Without being able to go to the delta, foreign journalists had to rely on secondary sources. A friend from Bangkok, who was in Rangoon filing for a daily in Europe, regularly did the rounds at NGO offices and UN agencies, but she still wasn’t able to gather many concrete answers. I accompanied her one day when she went to meet a spokeswoman for ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian aid office. The European Commission has a small office in the unlikely setting of the Kandawgyi Palace Hotel, a fanciful construction of intricately carved teak roofs set in a small jungle alongside the lake. The offices are located in several hotel guest rooms where the beds have been removed and replaced with office furniture. We were ushered into a guest-room-turned-meeting-room by a spokeswoman who seemed harried and overloaded. “To be quite frank, we haven’t been able to get an overview of the situation and assess what the needs are,” she told us. “It is becoming more and more difficult for our staff to get down to the delta. We have the staff here [in Rangoon]. We have a rapid response coordinator, a water sanitation expert, a doctor, but we can’t get them down there.”
The only way to accumulate information was to collate impressions from, say, a private donor who had traveled to Dedaye, a doctor returning from helping out at a clinic in Myaungmya, or an aid worker who had been able to travel south of Laputta and conduct an informal assessment. “It is like a jigsaw puzzle,” said the ECHO spokeswoman. “We are just trying to put the pieces together.”
Survivors in the delta had been moving away from devastated hamlets and villages and into larger towns, migrating to places where food and shelter might be available. In the towns, people were crowding into monasteries, schools, or camps set up by the Burmese government. There they were being assisted by the local authorities, UN agencies, and NGOs, all trying to provide enough aid for a population that appeared to be growing larger each day.
It was still not possible to accurately gauge how many people were in need of assistance. Infront of Save the Children’s headquarters, I saw a whiteboard that was regularly updated with the latest estimates. Over two weeks after the storm, the following figures were scrawled on the board:
Affected: High 2.5 million—Low 1.5 million
Dead, Missing: High 182,000—Low 60,000
Estimates as to how many people had been reached by then with some kind of assistance averaged out at around one-third of those in need, but I never met anyone who could explain how this fraction was calculated (especially when the variable was as high as one million people) or, indeed, what “reached” actually meant. And I continued to hear that there were areas, particularly in the southernmost parts of the delta, that had not been reached at all—places from which no news had yet been received.
I began to wonder if there was anyone in Burma who had any real idea as to what was happening beyond Rangoon. Everyone, it seemed, was lost in the fog of a mass unknowing.
Everyone, that is, except for the regime.
The authorities churned out statistics that were suspiciously precise. On May 17, the
New Light of Myanmar
ran a small article tucked away at the bottom of page six, entitled “Latest Casualty Figures.” The article listed the official death toll to date, stating that 77,738 people had died, 55,917 people were missing, and 19,359 people had been injured. It was another staggering leap in the official number of casualties; the dead and missing combined now amounted to more than 133,600.
No one seemed to know how these figures were being sourced. A Burmese researcher, who was experienced at sifting through dubious government sources in search of concrete information, explained that the numbers were probably an estimate drawn from existing government population figures for each village and township that had been in the path of the cyclone. As the last census was conducted in 1983, the numbers were out-of-date and the resulting figure was likely to be grossly inaccurate.
A few days later, diplomats and aid agency representatives were invited to a presentation on the government’s relief and rehabilitation program. They were told that 76.28 percent of telephone lines had been restored in Rangoon and that running water was now being supplied to 98.5 percent of the municipal area. The authorities had also put together a PowerPoint presentation detailing losses incurred due to the cyclone and cataloging with remarkable precision the number of farm animals killed (the casualties reportedly included 136,804 buffalo and 1,250,194 chickens).
Though these numbers may have been estimates based on farm animals registered before the cyclone, they were obviously fictitious—no one could have possibly been around the entire delta counting and confirming the death of each missing chicken. While the rest of us patched together disparate eyewitness reports and scrambled around after intangible facts, the generals were producing solid answers. The image they were trying to portray seemed to be one of omniscience and supreme power: The regime knows
everything
, even that which is, ultimately, unknowable.
OUT ON THE ANDAMAN SEA
, not far off the coast of Burma, the warships were gathering. The U.S. government had mobilized four ships from the USS
Essex
Amphibious Ready Group that had been in the region for Cobra Gold joint task force exercises with the Thai military. Since May 13, these huge vessels had been positioned offshore in preparation to assist the relief effort. Though they were there on a humanitarian mission, they were equipped for combat. One of the ships, the USS
Mustin
, was a guided missile destroyer. According to a Navy press release, the fleet boasted four amphibious landing craft that could operate in areas inaccessible by road, twenty-two helicopters, and more than five thousand U.S. military personnel.
England and France had also redirected craft toward Burma. England had sent the British frigate HMS
Westminster
, and France was moving the amphibious assault ship the
Mistral
. Moored in international waters, this impressive fleet of ships was not visible from land, but there could be little doubt that they were out there. The U.S. Navy released photographs of exercises being conducted on the Andaman Sea. One photo showed a Seahawk helicopter, part of the Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 25, transporting pallets of supplies between ships. In another photo, a landing craft shot out from the well deck of the USS
Harpers Ferry
in a burst of sea spray.
From the perspective of Burma’s ruling generals, the display of benevolent force assumed a somewhat less benevolent air in light of debates taking place in the international arena. Though France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, had not been able to convince the UN Security Council to adopt the responsibility to protect principle and deliver aid to Burma by force, the idea lingered in mainstream debate. The responsibility to protect was reduced to a jaunty acronym, R2P, which seemed somehow out of sync with the enormity of the action itself. “Is It Time to Invade Burma?” asked an article in
Time
magazine. A former United Nations emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, was quoted in the piece as saying, “We’re in 2008, not 1908. A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent.”
