The bodies of tens of thousands of people killed in Myanmar’s cyclone will probably never be identified because they were washed far from their homes and have decomposed so badly, an aid agency said yesterday.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said burying the estimated 78,000 killed when the storm hit has taken a back seat to trying to assist the 2.4 million survivors, many of whom are still without adequate food, water and shelter. Government’s restrictions on aid workers accessing the delta has made that task all the more difficult.
As a result, bloated bodies still litter the Irrawaddy delta more than five weeks after Cyclone Nargis struck. Some have been dumped in canals and unmarked mass graves or cremated, while others remain untouched.
“Identifying bodies at this stage will be incredibly difficult,” said Craig Strathern, a Red Cross spokesman in Myanmar.
“Many now are in advanced stages of decay and the information we have been able to gather is that many of the bodies that were affected by the tidal surges were stripped of clothing and any identifying items,” he said. “We have reports that some bodies ended up 7km from their place of origin.”
Survivors in the delta said they initially attempted to identify bodies but were overwhelmed by the numbers of corpses clogging the rivers and washing up on the beaches.
“Initially, the bodies were identified by relatives and we cremated them after holding religious rites,” said Myint Thuang, a survivor from the delta town of Bogalay, referring to Buddhist traditions.
“However, after more bodies washed up on the shore and with no one to identify them, we buried them in mass graves,” he said, describing how they sprinkled lime powder on the graves of 10 or more bodies and marked some with a wooden stick.
Strathern said the Red Cross last week began distributing kits — with body bags and forms to list where a body is buried and any details identifying it — for volunteers wanting to dispose of the dead.
But he said he doubted there would be any large-scale effort to identify victims, mostly because there is no motivation. Myanmar law allows families to declare missing persons dead after only three weeks, clearing the way for relatives to claim death benefits and land ownership and other inheritance issues.
“We’re certainly not aware of any initiatives that try to achieve positive identification of bodies,” Strathern said. “I don’t know what the reason would be. If there is not a demand from the families or legal imperative in the system, it’s not going to achieve too much.”
The situation differs greatly from the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed nearly 230,000 people. In worst-hit Banda Aceh, Indonesia, bodies were a top priority early on, driven largely by Muslim tradition that calls for burying the dead within the first day.
Corpses were dumped in mass graves as big as soccer fields, with aid workers, soldiers and volunteers all working together to mark the graves and identity the dead.
Disposing of the dead is just one of the many hurdles that have plagued the relief effort in Myanmar since the storm. The UN estimates that almost half of the 2.4 million survivors are still not getting adequate assistance, mostly due to the scale of the disaster and difficulty accessing the delta.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
RSS