Ad Hoc Groups Formed In Cyclone's Aftermath, But Causes May Widen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 21, 2008; A01
RANGOON -- Seven weeks after huge swaths of Burma were savaged by a cyclone and tidal wave, a new and remarkable citizen movement is delivering emergency supplies to survivors neglected by the military government's haphazard relief effort.
The scores of ad hoc Burmese groups, many of them based here in the country's largest city, are not overtly political. But they are reviving a kind of social activism that has been largely repressed by successive military rulers here.
Defying roadblocks and bureaucratic obstruction, volunteers have reached devastated villages in many parts of the Irrawaddy Delta, dropping off food, drinking water and other essentials and bringing back photos that contradict claims in the state media that life is returning to normal.
Some members of the groups say they hope to keep working together when the cyclone damage is finally repaired and turn toward other activities that carry shades of political activism in this tightly controlled state.
With residents' frustration over the official relief effort mounting, pledges of support and donations to the National League for Democracy, the main opposition group in Burma, also called Myanmar, have doubled since the cyclone, according to a student leader of the league.
The storm, which came ashore on the night of May 2-3, killed an estimated 134,000 people and created severe hardship for 2.4 million more. The country's deeply xenophobic junta turned aside many offers of foreign help, agreeing to let in substantial numbers of international aid workers only after U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon flew to the country May 22 with a personal appeal.
By then, however, homegrown groups were already mobilized, working to offset the tragic shortcomings of the government operation.
Down a street lined with gold and ruby merchants, where dealers charm clients over tiny tables set with tea and chess, employees in the back room of a gem shop one recent morning were swapping evidence: photos of rotten government food handouts.
A week earlier, people in the shops said, more than a dozen local jewelers had loaded 100 bags of rice, 20 bags of beans, tarpaulins and blankets onto a truck donated by a supplier and set off at midnight for the storm-ravaged town of Labutta.
They returned with photos of homeless villagers lining up for tins of food at a makeshift camp, a tear-stained boy who, they said, had lost his entire family to the storm's fierce tidal surge, and rotten rice -- yellow, fist-size chunks of it, piled like rocks in bags donated by the government-affiliated Myanmar Red Cross.
"When I saw what they were being fed, I was shaking I was so angry," said a shop assistant, 26, narrating each photo as she passed it to a customer.
The informal organizations are often based on occupation. Artists, doctors, students and the gem dealers have formed separate groups. In other cases, the groups are made up of friends coming together to help.
A 27-year-old lawyer trainee said he and five friends were furious when they tried to distribute supplies around the ruined town of Bogalay about a week after the cyclone but were turned away by local authorities who told them they needed a permit.
"They say they are giving these things to the people, but we know they aren't," he said, pointing at a photo in the state daily newspaper, the Mirror, that showed a relief camp with neat rows of tents and tables laden with food. "We know not to believe them."
In the weeks immediately after the cyclone, a doctor recounted, he closed his private medical clinic for twice-weekly trips to the delta with others. There, they noticed local officials shooing away desperate children, many of them orphaned or suffering storm-related trauma.
So the doctors, four of whom are pediatricians, tried to entertain the children to keep their minds occupied. They held a sanitation workshop after noticing that there were no visible efforts to instruct people in basic hygiene.
"The Ministry of Health is trying, but they're not effective, not organized," the physician said.
Like many other residents, the doctor can't afford to take many more days off work, but he still meets with the group every week. He said he hopes to translate the momentum of its cyclone relief work into other efforts, operating under cover of medicine.
"I'm not political; I'm a community-based activist," the doctor said, when asked how his group could keep working and turn from cyclone relief to other activities, such as organizing debates on health care.
"Now we're seeing the time of civil society. Now thousands of small groups are helping any way they can," said a magazine editor, who pooled funds with other journalists and artists in the hope of purchasing 1,000 shortwave radios so delta survivors could receive uncensored foreign news broadcasts. In the end, the group could afford only 50 but managed to distribute them in villages.
The back page of the Mirror and the New Light of Myanmar daily tells readers that "everybody may make donations freely . . . to any person or any area." But nearly a dozen people interviewed offered firsthand or secondhand tales of confiscation or obstruction by local authorities.
A surgeon said he and his group of medical and psychology students were prevented from handing out food at a monastery near the town of Dedaye to about 1,000 refugees who had been sheltering inside. A general there wanted to be seen to hand out the food first, the surgeon said.
