Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
May 10, 2008
Pg. 10
By Seth Mydans
BANGKOK — The military leaders of Myanmar seized a shipment of United Nations food aid on Friday intended for victims of a devastating cyclone, declaring that they would accept donations of food and medicine but not the foreign aid workers international groups say are in equally short supply there.
The ruling junta continued to permit a small number of aid deliveries and promised to allow the first air shipment from the Pentagon on Monday, a significant concession because the United States has been Myanmar’s leading critic, imposing sanctions and lobbying for a United Nations resolution condemning the nation’s generals for human rights violations.
But the refusal of the country’s iron-fisted rulers to allow doctors and disaster relief experts to enter in large numbers contributed to the growing concern that starvation and epidemic diseases could end up killing people on the same scale as the winds, waves and flooding that destroyed villages across a wide swath of coastal Myanmar nearly a week ago.
The International Red Cross estimated Friday that the combined efforts of relief agencies and the Myanmar government have distributed aid to only 220,000 of up to 1.9 million people left homeless, injured or subject to disease and hunger after the storm.
“There are problems to get the aid inside, and there are problems to get the aid out to the delta area,” the Danish Red Cross director, Anders Ladekarl, told Danish broadcaster DR. “We are simply lacking transportation. There are almost no boats and no helicopters. This is really a nightmare to make this operation run.”
As foreign aid groups scurried to deliver relief, the generals who run Myanmar continued to focus on a separate priority: a constitutional referendum scheduled for Saturday.
The junta’s plan to go ahead with the vote while restricting aid deliveries drew widespread criticism and concern that soldiers who could be rescuing survivors were likely to be sent to polling places instead.
“It is one of the best examples of the disregard for the people by the military,” said Josef Silverstein an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University.
Fourteen years in the making, the Constitution is formulated to keep power in the hands of military officers, even if they change to civilian clothes. It would guarantee the military 25 percent of the seats in Parliament and control of crucial cabinet posts, along with the right to suspend democratic freedoms at any time.
But while the state-run newspaper urged people on Friday to approve the Constitution, little help was reaching them. To date, Myanmar has allowed 11 airborne deliveries of aid, which experts say is a fraction of the relief needed if the scale of the disaster is even close to what the Burmese government has claimed. Much of that has come from the United Nations World Food Program, which said Friday that the aid it had delivered — and intended to distribute to hard-hit regions along the coast — had been seized.
“All the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated,” said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program in Bangkok.
After initially saying it would halt deliveries, the agency said later Friday that flights would continue Saturday while the issue is worked out. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the Myanmar authorities to let aid into the country “without hindrance” and said the effect of further delay could be “truly catastrophic.”
His spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, said Mr. Ban had been trying for two days without success to get in touch by telephone with Than Shwe, the junta’s senior general. “We have been told that the phone lines are down,” she said.
Myanmar’s military junta said in a statement on Friday that it was willing to receive disaster relief from the outside world but would distribute supplies itself rather than allowing in relief workers. Aid agencies want to coordinate and control their own aid.
Already Myanmar has turned away one fully loaded flight because the supplies were accompanied by disaster experts and press.
“Myanmar is not in a position to receive rescue and information teams from foreign countries at the moment,” a Foreign Ministry statement said. “But at present Myanmar is giving priority to receiving relief aid and distributing them to the storm-hit regions with its own resources.”
Even so, some agencies and nations were delivering supplies successfully. India sent two ships loaded with relief supplies, and the United Nations Children’s Fund said it was not meeting problems with its deliveries of aid.
A spokesman for Unicef, Christopher de Bono, said in an e-mail message that millions of water purification tablets had been delivered Thursday, and that although customs clearance could take two days, “as far as we know there has been no indication of any problems so far.”
In a telephone call from Myanmar, an official of the International Red Cross, Michael Annear, said delivery work was proceeding normally in cooperation with other agencies and local businesses.
Doctors Without Borders, which had been running large H.I.V. and malaria programs in Myanmar, has about 80 staff members in the Delta region and is sending more in, said Frank Smithuis, the group’s head of mission. He said the group was distributing food and medicine from the stores it already had in place.
In the worst-affected areas, he said, 95 percent of the people had lost their homes and everything they owned, and were in desperate need of food, water and shelter.
Dr. Smithuis said his group was dispatching teams of six — a doctor, a nurse, a medical assistant, two water and sanitation workers and a food distributor who would hire local people to help distribute food.
The teams are seeing many people injured by the storm who have infected wounds that need to be drained and treated with antibiotics, he said.
