Myanmar Reels as Cyclone Toll Hits Thousands

Displaced residents who lost their homes in a powerful cyclone took shelter on Monday in a Buddhist temple. (Hla Hla Htay/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
May 6th. (NY Times) - Myanmar struggled Monday to recover from a cyclone that killed more than 3,900 people and perhaps as many as 15,000. Foreign Minister Noppadol Pattama of Thailand met with Myanmar's ambassador on Tuesday, according to Reuters. After the meeting, Mr. Noppadol said that 15,000 people had been killed and another 30,000 were missing. If those numbers are accurate, the death toll would be the highest from a natural disaster in Asia since the tsunami of December 2004, which devastated coastlines in South Asia and claimed 181,000 lives. On Monday, three cabinet ministers told diplomats the death toll could reach 10,000 people in the delta region, an area that is home to nearly half of Myanmar’s 48 million people, according to Richard Horsey, a spokesman for the UN disaster response office in Bangkok. State radio reported that Saturday's vote on a draft constitution would be delayed until May 24 in 40 townships around Yangon and seven in the Irrawaddy delta, which bore the brunt of the killer storm, according to The Associated Press. It indicated that in other areas the balloting would proceed as scheduled. Tens of thousands of people were homeless after the cyclone, and food and water were running short. “Stories get worse by the hour,” one Yangon resident, who did not want to be identified for fear of government retribution, said in an e-mail message. “No drinking water in many areas, still no power. Houses completely disappeared. Refugees scavenging for food in poorer areas. Roofing, building supplies, tools — all are scarce and prices skyrocketing on everything.” Officials said they would open the doors of their closed and tightly controlled nation to international relief groups. So far, most foreigners and all foreign journalists have been barred from entering the country. They also said the referendum would proceed. “It’s only a few days left before the coming referendum and people are eager to cast their vote,” an official statement said Monday.

But witnesses and residents said the military had been slow to respond to the devastation of the cyclone, and some suggested that the government’s performance could affect the vote. Residents of the country, formerly known as Burma, said that they were being pressured to vote “yes” and that riot police officers had been patrolling the streets before the cyclone in a show of force that was more visible than their relief efforts afterward. Nine months ago, security forces had fired into crowds, killing dozens of people, to disperse huge pro-democracy demonstrations led by monks, and in the months since, the government has carried out a campaign of arrests and intimidation. State-owned television had reported early Monday that 3,934 people died in the cyclone, called Nargis, which swept through the Irrawaddy Delta and the country’s main city, Yangon, formerly Rangoon, early Saturday. The broadcast said nearly 3,000 were missing, all of them from a single town, Bogale. “What is clear,” Mr. Horsey said Monday, “is that we are dealing with a major emergency situation, and the priority needs now are shelter and clean drinking water.”

A spokesman for the World Food Program said the government of Myanmar, which severely restricts the movements and activities of foreign groups, had given the United Nations permission to send in emergency aid. At the United Nations, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he had mobilized a disaster assessment team to determine Myanmar’s most urgent needs. A human rights group based in Thailand, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), which has provided reliable information from Myanmar in the past, said soldiers and police officers had killed 36 prisoners in Insein prison to quell a riot that started after the cyclone tore roof sheets off cell blocks, Reuters reported. The report could not be independently confirmed. The junta that rules Myanmar has closed the country off from the outside world and maintained its grip on power through force, while its economic mismanagement has driven the country deeper into poverty. Some government-run enterprises or businesses with links to the government have already required their employees to vote in advance. Exile groups said some residents had told them they were angry about the weak response of the military, which had seemed strong enough when the task was to crack down on citizens. “This is what people I have contacted complain about,” said Aung Zaw, editor of the magazine Irrawaddy, based in Thailand. “These people were so active in September killing the monks, but where are they now?”

Residents of Yangon complained that the government had failed to adequately warn them of the approaching storm. “The government misled people,” Thin Thin, a grocery store owner, told The Associated Press. “They could have warned us about the severity of the coming cyclone so we could be better prepared.” On Sunday, the government’s initial estimate was that the cyclone had killed 351 people. Estimates of the toll soared on Monday, and on Tuesday the state-run Myanmar TV, monitored by Reuters from outside the country, reported that the cyclone had killed about 10,000 people in Bogale alone. The basis of the figure was not clear. In Washington, the first lady, Laura Bush, took Myanmar’s government to task on Monday for failing to notify its citizens in time, and pressed the military junta to accept American aid. “Although they were aware of the threat, Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path,” Mrs. Bush said in a rare news conference at the White House. “It’s troubling that many of the Burmese people learned of this impending disaster only when foreign outlets, such as Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, sounded the alarm.” Asked whether she was concerned that American aid might not reach Burma’s people, Mrs. Bush said, “I’m worried that they won’t even accept U.S. aid.”

