By Washington Post / June 22, 2008
RANGOON, Burma - Seven weeks after huge swaths of Burma were savaged by a cyclone and tidal wave, a new and remarkable citizen movement is delivering emergency supplies to survivors neglected by the military government's haphazard relief effort.
The scores of ad hoc Burmese groups, many of them based in Rangoon, the country's largest city, are not overtly political. But they are reviving a kind of social activism largely repressed by Burma's successive military rulers.
Defying roadblocks and bureaucratic obstruction, volunteers have reached devastated villages in many parts of the Irrawaddy Delta, dropping off food, drinking water, and other essentials and bringing back photos that contradict claims in the state media that life is returning to normal.
Some members of the groups say they hope to keep working together when the cyclone damage is finally repaired and to turn toward other activities that carry shades of political activism in this tightly controlled state.
With residents' frustration over the official relief effort mounting, pledges of support and donations to the National League for Democracy, the main opposition group in Burma, also called Myanmar, have doubled since the cyclone, according to a student leader of the league.
The storm, which came ashore on the night of May 2-3, killed an estimated 134,000 people and created severe hardship for 2.4 million more. The country's deeply xenophobic junta refused many offers of foreign help. It agreed to let in substantial numbers of international aid workers only after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon flew to the country May 22 with a personal appeal.
By then, however, homegrown groups were already mobilized, working to offset the tragic shortcomings of the government operation.
One day, more than a dozen local jewelers loaded 100 bags of rice, 20 bags of beans, tarpaulins, and blankets onto a truck donated by a supplier and set off at midnight for a storm-ravaged town.
They returned with photos of homeless villagers lining up for tins of food at a makeshift camp, a tear-stained boy who, they said, had lost his entire family to the storm's fierce tidal surge, and rotten rice - yellow, fist-size chunks of it, piled like rocks in bags donated by the government-affiliated Myanmar Red Cross.
"When I saw what they were being fed, I was shaking I was so angry," said a shop assistant, 26, who described each photo as she passed it to a customer.
The informal organizations are often based on occupation. Artists, doctors, students, and gem dealers have formed separate groups. In other cases, the groups are made up of friends.
A 27-year-old lawyer trainee said he and five friends were furious when they tried to distribute supplies around the ruined town of Bogalay about a week after the cyclone but were turned away by local authorities who told them they needed a permit.
"They say they are giving these things to the people, but we know they aren't," he said, pointing at a photo in the state daily newspaper, the Mirror, that showed a relief camp with neat rows of tents and tables laden with food. "We know not to believe them."
In the weeks immediately after the cyclone, a doctor recounted, he closed his private medical clinic for twice-weekly trips to the delta with others. There, they noticed local officials shooing away children, many of them orphaned or suffering storm-related trauma.
So the doctors, four of whom are pediatricians, tried to entertain the children to keep their minds occupied. They held a sanitation workshop after noticing that there were no visible efforts to instruct people in basic hygiene.
"The Ministry of Health is trying, but they're not effective, not organized," the physician said.
Like many other residents, the doctor can't afford to take many more days off work, but he still meets with the group every week. He said he hopes to translate the momentum of its cyclone relief work into other efforts, operating under cover of medicine.
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