The Hidden History of Burma

by The Hidden History of Burma (retail) (epub)

  The water level was now going down fast, Thura Aung recalled, “but by now I was really scared. We had no idea what was happening. Everything seems so unreal.” At 4 a.m., he and the others managed to sleep for a couple of hours. It was cold even under the tarpaulin but they found a few longyis (cotton sarongs) to wrap around their soaked clothes. The wind howled in the darkness.

  Thura Aung remembers the next morning as no longer cloudy but very hazy, with an unusual greyish light. His relatives boiled up some rice from the silo but he found it difficult to eat, as they had to use salt water for cooking. There was no fresh water, but there was water from coconuts to drink. Everyone was in shock. Many were weeping quietly. All they could see outside were trees lying on top of destroyed houses.

  He wondered if his parents were still alive. That evening, four people arrived, saying they were the only survivors from their village nearby. They also said that Amakan was gone. Thura Aung wanted to see for himself. Luckily his little boat was still intact. On the river, he first came across a local government official, who told him there was nothing left to see. Further along, on the shore, he saw people he thought looked like savages, naked or wearing only a tiny strip of cloth, their hair wild and covered in mud. He felt like he was in a dream. At the next village, he saw a sheet of aluminum that he recognized as being from his parents’ house, even though he was still three miles away. He saw someone trying to cook over a fire. He kept going. There were bodies everywhere in the water and along the shore, including the bodies of little children. There were the carcasses, too, of dead dogs, water buffaloes, and oxen. Nearly every tree was down, and Thura Aung could see far into the distance.

  “At one spot I saw a group of people running around almost naked trying to capture a pig. I wondered: why are they doing this? Are they really going to eat this pig? They seemed crazed. They called to me. I told them I was going to Amakan but I didn’t want to take them on board. They might have lost their minds.” At the next village, he saw no living people, only bodies and a single mango tree. He stopped the boat and wept for the first time. Another little boat appeared, carrying people who said they had been swept away for miles. It wasn’t impossible, he thought, that some people from Amakan had survived.

  When Thura Aung finally reached his parents’ house, he saw it was smashed. Only one side was left. But his mother, brother, and brother’s family were all there, crouched against the wall. At the same moment, his father appeared. He had been in the town of Bogalay when the storm struck, and had only just returned. They cooked some rice with salt water and ate it together.

  Over the next few days, twenty-one people sheltered in what was left of the house. They gave away some of what little rice they had to people who came by. They worried about looters and people who might have turned violent. About half the villagers of Amakan had died or simply vanished without a trace. On May 7, Thura Aung was finally able to get to the nearest town, where he bought clothes and food for everyone. The next day, soldiers arrived with rice and beans.

  AT LEAST 138,000 PEOPLE died between May 2 and 3. In Thura Aung’s village tract alone, 8,000 of the 43,000 residents died. Some were killed by the impact of the ferocious winds and collapsing houses, many more by the inundation that followed. Across the southern belt of the Irrawaddy delta and toward Rangoon, 450,000 homes were destroyed and another 350,000 damaged. Seawater flooded 600,000 hectares of farmland, and 60,000 water buffaloes, essential for plowing, were drowned.2 Three-quarters of all hospitals and medical clinics in the area lay in ruins, together with more than half of the schools. Scores of villages were entirely wiped away. Towns like Bogalay and Laputta, along the coast, lay devastated. In Rangoon, the streets were clogged with mud and littered with debris. Everywhere, power and telephone lines were down, bridges collapsed, and roads made impassable. In many communities, the dead far outnumbered the living.

  It was, by far, the worst natural disaster in Burma’s history. As news began to filter out, the world geared up to help. But this was to be no ordinary natural disaster: Nargis had not struck an otherwise trouble-free land. Over the next three weeks, the natural disaster would give rise to a political crisis of global proportions, a Burma crisis dominating international television screens for the second time in less than a year and drawing in politicians and diplomats from around the world.