Egeland went on to recommend options other than armed force, such as freezing the assets of the generals and issuing warrants for their arrest that would come into effect if they left Burma. But the bellicose tone of Kouchner’s initial call for a moral crusade that would storm the shores of Burma and rescue the people from their own government continued to resonate.
The possibility that an invasion could be imminent took hold in Rangoon. In addition to the tea shop chatter about the pros and cons of such an eventuality, a leaflet circulated advising people what to do if they encountered enemy forces. Beneath a picture of a tank with civilians standing nearby was a large red X and a caption that read, “Do Not Go Near.” In the next picture the figures were standing at a safe distance from the tank, and beneath them was a blue check mark with the caption, “Stay Far Away.” This commonsense message was probably borrowed from old combat pamphlets but was now being sent around anonymously.
The barely contained sense of panic that was ever present in Rangoon during the first few weeks following the storm was rising. As I was leaving the house of a Burmese friend one afternoon, an elderly man approached me. A dirty bandage was wrapped around a wound on his arm, and he looked disoriented, lurching around as if he had forgotten how to walk. He reached his wounded arm toward me and croaked, “Nargis! Nargis!” My friend stepped between us and shooed him away angrily. “He’s not real,” she said in quirky English. “You must not trust anyone in these days.”
There were reports of looting, murder, and violence. A man killed a noodle vendor who made
monhinga
, the popular Burmese noodle soup, for the thin gold chain around her neck. To protect against looters, a friend’s family buried what valuables they had in their garden and armed themselves with machetes. In Hlaingtharya, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, a group of women stabbed a township officer with their kitchen knives when he tried to stop donors from handing out food. At Pyapon in the delta, a laborer who was helping to unload donations off a truck was trampled to death by a hungry mob. In some parts of the delta, donors were afraid to stop their cars for fear of being attacked, so they were throwing food and donations out of the car windows.
It was thought that mass riots would break out soon as tempers rose toward a boiling point. Driving past the Ministry of Mines one afternoon, I noticed truckloads of the dreaded
Lon-Htein
riot police parked in the compound, in readiness for any upheavals on the streets.
Back at the house, I took to double-checking the locks each night. Sometimes I would get up in the middle of the night to make sure the catches on the windows had been secured. I wasn’t afraid of anything specific; it was more a vague foreboding that lurked just beyond the reaches of my comprehension. “Don’t you think something is going to explode soon?” asked an American expatriate friend who had lived in Rangoon for some years. “I can’t sleep at night because I lie in bed waiting for it to happen.”
My friend was right. The violence, the pamphlets, the ships moored out on the Andaman Sea, it all seemed to add to an inescapable feeling that something was about to happen. It was like the high pressure that builds up in the atmosphere before a monsoon storm, when the air becomes too thick to breathe and everyone waits impatiently for the first drops of rain to alleviate the tension. People in the city were over-excitable and agitated, myself included; we were talking too fast and fidgeting compulsively as we waited for the storm to break above our heads.
MIRACULOUS STORIES OF SURVIVAL
had begun to circulate within the city. I heard them from Burmese friends who had been to the delta and spoken with survivors there. The stories were often apocryphal. They were distorted from being passed through so many mouths and ears and had acquired additional embellishments with each retelling. Amid all the tales of death and despair, these survival stories offered brief moments of respite; for the duration of the telling it was almost possible to believe that all was right with the world and that happy endings could exist. Take, for example, the story about how one young boy survived the cyclone (retold here with my own writerly embellishments).
There was a boy who was swept away on the storm surge caused by Cyclone Nargis. Though the boy knew how to swim, the water was too strong, and each wave carried hard objects that knocked against him and threatened to push him under. One huge wave flung the boy against a tree. At the moment of impact he reached out his arms and grabbed on to the trunk. In the darkness, he could feel the ridged markings of a palm tree, and he held on as tightly as he could. Because it was so dark, the boy was not able to see anything around him, and all he could do was listen. Above the roar of the storm, he heard the sounds of catastrophe: a glass-shattering scream, a faraway voice calling out the name “Ma Pyu! Ma Pyu!,” the unforgiving crack of wood against wood. Though the young boy could not see what was happening, he could feel the enormity of it, and he could sense that his entire life and the world as he knew it was being uprooted and washed away.
And then the boy heard a dreadful wrenching noise that sounded as if it had come from the very center of the earth. The next thing he knew, he was hurtling through the black waters. The palm tree had snapped against the force of the wind and waves, and the boy had nothing left to hold on to. The churning water spun his body in every possible direction; his arms and legs flailed around him like those of a marionette. He was swallowing water; the water was gritty with sand and the remnants of people’s lives, and it scratched at his throat.
Then, just at the moment when the boy’s body seemed too tired and too twisted to struggle yet again for the surface, a log rose up from the depths beneath him. He wrapped his arms around the gnarled trunk and gulped in air. At that point he didn’t know if there was even any reason to hold on anymore, but the log was strong and sturdy, so he kept clinging to it. Hours passed. The winds died down and the water became calm and shallow. Though it was still dark, he could see the silhouettes of trees, charcoal black, sticking out of the water. The loudness of the storm had given way to a heavy silence that hovered just beyond the gentle sound of water lapping against the boy and the log as they drifted through the deluged forest.
The sky was beginning to lighten with the dawn when the boy found himself rolling off the log. He lay still for a moment, unsure what to do. When he realized that he was lying on dry land, he cautiously stretched out his stiff arms and legs and felt the reassuring immobility of the ground. He worked his aching body into an upright position and glanced over at the log that had saved his life. In the milky morning light, he saw that the log had four squat legs and was walking with the crouched gait of a crocodile. As the boy rubbed the grit out of his eyes, the log slipped back into the water and swam away.