Burma (Myanmar) aid logjam riles donors
UN members rejected a proposal Thursday to forgo junta permission and force aid in.
from the May 9, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
Meanwhile, Kouchner's proposal of forcing aid into the country gained little traction. Confrontation would not be helpful, UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs David Holmes said Thursday, a stance echoed by the European Commission, China, and other nations.
"I can understand the sentiment of France's foreign minister, but I don't think it's the solution," says James Schoff, associate director of Asia-Pacific studies at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Cambridge, Mass.
"You could get to a point where [the UN] could just do drops from the air. But for the whole assessment process – I don't see how you could do that without working with locals on the ground," he continues.
Analysts are hard pressed to recall a natural disaster where the UN's "responsibility to protect" – a phrase conceived in 2005 largely in response to atrocities in Rwanda and Darfur – has been invoked.
There is probably no other possibility for delivering aid to Burma right now, Mr. Schoff continues, other than slow diplomatic gains and persistence. In a few days, Burma might come around, he says.
Were Burmese citizens warned?
Critics see the Burmese government's foot-dragging as part of a pattern of lack of care for its populace: Another flashpoint of international criticism has been whether the government there failed to adequately warn victims of the coming storm, leading to greater losses of life.
Burma's government insists that it used its storm warning system to save lives. "We sent a warning one week [before the cyclone]. We sent it through fax, through television, and through our state-run media," says a duty officer at Burma's Department of Meteorology and Hydrology in Rangoon (Yangon), who refused to give his name.
Burma has one of the region's least effective disaster response systems, experts say. Unlike neighboring Bangladesh, which has 42,000 cyclone volunteers and almost 3,000 cyclone shelters along its coastline, Burma has neither.
The contrast underscores that the high death toll in the cyclone was not caused by a failure to warn victims alone, but by a wider failure of national priorities, one that puts the government's welfare before that of the public, critics contend.
Questions have also accumulated as to whether officials in Burma knew Saturday's storm was barreling down on the country's central coast.
Meteorological officials in India say they warned the Burmese government well ahead of time. "We issued a warning 36 hours in advance. Everything was told to the concerned officials in Myanmar: the intensity of the storm, the time of impact, where it will land – and that information was updated every three hours," says B.P. Yadav, a spokesman for the Indian Meteorological Department in New Delhi.
Burma's meteorological office said it received the warning from India and used it to issue a warning.
But critics say the warning was ineffectively disseminated, costing more lives. "They issued a typical storm report that nobody listened to. It was on page 4 or page 5 of the [state-run] newspaper," says Aung Saw, editor of Irrawadday, an opposition newspaper based in Thailand, relying on reports he received from inside Burma. "If it had been on page 1 ... maybe thousands of lives would have been saved."
"The cyclone warning from India to the authorities was ignored or downplayed by the weather forecasts on Burmese TV," wrote a Burmese resident, who asked not to be identified, in an e-mail. "It stated that the cyclone has lost its intensity and will go up north, and Rangoon will be hit only marginally, and the wind velocity hitting Burma will be reduced to 40/50 mph."
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