BANGKOK — Fighting erupted among starving survivors of the Myanmar cyclone Wednesday as the military junta continued to prevent relief workers from entering the country after a disaster that killed as many as 100,000 people.
Aid agencies said they are facing an almost unprecedented situation: a massive catastrophe in a country whose government is blocking any visits by the relief experts who could assess how to tackle the disaster.
Desperate survivors, facing serious shortages of food and water, fought with each other and broke into shops in an attempt to find food. “Our assessment teams witnessed general mayhem,” said Paul Risley, spokesman for the World Food Programme, the food agency of the United Nations.
“They said there was civil unrest. People were smashing what was left of the shops to look for food in storerooms.”
Bangladeshi soldiers prepare to fly out aid for Myanmar from Kurmitola air base in Dhaka on Wednesday. (AFP/Getty Images)
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The official casualty toll remained at more than 22,000 dead and 42,000 missing, but several sources said yesterday that the number could rise to 100,000 dead – a grim prospect that was also raised by Shari Villarosa, the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Myanmar, in a conference call with reporters in Washington.
Another 1.5 million people were left homeless by the disaster, and about 24 million are without electricity and running water, according to UN officials and Western diplomats.
United Nations workers said they were stunned by the junta's refusal yesterday to allow UN experts to enter the country. “This was a real shock,” Mr. Risley said.
About 40 experts and technicians from UN relief agencies, along with dozens of private aid workers, were forced to sit and wait for another day in neighbouring Thailand, five days after the cyclone smashed into Myanmar's major rice-producing region.
“They're basically all on standby,” Mr. Risley said. “There's a lot of frustration here. We have no visas. These are all experienced disaster-response experts and technicians who are vitally needed. They have saved lives in other cyclones and disasters in the past.”
He said the military regime had promised to issue visas to the relief workers so they could enter Myanmar today, but it offered no explanation for the delays.
“This is just completely unacceptable,” one Western official in Bangkok said. “The structures that the regime has put in place are all about maintaining its grip on power.”
France called on the UN Security Council to force the junta to allow international aid to be delivered under the concept of “responsibility to protect,” used in cases where a state fails in its duties toward its population.
“We are trying to see at the United Nations if we can use this responsibility to protect for there to be a resolution that imposes the passage [of aid] to the Myanmar government,” said Bernard Kouchner, a former humanitarian worker who helped found the charity Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
France also ordered two navy vessels to be ready to head to Myanmar to aid in the relief efforts, but other countries opposed its efforts to get a Security Council briefing on the disaster.
The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, urged the Myanmar regime to allow foreign aid workers into the country. “Given the magnitude of this disaster, the Secretary-General urges the government of Myanmar to respond to the outpouring of international support and solidarity by facilitating the arrival of aid workers, and the clearance of relief supplies in every way possible,” the UN said in a statement yesterday.
Amnesty International said it was worried by the delays in allowing foreign aid workers to enter Myanmar. “Government red tape in providing visas is costing lives, while some donors are delaying aid in the fear that it will be siphoned off to the army,” Benjamin Zawacki, Amnesty International's Myanmar researcher, said in a statement yesterday.
The military regime has been reluctant to allow international aid agencies to operate freely in Myanmar, preferring to keep full military control of the distribution of relief supplies. A key test will come today when the first three planeloads of WFP relief supplies are scheduled to land at Rangoon airport. The critical question is whether the military allows the aid supplies to be loaded into WFP vehicles, or whether it puts the supplies into military vehicles to be controlled by the military, Mr. Risley said.
Within Myanmar, there is mounting anger at the continuing delays in providing aid to the survivors of the cyclone. “Even in Rangoon, the relief effort is not yet under way,” said Aung Zaw, an exile from Myanmar who is editor of Irrawaddy, a magazine based in Thailand with close contacts in Myanmar.
“People are very angry with the slow response by the military and the lack of proper advance warning of the cyclone,” he said. “There is so much bureaucracy and red tape, and the regime is always hostile to international aid agencies. The soldiers were so active in suppressing the monks who protested last year, but there are they now? They've all disappeared.”
The full scale of the tragedy is still emerging. About 5,000 square kilometres of the Irrawaddy River delta is still submerged in water, and there is no chance of it draining soon, according to one analyst. The rainy season, which begins in about two weeks, could prolong the flooding and trigger mud slides or other disasters in the same region, the analyst said.
Long-term food shortages are likely. The Irrawaddy River delta is Myanmar's main rice-producing region, but the cyclone destroyed the latest rice crop in the field before it could be harvested. The cyclone inflicted so much devastation that the next rice crop is unlikely to be planted in time. And Myanmar's own stockpiles of rice are almost gone because the regime exported the rice to take advantage of high prices this year, the analyst said. It's a “triple whammy” for the country's rice farmers and consumers, he said.
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