The Myanmar Effect
"'A Catastrophe Within A Catastrophe'". That's how French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner described the "junta's uncooperativeness", after Cyclone Nargis devastated the Burmese city of Rangoon and the Irrawaddy Delta last week. The political struggles between the obstinate Myanmar military junta and international aid groups and governments trying to help Burma dominate the news. The German paper Spiegel shows a map of areas submerged in the storm earlier this week. The Guardian spoke to Mark Canning, ambassador to Britain, who warned that "authoritative estimates of the numbers of dead and missing ranged between 63,000 and 100,000, and up to 1.9 million were now vulnerable to water-borne disease, hunger and lack of drinkable water. 'So you can do the maths and you will see how quickly this thing can get larger'".
The International Red Cross and other agencies report that there aid is getting through to people who need it --a statement that will encourage donors -- but if that is remotely true, the aid is stretched very thin. The junta has confiscated food and equipment from the UN World Food Programme, refused to grant visas to aid workers, and said that it will only accept cash and material aid, not labor. The Guardian quoted the US ambassador to Thailand, Eric John, who noted in a somewhat awkward analogy that food without distribution capabilities would be like "dropping a lot of orchestral instruments on the ground and expecting a symphony to come out of it."
Let Them Eat Rotting Rice
In Burma, equipment and tools are forever scarce, as are all other resources. The military junta takes food from villagers even on "good" days, that is, when the government is merely tyrannical, incompetent and brutal but not faced with the aftermath of a massive cyclone that has ripped through a mangrove-stripped delta of rice paddies, leaving in its path face-down floating bodies and individuals desperately searching the rubble for their kin. Given the everyday actions of the junta, it should be no surprise that the government confiscates international food sent for Nargis victims -- that's just what they do. Nor should it surprise us that the government isn't ashamed to dole out supplies with the names of generals written on boxes -- before news cameras -- in some twisted "propaganda exercise", as the International Herald Tribune called it.
The military junta's political shenanigans are to be expected.The rulers are by all accounts paranoid as well as brutal, tenaciously controlling the population via the only methods they know, violence and manipulation. The Free Burma Rangers 1, a group profiled here by The Economist, lists the junta's habitual human violations, offenses that often target minority groups like the Karen. The group accuses the military of everything from stealing supplies to burning villagers out of their villages, to forcing unpaid villagers to clear land, build roads, and walk in front of bulldozers clearing land-mined areas.
Always wrangling to increase its power, the Myanmar military relentlessly pursues its goals, even as citizens are left struggling in the wake of the cyclone without water, food or medicine. The government insisted on holding a referendum to increase its power yesterday, and the military spent considerable effort coercing, forcing and bribing people to vote "yes". With mind blowing cynicism, the leaders had their pictures snapped with their fancy-dressed wives, casting their votes for what all outsiders call a "sham" election, while hundreds of thousands of "people with almost no clothes battl[e] it out to survive" -- as one Indian pilot reported on the situation after he flew an aid sortie and traveled through the Irrawaddy Delta.
China, Thailand and India have the most potential for nudging the junta towards accepting responsibility but it's unclear how much sway these governments hold. China has the closest economic ties to Burma apparently, but what incentive it has to mediate? It's own abuse of Tibetans and minorities and its interest in Burma's resources, not to mention its habit of not "interfering", leaves us skeptical. India reports sporadically about its stance on the situation, while Burma's neighbor Thailand, for its part, will send a diplomatic team to Myanmar. Thailand was obviously disturbed to see media films showing Thailand's aid boxes plastered over with labels indicating they were gifts from the junta's generals.
What the junta is actually giving in aid, the Associated Press reports is "minuscule rations of rice and oil", in some places one cup of rice per day per family. AP says many people are simply "clustered on roadsides hoping for handouts," and that desperate pleas -- "[t]he words "'Help us!'" [written] in chalk on the side of one home", are evidence of the level of despair.
Aid First?
Disasters such as Cyclone Nargis exaggerate and bring into stark relief dysfunctional politics. They also present a quandary for international communities. A few years ago, Acronym Required wrote about the Global Fund withdrawing its AIDS program in Burma due to difficulties working with the junta. At the time we commented on the conflicted ideas about providing aid to the repressed citizens of brutal regimes. The AIDS crisis in Burma is serious and any country's bad governance will make a public health or natural disaster recovery infinitely more dire. As we've often documented, politics can worsen the death toll of AIDS or avian flu pandemic, an earthquake, cyclone or tsunami.
