+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Myanmar Rulers Still Impeding Access
The Way We Live Now
Monks Succeed in Cyclone Relief as Junta Falters
Aid groups press Myanmar on camp evictions
Cyclone badly injured victims buried alive during the night
More firms 'have ties with Burma'

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Myanmar Rulers Still Impeding Access
NY Times
By SETH MYDANS
June 3, 2008

BANGKOK — One month after a powerful cyclone struck Myanmar and 10 days after the ruling junta’s leader promised full access to the hardest-hit areas, relief agencies said on Monday that they were still having difficulty reaching hundreds of thousands of survivors in urgent need of assistance.

Over the past week, they said, the door has opened slightly and a number of foreign experts have been allowed to travel to the Irrawaddy Delta, which bore the brunt of the May 3 storm. A modest flow of food, medicine and other supplies has begun to enter the delta by truck and barge.

But the agencies said that travel permits for international experts were limited and irregular and that dozens of relief workers remained stranded in the country’s main city, Yangon.

“Several have been able to make essentially day trips to work with our field staff there,” Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program, said. “But access remains a continuing challenge.”

A spokesman for the United Nations disaster relief agency said on Monday that as of two days before, 15 foreign experts representing United Nations agencies were in the delta.

Analysts of Myanmar, formerly Burma, said they feared that the junta was playing a game of hints, promises and deception, which it has used over the years to deflect criticism from abroad.

“In all these crises that the Burmese face, there always is the teaser to take the pressure off the government,” said Josef Silverstein, an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University.

“They seem like they are going to cooperate, and just as soon as comment dies down, anything that is going to be useful dies with it,” he said. “Look back at the ‘saffron revolution,’ when they made all kinds of promises about what they were going to do and nothing happened.”

He was referring to a peaceful uprising, led by monks, that was crushed in September. The junta’s promises included a dialogue with the democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but Myanmar’s rulers dropped the idea after international attention had moved on, and last Tuesday it extended her house arrest for a year.

In Geneva, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, who is leaving her position, said the world’s failure to press Myanmar more strongly on human rights issues made it easier for the junta to keep out cyclone relief.

“The obstruction to the deployment of such assistance illustrates the invidious effects of longstanding international tolerance for human rights violations,” she said.

The United Nations estimates that 2.4 million people were severely affected by the cyclone and said last week that 1.4 million of those remained in desperate need of food, clean water, shelter and medical care. The government says 134,000 people died or are missing.

International relief agencies have complained strenuously that the junta is barring foreign aid and foreign relief workers from the worst-affected areas and that it is endangering survivors.

After a 10-day delay, the junta allowed the first of 10 helicopters from the World Food Program to carry supplies from Yangon into the delta. The other nine were en route to Myanmar, Mr. Risley said.

He also said barges and smaller craft were delivering supplies to hard-hit areas.

The government has allowed American aircraft to land with relief materials but has barred American workers from leaving Yangon Airport to deliver them. It has turned away American, French and British ships loaded with supplies.

Some news reports from Myanmar have said the junta was beginning to force survivors out of shelters and back to the devastated countryside.

According to the independent group Human Rights Watch, thousands of displaced people have been evicted from schools, monasteries and public buildings.

“The forced evictions are part of government efforts to demonstrate that the emergency relief period is over and that the affected population is capable of rebuilding their lives without foreign assistance,” the organization said on Saturday.

Anupama Rao Singh, regional director of Unicef, warned after a visit to the Irrawaddy Delta that any resettlement would be premature, even if it was voluntary.

“Many of the villages remain inundated with water, making it difficult to rebuild,” she said. “There is also a real risk that once they are resettled, they will be invisible to aid workers. Without support and continued service to those affected, there is a risk of a second wave of disease and devastation.”

The government of Myanmar also said it would reopen schools with the start of the new term this week, though many school buildings were destroyed and many teachers were swept to their deaths. Unicef said that more than 4,000 schools serving 1.1 million children were damaged or destroyed by the storm and that more than 100 teachers were killed.

“I think the generals are doing what they do best, taking charge of everything, trying to keep themselves in complete control,” said U Aung Naing Oo, a Burmese political analyst who lives in Thailand.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Way We Live Now
NY Times
Humanitarian Vanities
By DAVID RIEFF
June 1, 2008

Ours is an age in which the responsibility for protecting people when their physical survival is at stake has become an increasingly accepted principle in international relations. It is even enshrined in a United Nations-approved covenant as the “responsibility to protect” — the idea being that a state that engages in criminal behavior toward its own people has forfeited not just its moral but also its legal right to sovereignty.

