Word: delta
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Forcing victims of Burma's worst natural disaster in modern history to participate in a referendum of questionable validity underscores the callousness of the Burmese regime. But the determination to hold the plebiscite also points to an even darker irony. A week after the cyclone devastated the Irrawaddy Delta, precious little aid is reaching the storm's victims. On Friday, in village after village, residents told me no aid at all had arrived. Blackened, bloated corpses still bobbed in rivers. Many storm survivors had no idea when they would be eating their next meal. NGOs began reporting outbreaks of diarrheal...
...Friday morning, as I left Bogalay, one of the worst affected townships in the Irrawaddy Delta, I noticed that a new checkpoint had been placed at the bridge in to town. Foreign reporters were being turned away, as well as some trucks laden with international donations that didn't have the proper documentation to convince the soldiers patrolling the checkpoint. Within the town itself, where two-thirds of buildings were battered by the cyclone, some soldiers were tossing storm debris into military trucks. But other army men were busy questioning suspicious-looking outsiders. It struck me that almost as much...
...spotted at least two dozen bodies of men, women and children during the short voyage from the battered delta town of Pyapon to Myint Swe's village of Myinkakon, where last weekend Cylone Nargis claimed a hundred lives and flattened most houses. Today, six days later, government aid has finally reached the village: officials gave each household about two kilos of rice - barely enough to feed a family for a day. Nearby villages have received nothing...
...cyclone raged for 12 hours, recalls boatman Myint Swe, and for three days afterwards the Pyapon River was clogged with bodies. Like hundreds of other delta villages, Myinkakon had few sturdy buildings to shelter in and no higher ground to flee to. And anyway, says Myint Swe, there was no way to outrun the storm surge, a wall of fast-moving water taller than the tallest man, which raced out of the darkness without warning and swept away tens of thousands of lives across the low-lying region...
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...