Myanmar Junta Begins Evicting Cyclone Victims from Shelters

June 7, 2008

Myanmar Junta Begins Evicting Cyclone Victims From Shelters

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

LABUTTA, Myanmar — Within a week of the storm that flooded the delta here last month with waves as high as 20 feet, the monasteries in this village were swarming with 14,000 people who had lost their families, homes and livelihoods.

Now those refugees are all but gone.

A week ago, Myanmar’s state-run media were comparing the visits of the junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, to government-run refugee camps, like the neat rows of blue tents outside Labutta, to “parents’ loving kindness and good will toward their offspring.” The junta promised the United Nations that tight restrictions on aid workers — which were worsening the effects of a storm that left 134,000 dead or missing — would be eased.

But a visit to villages here in the Irrawaddy Delta, hit hardest by the May 3 cyclone, suggests that the reality has been different — and that the story of the death and destruction, compounded by the junta’s actions, has been neither fully told nor even fully seen.

Even as the junta publicly praised its own largess, it more quietly began evicting destitute families from monasteries and sending them back to their villages for “reconstruction” and a life of isolation. It then began shutting down its own refugee camps.

“We had 2,000 people here, but three days ago, the immigration people came and took them all away,” Batdan Na Thartha Na, the senior monk at Yilakana Kyaik Htkee Yoe monastery, said Sunday.

In recent days, a Myanmar Navy ship with a belching smokestack was busy plying channels carrying refugees back to their homes. The police made daily rounds of Labutta’s monasteries to make sure no refugees were still being harbored there.

“We will definitely return to our village because that’s where our home is,” said Soe Paing Oo, a 25-year-old rice farmer, who had promised the local authorities that he would leave a Labutta monastery on Tuesday. “But we are afraid to go home this early because we have nothing left there and don’t have enough to rebuild our life.”

Forcing the survivors to move deep back into the sprawling delta will further stymie aid groups that have been obstructed by the junta from reaching victims and sending in disaster experts and vital supplies. The United Nations said this week that at least 1.1 million survivors still lacked sufficient food and clean water.

And despite promises from General Than Shwe to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, aid groups were still being required to apply for travel permits at least 48 hours before any trip to the delta. So far, only a few have been granted; in some cases, aid workers can visit delta villages only with government escorts.

Interviews with survivors there continue, still a month later, to reveal how the combination of weather, topography and a government determined to keep its people isolated and ignorant of their rights turned the cyclone, Nargis, into the world’s deadliest natural disaster since the Asian tsunami in 2004.

There are no hills in this part of the delta, so when the cyclone churned up high waves, people fled to the sturdiest buildings they could find, usually schools and monasteries.

In the village of Hluasa, an hour downstream from here in the Irrawaddy Delta, the refuge was a school. But when the May 3 storm surged into it, the walls and roof toppled. All 260 people inside drowned. In all, 800 of the village’s 1,900 people perished, villagers said.

At Ayadaw, a village an hour farther downstream toward the sea, people remember waves coming with such force that water broke up through the ground and spouted under their feet like geysers. There, 193 people died in a school when its roof collapsed.

“In the dark, people were shouting for help everywhere,” said Aung Myaing Oo, a 32-year-old Burmese member of the international aid group ADRA who was helping build a jetty at Ayadaw when the storm hit.

He was one of only seven people who escaped from the school alive.

Now, bodies still lie uncollected among palm trees on the muddy embankments along the channels. Boat passengers first detect their presence by the stench.

Villagers around here live without roads, cars, electricity or telephones. Their only links to one another and to the rest of the country are paddle boats or diesel-powered boats with propellers at the end of long shafts. The area is so low and flat that the land rarely rises more than six feet above sea level. When the cyclone struck, there was no higher ground to run to.

Although Labutta is less than 125 miles from Yangon, Myanmar’s main commercial city, it takes more than 10 hours to get there by car. The narrow, potholed road is littered with trucks stuck in mud or hobbled by broken shock absorbers.

On a recent trip from Labutta to Yangon, the aging bus was so crowded that people sat on wooden benches in its aisle. When the bus broke down, passengers waited for hours in silence, swatting at mosquitoes as body heat turned the vehicle into a caldron. No one voiced a complaint.

“We Burmese don’t know how to complain,” whispered one of the passengers, a 32-year-old construction material salesman. “We don’t even know that the government has a duty to protect its people.

“The generals think that if they built new roads and made it easy to travel, all those villagers might start crawling out and complaining,” he added.

The villagers here seldom volunteered any criticism of the government. They seemed to accept the death and suffering around them as their fate, rather than as a disaster whose impact might have been lessened by a more responsive government.

Recently, the government gave the people of Hluasa 32 power tillers. But given high fuel prices, the people prefer water buffaloes, and all 2,000 of their water buffaloes were killed in the storm.

At Kansu, a village east of Labutta that lost 821 people to the cyclone, a monk decided that he could no longer wait for government assistance that never came.

He traveled to Yangon a week ago and, with the help of fellow monks, began raising money to buy food, clothing, buckets and sheets of plastic roofing. He also needed pumps and generators to clean the village’s salt- and silt-contaminated reservoirs of rainwater, a crucial source of drinking and irrigation water here.

“I have a crowd of parentless children in my monastery, and I want to start a school for them,” said the soft-spoken monk, checking a long to-do list. “The government says everything is O.K. now. But when it’s raining and you don’t have a roof for your family, and when you have children in your village who have lost their parents and can hardly grasp what’s happened to them, it’s not O.K.”

U.N. Asks for Prison Inquiry

GENEVA (AP) — Myanmar should investigate reports that inmates were shot to death in a Yangon prison as a cyclone ravaged the country last month, a United Nations human rights expert said Friday.

Tomas Ojea Quintana, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s new investigator for Myanmar, said security forces apparently opened fire after prisoners at Insein prison panicked when zinc roofs were blown off during the May 3 cyclone.

Tate Naing of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), an exile organization based in Thailand, put the prisoner death toll at 40, based on several reports the group received about the shooting.

Myanmar’s government rejected the accusations.

“No one was killed or injured during the event,” said Wunna Maung Lwin, Myanmar’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. “The prison security, as well as the police and the military, had not in any circumstances used arms against the prisoners.”