Once again, in reaction to the government of Myanmar’s initial refusal to welcome cyclone relief from abroad — a decision that France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, described as a potential crime against humanity — a heated debate about protecting citizens from their own governments erupted. Should the Myanmar government have been forced, militarily if necessary, to accept foreign aid and foreign-aid workers? And if not — if pragmatism and respect for state sovereignty preclude such a course — was it really conscionable to stand by knowing that the dictatorship of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, showed few signs of caring about the victims of Cyclone Nargis?

These are urgent questions. Yet it is striking that all the strong talk about the need to intervene immediately in Myanmar did not in fact lead to action of any sort, let alone the kind of radical action activists and some major international political figures like Kouchner considered. Certainly there were practical reasons why nothing was done. The Chinese were opposed and the U.S. military unenthusiastic, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made clear. And in fairness, the responsibility to protect is a new doctrine; it was only adopted at the U.N. World Summit in 2005.

But there is more to the gap between principle and practice than that. If well-intentioned people in the West, and elsewhere, uphold the right to protect, why is it so seldom exercised? The trouble lies not only in power politics but also in the challenge of sustaining popular support for humanitarian missions and in the unintended consequences of acting in unfamiliar ways in unfamiliar places. Given such difficulties, you might ask, do our intervention debates exist on a separate plane, that of symbolic rather than practical politics? Or, to put it somewhat brutally, are we talking about people in desperate need of aid or are we talking about ourselves when we debate such matters?

Perhaps the Myanmar example is anomalous in that it involves a natural disaster and a malefactor government’s acts of omission, not commission. The responsibility to protect was not originally intended to cover catastrophes. Yet the debate differs little from those that have taken place over the man-made disasters of ethnic cleansing and massacre.

Think of Darfur. No international political cause since the campaign against apartheid in South Africa — not Bosnia, not Tibet, not El Salvador — has been as compelling to as many Americans as what, in this country at least, is generally thought to be the genocide going on in western Sudan. Unlike Central America, Darfur is the cause of the political right as well as of the political left, of the Congressional Black Caucus as well as of neoconservatives, of the American Jewish community as well as of Christian evangelicals. In other words, it is much more than the concern of a small elite, as was the case, for example, with pro-interventionist activism on behalf of Bosnia in the early 1990s. (I know; I was part of it.) Indeed, the main activist organization, Save Darfur, can legitimately claim to represent a genuine mass movement.

But the stubborn fact is that despite this extraordinary mobilization, no effective intervention has actually been mounted to prevent the genocide in Darfur. (Again, as the activists see it; some groups, like the French section of Doctors Without Borders, which has been on the ground in the region for many years, deny that genocide properly describes the situation.) Part of the reason is that China opposes such a move, and it is a lot harder for the U.S. in 2008 to go against the wishes of a country that holds so much of its government paper than it was to defy the wishes of a then-weak Russia in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999. But while realpolitik certainly has played a role, the failure to intervene in Darfur cannot be attributed to calculations of power alone.

After the Iraqi debacle, it is hardly surprising that we are hesitant to undertake interventions that may well involve regime change. And regime change — its moral legitimacy and political practicality — is the ghost at the banquet of humanitarian intervention. Use any euphemism you wish, but in the end these interventions have to be about regime change if they are to have any chance of accomplishing their stated goal. (That is why they are opposed in many parts of the formerly colonized world even as they are supported in the formerly colonizing West.) After all, how can the people of Darfur ever be safe as long as the same regime that sanctioned their slaughter rules unrepentant in Khartoum? Or, for that matter, how can the Myanmar government be trusted to look after the slow business of reconstruction in the zones hit by the cyclone if it was unconcerned with the fate of Nargis’s survivors from the beginning?

The harsh truth is that it is one thing for people of conscience to call for wrongs to be righted but it is quite another to fathom the consequences of such actions. Good will is not enough; nor is political will. That is because, as Iraq has taught us so painfully, the law of unintended consequences may be one of the few iron laws of international politics. And somewhere, despite all the outcry, leaders know that the same people calling for intervention may repudiate it the moment it goes wrong.

David Rieff, a contributing writer, is the author of “At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention.”

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Monks Succeed in Cyclone Relief as Junta Falters
May 31, 2008
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

KUN WAN, Myanmar — They paddle for hours on the stormy river, or carry their sick parents on their backs through the mud and rain, traveling for miles to reach the one source of help they can rely on: Buddhist monks.