The American Embassy in Myanmar has authorized the release of $250,000 in immediate emergency aid, and Mrs. Bush promised, “More aid will be forthcoming.” The immediate problem in affected areas now is survival, with water and electricity cut off, roads blocked by fallen trees, roofs torn off homes and prices for transportation and food rising quickly. “People are starving,” an unidentified resident was quoted as saying by the Democratic Voice of Burma, a dissident radio station based in Norway. Mr. Horsey, of the United Nations, said teams representing various aid groups were trying to assess the damage. Some aid had already been stockpiled in anticipation of natural disasters, he said. “It will take a few days until a complete and accurate picture of the impact and of the numbers of people affected comes out,” he said. Even without the destruction from the cyclone, travel and communications can be difficult in the country because of its weak infrastructure, said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with Human Rights Watch, a private organization. In Yangon, he said, people usually get only five or six hours of electricity a day, and some remote areas have no access to electricity. “So the fact that electricity is down is not really that important,” he said. Jens Orback, a former minister for integration and democracy in Sweden, was in Yangon when the cyclone hit. “Trees that were standing there hundreds of years fell easily,” he said, “and things from roofs fell down and the electricity went down and there were only flashlights. In the first day, you couldn’t go anywhere by car. No telephones worked. The Internet was out, and there was a lack of information. “What struck us also,” he continued, “was that in the first daylight, nobody from the police, military or firemen was out working with the devastation, but people privately were there with knives and machetes and hand saws.
by SETH MYDANS
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Scarred by Strife After Election, Kenya Begins to Heal

People driven off their land in Kenya began returning home on Monday. (Guillaume Bonn for The New York Times)
MOLO, Kenya May 6th. (NY Times) — The bus was full. Expectant faces pressed against the windows. Soldiers stood guard with their guns. Kenya began an operation on Monday to resettle people displaced after the crisis that followed December’s disputed election. Molo is emblematic of the ethnic fighting that erupted after the election, in which more than 1,000 people were killed. It was time to go home. “I’m ready,” said Dominick Ngigi, an 80-year-old farmer, stoically clutching a plastic bag with no more in it than a sweater and a flashlight. For the first time since Kenya’s disputed election erupted in crisis in December, the government has started a large-scale operation to resettle thousands of people violently driven off their land. Many have been living in squalid, wet camps that turned into breeding grounds for disease, crime, idleness and frustration. They have been languishing for more than four months, since the disputed election set off a wave of ethnic and political bloodshed that pitted neighbor against neighbor and drove upward of 600,000 people from their homes. More than 1,000 people were killed, and Kenya, once celebrated for its stability and relative harmony in a tumultuous region, ripped apart along ethnic lines.

Operation Rudi Nyumbani (Operation Return Home), which began in full on Monday, was all about stitching the country back together. Packed buses with heavily armed soldiers in tow rumbled across a scarred landscape, past homes with roofs burned off, past trees downed in January to block roads, past the very spots where farmers, laborers, mothers and children were killed by machetes, arrows and fire. The buses disgorged the occupants into familiar settings, but now with a strange dynamic: new arrivals in their old homes. “I feel lucky to be back,” said Meshak Njata, a farmer, as he inspected a few baby pineapples in his weed-choked garden.

Still, not everyone felt that way. At one camp in Molo, a large town in the Rift Valley where much of the fighting occurred, a mini-protest broke out Monday morning when hundreds of displaced people refused to leave. Peter Ngoge, a shopkeeper, shook a piece of notebook paper listing several demands. He spoke for many, as evidenced by the feisty crowd behind him, when he said he would not leave the camp until the government improved security and paid compensation to those displaced. “There’s no peace out there,” he said. “What do you think is going to happen?” a man in a grubby sweater next to him asked. “They will kill us.”

