Word: burma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma's infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur...
...When night falls, the delta is swallowed by the darkness. Candles burn dimly in the ruins. Most of Rangoon is also without power, and only the well-lit Shwedagon, the nation's most scared pagoda, is visible from a distance. Otherwise, Burma's largest city?a city of 4 million people?is barely a flicker on the horizon...
...days after cyclone Nargis tore through Burma, Mya Hen wandered the banks of the Irrawaddy River, searching for firewood. As he picked up kindling scraps, he barely glanced at a pair of bloated bodies splayed on the riverbank. Death is so pervasive in the delta now, what are two more corpses? Like hundreds of villages across the delta, almost all the bamboo shacks in Mya Hen's hamlet of Phya Chaung, near the town of Bogalay, collapsed under the force of a massive tidal surge triggered by the storm. No one is sure of the death toll, but if other...
...Although Burma's ruling military junta has been criticized for not adequately warning citizens about the approaching storm, locals conceded that government radio had announced that a cyclone was approaching. Rangoon's iconic Shwedagon pagoda, for example, was closed on the afternoon of May 2 because of the cyclone. But there has never been such a destructive storm in living memory in Burma. Nearly everyone ignored the government warning and went to sleep as usual in their flimsy shacks that night. By 9 p.m., delta residents realized this was no normal storm. Ei Phyu Aung, a 14-year-old girl...
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister, Gen. Thein Sein - the man nominally overseeing Burma's relief effort - toured the delta by helicopter on Thursday, reported the junta newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar. He urged cyclone victims to "show resilience...