  It’s not clear what the Burmese government knew about the impending catastrophe, or when. They certainly received warning from the Indian Meteorological Department of the cyclone’s imminent approach, but until a day or so before it struck, Nargis was expected to make land in Bangladesh or perhaps on the Bangladesh–Burma border, not the delta. On May 1, the state-run newspapers carried stories about the US presidential election (“Obama’s lead over Clinton shrinks to zero”) and the British royal family (“Britain’s Prince William on secret Afghan trip”) and pictures from Australia’s fashion week. There was warning of a severe cyclonic storm, but only in the weather section, and only predicting widespread “rain or thundershowers.” On the morning of May 2, commercial aircraft were diverted from Rangoon, but few other measures were taken.

  By the morning of May 3, the magnitude of the devastation was becoming clear. Communications were down, and any information received in Naypyitaw was sketchy and mainly from Rangoon. Nevertheless, a state of emergency was declared in all the affected areas, and troops and vehicles were ordered south to Rangoon and on toward the delta. The prime minister, General Thein Sein, was placed in overall charge of the response and on the same day set up a committee of relevant ministers and bureaucrats.3 The minister of health established a crisis center at Rangoon’s General Hospital and ordered teams of doctors and nurses from around the country to report immediately. But the enormity of the disaster was so overwhelming that Burma’s poor official infrastructure could barely begin to move. The army was by far the best-equipped institution in the country, but it was essentially a counterinsurgency force, with no experience or training in disaster relief.

  The first instinct of the military leadership, as soldiers facing chaos, was to ensure control. This sense of control would soon be challenged by the scale of the task at hand, and by the demands and expectations of a 21st-century relief operation.

  Over the next four days, from May 3 to May 7, as Thura Aung and his family huddled in what was left of their village house, the UN, international nongovernmental organizations, Burmese authorities, and the Red Cross hurried to assess the damage and provide what emergency aid they could. Rangoon was a mess, and frantic efforts were soon underway to clear the damage and repair basic infrastructure. Scores of local charities quickly went to work and private citizens mobilized by the hundreds of thousands. It was a heroic effort and a testament to the resilience of Burmese civil society—private businesses, professional groups, informal neighborhood associations, schools, Buddhist monasteries, Christian churches, and networks of friends organized spontaneously, raising money and rushing supplies to the delta any way they could.

  By May 5, the extent of the death toll along the coast was becoming frighteningly apparent. Satellite photographs from NASA showed thousands of square miles of what had been villages and farmland covered in a pale blue blanket of salt water. What should have happened next was a major international relief operation, like the one that followed the 2004 tsunami. But several factors came together to prevent this, delaying assistance and leading to weeks of frenzied diplomacy.

  First was the speed of the government’s response, and foreign perceptions of this response. No one could have blamed the junta for not having the resources at hand to cope straightaway. No government could have done this, not even a major industrial power. But the typical opaqueness of the army’s decision-making and information system meant that its own efforts were obscured. No one outside Naypyidaw really knew whether the government was doing anything at all. And given that the last big news story from Burma was the junta’s violent suppression of the monk-led protests in 2007, few wanted to give
them the benefit of the doubt. The government was instantly cast as the bad guy once again.

  Existing (and cumbersome) procedures requiring visas for foreign aid workers to enter the country and permits to travel beyond Rangoon remained in place. Within twenty-four hours, hundreds of disaster relief experts were queuing up at Burmese embassies around the world, eager to help, and within forty-eight hours hundreds were shocked and frustrated at not being able to get in. In Rangoon, international UN staff waited impatiently for permission to travel to the worst-hit towns and villages. News crews from dozens of international networks arrived in Bangkok. But they too had no luck.4

  The Burmese government had appealed for international aid, and had specifically asked UNICEF and NGOs such as World Vision, long present in the country, for special assistance. Planeloads of food and water and other emergency supplies landed at Rangoon airport from China, India, Thailand, and other nearby countries. Some charities, such as CARE Australia, stated that they were happy with the cooperation they had received from the government. But with UN and Western aid experts and journalists cooling their heels in New York and Geneva and Bangkok and elsewhere, the story quickly became one of the Burmese authorities barring the kind of global response necessary and again responding callously to the needs of its people.

