Propaganda doesn’t get much sicker than what Myanmar state television put on the air Thursday: shots of Prime Minister Thein Sein personally passing out food to people injured by last week’s catastrophic cyclone.
An honest report would have shown the exact opposite: Lt. Gen. Sein and his army doing their best to prevent thousands of tons of relief supplies from reaching the countless survivors who face disease, starvation and exposure to torrential rains.
Cyclone Nargis is already looking like one of the great natural disasters of recent history. The known number of dead and missing is at least 60,000; that’s what the regime will admit to. Deaths may well exceed 100,000 after cholera and other killers do their work. The death toll from Nargis – in a single country – is likely to reach the same order of magnitude as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which killed roughly 230,000 people in 12 countries.
Tens of thousands may wind up dying in Myanmar simply because the brutal generals who rule the country are treating the disaster chiefly as a threat to their power.
Only the United States has the airlift capacity to deliver relief supplies as fast as necessary in the quantities needed. Air Force transports are standing by to do that. U.S., British and French naval vessels are offshore, poised to drop supplies to villages in coastal areas cut off by floods and without any other prospect of timely help.
The generals will not let the assistance in. Nor will they let in United Nations teams to verify that international supplies are actually reaching storm victims and not being seized by the military.
There’s good reason to fear that will happen. Myanmar is a military dictatorship terrified of its own people, as it demonstrated anew last fall with its murderous suppression of pro-democracy protests.
In the aftermath of Nargis, Myanmar needs many things:
• Clean water and purification tablets to spare survivors from water contaminated by sewage, human bodies and animal carcasses.
• Mosquito nets to keep out malaria-carrying insects breeding in standing pools of floodwaters.
• Tarps and tents to shelter more than 1 million people whose homes were destroyed by winds and rain.
• A massive effort to rebuild flooded-out roads, electrical lines and restore running water.
The regime can’t deliver, and it won’t let anyone else. It appears terrified of letting in relief workers and military teams from democratic countries, despite the strictly humanitarian role they played in nearby countries after the 2004 tsunami. The generals appear fearful that the raw efficiency of the aid organizations will demonstrate their own incompetence.
As a result, untold numbers will die. The world is learning just how depraved this dictatorship is.
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