What was not known was what had happened on the ground and what had become of all the millions of people who must have been in the cyclone’s path.
Over the following week, news began to trickle out from Burma, as generators were activated and electricity and phone lines were restored to some parts of Rangoon. Photographs of the city looked as if they had been taken in the aftermath of a massive explosion. Roads were blocked by fallen trees. Cars had been crushed by logs and telephone poles. Cement walls had caved in and pavements were cracked open. The destruction in the city was catastrophic, but it soon became apparent that what had happened in Rangoon was nothing compared to the devastation of the Irrawaddy Delta. Toward the end of the week, an e-mail from Burma circulated some photographs taken in the delta; these were among the earliest harrowing glimpses of what had happened there.
The first image was a picture of two dead girls. One girl wore shorts and a bright orange T-shirt printed with a cheerful floral pattern. The other had on only a frilly pale green top. They lay on their backs in a nest of sodden palm fronds with their eyes closed and their heads turned away from each other. They looked as if they had fallen, or been flung, from a very great height.
The next photograph showed seven bodies floating in water, perhaps a pond. One grouping looked like it could be a family—a woman with two children on either side of her. The children were faceup with their arms flung out, as if reaching for their mother. The other figures could be seen only in parts: an exposed chest, a red T-shirt, a billowing blue
longyi
, or sarong, beneath which a pair of legs disappeared into the still, brown-gray surface of the water.
The most gruesome photograph captured a row of bodies scattered across paddy fields. They were swollen and black from sun exposure. Rigor mortis had locked the bodies into crooked postures; their legs and arms were spread wide, and they lay entangled in grotesque and awkward embraces.
Within just a couple of days, the Burmese regime announced on state television that as many as 10,000 people could have been killed. The very next day, an official death toll was released that was more than double that figure with over 22,400 people declared dead and more than 41,000 people missing. The majority of these lives were lost across the delta region, with Rangoon reporting only a few deaths.
From these initial snatches of information, it was clear that Cyclone Nargis had been a disaster of epic proportions. In the delta, tens of thousands of people were dead, and many hundreds of thousands must have been trying to survive without food, water, or shelter. As the horrendous scale of the disaster became apparent, foreign governments offered aid and assistance. Astoundingly, the Burmese government turned them down.
In neighboring Thailand, the U.S. government had loaded a C-130 cargo plane with lifesaving relief supplies that would have taken just under an hour to reach Burma, but the craft was not given clearance to land at Rangoon’s airport. The United Nations World Food Programme had three planes ready to fly in from Bangladesh, Thailand, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The planes were loaded with vitamin-fortified biscuits for hungry survivors who may not have been able to eat for some days and would be in need of instant nourishment. These biscuit-laden planes were also denied clearance. A flight from Qatar carrying relief materials and aid workers managed to land at Rangoon airport but was immediately forced to take off again without unloading any of its contents.
As international emergency response mechanisms kicked into action, UN staff and aid workers experienced in disaster response were mobilized from around the world. Few of them were granted visas to enter Burma. Many aid workers assembled in Bangkok, Thailand, a practical stopover for processing entry visas. The Burmese embassy, however, was closed on the Monday after the cyclone for a Thai public holiday. When a UN team of four experts was finally allowed to travel to Burma toward the end of the week, two were sent back after landing in Rangoon despite having valid visas.
In addition to preventing aid workers from entering, the regime was also restricting the movement of foreigners already inside the country. International aid agencies that had been working in Burma before the cyclone had switched into emergency mode, but their foreign staff was not allowed outside of Rangoon; only Burmese employees were able to travel to the delta to begin distributing supplies and look for ways to set up reliable delivery routes. It is an established procedure in Burma that foreign aid workers at international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) must apply for permits to travel outside of Rangoon (a process that can take weeks, sometimes months); it was hoped that the authorities would expedite travel requests after a natural disaster. Instead, they did just the opposite by slowing down the process and setting up checkpoints on exit routes out of the city. Policemen were posted at the bridges and jetties along the Rangoon River where cars and ferries depart for the delta and prohibited foreigners from crossing over to the other side.
It was, by all accounts, a situation unprecedented in the annals of disaster response. The UN and international aid agencies started to issue frantic and strongly worded warnings. OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that “thousands more could die” if assessments were not carried out that would enable the UN to respond effectively. Save the Children issued a press release stating that around 40 percent of the dead were children and that more would die if food and water did not reach them soon. A World Health Organization report warned that there was an immediate risk of waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. UNICEF stated that one in five children already had diarrhea. The Food and Agriculture Organization highlighted the bigger picture, saying that the area affected by the storm was the source of most of the country’s food (65 percent of the rice and 80 percent of the fishery products) and that Burma could face a food crisis in the near future. “We are on the cusp of a second wave of tragedy,” the chief executive of World Vision told the press. “It’s a race against time.”
Efforts were made to reason with Burma’s ruling generals through the highest diplomatic channels. UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon stated that he had been trying to contact the country’s leader, Senior General Than Shwe, to arrange a meeting; insiders at the UN said that the general was simply not returning Ban Ki-moon’s calls. George W. Bush, then the president of the United States, announced that the United States was willing to help and that U.S. Navy assets already present in the Southeast Asia region could be deployed to assist with search-and-rescue missions and aid distributions; first, though, the Burmese generals would have to allow U.S. disaster assessment teams to enter the country. The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, went so far as to invoke the “responsibility to protect” principle, a UN proposal that would allow for the delivery of aid and assistance without the consent of the host government.
