Burma News

UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-moon said on Monday all his efforts to speak to Burma’s junta leader, Sen-Gen Than Shwe, on the telephone have failed.

"Over the weekend and throughout much of last week, I tried repeatedly to telephone Sen-Gen Than Shwe. I wanted to ask for his cooperation with the international community and offer the United Nations' full support," Ban said at a press conference in New York.

Visibly disappointed, Ban said: "I was not able to reach him and so delivered a letter earlier this morning through diplomatic channels." This was his second letter since Cyclone Nargis hit the Irrawaddy delta on May 3. He has yet to receive an answer to the first letter.

Diplomatic sources told The Irrawaddy that every time an attempt is made from the office of the UN secretary-general to make a telephone call to Than Shwe, Burmese officials respond that they are unable to connect due to technical difficulties, an excuse that is very hard to believe.

In fact, this is likely to be a very rare event, when the head of a government has refused to speak to a UN secretary-general who is elected by more than 190 UN-member nations, of which Burma is a member.

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“It has been appallingly difficult to get assistance into Burma and once in, to have any guarantee of its proper distribution”

A member of the Myanmar military personnel helping to unload aid supplies takes a rest. via The Epoch Times

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Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told a press conference that China had early that month changed its guard on the border with Myanmar in Yunnan province, with People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers taking over the border defense responsibilities from local armed police. He said the move was a normal adjustment and had been completed, adding that many journalists had asked him about the issue the day before.

Intrigued by Kong's remarks, Asia Times Online sent a team to the southern province of Yunnan, and into Myanmar itself, to investigate the nature and scale of the border "adjustment", and to try to determine why it is taking place. Had a US military force been secretly deployed inside Myanmar, as one rumor had it? Or, more likely, was Beijing worried that the embattled military dictatorship in Yangon was losing control of the country all on its own, without interference by Americans in the shadows?

ATol found that Kong did not tell the whole truth by describing the deployment as a routine adjustment. The deployment is large, and existing border patrols have not been replaced, but have been reinforced by well-equipped units of the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

A restaurant owner in a night market near the southern border witnessed the "military adjustment" one night in early September. He said the fleet of army trucks from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, and other places could have numbered in the hundreds, to say nothing of other vehicles. It took about 10 minutes for these trucks to pass by his door. They were heading toward Yunnan's border with Myanmar within the province's Xishuangbanna autonomous prefecture.

As with the situation on the Sino-North Korean border at the end of September, the changes on the China-Myanmar border were clearly reinforcements, not replacements. The existing border police were not removed; in fact, to make things more complicated and mysterious, some of them were transformed into a "mobility brigade". For local residents, this is one of the signs of prewar preparations.

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There were still mathematical equations chalked on the blackboards of the classrooms of the number 8 middle school in Hlaing Tha Yar Sunday, but the only lesson being given was one of survival.

Since the cyclone hit, the school, in a village near Rangoon, has been turned into an impromptu refugee centre, with some 2,040 of the displaced crammed inside. About 17 families were camped in each classroom, including many nappy-less babies laid on the desks.

Mai Paw, her husband and their six children had sought refuge in the school as soon as the high winds flattened their shack. Sunday they, and their 50 or so noisy roommates, batted away swarms of flies as they each ate the scoop of rice handed out by the charity World Concern. "We have lost everything. We have no house and no jobs," said Mai.

They planned to stay in the school for as long as it took for the relief effort to rebuild their neighbourhood. Instead a government officer told them yesterday to expect an eviction, to make way for a polling station. Burma's ruling elite has rescheduled the referendum for May 24.

In Hlaing Tha Yar there were no government lorries helping with the reconstruction effort. It was a different story in downtown Rangoon Sunday, where the streets were lined with army trucks. But rather than attending to the most pressing concerns, soldiers swept leaves in an ill-placed show of civic pride.

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When one of Myanmar's best-known movie stars, Kyaw Dhyu, traveled through the Irrawaddy Delta in recent days to deliver aid to the victims of the May 3 cyclone, a military patrol stopped him as he was handing out bags of rice.

"The officer told him, 'You cannot give directly to the people,' " said Tin Win, the village headman of the stricken city of Dedaye, who had been counting on the rice to feed 260 refugees sleeping in a large Buddhist prayer hall.