A lawyer said he had set out on a relief trip to the delta town of Kyunpangong with five friends, but every box of goods they brought was opened and searched in front of them.
"If I had the chance, I'd occupy the whole delta and put up a sign to the authorities that reads 'Don't come here,' " said a Rangoon monk who is active in medical work. "So many people are waiting to get aid from the government, but they're having to rely instead on private donors."
In five relief expeditions to the delta or ravaged areas around Rangoon, he said, he saw military troops and police patrolling roads or monitoring checkpoints but not once helping survivors.
Since the cyclone, three people have been arrested on charges of taking photographs of the cyclone-ravaged areas and sending them to foreign news sites, and one person for marching to the offices of the U.N. Development Program to complain about government neglect, according to a lawyer monitoring their cases.
Though some private groups are keeping up their relief efforts, others are running out of steam -- and money.
Under monsoon skies one recent afternoon, porters loaded a boat berthed in Rangoon with rattan baskets of cloth, children's pajamas and bags of rice. It was sailing to the delta under the auspices of a prominent Buddhist abbot. On its previous trip, the owners had offered the boat for free. This time, said a monk directing the loading, the owner was charging.
Nearby, in a single-room apartment, 16 current and former university students crowded around a surgeon who was writing notes on a blackboard in preparation for another crack-of-dawn trip to the delta.
Later the surgeon remarked: "I think the government made a huge mistake. If they were seen to care, people would have forgiven them for the past 20 years."
Frustrated Burmese Organize Aid Forays
22 June 2008 Labels: Articles
Firsthand tale of Burma relief frustrations
Labels: ArticlesTyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 20, 2008
Richard Jacquot describes the cyclone that hit Burma on M... Richard Jacquot points to a place near the township of La...
(06-19) 18:10 PDT -- Nearly two months after Cyclone Nargis slammed into Burma's Irrawaddy Delta, humanitarian relief groups are still struggling to get government permission to deliver life-saving aid to 2 million survivors, said Richard Jacquot, a San Francisco resident and emergency program manager for Mercy Corps.
In a conversation with The Chronicle, Jacquot, who returned Sunday from a month in Burma, detailed the enormous frustrations and the modest triumphs of helping cyclone victims recover under the watchful eye of an authoritarian regime.
Although Burma's military leaders promised U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon a month ago that they would admit aid workers of all nationalities, they continue to restrict aid delivery, he said.
The French-born Jacquot has spent 24 years working in some of the hardest-hit war zones and disaster areas on the planet - from Sarajevo to Sudan and Congo to the Kurdish area of Iraq. He managed Hurricane Katrina recovery for Mercy Corps, an Oregon aid agency working in three dozen countries. Trained in international relations and economic development, Jacquot has worked for several humanitarian organizations coordinating emergency food, shelter, water, sanitation and health care.
The risks of providing aid in the midst of a war are manageable compared to the obstacles he confronted trying to deliver aid in Burma, said Jacquot, 58.
"You have to make contact with all the groups ... it's dangerous but you know the players," he said of his experiences in battle zones.
By contrast, in Burma, renamed Myanmar by the governing junta, "there's no rhyme or reason. You don't know why you can go here today and tomorrow you can't," said Jacquot. "It's the way an authoritarian regime works: It puts you off balance. That's the way it controls its population."
Jacquot spent a month in Rangoon, coordinating with colleagues in the delta town of Laputta over government-issued cell phones. He was not permitted to leave the city and they were unable to travel out of the delta. Satellite phones and Internet access was blocked by the government.
Mercy Corps has only been able to operate in Burma because it affiliated itself with a British medical aid group, Merlin, which had already been working in Burma and had a memorandum of understanding with the government to equip health centers in the Irrawaddy Delta. Like other aid groups, Mercy Corps and Merlin have relied heavily on Burmese staff and associates who have been able to move more freely.
The greatest frustration, said Jacquot, was watching millions of dollars worth of aid and hundreds of skilled relief workers stay bottled up in Rangoon while hundreds of thousands of survivors subsist on almost nothing after the May 3 storm, which took an estimated 134,000 lives.
"Imagine Katrina: it was already a pretty difficult challenge for the U.S. to handle," he said. "Now imagine the government has shut the area completely. No one is allowed inside and no aid is allowed to get in. The result is a population that needs assistance and cannot get it."
Mercy Corps and Merlin managed to install three large barges loaded with supplies on rivers in the delta, then used smaller boats to ferry food, plastic sheeting and other materials from the barges to the villages.
