flimsy shacks never looked as if they could withstand a raging sea.

  illusion

  It will take weeks to find out if the real death toll is anywhere near as bad as in Thailand -- if, that is, we ever find out. The junta has an interest in maintaining the illusion of total control. A public admission of weakness makes it seem vulnerable and plants the dangerous idea in people's minds that it may one day be weak enough to overthrow. Foreigners must be controlled as rigorously as the natives. Aid agencies need to grease palms and accept stringent restrictions on what they can do or say if they want to work in Burma. They can't be allowed to be independent sources of power which provide for the population and reveal the true nature of its suffering to the outside world. Last week reporters who tried to get information from the Unicef office in Rangoon were given a short course on the facts of life. The aid workers stonewalled because they would be thrown out of the country if they said a word out of place.

  The penalties on working in the world's worst states should raise the question of whether the game is worth the candle. To many it's an obscene question to ask.

  In the UK 20 years ago Band Aid and Live Aid punctured the selfishness of the Thatcher years with a simple message. You're rich. They're poor. Give them your money. Bob Geldof barely mentioned the Marxist-Leninist regime which governed Ethiopia and had pushed its people into misery with its endless wars. The politics was neither here nor there. The imperative was to feed the hungry.

  Last summer Christian Aid published The Politics of Poverty, a manifesto in the Geldof tradition, which tore into the effects of the war on terror. Parts of it were well-merited complaints about the cutting of aid budgets in South America to pay for reconstruction in Iraq. But the charity couldn't bring itself to admit that systems of government can change everything. To Christian Aid it seemed neither here nor there whether Afghanistan was ruled by an elected president or a theocratic tyranny, all that mattered was that the food got through. To link aid to the struggle against the Taliban was to politicize it. To allow coalition troops to help deliver food and medicine was a blurring `of the once distinct line between aid worker and combatant' which put the lives of genuine charity workers at risk.

  `politics is everything'

  In practice, Christian Aid knows as well as everyone else that politics is everything. The Disaster Emergency Committee, of which it is a member, said that initial relief efforts will be directed at India and Sri Lanka. Not because they are the worst-hit regions but because they have strong civil societies and well-organized local charities which could make sure that the help got to where it was needed. Indonesia and Burma would have to wait because of `political problems.'

  The Indonesia political problem is that the devastated Aceh region is also the site of a dirty war between secessionists and the center, which has been flaring on and off for the last 30 years. If there is any hope for Aceh after the fresh cataclysm of natural disaster, it lies in the replacement of General Suharto's dictatorship with a democratic government in the late 1990s.

  Democratic Indonesia's record in Aceh has hardly been spotless. But if Suharto was still there, it's easy enough to imagine him using the floods to starve the province into submission.

  In Burma, meanwhile, many charities have decided that giving aid to Rangoon is like giving EU grants to Sicily or oil-for-food programs to Saddam's Iraq: whatever your good intentions, the money always ends up strengthening one mafia or another. Thus, while Unicef, Save the Children and a handful of other organizations cling on, most won't go near the place. They know that what Burma needs isn't hand-outs but a revolution.

  Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for his brilliant insight that famines aren't caused by shortages of food. The 30 million who died of starvation in the late 1950s because of Chairman Mao's insane Great Leap Forward towards industrialization -- the greatest single crime of the 20th century, incidentally, far worse in terms of lives lost than the First World War or the Nazi death camps -- died because they had no way of forcing a Marxist tyranny to change course. Similarly, the 3 million who died in the Bengal famine of 1944 to 1945 didn't starve because food was scarce but because a wartime economic boom had pushed prices beyond the reach of the poor.

  accountable

  The British colonial authorities didn't intervene in the market because, like the Chinese communists, they weren't accountable to the public.

  The Sen way of seeing the world can be applied to natural disasters. The Disaster Emergency Committee has got its priorities right because if aid for the victims of the tsunami is stolen in democratic India, there will be a public scandal. If it is stolen by the military in dictatorial Burma, no one will dare point an accusatory finger.

  Sen's conclusion that famines were caused by the absence of political freedom wasn't a wide-eyed endorsement of democracy.

  Hunger, corruption and misery can flourish in democratic countries as well as under colonial and indigenous tyrannies. He merely pointed out that democracies have to act in moments of crisis, and, he might have added, not only democracies in the poor world.

  The British government is being judged on how it responds to the South Asian catastrophe. It had better do well, because Tony Blair is planning to use his commitment to reducing poverty in Africa in the UK's upcoming election campaign to woo back the liberal middle classes who were furious about the Iraq war.

  Whether this novel appeal to the electorate's better instincts will work is open to doubt, but it will be heartening to see them try.

  Just as people who made a donation toward the disaster fund are better than those who did not, so governments that expect to be held to account are better than governments which use all the power of the state to ensure that they are not.
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