The politics of food aid -- deciding who gets to deliver assistance to those homeless and hungry after the cyclone -- is not just confined to the dispute between Myanmar's military junta and Western governments and outside relief agencies.

Even Myanmar citizens who want to donate rice or other assistance have in several cases been told that all assistance must be channeled through the military. This restriction has angered local government officials such as Tin Win, who are trying to help rebuild the lives of villagers. He twitched with rage as he described the rice the military gave him.

"They gave us four bags," he said. "The rice is rotten -- even the pigs and dogs wouldn't eat it." He said the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees had delivered good rice to the local military leaders last week but they kept it for themselves and distributed the waterlogged, musty rice. "I'm very angry," he said, adding an expletive to describe the military.

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MILITARY-RULED Burma, among the globe's poorest and most authoritarian nations, is reeling from a natural disaster of such magnitude that both the people's suffering and political aftershocks are certain to persist long after the last emergency aid has been doled out.

As bloated bodies are counted and survivors face disease and hunger in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, dramatic scenarios are foreseen in a country that has changed little since an army coup 46 years ago.

These range from a revolt led by disenchanted army officers to the specter of the entrenched, xenophobic junta allowing thousands more to perish rather than risk its grip on power by opening gates to the outside world.

"If a split in the Burmese military between reformist and hard-line elements doesn't occur now, it will never occur," said Donald M Seekins, a Burma expert at Okinawa's Meio University.

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A sprawling new capital dubbed the "Abode of Kings", lavish weddings for family members, palatial villas -- Myanmar's ruling generals appear to have few qualms about spending money.

After more than 45 years of isolation and military rule, Myanmar is officially one of the world's poorest countries, with per capita gross domestic product (GDP) well below that of nearby Cambodia, Laos and Bangladesh.

The junta spends just 0.3 percent of GDP on health care, and 1.3 per cent on education, UN figures show. Yet while ordinary people grow poorer, critics say the generals have been lining their pockets with profits from the nation's vast bounty of oil, gas, tropical hardwood forests, and mines brimming with gems.

Economic sanctions from Europe and the United States were tightened after last year's deadly crackdown on demonstrations sparked by rising fuel costs, but booming Thailand, India and China continue to be big customers.

A semi-official Myanmar newspaper reported last month that the country earned 2.7 billion dollars from gas exports in 2007, an 80 percent increase from the previous year as more wells come on line. Sean Turnell, an expert on Myanmar's economy with Australia's Macquarie University, estimates that the top generals have about four billion dollars in foreign exchange reserves.

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“But even those are running out.”

Apart from the sound of children crying, the town of Labutta is strangely silent.

Traumatized by the ordeal of surviving Cyclone Nargis, few people have anything to say. But it is also fear bred by 46 years of repression by military regimes that keeps them quiet.

Although overwhelmed by the worst disaster in Myanmar's recent history, the junta has turned down foreign help and insists on using its ragtag infrastructure and poorly equipped military to conduct a grossly mismanaged relief operation for some 2 million people in distress. Read more

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Burma's military regime has plastered boxes containing international relief supplies with the names of top generals.

State-run television continuously showed images of the country's top generals -- including Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the junta's leader -- handing out boxes at ceremonies.

The junta has so far refused to allow foreign experts to deliver aid to assist their country, ravaged by Cyclone Nardis, saying it will only accept donations and then take responsibility for distribution.

"We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was a gift from them and then distributing it in their region," said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK. "It is not going to areas where it is most in need," he said in London.

Richard Horsey, who speaks for the United Nations' humanitarian operations, said international organizations are needed to examine the logistics of getting help into the Irrawaddy delta, the worst-hit area. "That's a critical bottleneck that must be overcome at this point," he said in Bangkok. Burma's government has only a few dozen helicopters and almost no transport plane capacity.

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The military junta that rules Myanmar held a planned referendum on a new constitution Saturday despite the widespread devastation caused by last week's fatal cyclone.

The government has postponed the voting in cyclone-affected areas, but U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has urged the government to delay the referendum altogether so it can focus on cyclone relief efforts.

The ruling junta was on Friday criticized by the United Nations for allowing aid planes to land but then refusing to let foreign charity workers distribute the supplies.

It then softened its stance, with Myanmar's U.N. ambassador saying, "We are ready to speed up and strengthen our relief effort. We will accept aid from any corner."

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