Burma (Myanmar) aid logjam riles donors
UN members rejected a proposal Thursday to forgo junta permission and
force aid in.
By David Montero | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the May 9, 2008 edition
Phnom Penh, Cambodia - In Burma's spiraling humanitarian crisis, the
international community faces a uniquely confounding scenario: how to
overcome the military government's foot-dragging response.
Key international players rejected France's proposal that the United
Nations should force aid into Burma (Myanmar) by invoking its
"responsibility to protect" citizens when their government failed to
do so.
The military regime's resistance to outside aid means that, almost a
week after cyclone Nargis left as many as 100,000 dead and 1 million
homeless, international shipments remain bottlenecked and most foreign
aid workers still lack visas.
It also reflects a government mentality that may have left much of its
populace unprepared for Saturday's cyclone, far less so than in many
neighboring nations.
Critics say the lack of a disaster mechanism highlights the skewed
priorities of Burma's Army-led regime. "The Burmese government
prioritizes the military, not serving the people. They rule through
public fear, not public support," says Win Min, a Burmese analyst in
Thailand.
International aid bottlenecked
International figures from UN chief Ban Ki Moon to President Bush have
urged the Burmese government to speedily accept badly needed
humanitarian aid.
So far, shipments have arrived from Japan, Bangladesh, India, Laos,
China, Thailand, and Singapore, according to the Associated Press. The
UN World Food Program (WFP) delivered its first planeloads Thursday.
Relief agencies including the WFP, however, reported that many of
their staff were still having trouble getting into the notoriously
closed country, which has been ruled by a secretive military junta
since 1962.
"A few visas are coming through. But there are still a number of key
[UN] staff who have not gotten their visas," says Richard Horsey, a
spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, speaking from Thailand.
"This is clearly a concern, because it's critical that these key staff
get in and begin coordinating relief efforts," Mr. Horsey continued.
Several international naval ships, including an American vessel, have
also positioned themselves just offshore from the disaster site, with
helicopters and supplies to aid in the assistance.
"We can intervene in the hours, or minutes, to come," said Mr.
Kouchner, referring to French ships nearby. But they have not yet been
given the go ahead, the Associated Press added.
Meanwhile, Kouchner's proposal of forcing aid into the country gained
little traction. Confrontation would not be helpful, UN Undersecretary-
General for Humanitarian Affairs David Holmes said Thursday, a stance
echoed by the European Commission, China, and other nations.
"I can understand the sentiment of France's foreign minister, but I
don't think it's the solution," says James Schoff, associate director
of Asia-Pacific studies at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis
in Cambridge, Mass.
"You could get to a point where [the UN] could just do drops from the
air. But for the whole assessment process =96 I don't see how you could
do that without working with locals on the ground," he continues.
Analysts are hard pressed to recall a natural disaster where the UN's
"responsibility to protect" =96 a phrase conceived in 2005 largely in
response to atrocities in Rwanda and Darfur =96 has been invoked.
There is probably no other possibility for delivering aid to Burma
right now, Mr. Schoff continues, other than slow diplomatic gains and
persistence. In a few days, Burma might come around, he says.
Were Burmese citizens warned?
Critics see the Burmese government's foot-dragging as part of a
pattern of lack of care for its populace: Another flashpoint of
international criticism has been whether the government there failed
to adequately warn victims of the coming storm, leading to greater
losses of life.
Burma's government insists that it used its storm warning system to
save lives. "We sent a warning one week [before the cyclone]. We sent
it through fax, through television, and through our state-run media,"
says a duty officer at Burma's Department of Meteorology and Hydrology
in Rangoon (Yangon), who refused to give his name.
Burma has one of the region's least effective disaster response
systems, experts say. Unlike neighboring Bangladesh, which has 42,000
cyclone volunteers and almost 3,000 cyclone shelters along its
coastline, Burma has neither.
The contrast underscores that the high death toll in the cyclone was
not caused by a failure to warn victims alone, but by a wider failure
of national priorities, one that puts the government's welfare before
that of the public, critics contend.
Questions have also accumulated as to whether officials in Burma knew
Saturday's storm was barreling down on the country's central coast.
Meteorological officials in India say they warned the Burmese
government well ahead of time. "We issued a warning 36 hours in
advance. Everything was told to the concerned officials in Myanmar:
the intensity of the storm, the time of impact, where it will land =96
and that information was updated every three hours," says B.P. Yadav,
a spokesman for the Indian Meteorological Department in New Delhi.
Burma's meteorological office said it received the warning from India
and used it to issue a warning.
But critics say the warning was ineffectively disseminated, costing
more lives. "They issued a typical storm report that nobody listened
to. It was on page 4 or page 5 of the [state-run] newspaper," says
Aung Saw, editor of Irrawadday, an opposition newspaper based in
Thailand, relying on reports he received from inside Burma. "If it had
been on page 1 ... maybe thousands of lives would have been saved."
"The cyclone warning from India to the authorities was ignored or
downplayed by the weather forecasts on Burmese TV," wrote a Burmese
resident, who asked not to be identified, in an e-mail. "It stated
that the cyclone has lost its intensity and will go up north, and
Rangoon will be hit only marginally, and the wind velocity hitting
Burma will be reduced to 40/50 mph."
But "the cyclone hit the wooden and thatched dwelling[s] across the
delta without warning at 150 m.p.h., and it lasted for 6 hours or
more," he continued.
The controversy highlights the fact that Burma has one of the most
poorly administered disaster response systems in the region. Some
experts say it may have none at all.
"According to our records, they don't have any preparedness measures,"
says Brigitte Leoni, a spokeswoman for the UN disaster reduction
agency in Geneva. "But the problem we have is, we can't get in to the
country, so we just don't know."
Building cyclone preparedness
Burma's situation contrasts sharply with regional neighbors', experts
say, whose example Burma should now follow.
Prior to the 2004 tsunami, Indian Ocean countries, including
Indonesia, lacked an early warning system and were heavily criticized
for failing to alert their citizens to the arrival of the tsunami.
After the disaster, the United Nations helped set up an Indian Ocean
tsunami warning system, which uses underwater seismic sensors to relay
information to monitoring centers around the region.
Bangladesh has set up one of the world's most advanced and effective
cyclone response systems, observers say. The key to its success is
people like M.A. Wahab. He runs Bangladesh's Cyclone Preparedness
Program, created in 1972 by the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society. Last
year, his army of volunteers were ready five days before cyclone Sidr
even hit Bangladesh's coast, and they rushed victims to shelters.
About 3,000 people were killed by that cyclone, compared with 500,000
people in a 1970 cyclone.
"Our volunteers have an organizational structure up to the village
level. They're from the community and the community knows them so they
can issue information quickly," says Mr. Wahab, speaking from Dhaka,
the capital of Bangladesh.
Good response and preparation systems require strong political
commitment from authorities, says Ms. Leoni, of the UN disaster relief
agency. "There needs to be political will and the government needs to
invest money," she says.
=95 Danna Harman contributed from Tel Aviv.
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