"In MYANMAR, "Little China," The JUNTA Urges Cyclone Victims To "EAT
FROGS!"
As Myanmar's survivors of the cyclone mourn 100,000 or so victims and
pathetically seach for virtually ANYTHING TO EAT, the criminal
Generals deny their negligent criminality and insist the starving
people can "go out with lamps at night and catch plump frogs."
I don't know about you, but this attitude toward Myanmar's
impoverished and tempest-tossed population seems like something from a
Chinese do***entary, describing events that might well happen in
Sinoland if the world wasn't watching China as the Olympics near.
In Myamnar -- aka "Little China" -- life is as terrible as it was in
China during one of its relatively recent purges or "cultural
revolutions." And maybe as things STILL ARE in China. But are now
better hidden.
And how nice to see how Hu and Wen are confronting the junta on
Myanmar's atrocious lack of humanitarian concern.
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"Let Them Eat Frogs"
"Burma's junta is willing to let its people starve while relief waits
just offshore."
Editorial
Friday, May 30, 2008; A12
"THE SEARCH for food begins just after dawn," the Los Angeles Times
re****ted 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 Es***
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 re****ter 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.
http://www.wa****ngtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/29/AR2008052903597.html
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