The world has experienced enough natural disasters in the past couple of years to know the difficulty of getting help to stricken populations. In the U.S., the government was challenged to evacuate survivors swiftly enough and to deliver aid and essentials in a timely way after Hurricane Katrina. Rescue and supply delivery is increasingly daunting in remote locations of the world, like SE Asia where the tsunami victims were hard to reach, and during the Kashmir earthquake. And in these situations the affected countries welcomed aid. 2
The international community is forever torn because there is no good answer. Try to support the citizens in spite of the government? Or condemn and punish the government, which further increases the suffering of the people? The current situation in Burma intensifies the unforgiving choices of this dilemma.
Given the Myanmar junta's treatment of the country's people, its hard not to advocate political change. But that's problematic, since governments around the world acknowledge that the Burmese in the stricken areas are in dire need of the most basic necessities now, not "democracy".
Barbara Bush, who back in 2007 advised that the US would impose sanctions on the Myanmar military government if it did not moving toward democracy "within the next couple of days", used the publicity of last weeks' cyclone to reiterate her displeasure with the military junta. The move was widely criticized by 'those in the aid community who know better', since it could only increase the paranoia of the highly paranoid holed-up-in-the-middle-of-the-jungle junta. Yet is restraining from beating people over the head when they say "no" such a challenging notion that it's only available to those in the aid community? You'd think the emerging White House diplomat would carry some insight about this from her second grade teacher experience, or her experience listening to why the US denied aid from Cuba during Hurricane Katrina, or even because her diplomatic threats to Myanmar never motivated the junta to budge before. You'd think she'd deliver a more nuanced diplomatic entreaty. Now apparently, Mrs. Bush seems to have backed off and Secretary Rice is left to insist that Burma Aid Is About Saving Lives, Not About Politics.
Of course, the White House always sends mixed messages. While Mrs. Bush lectured Myanmar from the podium in the past few years and the Bush administration imposed sanctions, for instance by cutting off the bank accounts of the junta, companies like Chevron provide a lifeline to the regime . Chevron runs a gas line through the country that is reportedly aggressively guarded by the junta.
"Tear Down the Bamboo Curtain"
So wrote the Financial Times last fall, and The Australian today. As if the western nations could just summon some erstwhile off-duty troops to parachute into Myanmar, China's neighbor and ally, to take care of this troublesome situation. The press loves to chant a rallying cry for "freedom", and "democracy", and no doubt could not restrain itself from referencing what is now relived in popular dream-talk as Reagan's great coup: the tearing down of the wall. It's the business of news to engage fantasies and so these headlines are relentlessly fantastic.
Reporters ask questions like: "Could there be a silver lining to the cyclone's clouds?" Time magazine wrote hopefully, "for decades, outsiders have searched for a way to pry open Burma's secretive regime". As if this is some natural evolution of government, when actually China, Russia and a host of other countries prove that power may be more instinctively and securely amassed via non-democratic and brutish governance. And so, spooked but with aid pouring in, after 40 years, Myanmar hunkers down to give its citizens and the world, more of the same. Tons of high-energy biscuits energy bars can go a long way in a junta that was days ago 'reduced' to stealing rice from villagers.
The Myanmar junta is of course defiant in the face of the international democracy criers, defending its own deadly actions by saying that the US government's response to Katrina was also slow. Seeing the same shaky (optimistic?) parallel, a dean from the University of Vermont, in an editorial for the Daily Times of Pakistan, offered: "This may also be a time for alerting the world to the grave inequalities in the country, just as Katrina was a wake-up call for the world to see the plight of impoverished African-Americans in Louisiana." Ah, silver linings.
It's hard to imagine that there would be "sides" in the midst of such a disaster, or that politicians would take the opportunity to push political points of view, but of course they do, even in the enlightened western democracies. In the Financial Times yesterday, Christopher Caldwell from the Weekly Standard took the opportunity to reconstruct the events of the Katrina aftermath altogether, with the truth defying statement: "that the US failed in part because it was too constitutional, too deferential to the prerogatives of the state of Louisiana, is not something anyone remembers or cares about any more." ("Disasters and Dictatorships"). "Too constitutional" -- that's Orwellian.
While countries like the US and France now try to muffle their instinctive calls for democracy, other countries will take a different lesson from the cyclone and in the US commentators will frame the disaster for their own ends. If nothing else, attempts to shape and rewrite history are universal.
Hopefully, the Myanmar military junta, weakened to the point that is convinced that it will lose control by letting aid workers in, will come to its senses and realize that in it's own best interests to save some of its people.
In the meantime, to help with aid efforts, various groups are accepting donations for Burma. Google gave a million dollars in matching aid (updated 05-17) and Doctors Without Borders, Unicef , and many others.
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1This group lists itself as a "multi-ethnic humanitarian service movement".
2With the exception of India which initially rejected international help after the tsunami.
Acronym Required has published several articles on Hurricane Katrina and FEMA and AIDS and Burma.