At a makeshift clinic in this village near Bogale, an Irrawaddy Delta town 75 miles southwest of Yangon, hundreds of villagers left destitute by Cyclone Nargis arrive each day seeking the assistance they have not received from the government or international aid workers.

Since the cyclone, the Burmese have been growing even closer to the monks while their alienation from the junta grows. This development bodes ill for the government, which brutally cracked down on thousands of monks who took to the streets last September appealing to the ruling generals to improve conditions for the people.

The May 3 cyclone left more than 134,000 dead or missing and 2.4 million survivors grappling with hunger and homelessness. This week, some of them who had taken shelter at monasteries or gathered on roadsides were being displaced again, this time by the junta, which wants them to stop being an embarrassment to the government and return to their villages “for reconstruction.” On Friday, United Nations officials said that refugees were also being evicted from government-run camps.

The survivors have little left of their homes and find themselves almost as exposed to the elements as their mud-coated water buffaloes. Meanwhile, outside aid is slow to arrive, with foreign aid agencies gaining only incremental access to the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta and the government impounding cars of some private Burmese donors.

In a scene the ruling generals are unlikely to see played out for themselves, a convoy of trucks carrying relief supplies, led by Buddhist monks, passed through storm-devastated villages in the delta this week. Hungry children and homeless mothers bowed in supplication and respect.

“When I see those people, I want to cry,” said Sitagu Sayadaw, 71, one of Myanmar’s most respected senior monks.

Village after storm-hit village, it is clear who has won people’s hearts. Monks were among those who died in the storm. Now, others console the survivors while sharing their muddy squalor.

With tears welling in her eyes, Thi Dar, 45, pressed her hands together in respect before the first monk she saw at the clinic here and told her story. The eight other members of her family were killed in the cyclone. She no longer had anyone to talk with and felt suicidal. The other day, word reached her village that a monk had opened a clinic six miles upriver. So on Thursday, she got up early and caught the first boat.

“In my entire life, I have never seen a hospital,” she said. “So I came to the monk. I don’t know where the government office is. I can’t buy anything in the market because I lost everything to the cyclone.”

Nay Lin, 36, a volunteer doctor at the clinic, one of the six emergency clinic shelters Sitagu Sayadaw has opened in the delta, said: “Our patients suffer from infected wounds, abdominal pains and vomiting. They also need counseling for mental trauma, anxiety and depression.”

While the government has been criticized for obstructing the relief effort, the Buddhist monastery, the traditional center of moral authority in most villages here, proved to be the one institution people could rely on for help.

The monasteries in the delta that are still standing have been clogged with refugees. People who could help went there with donations or as volunteers. Monasteries that served as religious centers, orphanages and homes for the elderly have also become shelters for the homeless.

The interdependence between monks and laypeople is age-old. Monks receive alms from the laity and offer spiritual comfort in return. In villages without government schools, a monastic education is often the only option.

“The monks’ role is more important than ever,” said Ar Sein Na, 46, a monk in the delta village of That Kyar. “In a time of immense suffering like this, people have nowhere to go except to monks.”

Kyi Than, 38, said she traveled 15 miles by boat to Sitagu Sayadaw’s camp.

“Our village monk died during the storm,” she said. “Monks are like parents to us. The government wants us to shut up, but monks listen to us.”

Faced with the deadliest cyclone to hit Asia in 38 years, senior monks have organized their own relief campaigns.

Every day, their convoys head down delta roads. A leading figure in these efforts is Sitagu Sayadaw, whose name invariably draws a thumbs-up sign here.

“Meditation cannot remove this disaster,” he said. “Material support is very important now. Now in our country, spiritual and material support are unbalanced.”

Trucks of rice, beans, onions, clothes, tarpaulins and cooking utensils, donated from all over Myanmar, pulled into his International Buddhist Missionary Center in Yangon from early morning on. Each day, shortly after dawn, a convoy of trucks or a barge on the Yangon River departs for the delta, loaded with relief supplies and volunteers.

Sitagu Sayadaw sat on a wooden bench in his field headquarters as people lined up to pay their respects. Villagers came to present lists of their most urgent needs. Monks from outlying villages came asking for help to repair their temples. Wealthy families from towns knelt before him and donated bundles of cash.

However, like other senior monks here, he must strike a careful balance. He has the moral duty to speak out on behalf of his suffering people, but in order to protect his social programs and hospitals, which provide free medical care to the destitute, he must try not to anger the government, which views such private undertakings as a reproof.