“It sounds like we have everything under control, and that’s not true,” Mr. Smithuis said. “The area is wide, and there’s a lot of people. We don’t see other players, we don’t see other help.” Most relief workers on the ground are local people and would be less likely to encounter the suspicion with which authorities view foreigners.
Save the Children reported that its staff members in the Irrawaddy delta region had come across many rotting bodies where the waters had receded. In the Pyinkaya area southwest of there, they said, people were dying of hunger and thirst.
Mr. Risley of the World Food Program said he had never seen delays like those being encountered in Myanmar. In Indonesia after the tsunami in 2004, he said, an air bridge of daily flights was established within 48 hours.
“The frustration caused by what appears to be a paperwork delay is unprecedented in modern humanitarian relief efforts,” he said. “It’s astonishing.”
He said his agency alone had submitted 10 visa applications for relief workers but that none had been approved before consulates shut down for the weekend.
“We strongly urge the government of Myanmar to process these visa applications as quickly as possible, including working over the weekend,” he said.
John Holmes, the United Nations chief aid coordinator, appealed to countries for $187 million in emergency aid on Friday. But Bettina Luescher, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, turned aside repeated questions about what had led her agency to make its original decision to suspend relief and then rapidly reverse it.
“All I can say is that at our headquarters in Rome, there were discussions going on and it was decided that we should send in those planes tomorrow,” she said.
She said that of the 16 visas for entry into Myanmar sought for international staff members, only one had been granted, and it had been requested prior to the storm.
The White House welcomed the news on Friday that Myanmar would allow some American aid on Monday. “We hope this is the beginning of major U.S. assistance to the Burmese people,” said Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman. He added, “We are very concerned about the people of Burma, and we’re going to keep on working with the government of Burma to do what we can to help the people there.”
Among the forces the United States could call on is the Essex Strike Group, which was in the region for Cobra Gold military exercises with Thailand. The group transferred a dozen transport helicopters to Thailand, where they could fly to Myanmar in a matter of hours with relief supplies. The ships are moving toward waters off Myanmar to be available with medical and other relief or reconstruction capabilities on board.
Aboard the ships are amphibious landing craft that can move onto battered shorelines and carry personnel and supplies to remote locations, inaccessible by road.
“We will come, provide assistance, and then leave — just like in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and other places where we have provided assistance,” said Maj. Stewart Upton of the Marine Corps, a Pentagon spokesman.
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations, Thom Shanker from Washington, and Denise Grady from New York.
May 10, 2008
Pg. 10
By Seth Mydans
BANGKOK — The military leaders of Myanmar seized a shipment of United Nations food aid on Friday intended for victims of a devastating cyclone, declaring that they would accept donations of food and medicine but not the foreign aid workers international groups say are in equally short supply there.
The ruling junta continued to permit a small number of aid deliveries and promised to allow the first air shipment from the Pentagon on Monday, a significant concession because the United States has been Myanmar’s leading critic, imposing sanctions and lobbying for a United Nations resolution condemning the nation’s generals for human rights violations.
But the refusal of the country’s iron-fisted rulers to allow doctors and disaster relief experts to enter in large numbers contributed to the growing concern that starvation and epidemic diseases could end up killing people on the same scale as the winds, waves and flooding that destroyed villages across a wide swath of coastal Myanmar nearly a week ago.
The International Red Cross estimated Friday that the combined efforts of relief agencies and the Myanmar government have distributed aid to only 220,000 of up to 1.9 million people left homeless, injured or subject to disease and hunger after the storm.
“There are problems to get the aid inside, and there are problems to get the aid out to the delta area,” the Danish Red Cross director, Anders Ladekarl, told Danish broadcaster DR. “We are simply lacking transportation. There are almost no boats and no helicopters. This is really a nightmare to make this operation run.”
As foreign aid groups scurried to deliver relief, the generals who run Myanmar continued to focus on a separate priority: a constitutional referendum scheduled for Saturday.
The junta’s plan to go ahead with the vote while restricting aid deliveries drew widespread criticism and concern that soldiers who could be rescuing survivors were likely to be sent to polling places instead.
“It is one of the best examples of the disregard for the people by the military,” said Josef Silverstein an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University.
Fourteen years in the making, the Constitution is formulated to keep power in the hands of military officers, even if they change to civilian clothes. It would guarantee the military 25 percent of the seats in Parliament and control of crucial cabinet posts, along with the right to suspend democratic freedoms at any time.
But while the state-run newspaper urged people on Friday to approve the Constitution, little help was reaching them. To date, Myanmar has allowed 11 airborne deliveries of aid, which experts say is a fraction of the relief needed if the scale of the disaster is even close to what the Burmese government has claimed. Much of that has come from the United Nations World Food Program, which said Friday that the aid it had delivered — and intended to distribute to hard-hit regions along the coast — had been seized.
