NightBlogger

Paul Chapman: DVDs selling fast on the streets of Yangon show the death and devastation wreaked by cyclone Nargis. The DVDs show bodies buried in rubble and survivors sitting in the open in stark contrast to state controlled television coverage which barely reports the scale of the destruction and concentrates mainly on reconstruction.

US Navy ships are due to leave Burma’s coastline because of the continued refusal of the government to allow them to help victims of Cyclone Nargis. The navy said it would withdraw the four ships, carrying helicopters and landing craft, after 15 failed attempts to convince the regime to let them in.

French and British navy ships have also been withdrawn after being refused permission to operate. Cyclone Nargis left more than 133,000 people dead or missing. More than a month after the disaster, the UN estimates that 2.4 million people are in need of food, shelter or medical care, and more than a million have yet to receive foreign aid. More

Myanmar’s ruling junta lashed out at foreign aid donors Friday, saying cyclone victims did not need supplies of “chocolate bars” and could instead survive by eating frogs and fish. The New Light of Myanmar newspaper, a government mouthpiece, also warned that foreign relief workers could snoop inside homes, and condemned donors for linking aid money to full access to the hardest-hit regions in the Irrawaddy Delta.

After several days of praising the work of the United Nations and charities, the regime’s official newspaper renewed its attacks on foreign aid and insisted Myanmar could survive without outside help. “The government and the people are like parents and children,” the paper said. “We, all the people, were pleased with the efforts of the government.” More

The Associated Press
Chevron Corp. Chief Executive David O’Reilly faced intense criticism from environmentalists and human rights advocates who detailed their grievances at the company’s annual shareholders meeting Wednesday. At Wednesday’s meeting, activist Luis Yanza told O’Reilly that the contamination has poisoned the land and sickened thousands of people who live in the Ecuadorean Amazon. In Ecuador, Chevron faces a multibillion lawsuit by 30,000 jungle settlers and Indians who allege the company failed to clean up billions of gallons of toxic wastewater produced by Texaco Petroleum Co., which Chevron acquired in 2001.

Chevron faces another lawsuit by Nigerians who claim that the company hired soldiers who shot and killed protesters at an offshore oil platform in the Niger Delta in 1998. The company claims the protesters were armed youths who were shot after they demanded money and took more than 200 workers hostage.

Activists also complained about Chevron’s operations in Myanmar, where the company owns a minority stake in a natural gas pipeline that generates revenue for the country’s military dictatorship. They also said the company hasn’t done enough to push the regime to accept international aid following the devastating Cyclone Nargis earlier this month. More

JOHN HEILPRIN
Associated Press
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Myanmar to focus on saving lives, not on politics, after the military government on Wednesday shunned a U.S. proposal for naval ships to deliver aid to cyclone survivors. The U.N. says up to 2.5 million survivors of Cyclone Nargis face hunger, homelessness and potential outbreaks of deadly diseases.

“This is a critical moment for Myanmar,” Ban told reporters after arriving in Bangkok, Thailand. “The government itself acknowledges that there has never been a disaster on this scale in the history of their country … The issues of assistance and aid in Myanmar should not be politicized. Our focus now is on saving lives.” Read more

Parrish Robinson
The China Post
Living in Asia, I have been following the recent disaster in Myanmar very closely. The response to Cyclone Nargis by the ruling government in Myanmar has made me reflect on Hurricane Katrina and my own government’s reaction.

At the time of Katrina, I was actually back in the U.S. for an extended period of time and was able to watch news coverage daily. I watched the forecasts prior to the event calling for an enormous storm to make direct contact with the Gulf Coast and I watched the impotent response in the aftermath.

But, how ironic is it that the U.S. administration is criticizing the junta for not allowing in aid in a timely manner? Maybe we actually learned something from the Katrina debacle. Read more

Up to 2.5 million survivors are clinging to life in the low-lying Irrawaddy delta, with thousands of people lining roadsides to beg for help in the absence of large scale government or foreign relief operations.

Aung Hla Tun
Reuters
Diplomats witnessed “huge” devastation in the Irrawaddy delta on Saturday and the toll of dead and missing from the cyclone rose above 133,000 people, making it one of the most damaging to hit Asia.