  On Monday, May 5, Laura Bush, the First Lady of the United States, went on television to criticize the Burmese response to Nargis, saying that it was “only the most recent example of the junta’s failure to meet its people’s basic needs.” The next day, as the official toll rose dramatically to 22,000 dead and 41,000 missing, President Bush himself hosted a ceremony at the White House to award the Congressional Gold Medal—which, along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, is America’s highest civilian award—to Aung San Suu Kyi. This had been planned well in advance, but the combination of President and Laura Bush’s appearances underlined to the Burmese leadership that aid from the US was aid from their enemy. The US routinely sends disaster specialists to assess damage in the wake of a natural disaster, but the junta refused to let them in, fearing that they were spies preparing to team up with underground dissidents and use the Nargis emergency to drive forward their goal of regime change.

  What made the Burmese even more suspicious was the presence of US warships off the coast. The same day as the White House ceremony for Aung San Suu Kyi, a Pentagon spokesman reported that the Essex Strike Group, with four ships led by the amphibious assault ship the USS Essex, as well as the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, with twenty-three helicopters and 1,800 marines, were nearby and “ready to help.”5 The spokesman also said that the US Seventh Fleet’s flagship, the USS Blue Ridge, the USS Kitty Hawk, and the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz were “all in the region.” On board was an impressive capacity to deliver desperately needed assistance with superpower efficiency. But what was a good-faith offer of emergency help seemed to the Burmese authorities like their worst nightmares come true. Nargis had pulverized the Burmese navy’s own base along the coast, and now an American naval force was steaming toward Rangoon.

  To almost everyone’s astonishment, on May 10 the government went ahead with the planned referendum on the new constitution. For the government’s detractors, and there were many, there could be no better evidence of the regime’s lack of concern for the plight of ordinary people or their willingness to use precious resources to further their own political goals rather than tending to the humanitarian emergency at hand.

  On the ground, efforts continued—by the aid agencies already present, by Burmese groups, and by local authorities. It was far from enough. Rangoon was approaching a degree of normality, but in the delta the situation was very different. Casualty figures were soaring. It was now clear that over 100,000 people were dead or missing, and that over two million were in urgent need of help. The lower delta was now one big field of mud, without roads or bridges, crisscrossed by hundreds of streams and miniature waterways, the sea having created dozens of islets practically inaccessible by land. The skies blackened and new storms lashed the coast. Government roadblocks went up to make sure that no one without authorization, which essentially meant all foreigners, could leave Rangoon. No one knew how hundreds of thousands of survivors were coping. A week after the storm, experts warned that starvation could be setting in and that a wave of water-borne diseases threatened the lives of hundreds of thousands more.

  Enter Bernard Kouchner, the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières, famous for its work in war zones and its principle of speaking out for the rights of victims. Kouchner was now foreign minister in the new government of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. He had railed against General Than Shwe’s junta during the 2007 protests, and now cautioned that delivering aid through the Burmese government might not be wise.6 A French as well as a British navy vessel joined the USS Essex and others in the Andaman Sea, waiting for permission to land.

  On May 7, as international frustration turned to disbelief and then rage, the melodramatic Kouchner called for forceful action from the UN Security Council under the new doctrine of a “responsibility to protect.” Others agreed, and just four days after the cyclone, pundits and opinion writers around the world began to wonder out loud whether or not Burma should be invaded.

  Was it time to use force to help the victims of Nargis? The Burmese government clearly wasn’t responding quickly enough, and was restricting outside aid. But could it be right to use military force to speed up the delivery of aid? Did it matter that thousands of lives were at stake? Or a million lives? Using force against the Burmese military—say, to secure parts of the delta, as some were suggesting—would effectively mean war.

