Word: delta
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Rangoon travel agent Chin Chin used to take tourists to a nearby Irrawaddy Delta town famous for its pottery. But the vast waterworld of rivers and rice fields that stretched beyond it was a foreign land to her until Cyclone Nargis and its horrific aftermath. On Thursday, Chin Chin and her friends bought rice and water, loaded it on a truck, and drove deep into the delta. She was shocked by what she saw: roads lined with hundreds of cold and hungry villagers, disregarded by their own government, who had walked for an hour from their broken villages...
...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...
...uninvited foreign intervention likely to happen? Any relief operation would be fraught with risk. Air-dropping food into the Irrawaddy Delta could cause even more chaos, in the absence of military or relief personnel on the ground who can distribute supplies. And given the junta's xenophobia and insecurity, it's a safe bet any outside troops--or worse, foreign relief workers--would be viewed as hostile forces even if the U.S. and its allies made clear that their actions were strictly for humanitarian purposes. To save the Burmese people without their rulers' consent, in other words...