The devastation caused by the 120 mph winds of Cyclone Nargis is bad enough with maybe 60,000 people killed or missing in the low-lying Irrawaddy Delta which took the main force of the storm and 12-foot tidal wave. It is, however, being compounded tragically by the reaction of Myanmar’s ruling military junta.
The international community was yesterday poised to send all the aid and support it could to the stricken region but UN officials along with NGO disaster response teams, barely concealing their despair, were reporting immense difficulties in obtaining visas to enter this secretive and paranoid country. This despite official pronouncements that international aid was needed and would be facilitated.
A catastrophe on this scale demands normal political prejudices should be put aside for the sake of bringing relief rapidly to where it is needed. Yet Myanmar’s generals in the hours after the cyclone struck seemed paralyzed by indecision. The armed forces that the government has always presented as the guardians of the civil population against malign influences, both internal and external, seemed incapable of mounting an immediate response to the disaster. Indeed apart from hopelessly optimistic early estimates of the low numbers of dead, the government’s only other announcement was that the constitutional referendum scheduled for this Saturday would still go ahead.
This grievous distortion of priorities does not bode well for the success of domestic and international relief operations in coming days. It also exposes the deeply unpopular junta to further anger from the people of Myanmar, who will rightly draw comparisons between the pathetic first response of the military to the cyclone and the speed with which Yangon’s streets were flooded with troops during last year’s peaceful protests by thousands of demonstrators led by Buddhist monks.
The generals probably rightly anticipate that if the international community is allowed to bring succor to the victims of Cyclone Nargis, it will further undermine their standing. However, this is a time when the government’s self-regard must take second place to the needs of its people. If only the junta had been competent enough to respond rapidly to the calamity and then seek international aid, it might have turned the cataclysm to its advantage. Currently under half-hearted international sanctions for its violent 1990 suppression of democracy and the house arrest of opposition leader and Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for 12 of the last 18 years, it had the opportunity to present both a helpless but brave face to the outside world. It might have won outside support and sympathy as it confronted the enormous challenges of the disaster.
Instead it presents the unedifying spectacle of petty bureaucracy and evident paranoia as it grapples with the issuance of visas to outside agencies which want only to come and help the survivors overcome the imminent dangers of exposure, disease and starvation, The junta may yet retrieve some self-respect in the coming days but it clearly lacked both the resources and imagination to take advantage of the initial opportunity, at the expense most significantly of its own long-suffering people.