Molo is emblematic of the us-versus-them problem still festering in Kenya. The town is nestled in a breathtaking sweep of rolling hills and impossibly green farmland. But it lies on a fault line between the Kalenjin and the Kikuyu, two powerful ethnic groups that battled viciously after the election. The Kalenjin mainly supported the opposition, and the Kikuyu mainly supported the government, which is led by president Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu. Most of the families driven off their land were Kikuyus. Kenya’s leaders face a growing economic and food crisis, and they decided that, ethnic tensions aside, now is not the time for miles of productive farmland to go to waste. As part of Operation Rudi Nyumbani, the government is promising food, tools, new houses and even cash for those who return to their farms. To make its plan work, the government has said, there must be genuine ethnic reconciliation. Over the past several weeks, local administrators have held meetings, seminars and soccer games to build trust between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin. “It’s a process,” said Katee Mwanza, Molo’s district commissioner.

And that process may be bearing fruit. Some Kalenjin elders, who just a few months ago had insisted that Kikuyus leave the Rift Valley, came to the Molo police station on Monday to welcome the Kikuyus back home. “The war’s over,” said Samuel Kirui, a Kalenjin elder. The change of heart came, he said, because “our leaders have agreed to work together, so why can’t we?” But are the leaders really working together? Mr. Kibaki, who was declared the winner of the election despite widespread evidence of vote rigging, finally named a unity government in April, appointing his top rival, Raila Odinga, as prime minister. But the government’s first joint exercise, a tour of the turbulent Rift Valley, was marred by protocol wars centering on who was more senior, Mr. Odinga or Kalonzo Musyoka, the vice president and a Kibaki ally. Those squabbles frustrated many Kenyans, especially at a time when the country is still suffering from self-inflicted wounds. The election crisis has crippled the safari business, one of Kenya’s biggest industries, with recent figures showing tourism down more than 50 percent. Inflation is shooting up, and jail guards recently held a violent strike. Teachers and nurses have threatened to follow suit. Yet the president’s cabinet is bigger than ever, with more than 90 ministers and assistant ministers and a record-breaking budget.

Meanwhile, many displaced people are returning to nothing. “No cows, no sheep, no house, no corn,” said Mr. Ngigi, the farmer, as he got ready to board a bus. “All that is bad. But life in a camp is worse.”
by Jeffrey Gettleman
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Vatican puts Blessed Damien, Patron of Aids Sufferers, on the Road to Sainthood

Blessed Damien: The Belgian missionary lived among lepers in the Pacific and died from leprosy in 1889
May 2nd. (Mail on Sunday) - The Vatican today cleared the way for the canonisation of the unofficial patron saint of HIV/Aids sufferers. Theologians have ruled that a Hawaiian woman was inexplicably cured from lung cancer as a result of praying at the graveside of Blessed Damien de Veuster, a Belgian missionary. His cause now needs only to be rubber-stamped by the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints and given the nod from Pope Benedict XVI before he can be declared a saint. His canonisation, expected later this year, will draw hundreds of thousands of supporters to Rome because of the huge following that has grown around Father Damien since his death more than a century ago.

The Belgian missionary, who died in 1889, became famous for living among lepers in the Pacific islands - only to die from leprosy himself. He has been adopted by many HIV/AIDS sufferers as their unofficial patron saint because they feel stigmatised by their disease in the same way lepers were in previous centuries. He is also the patron saint of Hawaii, where his statue stands outside the state parliament building. After a poll in Belgium in 2005 Father Damien was named “the Greatest Belgian throughout Belgian History”. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Brussels in 1995 following the first of two "miracles" needed to declare him a saint.

The second miracle is said to have come after Audrey Toguchi, now 80, who had aggressive lung cancer, prayed for healing at his graveside in Molokai, Hawaii. She had been strongly advised to undergo chemotherapy but refused, telling doctors that she wanted to instead pray to Blessed Damien, whom she had admired since a child. The cancer disappeared without treatment. The case was documented by Dr Walter Chang, the woman's doctor, who is not a Catholic, in the October 2000 issue of the Hawaii Medical Journal.

Father Damien, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, died in1889 at the age of 49. He had been working with lepers segregated on to a colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, knowing all along he would eventually contract and die from the disease, for which at the time there was no known cure. Hawaii's other candidate for sainthood is Blessed Marianne Cope, Father Damien's successor in Kalaupapa, who was beatified in 2005.
By SIMON CALDWELL
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