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Trocisp

Best of news... albeit late.


UN chief says junta to let aid workers into Myanmar - International Herald Tribune

BANGKOK: In what he said appeared to be a breakthrough after three weeks of obstructionism, the United Nations general secretary, Ban Ki-moon, said Friday that the leader of Myanmar's military junta had promised to allow into the country "all aid workers" of any nationality.

But Ban gave no indication when the Myanmar government would allow aid workers to enter the country and whether they would be allowed to travel to the badly-hit Irrawaddy Delta.

The statement was met with surprise and wariness by relief officials, including some affiliated with the United Nations, who have been struggling since the cyclone against the intransigence of the Myanmar authorities to let in aid workers.

"I had a very good meeting with the Senior General, particularly on these aid workers," said Ban, according to international news service reporters who were invited to travel with him to Myanmar.

Describing an uncharacteristic attitude by the usually tough and combative leader, Senior General Than Shwe, Ban added: "He has taken quite a flexible position on this matter."

On Sunday, Ban was to join an international donors conference in Myanmar at which the United Nations and the regional grouping, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, are to discuss the delivery and allocation of humanitarian assistance.

The junta has asked for $11.7 billion in international assistance, said the Asean secretary general, Surin Pitsuwan.

Relief officials said a key issue would be whether any more relief workers allowed in from outside would be allowed free access to hard-hit areas where the United Nations says only a quarter of some 2.4 million victims of the cyclone have been reached with aid.

In recent days, Myanmar has allowed a modest flow of supplies and relief workers into the country, but the military government continues to bar foreigners from entering the delta region to assess damage and coordinate the delivery of aid.

"Translating what you hear in a place like that into reality — we will have to wait and see what will happen," said Lionel Rosenblatt, president emeritus of the humanitarian agency Refugees International.

In the diplomatic campaign to provide cyclone relief, one major issue has been all-but ignored: the abuses of human rights and political freedoms that have been almost the sole agenda of the United Nations and Western nations in Myanmar for nearly two decades.

In talking with reporters, Ban did not mention Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader, whose freedom from house arrest has been the chief demand of the international community and whose detention reaches what appears to be a statutory five-year limit at midnight on Saturday.

If her detention is renewed, human rights workers say, the junta will be perpetuating an abuse and violating its own laws in the presence of the United Nations secretary general and foreign diplomats.

"With the cyclone, the whole political side of the crisis has just dropped off the map," said Benjamin Zawacki, a researcher with the human rights group Amnesty International.

Ban's meeting with Shwe came on the second day of a visit during which he took a helicopter tour of affected areas and met with government officials and relief workers.

At the donors' conference on Sunday, Ban was scheduled to meet with representatives of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, which reached an agreement this week to coordinate humanitarian assistance.

Although the United Nations says millions of people are still in urgent need of food, water, shelter and medical supplies, the junta insists that "the emergency phase of the operation is over" and that donors should focus on reconstruction, which would include instead large amounts of machinery and materials.

"This discrepancy is a confidence gap that has to be verified, that has to be reconciled," said the Asean secretary general, Surin Pitsuwan. "Whether the Sunday pledging conference will be successful or not depends on the ability to reconcile the difference." He added that without international access to the worst-hit areas, "the shared concern is we don't know the extent of the damage. We don't know the number of the missing or the number of the displaced."

 

sterbo

Ongoing negotiations are always good news.
Other than that nothing has changed -
The record still plays; the needle still skips...

__________________

JohnBoySmoker

You're showing your age. Records? Skipping needles?
On a darker side, there is only a small window of opportunity to help these people before some serious social and human damage occurs. Water supplies become poisoned with disease and people begin to have issues with malnutrition.
Maybe thats what the junta really want.

sterbo

U.N. must try Burmese leaders for genocide


Almost 30 years ago, my editor dispatched me to Cambodia to cover the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime and the resulting refugee holocaust. The images of babies with swollen bellies and only a few days left to live, emaciated and lethargic adults dying from typhoid, cholera or worse have hung with me to this day.

Now, three decades later, the United Nations and the Cambodian government are staging a genocide tribunal for several surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. Nearly 2 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge reign - most of them from disease and starvation.

One country away, in Burma, more than 1 million survivors of Cyclone Nargis have now gone without food, medicine, clean water or sanitation services for more than four weeks. Though Burma's military dictators won't allow anyone to see, babies' bellies are beginning to swell, and listless adults are slipping away, victims of cholera, dysentery or worse. Tens of thousands are likely to die - most of them from disease and starvation.
The fault for all of this lies squarely on Gen. Than Shwe's shoulders.

It's past time that the United Nations started planning a genocide tribunal for Shwe, the Burmese leader, and his fellow thugs. The case is clear, the verdict already known.

Here's the dossier: On May 20, Shwe promised Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, he would finally allow aid workers to deliver food and medicine to cyclone victims - three weeks after the storm.
The next day, Shwe ordered his troops to sweep through the Irrawaddy Delta and evict cyclone victims from the few buildings that remained standing so they could be used as polling places. Then soldiers pushed and prodded hungry and sick Burmese to vote in a sham referendum intended to extend Shwe's time in office - and sometimes filled in their ballots for them.

Last Sunday, soldiers ordered cyclone victims to dismantle makeshift shelters they had put up near main roads to escape the floodwaters. The soldiers said they were unsightly.

Meanwhile, the International Red Cross reported that rivers and ponds in the delta remained clotted with corpses. On Tuesday, UNICEF noted that Burmese children were drinking from these fetid ponds. They had no other source of water. Even before the storm, Save the Children said it had identified 30,000 malnourished children in the affected areas. Many of them, the group said a few days ago, "may already be dying for lack of food."

The government's relief operations have come to an end, he insisted. Burma is shifting its focus to rebuilding and reconstruction. So much for Shwe's promise to Ban. So much for 100,000 sick and dying people. Last week, Burma admitted about 40 more aid workers - while throwing up onerous restrictions on their work.

For weeks, Shwe had refused even to take Ban's phone calls. Finally, Ban decided simply to show up. So the military set up a Potemkin refugee camp complete with crisp green tents and shiny new cookware. When Sein took Ban there a week later, reporters noticed that cooking oil jars remained sealed and store labels were still affixed to the frying pans.
The New York Times reported that soldiers had used dynamite to rid the streams of unsightly corpses in the areas Ban visited.

Now, a month after the storm, the United Nations estimates that fewer than half of the sick and starving cyclone victims have received even the first dollop of aid, while the generals insist that it's time to give up on the victims and start putting up new buildings.
If the world were a just place, then the first building project would be a prison to hold Shwe and his fellow thugs - after their genocide trial.



*U.N. must try Burmese leaders for genocide

Trocisp

More (subjectively) good news.

I would thank God... but that seems inappropriate for a variety of reasons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/wo...18myanmar.html

YANGON, Myanmar — More than six weeks have passed since Cyclone Nargis swept through the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Myanmar, leaving a trail of flattened villages and broken lives and arousing international sympathy that turned to anguish as the military government obstructed foreign aid.

Now doctors and aid workers returning from remote areas of the delta are offering a less pessimistic picture of the human cost of the delay in reaching survivors.

They say they have seen no signs of starvation or widespread outbreaks of disease. The number of lives lost because of the junta’s slow response to the disaster appears to have been few.