Unicef cyclone children's appeal | Disasters Emergency Committee

If a doctor had seen him on the first day, or the third day, or even yesterday, then something might have been done for Kyaw Zin Law. The ailment that bloats his stomach and drains his strength is almost certainly something readily curable - malaria, or parasites perhaps, or a straightforward case of malnutrition. But since the cyclone drowned his neighbours and destroyed his home, there have been no doctors in this part of Burma, and Kyaw Zin Law has little time to live.

Cradled in his mother’s lap, in a storm-damaged Buddhist monastery that houses hundreds of other refugees, he lacks even the strength to cry. His eyes are narrow slits, his skin is grey and his skinny arms and legs stir feebly. A midwife, armed with nothing more potent than paracetamol and coughdrops, ministers to him as best she can, but it is hard to believe that he will live out the week. He is 2 months old.

It is a week ago tonight that Cyclone Nargis began its catastrophic course across Burma, and still the number of those killed in the storm is rising. The official count yesterday was 22,980, an estimate that has not been updated recently; foreign estimates, including that of the US Embassy in Rangoon, run as high as 100,000. But however many people drowned in the storm surge or were crushed to death in their collapsed homes is, in some ways, a precursor to the continuing secondary tragedy: the millions of survivors, including hundreds of thousands like Kyaw Zin Law, who face disease, hunger and unnecessary death across the vast flooded expanse of the Irrawaddy delta.

The Burmese Government cannot – or perhaps will not – help them. The international aid organisations want to bring in supplies and expertise but have been prevented by the bureaucratic paranoia of the military regime. During a ten-hour journey by motorcycle yesterday through the worst-hit areas of the disaster, the maddening, lethal stubbornness of Burma’s generals was on dismal display. It is more than pride or pig-headedness. In their reluctance to let international aid in, and their refusal to admit access to the victims of the disaster, the authorities are engaging in an active cover-up of the worst disaster in their modern history.

Help comes too slowly in every natural disaster, but rarely as slowly as this. Six days after the Indian Ocean tsunami hit the Indonesian province of Aceh in 2004, the main city was a dynamo of activity. Half a dozen United Nations organisations had offices in the town, charities from as far away as Turkey, Britain and Singapore were distributing supplies across the region and the Red Cross was helping people to track missing relatives. In the Irrawaddy delta yesterday I saw one truck with the logo of Unicef and one from Médécins Sans Frontières, along a 100-mile stretch of road.

Burmese soldiers and a few aid workers were also to be seen, removing the debris of fallen trees and burying the putrefying corpses of the thousands of water buffalo that drowned during the storm. But, at present levels of intensity, they are doing nothing to hinder the momentum of an accelerating disaster.

“There is nothing coming from the Government – no rice, no money,” said Kyaw Thein, a retired soldier who shelters in a monastery in the city of Pyapo, where baby Kyaw Zin Law lies. “People give us some rice to live off here, but that is all. The Government is not coming, the foreign countries are not coming. It is very, very bad.”

He comes from Kyi Ku, a farming village in the paddyfields close to Pyapo, and his story is typical of the victims of the cyclone. Despite the Government’s rather overemphatic insistence that it warned people of the coming storm, they received no advice to take precautions. When the winds began to rise, and then scream, and then tear off palm roofs and bamboo frames, no one expected it. The sea rose, surging up through the rivers and creeks that make this region so fertile; the village was beneath three feet of water.

The fit and the lucky made it out alive. But 50 people died in Kyaung Ku alone. The rest, thousands altogether, live on top of one another in schools and in the Ka Ba Kyat Kaw monastery, whose gilt-covered statues have been toppled by the wind.

For two reasons, it is extremely difficult to make an independent judgment of the Government’s casualty figures. For a start, the worst-hit areas are almost completely inaccessible. A jarringly rough but accessible road extends deep into the delta, The districts along here, such as Dedaye, Pyapon and Bogalay, are classified priority one, on the basis that from 90 to 95 per cent of homes have been destroyed.

But the worst loss of life occurred not in the district towns along the road but in the villages to the south, along the marshy fringes of the Andaman Sea. The tracks that led to these were rough at the best of times; now many of them are nonexistent and the only way in is by boat, or by hours of wading.

For independent observers such approaches are impossible. Only the bravest of locals wish to be seen with foreigners, particularly foreigners asking questions. And requests for information are the object of immediate suspicion from police and local authorities, who behave as if the details of the disaster are a state secret.

If a mobile, multi-tentacled catastrophe such as a cyclone can be said to have an epicentre, then the epicentre of Cyclone Nargis is the town of Bogalay. Even without looking at the weather maps, you can tell that that the storm passed almost directly over here, and when the Burmese Government put out its own casualty figures Bogaly had the highest death toll of all – more than 10,000. Within minutes of entering the town with a small group of friends yesterday, I was entangled with Burma’s state security apparatus.

A policeman took down our passport details, politely enough. At the town hospital, the medical staff – seven government doctors brought down from the country’s largest city, Rangoon – refused to discuss the numbers of dead and injured without clearance from the military authorities. Policemen followed us throughout the ruined town, communicating with one another by radio, and when we attempted to enter a compound filled with hundreds of refugees, they swooped.

“This is a restricted area – no questions, no photograph,” the officer told us, before ordering us to report to the local government building. Such an interview promised to be both time-con-suming and unrewarding, so we promptly motored out of town.

The regime here is so repressive and cruel that it is easy to underestimate another of its characteristics: incompetence. Any country would be stretched by such a disaster; in Burma, with its poverty, poor infrastructure, communications and standards of training and education, all problems are multiplied. Perhaps the generals simply do not know what to do and, in the absence of any better ideas, they stick to the approach they know – xenophobic isolation.

One of the most mysterious unanswered questions of this disaster is: where are the dead? Unlike Muslims, for example, Buddhist Burmese do not bury their dead immediately, and often lay them out for days at a time. In circumstances like this such rites are difficult, but in two days of travelling in the delta I have seen no funerals, no fresh graves of any kind, other than those of beasts. If it is true that 100,000 people have died, where are they?

Out there, washed up somewhere in the paddyfields, unburied and lost, cut off from the rest of the world by the shame of the dictatorship.

Unicef cyclone children's appeal | Disasters Emergency Committee

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