Everything Is Broken (25 page)

The wreckage of Cyclone Nargis was still very visible, especially out on the edges of town where thatch houses had been resurrected and pieced together from disparate strips of paneling and cloth. Almost all of the town’s trees had been felled by the storm, and logs and branches were chopped up and stacked in yards and at street corners. On a few buildings, gleaming tin sheets were used to replace old roofing and shingles that had been blown away.

The heyday of the delta was long past. Back before World War II, when Burma was the largest rice exporter in the world, the delta had been the pulsing agricultural heart of the rice business and Bogale was a town of thriving traders and brokers. Farmers, fishermen, and plantation workers sold their produce in town, from where it was then traded within the country or exported abroad.

But years of deprivation and mismanagement that began under military rule and socialist policies in the 1960s decimated the rice industry, and today Burma exports just one-tenth of the three million tons that used to be loaded onto ships at Rangoon, or at Pathein on the western coast of the delta, and sent out of the country each year. Even with the glory days of the rice trade far behind, Bogale still functions as a somewhat dilapidated clearinghouse for the produce of the delta farmlands.

Aid material moving through Bogale—initially emergency relief supplies and then more sustained deliveries for rehabilitation and longer-term aid programs—had reenergized the economy and the town. Disused warehouses colonized by sparrows and rats had been cleaned up, and sacks of rice and other commodities were once again piled high within the dark, cavernous interiors. The rickety walkways of the wooden jetties were crowded with laborers off-loading barges that had sailed down from Rangoon. They jostled one another to hand their colored sticks to tally-men as they redistributed the supplies onto smaller boats capable of navigating the narrower creeks and waterways farther south.

Boats moored along the riverfront flew the flags of aid organizations. Attached to a fishing boat was a white flag bearing the circle of yellow-and-orange handprints that is the CARE logo, while another vessel flew the red-and-white standard of Médicins Sans Frontières, accompanied by the organization’s ever-present “no guns” symbol. In the town, grimy guesthouses had been given a new lick of paint to cater to the incoming international and local aid workers. Houses had been rented out for aid organizations and UN agencies to use as temporary offices. Outside each office, generators as big as cars thundered continuously throughout the day and late into the night.

Maps of the delta were stuck on the walls inside, listing town names, population figures, and ongoing needs. A color-coding system was used to indicate the locations where each organization was working, and the delta was shown carved up by new boundaries and divisions; there was a United Nations Development Programme area, a pact zone, and World Vision villages, among others. Within this booming industry, townspeople had found work as office staff, cleaners, cooks, and laborers.

Each day, when the World Food Programme helicopters landed at Bogale, people gathered at the old football stadium that was being used as a helipad. Though soldiers guarded the entrance to the field, spectators were allowed into the brick stands to watch the helicopters land and take off. It was undeniably exciting to listen for the distant drone of the helicopter engine in the empty gray skies; whenever a helicopter appeared out of the gloom, the waiting crowd would often clap and cheer. The helicopter engines were usually kept running in Bogale, as they hurriedly dispatched aid workers from Rangoon and loaded up on cargo to transport to the villages. The rotor blades spun up a whirlwind that flattened the overgrown grass of the football field, blowing hats off laborers and forcing women to laughingly hold down their
tamein
and blouses.

At night, evening tea shops and beer stands spilled out from the shop-houses in the center of town. Against the roar of generators that powered the fluorescent bulbs dangling above them, people exchanged the news and events of the day, swapping rumors and the occasional fact. One evening I joined a table of international aid workers, who sat at an open-air stand drinking lukewarm beer and munching on crispy fried eel dipped in ketchup.

To begin with, their conversation revolved around work. More logistical challenges had arisen that day. Cooking oil destined for the village of Kone Gyi had taken too long to load due to the afternoon rainfall and the boat wasn’t able to set sail before dark; the eight-hour journey would have to begin the following day, which would set the whole boat schedule out of whack for the rest of the week.

The continued movement of people across the delta was also causing major headaches for those in charge of distributing aid. As cyclone survivors left villages that had been completely destroyed and fields they were no longer able to farm, they moved from village to village in search of work. Aid agencies struggled to keep up with the ever-changing population figures and often delivered too much or too little.

One agency had been summoned by the tactical commander, a military officer overseeing the relief effort in Bogale Township. The commander wanted to know exactly how much tarpaulin they had given to a cluster of villages along the coast; until he received a breakdown of the exact length and number of sheets donated, he was prohibiting all future deliveries. Someone would have to go and see him first thing in the morning.

I asked the aid workers how they found working with the authorities and was surprised when they unanimously agreed that it wasn’t as bad as one might have expected. “It’s the people at the top of the pile who cause problems,” said one New Zealander used to working in combat zones. “But out here in the field we don’t have many problems with them. They live here, and their families suffered from the cyclone too, and they seem to want to help.”

Those at the top of the pile, however, seemed to be conjuring up policies that were explicitly designed to further complicate the delivery of aid and movement of aid workers. In June, the regime released a set of NGO “guiding principles” that were in fact a series of convoluted rules and regulations. At the end of the six-page document, the guiding principles were summarized in ten not-so-easy-to-understand bullet points, some of which were grammatically incomplete. Among them were the following:

Though the document declared that its aim was to coordinate efforts and prevent duplication of supplies to areas where they were not needed, most agencies had difficulty simply trying to decipher the new rules and working out how to abide by them.

