Let Them Eat FrogsBurma's junta is willing to let its people starve while relief waits just offshore.
Washington Post Editorial Friday, May 30, 2008;
"THE SEARCH for food begins just after dawn," the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday from a small, devastated village in Burma. "Each day, men, women and children fan out into paddies flooded by seawater, littered with corpses. Like prospectors working claims, they scoop up the muck in their bare hands and finger through it for grains of unmilled rice swept away by the cyclone. When their luck is good, they discover red chile peppers or small onions in mud reeking of the dead. Then, they can have condiments with their next meal of rotten rice and coconut meat."
If only those villagers had read the New Light of Myanmar! The official newspaper for the military junta in charge (Myanmar being the generals' name for the country) this week assured its readers that everything was returning to normal in Burma's Irrawaddy Delta. And, the junta also assured its readers, hunger could not be a problem, since farmers can gather water clover or "go out with lamps at night and catch plump frogs."
This might be funny were it not obscene. In fact, according to editor and columnist Aung Zaw of the exile magazine Irrawaddy, more than half of the 2.4 million people affected by the cyclone have yet to receive aid. Meanwhile, a U.S. naval task force consisting of the USS Essex and three other vessels has been steaming in circles offshore since Cyclone Nargis swept through Burma on May 2 and 3. According to Adm. Timothy Keating, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, the task force could deliver 250,000 pounds of relief material per day, by plane, helicopter and amphibious landing craft. "And the kids out there, the young sailors and Marines, are desperate to provide help," Adm. Keating said Wednesday. "Some of them have experience with the tsunami at Aceh. Some of them have experience with Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh last Thanksgiving. So these guys, they know what they're doing and they know how much help they can provide just that quick. . . . And there would be significant materiel going ashore within an hour, I'd say."
So why are those villagers still scrounging? "As yet," Adm. Keating explained, "we don't have permission from Burma to conduct those operations."
That's right. Since the cyclone that left more than 100,000 people dead or missing, Burma's generals have found time to conduct a phony referendum to make military rule permanent; issue a decree extending the house arrest of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi; detain many other democracy activists and ordinary civilians and monks trying to deliver aid to cyclone victims; harry and repulse foreign correspondents (the Los Angeles Times reporter quoted above had to file anonymously); and complain that foreign governments are being stingy with "reconstruction" aid. But the junta continues to prevent the kind of large-scale relief operation that the country needs, allowing in just enough private aid workers to defuse international pressure.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was right to visit Burma and press the junta to admit more aid. But he was wrong, in explaining why he didn't say much there about Aung San Suu Kyi, to urge a "focus on people, not politics." It is politics -- the generals' politics -- that is killing uncounted numbers of children in Burma's delta. It is the generals' politics to rebuff emergency relief while demanding reconstruction loans that could make the junta richer. And it is the generals' politics that is forcing villagers to strain the mud for rotten rice while tons of clean food float unused not many miles away.
Burma's Rulers Sink To New Low Miami Herald Editorial Friday, May 30, 2008
In an appalling display of contempt for international public opinion and their own people, the generals who rule Burma have extended for one year the house arrest of democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi. This completes a trifecta of tyranny for the junta. Over the past few weeks, it has denied access to international-aid workers following a devastating cyclone, held a sham referendum designed to tighten its grip on power and prolonged the punishment of the world's only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate. How's that for telling the world to go fly a kite?
Ms. Suu Kyi has been a target of the junta ever since she and her pro-democracy allies won the parliamentary elections of 1990 but were kept from taking office. She has spent 12 of the ensuing 18 years in jail or under house arrest. This time around, the generals didn't even bother to file new charges against her, as the nation's own laws dictate when extending an expired sentence. They did it because they can. They're used to thumbing their noses at the rest of the world and getting away with it.
Tuesday was also the anniversary of the abortive 1990 elections, prompting a few of Ms. Suu Kyi's allies to make a brave public protest against her detention. Most of them were immediately hauled away by the police -- par for the course in this forlorn country.
The mistreatment of Ms. Suu Kyi is symbolic of how little the junta led by Gen. Than Shwe cares for civil liberties, but hardly the only -- or worst -- abuse committed by the rulers. Out of paranoia or mere disdain for their own people, they have refused to cooperate fully with aid agencies trying to help victims of Cyclone Nargis, which left some 134,000 dead or missing.
The United Nations estimated that only 42 percent of the 2.4 million affected victims have received aid. On Wednesday, a frustrated U.S. Navy Adm. Timothy Keating, chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, said he probably will withdraw a group of naval vessels from nearby waters soon unless the government allows the ships to offload their relief supplies.
Despite the devastation, the junta forged ahead on May 10 with a vote on a new constitution that strengthens the power of the generals and bans Ms. Suu Kyi from holding public office -- ever. They claimed that 98 percent of voters turned out and that more than 92 percent endorsed their charter.
As absurd as this claim is, the generals will probably get away with it, as they have with previous power grabs, until the international community comes together at the United Nations or a similar forum to denounce the junta and demand freedom for Ms. Suu Kyi and better treatment for the people of Burma.
