Word: delta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...superior defensive position compared to the former capital: mountains on one flank, distance from the sea and limited road access. The only vulnerability to this bunker city was from the air. But even here, Naypyidaw has been blessed. When Cyclone Nargis devastated Rangoon and the nearby Irrawaddy river delta on May 2 and 3, killing perhaps 100,000 people and leaving as many as 2 million others fighting for their lives, the new capital escaped unscathed...
...Cyclone Nargis can't be blamed on Burma's leaders. But their inaction has indeed been murderous. A week and a half after the storm inundated the Irrawaddy delta with a 12-foot-high tidal surge, flattening countless homes, the junta was still blocking much of the aid proffered by foreign nations. Although three U.S. military cargo planes were allowed to offload relief supplies in Rangoon, the World Food Program estimates that the amount of aid reaching storm victims is just a fraction of what's needed. Hundreds of international disaster experts are still awaiting visas to enter the country...
...Laputta for the German relief group Malteser International. "What we're doing now is too little compared to the need." To make matters worse, an International Red Cross ship laden with aid, the first to be allowed into Burma, sank when it hit a submerged tree in the Irrawaddy delta. And by the middle of this month, seasonal monsoons are expected to further inundate the region. What will happen then to those hundreds of thousands of people with no shelter? "We're in 2008, not 1908," says Jan Egeland, the U.N.'s former emergency-relief coordinator...
...Perhaps this time will be different. The Irrawaddy delta is Burma's rice bowl. Not only was nearly all of this season's crop destroyed by Nargis, but most farmers won't be able to plant the next batch of seedlings because of salt-water inundation. Future shortages could spell dissent: at least five protest movements in Burma's recent history happened in the months when grain prices were at their highest. In a startling indication of dissatisfaction, an official counting referendum votes in Rakhine state told a Rangoon journalist that in 15 townships, the "no" vote ranged from...
...While the world debates what to do, the people of the delta wait. They are in no condition to foment revolution. In one village that no government representative had yet visited, I met a teacher who could speak a little English. He showed me the rubble of his destroyed schoolhouse. Only two things had been salvaged from the building: a small globe used for geography lessons and a framed photograph of junta leader Than Shwe, which normally hung at the front of the classroom. I asked if the 75-year-old strongman was a good person. The teacher laughed...