With about 2.5 million people clinging to survival in the delta, and the military government refusing to admit large-scale outside relief, disaster experts say the death toll from Cyclone Nargis which struck on May 2 could rise dramatically. Read more

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) The Red Cross estimated Wednesday that the cyclone death toll in Myanmar could be as high as 128,000 - a much higher figure than the government tally. The U.N. warned a second wave of deaths will follow unless the military regime lets in more aid quickly.

The grim forecast came as heavy rains drenched the devastated Irrawaddy River delta, disrupting aid operations already struggling to reach up to 2.5 million people in urgent need of food, water and shelter. Read more

CNN
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP)
Phones are tapped and the few foreign journalists inside Myanmar are operating in secret, making it dangerous and difficult to tell the story of the cyclone that has devastated the Southeast Asian country. “This government is very paranoid, very xenophobic and they think this cyclone could undermine their credibility,” said Aung Zaw, editor of Irrawaddy, a Thailand-based magazine and Web site put out by exiled Myanmar journalists. Read more

Photo worak

Shawn W Crispin
atimes.com

BANGKOK - With United States warships and air force planes at the ready, and over 1 million of Myanmar’s citizens left bedraggled, homeless and susceptible to water-borne diseases by Cyclone Nagris, the natural disaster presents an opportunity in crisis for the US.

A unilateral - and potentially United Nations-approved - US military intervention in the name of humanitarianism could easily turn the tide against the impoverished country’s unpopular military leaders, and simultaneously rehabilitate the legacy of lame-duck US President George W Bush’s controversial pre-emptive military policies. Read more

Disease threatens up to 1.5 million

msnbc
BANGKOK, Thailand - Desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis poured out of Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta on Sunday in search of food, water and medicine but aid workers said thousands of them would die if emergency supplies do not get through soon.

Buddhist temples and schools in towns on the outskirts of the storm’s trail of destruction are now makeshift refugee centers for women, children and the elderly — some of the 1.5 million people left clinging to survival.

The reclusive military government is accepting aid from the outside world, including the United Nations, but has made it clear it will not let in the foreign logistics teams needed to transport the aid into the inundated delta.
Read more

Video the military rulers in Myanmar don’t want the world to see

NYTIMES
The bodies come and go with the tides. They wash up onto the riverbanks or float grotesquely downstream, almost always face down. They are all but ignored by the living. In the southern reaches of the Irrawaddy Delta, where the only access to hundreds of small villages is by boat, the remains of the victims of the May 3 cyclone that swept across Myanmar are rotting in the sun.

“These people are strangers,” said Kyaw Swe, a clothing merchant who said he expected the tides to take away the six bloated bodies lying on the muddy banks near his collapsed home. “They come from upstream.”

Villagers here say it is not their responsibility to handle the dead. But the government presence is barely felt in the serpentine network of canals outside Bogale and Phyarpon, devastated towns in the flooded Irrawaddy Delta, one of the areas hardest hit by the storm. “When we first saw the bodies floating past, we were sad and afraid,” said Aung Win, a 45-year-old rice farmer, who seemed to have survived because his house is made of hardwood. “Now we just say, here comes another body.”
Read more

globeandmail.com
The toll continued to rise Tuesday in the aftermath of a catastrophic cyclone in Myanmar, with 22,000 people dead and officials acknowledging that 41,000 more are missing. More than a million survivors are without food, water, electricity or telephones.

Relief workers who finally reached the survivors of Myanmar’s cyclone Nargis Tuesday were stunned to find scars on their faces, evidence of the ferocity of the rain storm.

“They had visible scars, almost burns, on their faces from the driving force of the rain,” said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program. “The rain had pelted them at such a velocity that it left marks on their faces. Our workers had never seen that before.” More

Myanmar’s military government raised its death toll from Cyclone Nargis on Tuesday to nearly 22,500 with a further 41,000 missing, nearly all of them from a massive storm surge that swept into the Irrawaddy delta.

Of the dead, only 671 were in the former capital, Yangon, and its outlying districts, state radio said, confirming Nargis as the most devastating cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people died in Bangladesh.

“More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself,” Minister for Relief and Resettlement Maung Maung Swe told a news conference in the rubble-strewn city of five million, where food and water supplies are running low. More