Jacquot's team has employed Burmese health workers to serve the remote communities along the rivers and hired local people to drain salt water and clear corpses out of rainwater reservoirs and prepare them to catch the monsoon rains again for drinking water.
Jacquot said he was moved by the ingenuity and initiative of Burmese people in reaching out to their countrymen in spite of government-erected obstacles.
"One of the side effects of a controlling government is that it triggers human creativity," he said. "What is extraordinary there is the response by local organizations. We have to admire them because they are taking a lot of risk."
The United Nations, along with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Burmese government, is conducting a comprehensive disaster assessment to be complete next month. Early reports indicate that a feared wave of disease and death has not materialized. But that doesn't mean that all is well in the Irrawaddy Delta, where families still huddle in shelters with their livestock and scrounge for food and fresh water, said Jacquot.
"The fact that there isn't secondary death doesn't mean they are not suffering," he said. "You hear people say, 'It's amazing how resilient they are.' But what choice do they have?"
Meanwhile, aid workers like Jacquot debate how best to proceed in the face of continuing government resistance to foreign aid.
"Some say providing a little bit of help is better than no help at all, others say we should challenge the government further," said Jacquot, now back in his San Francisco living room. "I don't know the answer but it's a dilemma everybody has to deal with."
Plight of Burmese people
20 June 2008 Labels: PoemGone with the wind,
Countless numbers of lives.
Numb with tears,
This undescribable feeling of pain.
Faced with fear,
The possibility of lost future.
Grappling with darkness,
A chance to see a glimpse of light at the end.
In Hard Times, Pawnshops Thrive
Labels: NewsBy Aung Thet Wine/ Rangoon
[Source - Irrawaddy]
A 13-year-old student wearing a school blouse and a faded green longyi shyly approached the owner of the Yadana Pawnshop on Moe Kaung Street in eastern Dagon Myothit.
Pale and very thin, the girl slowly removed a packet from her ragged school bag and handed it to the woman pawnbroker, who unfolded a tattered, faded, longyi. She inspected it carefully, before speaking.
"300 kyat [0.40 cents]," she said. The girl’s eyes turned sad.
"Aunty, please give me 500 kyat,” she said. “Today I have to pay school fees."
The pawnbroker looked at the girl and then silently began folding the longyi. Finished, she carefully wrote out a receipt.
Through a small window, she handed the student 500 kyat and a crisp, white receipt.
The girl smiled. She put the kyat and receipt into her school bag and walked outside into the rain. She could remain in school for one more term.
The men and women waiting in the pawnshop had watched the exchange with sympathy. They were also customers with hopes of getting a few kyat to meet their immediate needs. Some needed bus fare to get to work; some needed money for rice; some needed medicine.
Many people in Burma go to pawnbrokers each day now carrying clothes or cooking utensils to pawn for enough money to get through the day. They are mostly day laborers who are paid small salaries at each day’s end. Some would return that evening to buy back whatever they pawned in the morning, only to return in a few days’ time to pawn the object again.
"After Cyclone Nargis, the most pawned items are clothes and cooking utensils,” said a pawnshop owner in Hlaing Tharyar Township. “Mostly women’s longyi and cooking pots. Most people who pawn things are daily wage earners with low living standards or civil servants in low ranks." "
“Every morning, I have to find money for bus fares," a mason from Ward 21 in Hlaing Tharyar Township told The Irrawaddy. He was working regularly at a construction site in downtown Rangoon and had to commute to work.
A pawnbroker with a shop near Insein Market, said: "When the houses collapsed in the cyclone and a lot of people lost their jobs, they turned to the pawnshops. I had roughly 60 to 100 customers before, but now about 200 to 300 people come regularly.”
A civil servant at the Defense Textile Mill said, "Twelve days after I’m paid the money runs out, and then I have to run to the pawnshop for daily food.”
Pawnshops are among the most successful businesses in Rangoon, according to an official at the Yangon Municipal Committee. He said Rangoon had 137 registered pawnshops in 2000-2001; 169 in 2001-2002; 162 from 2002-2004; 189 in 2004-2005; 214 in 2005-2006; 250 in 2006-2007; and 256 pawnshops in 2008.
A pawnshop owner must bid for a registration license. Owners say the winners are those who pay the largest bribes.
"The license fee is 5 million kyat [about US $4,237] and the bribe is 2 million kyat [$1,695], so totally it costs about 7 million kyat [$5,929] for a license," said a pawnbroker in Hlaing Tharyar Township.