“All the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated,” said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program in Bangkok.
After initially saying it would halt deliveries, the agency said later Friday that flights would continue Saturday while the issue is worked out. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the Myanmar authorities to let aid into the country “without hindrance” and said the effect of further delay could be “truly catastrophic.”
His spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, said Mr. Ban had been trying for two days without success to get in touch by telephone with Than Shwe, the junta’s senior general. “We have been told that the phone lines are down,” she said.
Myanmar’s military junta said in a statement on Friday that it was willing to receive disaster relief from the outside world but would distribute supplies itself rather than allowing in relief workers. Aid agencies want to coordinate and control their own aid.
Already Myanmar has turned away one fully loaded flight because the supplies were accompanied by disaster experts and press.
“Myanmar is not in a position to receive rescue and information teams from foreign countries at the moment,” a Foreign Ministry statement said. “But at present Myanmar is giving priority to receiving relief aid and distributing them to the storm-hit regions with its own resources.”
Even so, some agencies and nations were delivering supplies successfully. India sent two ships loaded with relief supplies, and the United Nations Children’s Fund said it was not meeting problems with its deliveries of aid.
A spokesman for Unicef, Christopher de Bono, said in an e-mail message that millions of water purification tablets had been delivered Thursday, and that although customs clearance could take two days, “as far as we know there has been no indication of any problems so far.”
In a telephone call from Myanmar, an official of the International Red Cross, Michael Annear, said delivery work was proceeding normally in cooperation with other agencies and local businesses.
Doctors Without Borders, which had been running large H.I.V. and malaria programs in Myanmar, has about 80 staff members in the Delta region and is sending more in, said Frank Smithuis, the group’s head of mission. He said the group was distributing food and medicine from the stores it already had in place.
In the worst-affected areas, he said, 95 percent of the people had lost their homes and everything they owned, and were in desperate need of food, water and shelter.
Dr. Smithuis said his group was dispatching teams of six — a doctor, a nurse, a medical assistant, two water and sanitation workers and a food distributor who would hire local people to help distribute food.
The teams are seeing many people injured by the storm who have infected wounds that need to be drained and treated with antibiotics, he said.
“It sounds like we have everything under control, and that’s not true,” Mr. Smithuis said. “The area is wide, and there’s a lot of people. We don’t see other players, we don’t see other help.” Most relief workers on the ground are local people and would be less likely to encounter the suspicion with which authorities view foreigners.
Save the Children reported that its staff members in the Irrawaddy delta region had come across many rotting bodies where the waters had receded. In the Pyinkaya area southwest of there, they said, people were dying of hunger and thirst.
Mr. Risley of the World Food Program said he had never seen delays like those being encountered in Myanmar. In Indonesia after the tsunami in 2004, he said, an air bridge of daily flights was established within 48 hours.
“The frustration caused by what appears to be a paperwork delay is unprecedented in modern humanitarian relief efforts,” he said. “It’s astonishing.”
He said his agency alone had submitted 10 visa applications for relief workers but that none had been approved before consulates shut down for the weekend.
“We strongly urge the government of Myanmar to process these visa applications as quickly as possible, including working over the weekend,” he said.
John Holmes, the United Nations chief aid coordinator, appealed to countries for $187 million in emergency aid on Friday. But Bettina Luescher, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, turned aside repeated questions about what had led her agency to make its original decision to suspend relief and then rapidly reverse it.
“All I can say is that at our headquarters in Rome, there were discussions going on and it was decided that we should send in those planes tomorrow,” she said.
She said that of the 16 visas for entry into Myanmar sought for international staff members, only one had been granted, and it had been requested prior to the storm.
The White House welcomed the news on Friday that Myanmar would allow some American aid on Monday. “We hope this is the beginning of major U.S. assistance to the Burmese people,” said Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman. He added, “We are very concerned about the people of Burma, and we’re going to keep on working with the government of Burma to do what we can to help the people there.”
Among the forces the United States could call on is the Essex Strike Group, which was in the region for Cobra Gold military exercises with Thailand. The group transferred a dozen transport helicopters to Thailand, where they could fly to Myanmar in a matter of hours with relief supplies. The ships are moving toward waters off Myanmar to be available with medical and other relief or reconstruction capabilities on board.
Aboard the ships are amphibious landing craft that can move onto battered shorelines and carry personnel and supplies to remote locations, inaccessible by road.
“We will come, provide assistance, and then leave — just like in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and other places where we have provided assistance,” said Maj. Stewart Upton of the Marine Corps, a Pentagon spokesman.
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations, Thom Shanker from Washington, and Denise Grady from New York.