=====
Zomi says:
By delaying help, the SPDC has been killing one hundrd thousand people.
=====
Political Obstacles Slow Disaster Aid for Myanmar
The nation's military dictators are wary of admitting foreigners to help
with relief efforts
By Kevin Whitelaw
Posted May 7, 2008
Officials in Myanmar are still struggling to count the dead from a monster
tropical cyclone that swept through over the weekend, but efforts to aid
the
survivors have been hampered by the slow response from a military junta
that
is notoriously suspicious of outsiders.
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Photo:
FE_DA_080507cyclone185x123.jpg
A girl drinks water from a container as her homeless family eat donated
food
in Konegyangone township in the outskirts of Yangon.
(Khin Maung Win/AFP/Getty Images)
==
Amid estimates that the death toll from the storm topped 22,000, the
government of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) said that it welcomed
humanitarian aid from "friendly" countries. But aid workers had trouble
getting visas to enter the country. United Nations relief officials, along
with a team of U.S. disaster assessment officials, were stalled by visa
delays.
Myanmar's deep reluctance to admit the additional teams left a small
number
of aid workers already in the country struggling to cobble together
deliveries of food and water to as many as 1 million people left homeless.
"This regime is extremely paranoid and isolated and xenophobic," says
Derek
Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies. "The prospect of having all kinds of people from all over the
world
doing work they cannot really control or even monitor is troubling to
them."
The U.S. military offered to send Navy ships to aid in relief efforts. But
the regime in Myanmar might not find that to be a reassuring offer,
particularly after listening to years of senior U.S. officials'
condemnations of the country's military leaders. "Even under the best of
circumstances, nations that know the United States is out to get them
would
be suspicious," says Mitchell.
Unsurprisingly, aid groups are reluctant to criticize Myanmar's regime too
publicly because they fear losing whatever access to the country they have
been granted. But aid workers are growing increasingly worried about the
delays. "Everything hinges on access," says Greg Beck, the Asia regional
director for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid group.
"The international aid community needs to get staff and supplies into
devastated communities rapidly if we're going to avert further deaths."
Maung Maung Swe, Myanmar's minister for social welfare, said the
government
has a process that must be followed. "For expert teams from overseas to
come
here, they have to negotiate with the Foreign Ministry and our senior
authorities," he told a news conference.
But with tens of thousands of people without access to clean drinking
water,
food, or shelter, aid groups are worried about the scale of the disaster.
"Prices of basic foods, including rice, have already doubled in the last
few
days, which is very worrying for a population who have already been living
under precarious circumstances before the cyclone," notes Doctors Without
Borders, a humanitarian aid group with teams inside Myanmar.
Even for relief workers already stationed in the country, access to the
worst-hit areas is difficult, both for assessment teams and for those
bringing in relief supplies. Many of the main roads have been destroyed,
and
there is limited access to other means of transport.
The slow response by Myanmar's pariah military junta is another black eye
for a government recently under public scrutiny for its violent
suppression
of monks leading democracy protests.
A bungled response "could create new tensions and fissures" inside
Myanmar,
says Mitchell. "But that's a possibility we see no evidence of yet."
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/world/2008/05/07/political-obstacles-slow-disaster-aid-for-myanmar.html
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