Everything Is Broken (11 page)

In Rangoon, four hundred Christian villagers from the ethnic Karen group in the delta who had been sheltering in a Baptist church compound at Insein in the northern part of the city were unceremoniously evicted in the middle of the night. Only a few sick people and one heavily pregnant woman were allowed to stay on at the church.

Unable to prevent these forced resettlements, aid organizations operational in the delta assembled supplies, so that returnees would have at least a few days’ worth of food and water, and some materials with which to build a shelter.

The students at the private school I had visited, who were still energetically delivering aid, went to a camp where they had been making regular deliveries only to find that it no longer existed. The camp, located alongside a road on the outskirts of Rangoon, had vanished, along with the two hundred families who had been sheltering there. After making discreet inquiries, the students learned that township authorities had ordered the people to return home. But their homes had been ruined by the cyclone and they had nowhere to go. The students found a small group hiding out in a nearby grove of trees and gave them tarpaulin so they could construct new shelters, but when they returned the next day with additional supplies, they discovered that the authorities had taken the tarpaulin. “What are we supposed to do?” asked the enraged teacher who had been supervising the students. “Do we give them more? If we do, won’t they just take it again? We may as well just give it directly to the township officers!”

One of the students had dared to ask a township officer why the relief camps were being disbanded so soon. The officer replied that staying in a camp was like living in a hotel, as the people had breakfast, lunch, and dinner served to them. He explained that the authorities were concerned that people would grow used to this decadent lifestyle and become too lazy to work for a living.

This sentiment was echoed in the
New Light of Myanmar
, which ran an article about how storm victims were surviving perfectly well without help from the outside world. “Myanmar people are capable enough of rising from such natural disasters even if they are not provided with international assistance,” the article stated. “Maybe they need temporarily instant noodle and biscuit packets. However, [they] can easily get fish for dishes by just fishing in the fields and ditches. . . . In the early monsoon, large edible frogs are abundant.” The article concluded that people in the Irrawaddy Delta could survive “even if they are not given chocolate bars from the international community.”

On June 4, the popular comedian Zargana was arrested. Since the cyclone, Zargana had managed to build up a team of over four hundred volunteers to deliver aid to scores of villages across the delta. He had talked openly with the international media, criticizing both the government for its negligence and the United Nations for pandering to the generals and not taking a more hard-line approach with the regime. When asked whether people in the delta were surviving without chocolate by catching fish and frogs to eat as suggested by the
New Light of Myanmar
, he replied, “We renamed the Irrawaddy River and Bogale River by the color of the water. The rivers are a chalky white color. We call it the Nargis color. There are many dead bodies and cadavers of cattle floating in the rivers. We call that the Nargis odor. The odor sticks with us when we come back from the villages. Nobody can stand it, and [it] causes some people to vomit. How could people find edible fish and frogs in that environment?”

While it was unclear what crime Zargana would be charged with, his arrest, combined with the random impounding of vehicles at delta checkpoints, was enough to make other donors nervous, and the number of private citizens taking supplies down to the delta began to dwindle. Rangoon took on the feeling of a city under siege. It was as if an invisible wall had been built around the city and we were all trapped within its boundaries, unable to get over it or see beyond it.

Each morning I woke up to the sound of crows cawing in the garden. With so many trees felled by the cyclone, the crows could find nowhere to settle, and they flitted restlessly around the cloudy skies, perching for a precarious moment or two on the battered branches of the few remaining trees. Their insistent cries were maddening to listen to, and I often went out to feed them the remains of my breakfast. When I threw slices of mango and crumbled toast onto the grass, the crows swarmed around me, forming a panicky black cloud of flapping wings and snapping beaks.

 

 

 

MY BURMESE VISA
was about to expire. Almost four weeks had passed since I had arrived, and I would soon have to leave the country. It would be just over a month before I was able to return and gain access but at that time, I was still plagued by the sense of uselessness I had felt on my arrival. Tired of chasing information that wasn’t available and asking questions that had no satisfactory answers, I was ready to leave.

By then, most of the international media attention had died away. Headlines that once featured Burma had been replaced by other more topical events elsewhere around the globe. The outrage expressed by world leaders, United Nations officials, and NGO representatives had been quelled or simply run out of steam. Either way, it seemed to me that righteous moral indignation had been traded in for a shoddy compromise with the regime. The generals, I decided, were smarter than they were given credit for. They had pacified angry and powerful critics across the world with an empty promise and were staving off further criticism from aid agencies in Burma with continued assurances of a few more entry visas and a little more access. It was a tried-and-tested method that the generals had used before in times of crisis, and it boiled down to a simple strategy: Toss out some crumbs of concession to appease foreign detractors, hunker down, and wait for the storm to blow over. As a U.S. diplomat I spoke with said, “They know they have a six-to-nine-month window after they’ve promised something for the international community to realize that they didn’t deliver.”

