Some Myanmar aids stolen by military

May 15, 2008
Some Myanmar Aid Reportedly Stolen
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
YANGON, Myanmar — The directors of several relief organizations in Myanmar said Wednesday that some of the international aid arriving into the country for the victims of Cyclone Nargis was being stolen, diverted or warehoused by the country’s military.
The United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said there was a good chance that “a significant tropical cyclone” — a second big storm — would form within the next 24 hours and head across the Irrawaddy Delta, the region that suffered most from the first storm that struck on May 3.
In Yangon, the main commercial city, winds were already beginning to whip up Wednesday evening, but it was unclear how strong the storm would become.
Thailand’s prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, flew to Yangon on Wednesday to persuade Myanmar’s leaders to allow more foreign aid workers into the country. The members of the military junta told him they were in control of the relief operations and had no need for foreign experts, he told reporters after returning to Bangkok, The Associated Press reported.
The government said there were no outbreaks of disease or starvation among the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the cyclone. In Yangon, Mr. Sundaravej met the prime minister, Lt. Gen. Thein Sein, The A.P. said.
The aid directors in Myanmar declined to be quoted directly on their concerns about the stolen relief supplies for fear of angering the ruling junta and jeopardizing their operations, although Marcel Wagner, country director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, confirmed that aid was being diverted by the army. He said the issue would become an increasing problem, although he declined to give further details because of the sensitivity of the situation.
International aid shipments continued to arrive Wednesday, including five new air deliveries of relief supplies from the United States. Western diplomats said their representatives at the airport were making sure the cargo was unloaded efficiently and then trucked to staging areas.
The fate of the supplies after that, however, remained unknown, because the junta has barred all foreigners, including credentialed diplomats and aid workers, from accompanying any donated aid, tracking its distribution or following up on its delivery. Myanmar state radio reported Wednesday that the death toll from the May 3 cyclone had risen again, to 38,491, Agence France-Presse reported, with 27,838 people still missing. The toll has been increasing daily as more of the missing are identified as dead. The United Nations has estimated that the toll could be more than 60,000.
The International Red Cross estimated Wednesday that the cyclone death toll was between 68,833 and 127,990, according to the A.P.
There were rumors in the capital on Wednesday that special high-energy biscuits donated for distribution in the disaster areas had been replaced by cheaper, off-the-shelf crackers. But Mr. Wagner and the others said they had not heard of high-quality foodstuffs being stolen and replaced by inferior products.
Although aid flights are now regularly seen arriving at the Yangon airport, international rescue teams and disaster-relief experts for the most part are being kept away from the country. A small French rescue team has arrived in Yangon, although it was unclear whether it had received official permission. Diplomats and representatives of aid missions said that visas for overseas experts were still being denied.
Mr. Wagner said he and his agency’s foreign staff members were now barred from the Irrawaddy Delta, even to areas where the group has ongoing projects dating from before the storm. Fortunately, he said, he has Burmese staff who are permitted come and go through an increasing number of military checkpoints.
The Adventist group specializes in rainwater collection, water filtration and sanitation — just the kinds of expertise most needed now — and Mr. Wagner said outside experts were needed to train local people in the proper use of filters, pumps and hygiene practices.
Reports have been mixed about how much aid was actually getting through to the delta. One longtime relief coordinator in Myanmar said Tuesday that 30 percent of the people in the damaged areas had been reached. But other agencies were encouraged about recent improvements in deliveries, especially those groups with projects and local staff already in place, and the agencies with established working relationships with the government.
The World Health Organization said that its medical supplies were arriving in the country normally, without being diverted, siphoned off or replaced with substandard items. Its deliveries were even being made to Labutta and Bogale, two badly damaged areas deep in the southern delta.
Mr. Wagner said that his agency had success in getting its trucks into Labutta, although daily rainstorms were beginning to make road travel more difficult. The upcoming monsoon season would make things worse, he said, and he and the World Health Organization experts said they expected to start getting reports from the field soon about malaria, dengue fever and water-borne diseases.
Mr. Wagner was careful to point out that these afflictions were not unusual in the delta region, saying, “They happen every year at this time, with or without a cyclone.”
His group also uses shallow-draft motorboats of the kind typically used in the delta, craft capable of carrying 15 to 20 people. Another veteran aid director said that availability of boats was one of the bottlenecks in aid distribution in the delta.
Shari Villarosa, the senior diplomat at the United States Embassy in Yangon, said she was encouraged by the military government’s acceptance of aid and said it was a remarkable development given what she called the xenophobia of the regime, but that aid itself would not be enough.
“The Burmese will see they’re going to need help getting this aid out, but they’re going to come around way too slow — and too late for many,” Ms. Villarosa said during an interview in her office.
A number of countries have offered to bring in aid and deliver it from the south, by ship, but the junta has adamantly refused. One of the generals’ most enduring fears is a seaborne invasion by Western powers it refers to as “foreign saboteurs.”
Fear of a southern invasion is one of the reasons, along with ominous astrological portents, that the junta moved the country’s capital to the hinterlands. The new capital, in the city of Naypyidaw, was carved out of the jungle about 180 miles north of Yangon, the former capital and still the country’s commercial capital.
“These guys really believe we are planning an invasion,” Ms. Villarosa said. The United States said this week that several of its military ships were in the area and ready to provide help in Myanmar. “It’s nuts! We’re not! But if they hear that a large U.S. ship is off the coast, they don’t receive the message that it’s a genuine humanitarian effort,” she said.
A medical officer from the World Health Organization said Wednesday that the most pressing public health issue facing the delta was not the presence of corpses in the region’s waters.
“I know this issue of dead bodies is a worldwide concern, but the dead bodies do not represent any specific additional public health risk,” said Pino Annunziata, a medical officer in the organization’s Department of Emergency Response and Operations.
“This is a very negligible risk from a public health standpoint. We have to focus on the survivors.”
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