Is Burma stumbling towards another disaster?

Source: The Irrawaddy Date: 23 Mar 2009
By Yeni

Nearly a year after Cyclone Nargis caused catastrophic destruction in Burma's Irrawaddy delta, the road to recovery remains as bumpy as ever, despite claims of "unprecedented cooperation" between the country's ruling junta and international aid agencies.

Less than a month ago, Burma's regional neighbors were welcoming the junta's announcement that it would extend the mandate of the Tripartite Core Group (TCG), the main body responsible for coordinating the Nargis relief effort.

But even as it was giving the TCG—which consists of representatives of the regime, the United Nations and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean)—a new lease on life, the junta was moving to limit its effectiveness.

The first sign of trouble came in early February, when the TCG's chairman, former Deputy Foreign Minister Kyaw Thu, was reassigned to head the Civil Service Selection and Training Board, an inactive ministerial position.

This worried many aid workers involved in the Nargis relief effort, because Kyaw Thu was seen—uncharacteristically for a senior member of the Burmese government—as cooperative and open to pragmatic solutions.

Last week, the concerns of aid workers proved well-founded, after it was revealed that the regime had halted a program introduced by Kyaw Thu to expedite visa applications for foreign aid workers involved in Nargis-related projects.

The move means that foreign employees of international NGOs must now follow the complicated and time-consuming visa application process that was in place before Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy delta last May.

The decision to tighten visa restrictions on foreign experts is seen as a serious setback for the relief effort, which is already hobbled by tight controls on the activities of local aid workers.

"We must submit information about every step of our activities to them," said a Burmese relief worker.

Meanwhile, there are growing calls for the international community to press Burma's military government towards greater transparency and accountability in receiving assistance.

A recent report titled "After the Storm: Voices from the Delta"—a joint project of aid workers from the Thai-Burma border and US-based Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health—accuses the regime of numerous abuses, including interference in assistance, confiscation and resale of aid, arrest of aid workers, discrimination in aid along ethnic lines, forced labor and confiscation of land.

Last week, a protest by Nargis survivors in Twante Township, Rangoon Division, echoed widespread dissatisfaction with the junta's role in the relief effort.

The protesters, from the village of Zeekone, appeared at the local cyclone reconstruction committee office to voice complaints that they were still without homes, even as the rainy season approaches.

The protest was small, but it should be considered a sign that much more needs to be done to speed up the unnecessarily slow pace of reconstruction.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the failure to rebuild the delta nearly a year after Nargis is the fact that Burma still has no effective disaster prevention system.

No one can predict when another deadly storm will hit again, but if the regime is allowed to continue to put its own priorities ahead of the safety and well being of the public, it is safe to say that many more people will die needlessly.