The anticipated breakthrough never did materialize, and the emergency operation was limping along at a snail’s pace. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated, “[P]reliminary estimates indicate that 1.3 million beneficiaries, out of the estimated 2.4 million people affected [by Cyclone Nargis], have been reached with some assistance.” In other words, one long month after the cyclone, help had gotten to only just over half the people who needed it. OCHA went on to clarify that most of those 1.3 million had “received very basic assistance, which is inadequate and below minimum requirements” and that “a large number of villages have not received any support from the UN, international NGOs, or the Red Cross.”

The Burmese state media stuck doggedly to its version of the truth. Highlights from the relief effort could be seen on television accompanied by a soundtrack of rousing martial music. Bottles of drinking water were handed along a human chain of strong-armed soldiers. Cooked rice was scooped out of steaming vats by motherly women and ladled with generous helpings of curry. Doctors operated in well-equipped, tented theaters. Nurses bandaged scrapes and administered pills. Men in smart business suits handed checks worth millions of
kyat
to smiling generals. The mood conveyed was one of happy and productive activity, of hard times overcome thanks to the government’s heroic contributions.

In the never-never land of the regime’s imagination, survivors of the storm suffered no trauma and felt no grief at having lost family members, homes, and livelihoods. Relieved to be so warmly looked after by their benevolent leaders, they sat smiling obediently amid mountains of Mama noodles and brightly colored plastic buckets.

 

 

 

A FEW DAYS BEFORE
I departed from Rangoon, I dropped in on an emergency shelter cluster. By then the cluster system had expanded and become more official, with microphones for participants and government representatives in attendance. The aim of the meeting was to ensure that shelter materials were being properly and comprehensively distributed, and the meeting opened with a short speech delivered by the deputy director of the international relations department of the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement. He expressed his pleasure that coordination among all the agencies and the government was going so well and said that, due to the rainy season, shelter was of the utmost importance. “My specific data is that shelter is not enough,” he said in hesitant English. “We would like to request the need for shelter. Today it is a priority.”

A staff member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies was chairing the meeting, and he said he needed answers to the following questions: Who has done what? Where are the gaps? Who should be doing what? The IFRC handed out basic forms to the agencies involved in delivering shelter, so that they could list what resources they had available and how much they were planning to supply. There was a distinct weariness in the IFRC man’s voice as he reiterated, “Please try to be exact. Write down the number of shelter kits you have delivered and what is in those kits.”

Shelter kits distributed during emergencies, I had learned, were available in varying calibers. At the top of the range were those supplied by the UK charity ShelterBox. The ShelterBox concept is to supply survivors with a fully stocked box containing everything a person trying to survive after a disaster might require. Typical contents include: a ten-man tent (plus blankets or mosquito netting), a multifuel stove (complete with pans and utensils), working tools (such as a hammer, an ax, and a saw), and even a few treats for children (drawing books and crayons). But, with just over two thousand ShelterBox kits delivered in Burma, it was really only the luckiest survivors in the delta who received one. Standard kits were more economical and provided only the bare essentials: a sheet of tarpaulin, a rope, and a leaflet on how to tie tarpaulin to bamboo poles.

The IFRC lead also tried to establish geographical areas of operation—who was working where? “The longer you delay in giving us information on where you are working, the more we will end up with overlaps and areas without [shelter],” he said. “If you’re planning to work in an area, you need to tell us.” Few people responded, and it seemed that most attendees had come to the meeting to gather information rather than share it. Or it may have been that the unnerving presence of the government representative contributed to their laconic attitude.

There were, however, some offerings of information. Smaller clusters were being set up in delta towns where aid agencies had been able to set up delivery hubs and temporary offices operated by Burmese staff, and focal points were established for each town. Two organizations announced their involvement in body collection with a recently arrived Australian specialist offering his chilling expertise to anyone who might need it: “I personally have extensive experience on body collection and mass disposal.”

“AOB?” asked the tired lead.

A man from the World Society for the Protection of Animals piped up with a winning grin, “This really is
Any Other Business
, but . . .” There were sniggers around the room in expectation, perhaps, of a pitch to supply cyclone-affected poodles with an adequate supply of chew toys and flea powder. The WSPA representative asked if anyone had heard of people bringing companion animals with them to the camps, as had happened after Hurricane Katrina in the United States, and whether any support was required for livestock in the delta.

The meeting coordinator, keen to wrap things up, directed him to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and offered a slight variant on the usual response to any requests for information: “We are not at the stage where we have a view on that.”

The meeting ended with the same dissatisfied air that tainted most of the cluster meetings I had attended. Nothing much seemed to have changed; critical questions remained unanswered; and, though progress was being made, it was still nebulous and agonizingly slow.

After his opening words, the deputy director from the Ministry of Social Welfare had remained mostly silent throughout the meeting. He didn’t stick around for the finger sandwiches and tea that were on offer outside the meeting room but strode off in a hurry, swinging his briefcase manically, as if he was late, very late, for another very important meeting. As I watched him rush away, I noticed that the briefcase looked incredibly light and wondered idly if it might actually be empty.

NOVEMBER 2005