  It was an ethical dilemma. It was, in the end, an academic one as well. The reality was that neither the Americans nor the French nor the British nor anyone else was going to risk a firefight in Burma. With commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the West was not seriously thinking of starting a major conflict in Southeast Asia. Taking responsibility for a poor country of fifty million, with hundreds of ethnicities, dozens of armed groups, and little state infrastructure other than the Burmese army itself, was never in the cards. Moreover, China might have felt obliged to support the Burmese regime in any conflict.

  And so diplomacy was instead revved up and the pieces began to fall into place. On May 9, the Americans and the Burmese agreed that a single US cargo plane with aid supplies would fly to Rangoon. The early insistence on a US assessment team going in first was quietly dropped. On May 12, the first American plane arrived, carrying not only supplies but also the highest-level US delegation to the country in decades. On board were Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of all US forces in the Asia Pacific region, the head of the US Agency for International Development, the State Department’s senior official for Southeast Asia, and an assortment of other military officers and diplomats.7

  The arrival of Admiral Keating was a surprise to the junta. The Americans had tried to keep it under wraps, but Thai diplomats had inadvertently tipped off the Burmese during a discussion with Kyaw Thu, a deputy foreign minister.8 Kyaw Thu, alarmed, consulted his superiors in Naypyitaw, who also knew nothing of the visit. Ordered to stop it, he went to see Shari Villarosa, the US chargé d’affaires in Rangoon (there was no ambassador). Villarosa admitted that Keating was coming, saying that the US hoped merely for an informal chat at the airport. The junta, fearing more international censure, relented.

  Admiral Soe Thane, the commander of the Burmese navy, was sent to meet the Americans together with Kyaw Thu. Soe Thane was well aware of the extent of the disaster. All his ships except one frigate had been lost, and a major base on the west coast of the delta wiped out. He had traveled to the affected areas by car and helicopter with prime minister Thein Sein (whose own family was from the delta and had their homes severely damaged). When the call came to return urgently to Rangoon, he worried that he was going to be arrested. But it was to meet Keating.9


  Niceties were exchanged, and the American side tried to impress upon the Burmese their goodwill and desire simply to help the survivors of Nargis. Soe Thane and his junta colleagues were worried that the Americans would come and never leave. They were happy to accept aid, Soe Thane said, but only via Rangoon. They also had Chinese sensitivities to consider.

  The next day, May 13, I saw Admiral Keating in Bangkok. I had recently moved to Bangkok and was traveling often to Burma. I was researching and writing my book Where China Meets India, traveling often to the India–Burma–China borderlands, but also seeing senior government and army officers at least every few months, trying to build relationships and get a better sense of what was going on. At a time when most embassies in Rangoon had very little contact with anyone in the regime, I was regularly asked to meet VIPs passing through to give them my sense of the political landscape.

  The admiral told me that while Soe Thane had seemed interested in striking up a rapport, other officers were much more inhibited. Another US Navy officer told me that “all options were on the table.” I spoke as well to Marine General John Goodman, who had stayed behind in Rangoon to see if the US could reestablish communications with the Burmese military. There was a feeling that, in addition to coping with the present tragedy, a door could be opened to a different and better chapter in US–Burma relations—not the invasion the Burmese generals feared, but something else. No one was very sure. The week before, I had been in Washington where staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told me of their hope that aid for Nargis victims could lead to a bigger assistance program, effectively easing sanctions policy.

  Over the coming week, a string of high-level visitors tried their hand at Burmese diplomacy. Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej, EU commissioner for development and humanitarian aid Louis Michel, the UK minister for Asia Mark Malloch Brown, and John Holmes, the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, all came and went. I met them all in Bangkok or Rangoon to give them my best analysis of what future assistance relationship might be possible. Each tried to convince the Burmese of the urgent need to allow a proper international aid effort and allow foreign disaster specialists directly into the delta. There was no breakthrough, but a steady diplomatic pressure was building. The story was still at the top of the international news, with analysts warning daily of an impending catastrophe.