The license fee varies in each township, rising to around 8 million kyat [$6,776] for a downtown township location, according to owners.
Pawnshop owners say you need about 200 million kyat [$169,500] to start a top-line pawnshop, which essentially functions as a small loan business. Many unlicensed pawnshops are springing up, they say, drawing many regular customers away from registered pawnshops.
But for now—with the Burmese economy reeling from the cyclone’s impact and more people out of work—pawnshops everywhere are thriving with customers trying to get through one more day in a life of unrelieved hardship.
The Imprisoned Voice of Freedom
Labels: ArticlesBy Kyaw Zwa Moe
[Source - Irrawaddy]
Everyone knows where Aung San Suu Kyi is spending her 63rd birthday today. But as millions of her supporters around the world mark the occasion, no one can say when she will be released from the family home that has been her prison for most of the past 19 years.
I still remember a conversation I had with Suu Kyi in late 1999, during one of her brief interludes of freedom. We met at the Rangoon headquarters of her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). Two youth members of the NLD were also there. We discussed politics and our experiences as political prisoners, as well as our plans for our future education.
I can clearly recall her sobering advice at that time: that we should be prepared for a “lifelong struggle” to restore democracy to Burma.
It already feels like a lifetime has passed since then.
A few months after I met her, she was put under house arrest again. Today, almost a decade later, she is still in detention. She has been a prisoner for nearly 13 of the past 19 years.
On May 27, five years after she was taken into custody following the infamous Depayin massacre that left many of her followers dead, her detention was extended again.
When she will be released is as uncertain as the future of Burma itself. After 46 years of iron-fisted military rule, Burma seems to be perpetually on the verge of collapse. No one knows when the next crisis will strike. But one thing seems certain: The fate of Burma and its most famous prisoner of conscience are inextricably intertwined.
For the moment, the junta still holds the reins. And that means that Suu Kyi will probably not see freedom before 2010, when the regime plans to hold an election that it has no intention of losing. By that time, she will be 65 years old—twenty years older than she was when her party delivered the junta a humiliating defeat in the country’s last general election.
The regime never honored the results of the 1990 election, but it is expected to welcome the outcome of the 2010 vote. As in the constitutional referendum held in May, the junta’s victory is guaranteed.
The draft constitution, which was supposedly supported by 92 percent of the population, sets aside 25 percent of parliamentary seats for military appointees. It is also highly likely that the regime will form a political party and field candidates with strong military backing.
If the junta can achieve its goal of rewriting history—erasing the two decades that it has ruled as a reviled and illegitimate regime and starting afresh with an electoral and constitutional mandate, however dubious—it may see fit to release Suu Kyi.
But this is far from certain. The regime knows from past experience that Suu Kyi’s influence is not easily eclipsed.
When she was released from her first six-year period of house arrest in 1995, crowds flocked to her home each Saturday to hear her speak. Her talks on political subjects threatened to revive the people’s democratic aspirations, and so she was once again removed from the public eye.
In 2002, Suu Kyi was released again. Sure enough, her magnetism proved to be undiminished. Her travels around the country attracted immense attention.
Desperate to contain her popular appeal, the regime masterminded an attack on her motorcade in Depayin, Sagaing Division, on May 30, 2003. She survived the carefully orchestrated assault, but many of her supporters did not.
Even after the regime had shown the extent to which it was willing to go to remove her from Burma’s political equation, Suu Kyi remained firmly committed to dialogue.
In an article written several years later, Razali Ismail, the former United Nations envoy to Burma, recounted a conversation he had with Suu Kyi a few days after the Depayin incident: “She said that she was prepared to turn the page for the sake of the people and reconciliation, saying she was still prepared to talk to the government.”
It is almost bizarre, in light of such evidence of Suu Kyi’s willingness to forgive the regime for the many indignities that it has inflicted upon her over the past two decades, to listen to charges that she has been inflexible in her dealings with the ruling generals.
There are even some who ask if her unwavering principles, determination and courage have become political liabilities for Burma. They seem to imply that the country would be better off with an opposition leader who didn’t make the regime look so nasty and brutish by contrast.
Many of Suu Kyi’s supporters have commented that she has the power to bring out the best in people. Is it possible that she also brings out the worst in her opponents? But it seems almost grotesquely unfair to suggest that she’s to blame for the junta’s poor public image.
What makes Suu Kyi so appealing to many, and so appalling to some, is that she speaks the simple truth. She disarms people with her candor. But the generals know that lies are all they have, so they continue to attack her.
