It was hard to know what had triggered this belated and clumsy attempt at public relations. It may have been that the Chinese government provided a helpful lesson after being widely praised in the international media for its fast and efficient work in assisting victims of the Sichuan earthquake that struck on May 12, shortly after Cyclone Nargis hit Burma. One week after the earthquake a three-day period of mourning was declared in China, and the flag was flown at half-mast in memory of the tens of thousands who had been killed. The very next day the Burmese government copied the gesture by lowering flags and announcing its own three days of mourning.
I followed the Than Shwe Disaster Tour in the
New Light of Myanmar
as it unfolded across the delta throughout the rest of the week. At each stop Than Shwe provided what the newspaper referred to as “necessary guidance” for the government’s rehabilitation plans. He met the minister who had been put in charge of each delta township and inspected repair work conducted by selected companies known to be cronies of the regime. When Than Shwe arrived in Kunyangon, a township south of Rangoon, the minister for energy, Brigadier General Lun Thi, briefed him on the progress being made and listed the hospitals, schools, and government buildings already being repaired (courtesy of Asia World Co.). Farther along in the delta, at Pyapon, the senior general was briefed by the minister for hotels and tourism, Major General Soe Naing, and listened to similar tales of progress and reconstruction (courtesy of Dagon International Ltd. and Yuzana Co., among others). It didn’t matter where Than Shwe went in the delta, the script was always the same, and the model camps looked identical.
As I read the papers each day, I found little in the repetitive coverage that looked like anything other than theatrical performance. Nothing about the senior general’s tour had the ring of truth. The tents in the camps were too well appointed and the survivors too well dressed. There was none of the deprivation I had seen in Chit Swe’s film, and I was quite sure that the route the general had traveled had been cleared of any remaining corpses or people begging along the roadside. This may go some way toward explaining Than Shwe’s extended absence after such a cataclysmic natural disaster. He couldn’t have gone to the delta any earlier because the authorities there had been unprepared for a visit from the country’s leader; in the widespread havoc caused by Nargis, it took some time to make things presentable by erecting the necessary stage set and casting the required background actors.
Urgently Needed: Fifty families (preferably with young children) and fifty tents (preferably new and matching) for one-week tour of the Ir rawaddy Delta.
THE MONSOONS ARRIVED
early in Burma, and by mid-May it was raining heavily every day. The storms were sudden and incredibly heavy. Umbrellas buckled under the daily downpours, and the roads of downtown Rangoon were transformed into dark, sludgy canals. Some parts of the city remained persistently flooded, and stones or planks were placed in areas where the water was too deep to wade through or too wide to jump across. Even when it wasn’t raining, water dripped incessantly off the plants and the eaves around the house where I was staying. Inside, the air took on the heat and humidity of a greenhouse. The moisture in the atmosphere seeped into everything; the sheets on my bed felt slightly damp and the pages of my notebooks curled up at the corners.
One afternoon I was caught in a rainstorm while walking along Maha Bandula Garden Street in downtown Rangoon. The rain came down in such thick torrents that I could barely see across the narrow street and had to duck into a shop for cover. The shop was a general store on the ground floor of a colonial-era shop-house with its front wall open to the street. A single fluorescent bulb dangled from the cobweb-strewn ceiling and shed a sickly light across the interior of the shop and the goods for sale—mosquito coils, packets of roasted nuts, plastic combs. The proprietor sat in the back, obscured by shadows and engrossed in animated conversation with two other men. Though the men sat close together they had to shout to hear one another above the roar of the storm. When I heard them mentioning the now familiar names of Dedaye, Bogale, and Pyinzalu, I knew they were talking about Nargis. I had rarely heard these delta townships spoken of before the cyclone, but the names now had a horrible resonance, evoking images of desolation and death.