Nonetheless, speaking at his shelter as an afternoon monsoon rain drummed against the roof, Sitagu Sayadaw sounded frustrated with the government.

“In my country, I cannot see a real political leader,” he said.

“Gen. Than Shwe’s ‘Burmese way to democracy?’ ” he said, referring to the junta’s top leader. “What is it?”

He defended the monks’ uprising last September, saying the government’s failure to provide “material stability” for the people undermined the monks’ ability to provide “spiritual stability.”

Among monks interviewed in the delta and Yangon, there was no sign of imminent protests.

Still, a 40-year-old monk at Sitagu Sayadaw’s camp who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of official retribution said that “monks are very angry” about the government’s recent move to evict refugees from monasteries, roadside huts and other temporary shelters, even while the state-run media are filled with stories of government relief efforts. “The government doesn’t want to show the truth.”

A young monk in the Chaukhtatgyi Paya monastery district in Yangon predicted trouble ahead. “You will see it again because everyone is angry and everyone is jobless,” said the monk, who said he joined the September “saffron revolution” and had a large gash over his right eye from a soldier’s beating to show for it.

A monk from Mon State in southern Myanmar, who was visiting the delta to assess the damage and arrange an aid shipment, said, “For the government, these people are no more than dead animals in the fields.”

The simmering confrontation between the pillars of Myanmar life was evident at the village level after the cyclone.

Shortly after the storm, a monk in Myo Thit, a village 20 miles from Yangon, walked around with a loudspeaker inviting victims to his monastery and asking people to donate. The monk had to stop, villagers said, after a township leader affiliated with the government threatened to confiscate the loudspeaker.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Aid groups press Myanmar on camp evictions
Reuters
By Aung Hla TunTue Jun 3, 8:13 AM ET

International aid groups pressed Myanmar on Tuesday to stop closing cyclone relief camps as southeast Asian experts kicked off a mission to pin down the scale of the devastation a month after the storm.

Cyclone Nargis, the world's most deadly natural disaster since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, is officially thought to have left 134,000 people dead or missing and 2.4 million destitute.

But many survivors have not yet been reached and Western nations and foreign aid groups complain the relief effort is being hampered by the inflexibility of Myanmar's military rulers.

"They've had a cyclone but they're not changing the rules. It's business as usual," said one official at an aid agency in Yangon, who asked not to be named.

Cumbersome regulations were blocking more vehicles and boats being used to distribute vital aid and even access to satellite communications was being made difficult, the official added.

Authorities have pushed ahead with a campaign, condemned by human rights groups and deemed "unacceptable" by the U.N., of evictions of displaced people from government shelters.

"If populations are on the move all the time, it's very hard to reach them," said Chris Webster, a spokesman for the charity World Vision in Yangon.

Closing the camps, usually clusters of tents around schools or other buildings, meant that growing numbers of displaced were returning to areas where the situation was already bad, said the first aid worker.

The last camp in Kawhmu, a district south of Yangon, was shut on Monday, witnesses said of the closures which appeared aimed at stopping the tented villages from becoming permanent.

International relief groups, the U.N. and government disaster officials met in Yangon, but little progress was reported on key issues affecting the delivery of aid.

They had sought details on camp evictions and the government's repatriation policy, but got no answers, said a senior Western aid worker who declined to be named.

Foreign aid workers would be allowed to stay for two days in the badly-hit delta area but it was not clear if they would be accompanied by official minders.

"To be honest it's still not clear how it will work," the aid worker said.

SITUATION ON THE GROUND MURKY

The United Nations estimates that 1.3 million people had been given some assistance, although this was patchy and only half of those in the worst-hit delta had been reached.

"There remains a serious lack of sufficient and sustained humanitarian assistance for the affected populations," the U.N.'s humanitarian arm said in a report.

In the last week around 15 international staff had been allowed to travel to the delta, but agencies still had no permanent presence, it said.

World Food Program boss Josette Sheeran said its $70 million food aid program faced a 64 percent funding shortfall, as did its logistics plan which includes boats, trucks and helicopters.

A United Nations "flash appeal" also remains well short of its $201 million target a month after the disaster.

The level of aid stands in stark contrast with the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia's Aceh, when governments around the world promised $2 billion within the first week for a disaster which killed at least 232,000 people.

With the needs on the ground still so murky, an assessment team of experts led by Southeast Asian nations and the United Nations arrived in Yangon on Monday.

"Based on the assessment report that they will produce, we will be able to identify the needs of the Cyclone Nargis' victims and intensify our efforts in the most needed areas," said Surin Pitsuwan, secretary general of the Southeast Asian body ASEAN.

