BANGKOK — Myanmar's military regime has seized two planeloads of relief supplies and ordered a third planeload to leave, throwing into chaos the international effort to help the 1.5 million homeless victims of cyclone Nargis.
The United Nations briefly suspended its aid shipments to Myanmar after the military confiscated the emergency food supplies from two UN planes that landed at Rangoon airport and turned back a third. The restrictions were “unacceptable,” a UN official said.
Among the seized supplies were 38 tonnes of high-energy biscuits, enough to provide emergency rations for 95,000 people.
Later, the UN said it would resume its aid flights to Myanmar Saturday, while negotiating for the release of the seized supplies. But relief workers were angered that the military junta was delaying food and medical aid for the desperate survivors of the cyclone that is believed to have killed more than 100,000 people.
Cyclone-affected residents struggle to salvage their destroyed house in Kungyangon in the outskirts of Rangoon on Thursday. (Khin Maung Win/AFP/Getty Images)
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Myanmar was also continuing to stall on issuing visas to dozens of aid workers, including disaster-response experts, who have been sitting idle in Bangkok as they wait for permission to enter the country. The regime said it would accept foreign supplies but not foreign workers.
One UN spokesman said the delays were “astonishing” and “unprecedented” in the modern history of humanitarian efforts.
While the regime blocks the UN aid shipments, thousands of cyclone survivors are weakening from hunger, thirst and disease, and many are dying. Most are relying on dirty or contaminated water. Fewer than 15 per cent of survivors have received any aid at all, even though almost a week has passed since the cyclone, according to estimates by aid agencies.
“It's outrageous that the regime seized the aid that is meant for the people,” said Soe Aung, spokesman for the National Council of the Union of Burma, a group of exiles based in Bangkok.
“Instead of reaching the people who are in dire need, the aid is sitting on the airport tarmac,” he said. “It's a big shame. This is not the time to be playing politics.”
Myanmar's military junta is seizing relief supplies because it worries that it could lose legitimacy in the eyes of its population if it fails to control the flow of foreign aid, or if the foreign aid workers are more efficient than the military in distributing aid, he said.
“In their mindset, if the international aid workers come in, the regime is afraid of a loss of face. It would make them weak in the eyes of the people.”
The regime has also blocked foreign journalists from entering the country. Even diplomats have found it almost impossible to enter Myanmar in recent days.
The junta has been obsessed with supervising a tightly controlled referendum Saturday to gain approval for a new constitution that would entrench the military's dominance of the country. The referendum has been postponed until May 24 in some of the worst-hit regions of the disaster zone, but the regime has refused to postpone the vote in the rest of the country, despite requests from UN officials, who say the referendum will distract workers who should be focusing on emergency aid efforts. In propaganda messages this week, the regime has urged Myanmar's people to vote in the referendum.
In a statement Friday, the military regime said it wants to distribute all of the aid itself. It has accepted donations from some countries, including China and Thailand, that have allowed the military to handle the distribution of the aid. But the UN says it needs to ensure that its aid is supervised by experienced technicians and experts who have co-ordinated relief efforts in other disaster zones in the past. Without such co-ordination, the aid could be wasted or diverted, it says.
A foreign diplomat in Bangkok said the military junta does not have enough experience or skills to organize a massive aid operation. It has only a handful of the planes and helicopters that are crucial for bringing aid to the survivors. To allow the survivors to suffer or even die, while blocking the flow of foreign aid for political reasons, is “breathtaking” in its cynicism, the diplomat said.
“There is no co-operation at all, and a worsening crisis,” he said. “The regime is just absolutely paranoid, and fully preoccupied with maintaining its grip on power. They're completely indifferent to international criticism.”
Some aid supplies, meanwhile, were arriving in Rangoon Friday, but far fewer than the UN had hoped. Within a few days after the tsunami disaster in Aceh in 2004, it had set up a massive airlift, allowing aid to reach thousands of survivors quickly. This time, it is far behind that pace.
Among the aid supplies to reach Myanmar this week was a shipment of 20,000 body bags from the Red Cross. Thousands of decaying corpses are still lying in flooded fields.
Assessment teams from Unicef, the UN children's fund, reported Friday that the death toll in the Irrawaddy River delta “continues to rise day by day.” It said the unofficial death toll was “far outnumbering the government official figures.”
The Unicef teams also reported that displaced survivors “are currently staying in very congested shelters suffering from lack of clean drinking water and latrines, and some camps already observed an increase in diarrhea.”
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