From my perch on a low wooden stool at the entrance to the shop, I gazed at the solid wall of water gushing down. The street beyond emerged in fleeting snapshots whenever the rain eased momentarily. A car drove at walking pace down the street, the top of its tires only just visible above the flood. A group of drenched pedestrians who had given up even the pretense of trying to stay dry waded through the murky water as if they were fording a river. Mostly, though, the streets were deserted, as the rain had driven everyone indoors.
Not long after I sat down the shopkeeper came over to me and, yelling above the noise of the storm, asked where I was from. When he heard I was American, he expressed surprise that I had been allowed into the country at a time like this and hurried to the back of the shop to fetch a digital camera, which he handed to me excitedly. The photograph showing in the display panel was of a human corpse lying facedown in a paddy field.
The man told me that he and his friends had been to Kunyangon to hand out rice and cooking oil to cyclone survivors. Pointing at the photograph, he said simply, “The dead are still waiting for peace.”
I asked about the living. The shopkeeper grabbed his camera back and clicked through an alarming number of dead-body photographs before coming to a picture that showed crowds of people squatting down on either side of a dirt road, holding their hands up toward the camera. “They have nothing. They have no money. They have no shirts. No shoes. Nothing. And there is no help for them. I saw no officials there to assist them. With nothing, how will they survive?” I thought it was a rhetorical question, but the shopkeeper seemed to be waiting for an answer. I couldn’t think of a reassuring response; it didn’t seem possible that people who had nothing left could survive without help. We sat in silence for a few moments and listened to the rain.
Photographs of dead bodies had become common in the city. Everyone I met who had been to the delta returned with at least one image of a corpse, if not many. When I was watching footage of the delta with Chit Swe and his fellow businessmen who had taken aid down there, they often paused the film on particularly gory images so that we could all take a good leisurely look. There was the body of a child protruding from beneath a dead buffalo; the toddler’s tiny feet made the beast on top of it seem abnormally large. There were arms and legs emerging from piles of rubble that had been twisted into impossible positions and corpses in various stages of decomposition. And there was one particular image that had generated much curiosity: The camera had captured the intact skin of a human hand, complete with fingernails, lying on the riverbank. After some discussion as to how the skin could become detached from flesh and bone, we eventually concluded that bodies floating for long periods in the river become soaked with water, and the saturated skin must somehow loosen, thereby enabling the encasing of a human hand to slip off and end up on a riverbank, like a discarded glove.
At first, I found these images and conversations deeply unsettling. But within just a week or so of arriving in Rangoon, I had seen so many pictures of dead bodies that it was hard to acknowledge each one for the individual tragedy it represented; a father who had left behind a wife and children or a child whose parents might be praying their firstborn would still be found alive. I was disturbed to notice that I became quite comfortable discussing the details of human decay. I easily flicked through photographs of dead people in the same way I might politely look through an album of someone’s holiday snapshots, asking questions and feigning interest but hoping there wouldn’t be too many more. Most of my friends in Rangoon felt the same; it was a necessary coping mechanism for processing the relentless horror of the images we looked at each day. And there would be no shortage of dead-body photographs for some time to come. By May 13, just over ten days after the storm, the official death toll had risen to more than 31,900, with a further 29,700 missing. There was little doubt in anyone’s minds that the numbers would continue to escalate.
Bootleg DVDs featuring the destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis were available at streetside stalls and at traffic intersections, where boys walked between the vehicles parked at red lights and held the covers up for viewing. Most of the DVDs had simple titles, sometimes written in English (
Cyclone Nargis
,
Nargis
,
Nargis Storm
), though I came across one DVD poetically entitled
Gone with the Wind
. The DVDs were poorly packaged, wrapped in cheap color photocopies of photographs taken in the delta. Almost all the cover shots featured a corpse or two, a sort of gruesome teaser for the dead-body pornography on sale.