In July, it came to light that the regime was profiting directly from the influx of aid dollars through the country’s dual-system currency exchange. Though black market rates averaged around K1,100 to the U.S. dollar, the official exchange rate had remained stuck at K6 to the dollar. Even the authorities seemed to acknowledge that this difference was ludicrous and allowed international agencies working in Burma to exchange incoming dollars into Foreign Exchange Certificates, known as FECs. In the months after Nargis, however, the FEC was valued lower than the dollar when changed into Burmese currency. UN officials admitted that the discrepancy may have resulted in a serious loss of 25 percent of relief funds amounting to as much as US$10 million. It later transpired that the amount was far less, and was estimated to be around US$1.56 million. Still, it was a substantial bonus for the regime’s coffers from money that had been earmarked for charitable contributions.

The regime also made money off other transactions. Shortly after the cyclone, aid agencies were informed that cell phone and radio communication was prohibited in the delta. The May 16 edition of the
New Light of Myanmar
ran a small article noting that the Burmese minister for communications, posts, and telegraphs had accepted a donation of thirty thousand CDMA cell phones and fifteen base stations worth US$3.3 million from a major Chinese telecommunications company. Not too long after that, the authorities offered an alternative form of communication for aid agencies in need of cell phone systems: CDMA phones that could be purchased from the government for US$1,500 per unit.

An Indonesian aid worker I met in the delta, who had worked in Aceh after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, told me he was trying hard to see things from the perspective of the ruling generals. “I have to understand them if I’m going to work here,” he explained. “Their thinking, as I have processed it, goes like this: My child is sick and my neighbor comes along with some large and shiny apples. These apples are maybe imported fruit or some such thing, and they are better than any apples I could ever give my child. So I feel bad because I cannot provide for my child as well as my neighbor can. I don’t want my child to know this, so I prevent my neighbor from giving my child the apples. This is how I think the generals are thinking now—they didn’t want us to help at first because they thought the apples we would bring in would be so much better than theirs.”

In the sticky heat of the moment I thought there could be some wisdom to this theory; while Than Shwe might have Granny Smith and Golden Delicious apples flown in for his own fruit basket, he probably wouldn’t want farmers in the delta getting a taste for imported fruits. Perhaps the regime closed off access to the delta to prevent itself from being seen as the governmental equivalent of a bad parent in the eyes of its people.

I later tried out the theory on a Burmese friend, who snorted with derision. “And what if your child is not just sick?” he asked. “What if your child is drowning in the river and you don’t know how to swim? If your neighbor knows how to swim, or has an inner tube that he can throw to your child, don’t you think you would
want
him to help?”

Indeed, even when taking into account the regime’s ruthlessness, I found it difficult to understand its cruel negligence after the cyclone. The most convincing explanation I had heard was that the regime was driven by fear and self-protection. The generals live in a rarified atmosphere; the very air they breathe is clouded with paranoia and the ground they walk upon is riddled with the fault lines of treachery. The thought of hordes of Western aid workers with their airy-fairy ideals of democracy and equality pouring into the country and running around remote and hard-to-police areas must have been anathema to them. With the September marches still fresh in everyone’s minds and commodity prices on the rise again, they would have been especially wary of taking any steps that might compromise their control.

The regime’s reluctance to open its doors may have been further exacerbated by the foreign navy ships waiting offshore; the threat of invasion could have looked very real to a pariah dictatorship sitting in the isolated splendor of its fortified capital. Under such conditions it was unlikely that the generals would acquiesce to allowing large numbers of foreigners into the country. To Than Shwe, U.S. troops were potentially hostile. The day before the cyclone struck, President George Bush had imposed more U.S. sanctions against Burma and stated that he was committed to helping the people of Burma “free themselves from the regime’s tyranny.”

Almost all the top generals were old enough to remember previous invading forces—the British in colonial times, the Japanese during World War II, and the Kuomintang incursion from China in the 1950s. While the junta views itself as the only mechanism able to hold the country together in times of crisis, its rhetoric also emphasizes the maintenance of national sovereignty at any cost. The Three Main National Causes, printed in the frontispieces of books and on billboards throughout the country, are:

A Burmese friend, who had been helping a company owned by the son of a top-ranking general to organize an aid operation in the delta, managed to glean some direct insight into the regime’s perspective. The general’s son explained that his father and fellow generals had been deeply concerned by the fact that Western governments chose to send naval ships to Burma. He said that they had prevented aid from entering the country because they were afraid that foreign aid personnel and troops would use the relief mission as a cover to invade Burma and overthrow the junta.

Another theory came from Mi Lwin, the editor I visited back in May, who interpreted the international community’s efforts to reason with the generals as a carrot (Ban Ki-moon) and stick (ships) approach. “I think this is something very ancient,” he said. “It is like we are returning to the time of the old, old kings. Our senior general is the king and the people are his subjects or slaves. The king does not consider it his role to look after the condition of his slaves—they are only slaves, and he has so many of them that their death or hardship is not his concern.”

The self-protection could also have been purely personal. The amateur astrologer whose hobby was to run Than Shwe’s birth date through his computer and calculate the ruler’s astrological forecast had noticed early on that 2008 was going to be an extremely bad year for the senior general. It was written in the stars that the general would be faced with many challenges and threats to his rule throughout the year. As a result, the astrologer reasoned, the superstitious general was doing everything possible to protect himself—from black magic rituals conducted by his wife at Burma’s most holy Buddhist shrine to locking down the country in its hour of greatest need.