Southeast Asian nations have been seeking to take a leading role in relief efforts, particularly since Myanmar's generals have often been wary of accepting help from Western countries, whose patience also appears to have been wearing thin.

(Writing by Ed Davies; Editing by Darren Schuettler and Sanjeev Miglani)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Cyclone badly injured victims buried alive during the night

The past months have been for me an eye opener to the reality inside Burma. For the past 4 weeks I did not expect improvements or change of heart from the generals. Once more, they have shown their selfish resistance towards humanity.

I just read the following news at Burma Digest and I hope this news can travel as far and fast as possible. I thank the Burma Digest team for releasing this news. The news start here.

After the cyclone swept lower Burma, much terrible news was coming out from Burma media about the plight of the victims and the bad behaviour of the SPDC but we had not yet read about one of the worst hidden news in any media.

This news came from the wives of colonels’ society in Yangon. One of the friends of a colonel’s wife told about the event which one of her friend (a colonel’ wife) told them when she was in Yangon.

After the cyclone hit, her husband, the colonel went out at night to serve night duty for every night and when she asked where he had went he was afraid to tell her. One night she asked her husband to allow her to follow him and at last she got a chance to follow her husband.

Several colonels gathered at night, at the same place like the other nights before they travelled by truck. Then they went to the area of the cyclone victims, then they picked up the heavily injured victims and put into their truck then drove away to the place which they had dug a big hole and threw them all together and buried them alive. When they picked up the people they lied that they will send them to the hospital but they did not do so. The colonel’s wife could not hold her tongue about the terrible event when she met with her friends.

As told by a friend inside Burma.
Feraya

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
More firms 'have ties with Burma'
BBC News
3 June 2008

A total of 154 companies feature on the list compiled by Burma Campaign

“We do not sell vehicles to government agencies nor officials” Toyota spokesperson

More companies now have business links with Burma's ruling military junta, according to pressure group Burma Campaign UK.

Fifty new companies have been added to the group's "dirty list" of companies, including Toyota, Kuoni, BBC Worldwide and Qantas.

The group claims the firms directly or indirectly finance the Burmese regime.

Three of the companies listed said their commercial activities did not support the regime.

Many of the companies on the list are involved in the oil and gas sector or with tourism.

"By being there, these companies are financing a regime that is one of the most brutal regimes in history," said Johnny Chatterton, campaigns officer at Burma Campaign UK.

"The foreign exchange these firms generate allowed the regime to double the size of its army," he added.

The jump in the number of firms appearing on the list is the result of investment in Burma's gas sector and new information, the group said.

Cars

Car maker Toyota said it had sold fewer than 40 vehicles in Burma, predominantly to embassies or the United Nations.

"We do not sell vehicles to government agencies nor officials," a spokesperson for the company said.

However, Toyota Tsusho Corporation (TTC), a Toyota subsidiary, has a small interest in a joint venture in the country as a result of a merger with Tomen, a trading company, in 2006.

Burma Campaign said the venture involved a state-controlled firm and its vehicles were used by the Burmese military.

Toyota said the venture did not manufacture or sell Toyota vehicles.

"In view of the current sitution in Myanmar, we have conveyed our concerns to TTC and asked them to reconsider their business," the spokesperson added.

Holidays and guidebooks

Tour operator Kuoni, which featured in the list for the first time, said that it only worked with privately-run hotels, minibus and river boat operators in the country.

All contracts were checked by Kuoni's head of corporate responsibility, it said.

Kuoni offers holidays to Burma to Swiss and French customers, but it said the tours were not available in the UK because of a lack of interest.

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, appeared on the list after it took a majority stake in Lonely Planet last year.

Lonely Planet first published a guide book to the country in 1979.

It said that publishing a guide book to the country "does not of itself represent support or otherwise for the current regime".

"It provides information and lets readers decide for themselves."

Other guide book publishers on the list include Insight Guides and Fodor's, which is published by Random House.

Forced labour

Burma Campaign UK said that pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi had asked tourists not to visit Burma because it helped fund the regime and gave it legitimacy.

Forced and child labour was used to develop many tourist facilities, it added.

Burma Campaign says more than 100 firms, such as Rolls Royce, British American Tobacco and DHL, have withdrawn from the country since the group began compiling the list six years ago.

Qantas appears on the list because of its controlling stake in Jetstar Asia, which, according to Burma Campaign, flies to the country in partnership with Myanmar Airways International.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7433145.stm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++