There was no voice-over or commentary on the DVDs, and they were often little more than compilations of mismatched footage. Most were filmed from boats sailing through the delta and depicted an unrelentingly miserable vista of broken homes and floating corpses. Riddled with waterways, the delta is a low and featureless terrain, and watching these films often felt repetitive:
Haven’t we been down this creek already? Wasn’t that the dead body that was floating in the bend of the river the boat passed earlier?
The amateur footage was filmed anonymously, probably by people who had taken donations down to survivors. There was also aerial footage that must have been taken by cameramen working for the regime who were allowed onto military helicopters and had later decided to leak their material.
With all other media in the country vetted meticulously, these DVDs were a welcome if dismal dose of reality. There are few other ways for people to get information that hasn’t first passed the censors. Many people listen to Burmese-language news broadcasts from radio channels such as the BBC and Voice of America and, in urban areas like Rangoon where there is access to the Internet, people can go to Internet cafés and use specially installed software to get past the regime’s firewalls and blocks on news channels. Still, at a time when few reliable reports were emerging from the delta, nothing quite matched the visceral visual content of the DVDs, and the films served an important function by documenting the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis and capturing an uncensored record of the full extent of the damage it had caused.
But it turned out that the DVDs were only available for a limited period of time. One day in mid-May state media announced that foreign news agencies and local “destructive elements” were trying to manipulate public opinion by broadcasting false information. It was an oblique warning, but it was enough; the very next day the DVDs were gone. The boys who sold them at traffic intersections went back to selling garlands of flowers or cigarettes. I went to the movie vendor on a busy market street where I had previously bought copies. His stall was still there, but the only DVDs on display were Chinese and Korean soap operas with Burmese subtitles. I asked if he had any Nargis DVDs left. “DVDs of Nargis?” he asked, laughing loudly. “There are no such things.”
It was not at all unusual for the authorities to clamp down on these informally made films. The regime has always had an intense dislike of news outlets it cannot control. During times of political tension when events in Burma make international headlines, warnings are posted in the newspapers ordering people not to believe foreign news sources and not to listen to foreign radio channels that produce what the writers of regime propaganda refer to as a “skyful of lies.”
Yet the regime’s attempt to cover up the destruction wreaked by Cyclone Nargis was counterproductive. The initial images were a chronicle of nature’s fury, not of the regime’s misrule or brutality. By banning them and preventing the local press from running photographs deemed to be negative, the authorities were handling the disaster as if it was something that needed to be hidden from public view. As a result of this secrecy, the contraband images had taken on a different attribute; images of people killed by a natural disaster became atrocity pictures used as evidence to portray the callous neglect of an already vilified re gime.
People were afraid that the decaying corpses could spread disease. This is apparently a common and enduring myth in the aftermath of large-scale disasters; though people using water sources contaminated by corpses can contract gastroenteritis, it is generally acknowledged by emergency experts that bodies, especially those killed by sudden trauma, do not cause cholera or typhoid epidemics. The greater concern is the psychological toll for survivors who must live in close proximity to the dead.
There was no widespread, concerted effort by the authorities to collect the corpses or to try to identify them. When a brigadier general was asked what should be done with all the bodies, he allegedly replied that there was no need to do anything: “The fish can eat them,” he said.
Back in the store, the shopkeeper who was sitting next to me told me that he did not believe the generals could be real human beings. “How can they witness such suffering and be indifferent to it?” he demanded. His friends had joined us at the front of the shop, and one of them said, “You’re right, brother. They are not human. They are devils. Only devils can ignore suffering so great.”
The rain continued to pour down, and I had to raise my voice to ask them what they thought about the U.S. government’s recent offer to send Navy ships to provide assistance. They were enthusiastic about the idea, and they all agreed that it would even be a good thing if the United States were to invade. Though it was a frequently expressed opinion, I was always slightly incredulous that people would welcome the idea of foreign troops in Burma. “Do you
really
want to be invaded by U.S. soldiers?” I asked. “Surely you don’t want Burma to become like Iraq is now. . . .”