Not everyone who criticizes Suu Kyi is attacking her. But what some of her critics have in common with the regime is that they tend to ignore the facts in favor of a view which suggests that Burma is a permanent basket case, with or without military rule.
Some say that Suu Kyi’s Burman ethnicity, which she shares with most of the ruling generals, makes her equally unfit to rule a country as ethnically diverse as Burma. She herself has never shied away from the complex issue of ethnic politics. Indeed, she has always been clear that talks with the regime should include representatives of Burma’s many ethnic minorities.
Suu Kyi has never spoken of the ethnic issue as if it were a secondary matter, although her energies have always been directed primarily at restoring democracy. Far from treating the ethnic issue as unimportant, she has always envisioned democracy as a means of addressing the legitimate aspirations of various ethnic groups.
In this, she is worlds apart from both the junta and many so-called “Burma experts.” While the regime believes that force is the only way to hold the country together, some academics argue that the country is doomed to fall apart. Suu Kyi rejects both militarism and pessimism as political dead ends.
Is Suu Kyi guilty, then, of unfounded optimism about the future of Burma? Not at all.
In 1990, the NLD won over 80 percent of the seats in parliament. Even more significantly, the party’s support was strong not only in Burman-dominated cities such as Rangoon and Mandalay, but also in ethnic states.
In eastern Karen State, the NLD won 71 percent of seats; in northern Kachin State, it took 73 percent. Southeastern Mon State gave the party 80 percent support. In Shan State, the NLD won over 39 percent, while in Karenni State it won 50 percent. In western Arakan and Chin states, it won over 34 and 30 percent, respectively.
What does this prove? That Burma’s people, regardless of ethnicity, want democracy and see it as a means of improving their lives. That was true in 1990, and it is true today.
But Suu Kyi’s appeal has never been based on false promises, so the people of Burma also know that even if they get what they want most—freedom from a brutal dictatorship—there will still be challenges ahead.
Nearly a decade ago, Suu Kyi warned me that the road ahead would not be easy. Perhaps it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at the time. But now her words ring truer than ever, even though the voice that spoke them has been silenced—for how long, nobody knows.
More local aid workers arrested
Labels: NewsSource: Irrawaddy
Recently, a local volunteer group made headlines when they started collecting the bodies of the Cyclone Nargis victims and gave them a decent burial in a plot of land they had purchased for this purpose. On 14th June, 7 of these volunteers were detained by the government. Out of these 7, 5 of them belong to a group called All Burma Federation of Students' Union (ABFSU).
Those detained include the Myanmar Tribune publishers U Aung Kyaw San and Dr Nay Win as well as ABSU leaders Ko Lin Htet Naing, Ma Hnin Pwint Wai, and Ko Hein Yazar Tun.
One aid worker told Irrawaddy: "They were detained at a checkpoint on our return trip from Bogale to Pyapon. We heard that the detainees were transferred to Yangon. There were about 16 people in the truck but the driver and some other people were allowed to go home."
For security reasons, ABFSU members have been in hiding since September's Saffron Revolution. However, they have been actively involved relief work since Cyclone Nargis hit the Burma's Irrawaddy Delta in early May.
Since the beginning of June, junta has detained over 20 prominent aid workers without any valid reasons. Those under detention include comedian Zarganar and Sports Editor Zaw Thet Htwe.
A spokesman from ABFSU told Irrawaddy,
"(The Junta is angry for several reasons.) For one, they are not getting as much funds as they want from the International Community. Secondly, news continue to leak out even though they are trying hard to control the media. The fact that private aid workers are getting things done while they cant, it is making them lose face. So of course, they take it out on the local aid workers."
Original article: http://www.irrawaddy.org/bur/news2008/June/june_19a_08.html
Detention of private aid workers
16 June 2008 Labels: NewsSources: Myo Chit Myanmar & Irrawaddy
One of the most active private donor groups have stopped distributing aid after two of its leaders were detained. The group, led by comedian-philanthropist Zarganar and Sports Editor Zaw Thet Htwe, said they will stop distributing aid for the time being.
Meanwhile, three other private aid workers were detained last thursday when they went to a pre-arranged meeting with a monk who had asked for donation items. A family member said the authorities searched the houses of one of the detainees and asked the family to produce receipts and other documents related to aid work.
The reason for detention remains unclear.
Reference Articles:
1. http://myochitmyanmar.blogspot.com/2008/06/blog-post_4535.html
2. http://www.irrawaddy.org/bur/news2008/June/june_16d_08.html