For the strongmen of Myanmar, nothing was going to stand in the way of the ballot. Not a devastating cyclone that reaped death and destruction on a biblical scale. Not the international aid community banging on the door to get in to help. So on Saturday, survivors of the cataclysm that may have left 116,000 dead and 1.9 million homeless were ordered to turn out and vote yes in the constitutional referendum by generals who have held their impoverished country in a grip of stone for 46 years.
Even as incoming aid was being impounded by the military as it landed at Yangon and other aircraft sat waiting at foreign airports, loaded with lifesaving cargoes but unable to fly in without permission from the authorities, state-run television was running rousing political broadcasts and offering occasional shots of immaculately uniformed generals handing over packages of food to grateful peasants. The military have so far admitted to a death toll of 28,458.
The only concession under the welter of international criticism and calls for the ballot to be postponed in the face of the crisis was a two-week postponement for those who had survived in the worst hit areas in Yangon and the Irrawaddy delta, areas that took the full force of Cyclone Nargis on May 4.
“The generals in Naypidaw [the new capital city] sense that with the referendum they’re on the cusp of something politically huge,” said one Western diplomat in Yangon. “So they find it very hard to change completely their way of operating and let aid teams in with free access.”
An extraordinary diplomatic war of words broke out last week between the entrenched regime, determined to hold power at any cost, and rumored to be engaged in their own internal power struggle, and the international community led by the UN.
With rising frustration it was trying to get aid and disaster experts into Myanmar to help those without water, food and shelter.
on their own
The limited success of the UN and other aid agencies left most survivors to fend for themselves, scavenging in the wreckage of their inundated homes and living side by side with bloated corpses. Only between 149,000 and 271,000 people — 10 percent of those affected — have been reached, Save the Children has said.
Aid agencies already in the country have been working flat out to reach people and distribute the meager emergency supplies that were stockpiled.
The advance preparations in the days before Nargis — the Urdu word for daffodil — were never going to be enough to cope with a disaster of such magnitude.
The UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the lead agency for disaster management, called aid agencies together in Yangon in the two days before the cyclone struck and established “clusters” — assigning each organization responsibilities.
None could have foreseen what Nargis would bring. It had been building in the warm tropical waters of the Bay of Bengal for almost a week, eagerly eyed by India and Bangladesh.
Cyclone Sidr, which hit Bangladesh last November killing 3,500, left them all too aware of Nargis’s potential.
The cyclone began to deepen and intensify, tracking slowly eastward before finally making landfall at Haing Kyi island just off the Irrawaddy delta at 10:30pm, on May 3. It packed winds of 200kph, gusting to 250kph. But a deadly combination of circumstances did the real damage.
The slow moving eye of the storm — just 17kph — left people subjected to the ferocious winds for hours as it tracked agonizingly along the delta coast before moving northeast to Yangon.
Yet it was the storm surge that was most deadly. The shallow shelf that stretches far out into the Andaman Sea allowed the waters to pile up as they came ashore, made worse by a high tide.
The densely peopled rice-growing delta was especially vulnerable. It is home to 7 million people, 2 million of whom live on land less than 4.5m above sea level. The development of rice farms and shrimp fisheries down the years had seen the mangroves that might have blunted the storm surge cleared.
survivors’ tales
Coastal villages constructed of flimsy bamboo huts were washed away like matchwood. Fifteen townships were all but wiped out, with seven — among them Bogalay and Laputta — designated “priority one” by the authorities that is, with between 90 percent and 95 percent of the buildings destroyed.
Thein Myint, 68, a fisherman near Bogalay, deep in the delta criss-crossed by waterways, wept as he explained how the cyclone swept all 28 of his family members away, leaving him the only survivor.
A neighbor, Htay Maung, 70, sheltering in the same Buddhist monastery that was among the few buildings sturdy enough to withstand the fierce onslaught, explained the terror wrought by the storm.
“We huddled together, but the big trees carried by the waves knocked down two of my children and my wife,” he said, speaking among the gaggle of wailing children and moaning adults. “Only two of my children survived.”
As Nargis reached Yangon — a decrepit colonial city of 6 million — the winds had dropped to 117kph, but were still fierce enough to uproot trees, blow down telegraph lines and tear corrugated roofs off buildings.
By midday the next day, it had moved on, leaving a trail of havoc. Then came the eerie calm after the storm as downed communications and destroyed infrastructure prevented the sclerotic regime comprehending the scale of the devastation.
For three days the death toll appeared mercifully low, in just the hundreds. But then it began to be revised dizzyingly upwards until it now stands at 28,458 dead — 10,000 in Bogalay alone — and 42,000 missing, presumed dead. The real figure is likely to be many times that, however.
Satellite images showed the true scale of the disaster, with the whole southern half of the Irrawaddy delta — 5,000km2 — still under water. With steel and concrete bridges turned to twisted junk and 80 percent of boats sunk, getting aid to the hardest places is a mind-boggling task.
Survivors who were able to walk from the farthest flung areas of the delta to seek aid told of hundreds of corpses along roadsides or floating in rice paddies. Others sat mute in the wreckage of their homes waiting for help that never comes.
numerical confusion
Andrew Kirkwood, country director for Save the Children in Burma, took a helicopter trip over the area on Saturday to assess the damage.
“It gave me a sense of the scale, the massive, massive scale of the devastation. The death toll is a very confusing issue. On Friday I checked figures collated by the UN and put it at 216,000 dead, but today I spoke to someone with a knowledge of this area who was talking about 400,000. It is very confusing and there has not been a census in these areas since 1983 which doesn’t help,” he said.
“When I flew over one island that was simply all sand, my pilot told me that there had once been a major village down there. That was a really choking moment for me, to look down on that,” Kirkwood said.
“But in other places I did see signs of life, canoes moving around waterways and even tarpaulins of rice hung out on higher ground — that gave me real hope that it is not too late to help many people,” he said.
He said that so far they estimated around 10 percent of the people affected had been reached with food or medial aid.
“We can only hope people down there are finding ways of looking after each other at the moment,” he said.
The aid agency has set up a base in Pathein, the capital of the Irrawaddy delta, and is distributing emergency food, water, shelter and mosquito nets in an effort to stave off the threat of diseases like cholera and outbreaks waterborne illnesses like acute diarrhea.
Along with disease there are fears that the military are already moving people away from the affected areas and relocating them in towns, creating tensions in places where food and water is already scarce — something which has been shown in past disasters to simply create a whole new refugee problem.
But the extraordinary row between the junta and the international community over outside help has seen to it that the ramping up of the relief effort is far from where it should be a week after a natural disaster.
Delays are undoubtedly costing the lives of survivors as scores of UN and aid agency disaster specialists and doctors have been kept out, vainly waiting in Bangkok for visas that never come. The regime’s foreign ministry said it welcomed aid, but not aid workers.
limited relief
Just a handful of relief planes have been allowed to land in Yangoon as the UN World Food Programme wrangled with the regime to get its specialists on the ground to facilitate the distribution.
By comparison, one plane was landing in Aceh every hour a week after the tsunami struck at Christmas 2004.
But even when the planes land there are no guarantees the help will reach those who need it — there was an extraordinary standoff on Friday night after the authorities impounded 38 tonnes of World Food Programme high-energy biscuits, intent on distributing the aid using the army. WFP suspended further flights, but relented while it negotiates for the release of the aid.
In the meantime the army was out and deployed — not passing out supplies, but supervising the ballot for the referendum on the draft constitution that critics said was stacked to ensure the junta consolidates the hold on power it has used to slowly impoverish and break its people. It seems not even a cyclone can loosen the generals’ grip on the throats of their people.
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