The generals were impervious to these pleas and threats. On May 9, a week after Cyclone Nargis, a statement was released in which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the country was “not yet ready to receive search-and-rescue teams as well as media teams from foreign countries.” According to the statement, the government was willing to accept provisions but would take charge of distributing them “by its own labors to the affected areas.” Officials indicated that bilateral aid, assistance given government to government, would be welcomed, but that meant placing a large amount of supplies directly into the hands of a rogue regime—a setup that was unacceptable for most Western donors, who require accountability, transparent procedures, and the ability to track the delivery of the goods they donate.
As if to further infuriate those who were trying to provide help, the regime announced its plans to go ahead with an upcoming national referendum to vote on the newly drawn up constitution. Scheduled for May 10, the referendum had already been dismissed as a sham by most Burma experts. Having ruled the country for almost fifty years, the military government has established a well-earned reputation for being willing to do whatever it takes to stay in power, and the referendum seemed like just another piece of trickery, a grand subterfuge designed to give the appearance of democracy without actually delivering any greater freedom to the people.
Indeed, the ruling generals have shown little interest in democracy and human rights. The regime’s current incarnation came into being after a nationwide uprising against military rule in 1988, during which soldiers shot into the crowds and killed an estimated three thousand civilians. In the years that followed, the regime continued to quash any form of dissent. To this day, people perceived as a threat are imprisoned, and all criticism of the regime—be it spoken or written—is systematically silenced. Most prominent among Burma’s political prisoners is the country’s iconic symbol of democratic values, Aung San Suu Kyi, who came to the fore during the demonstrations in 1988 and who has spent the majority of the intervening years under house arrest.
Efforts made both inside and outside the country to unseat the junta or coax out its softer side have so far failed. When Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory in general elections held in 1990, the regime discounted the results and continued to rule. Economic sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe have been ineffective in eliciting any substantial concessions from the generals. So when the regime launched its so-called Road Map to Democracy in 2003, no one held their breath in anticipation of great changes. The Road Map, which includes the referendum as part of its seven-step plan, is expected to lead to another general election in 2010 and culminate in what the generals refer to as a “discipline-flourishing democracy”—a phrase that sounds distinctly
un
democratic, especially when used by a military junta that has demonstrated its enduring ability to rule against the will of the people.
After the cyclone, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon issued a statement urging the regime to postpone the referendum and concentrate on the relief effort, but the generals ignored him. Such was their determination to proceed with their plans that preparations for the referendum continued in the wake of the worst natural disaster in the country’s recorded history.
An impending sense of anarchy seemed to emanate from Rangoon. With no electricity, whole neighborhoods were plunged into total darkness each night. The cost of fuel was rising rapidly, and long queues had formed outside gas stations as people raced to fill up their vehicles before prices became too high. Most parts of the city had no running water, and many residents had to purchase water from the owners of neighborhood wells. In the markets, people who could afford to were buying up large amounts of food to stockpile at home. Commodity prices were spiraling ever higher, and there was talk that the city was running out of medicine, food, and water.
In the tumbledown outskirts of Rangoon, and farther afield in the Irrawaddy Delta, there was untold devastation. Everyone thought that the death toll was sure to be much higher than the figures stated by official sources. Boats transporting aid to the delta were encountering waterways clogged with dead bodies. Weak and shocked survivors whose homes and villages had been obliterated by the cyclone were beginning to congregate in bigger delta towns, where they sought shelter in monastery and school buildings that were ill equipped and poorly prepared for such large crowds. Thousands were camping alongside the roads. In the delta town of Laputta, shopkeepers and residents were said to be bolting their doors shut as gangs of survivors roamed the streets wielding machetes and demanding food.
An ominous story emerged from Insein Prison in northern Rangoon. A sprawling prison complex built by the British colonial administration in the late nineteenth century, Insein (pronounced “insane”) is the country’s most notorious lockup and holds hundreds of political prisoners along with other inmates. The cyclone had ripped off parts of the roof in the prison and some one thousand inmates were moved by prison guards into an assembly hall. Wet and shivering, the prisoners lit a fire to warm themselves, but the fire raged out of control and the prisoners panicked. Unable to quell what was threatening to explode into a full-scale prison riot, the guards called in armed soldiers who reportedly shot into the crowd, killing thirty-six prisoners and injuring at least seventy others.
The story of this prison massacre was like a microcosm, a bloody prediction in miniature, of what could happen on a far larger scale in Rangoon and across the delta. There was already speculation that riots would break out soon. If people began rioting, the soldiers would be deployed and—as reportedly happened in the prison and has happened many times before in Burma—the soldiers would start shooting people.
Given the ruthless track record of Burma’s soldiers, many thought the mounting turmoil could only end in bloodshed. But among the voices prophesying doom, there were also hopeful visions. Some believed that the regime would have to back down; this event was too big, too overwhelming, and sooner or later the regime would relent and accept foreign aid and assistance. The most hopeful went so far as to predict that the end result of all this mayhem would be the fall of the regime and the installation of a democratic government in Burma.
In the chaotic days after Cyclone Nargis, the mood of the country seemed to teeter wildly between abject despair and a deliriously irrational sense of hope.
IT WAS AROUND
that time, just over a week after the cyclone, that my request for a tourist visa for Burma was granted. I had been there many times before and, in the early 2000s, I had spent more than a year traveling back and forth to the country researching a book on the links—both factual and fictional—between Burma and the British writer George Orwell, who had been posted there as an imperial policeman in the 1920s, when the country was part of the British Empire.