Entries categorized as ‘economy’
Sea-level farmlands like these have not recovered from Cyclone Nargis
A week ago the United Nations humanitarian news agency ran a telling interview with a survivor of Cyclone Nargis, the storm that devastated Burma in May.
The interviewee, a 62-year-old farmer whose daughter-in-law and granddaughter were killed in the cyclone, said that although after the disaster some monks gave her paddy seed with which to replant her fields, the crop has failed.
“Even with fertilizer, the plants simply didn’t take or died,” Aye Yin told a reporter from the IRIN news service. “Some say it’s because of the salt water that inundated much of our fields. I don’t know. In any case, it doesn’t matter now.”
To get a little income, her grandson now collects empty water bottles from the streets and sells them to recyclers. The family has also received some assistance from the World Food Programme, but Aye Yin says that it isn’t enough.
“Now all we worry about is how we will survive the coming months,” she said. “I pray we won’t starve to death.”
She is going to have to pray harder. In November, the WFP is set to scale back its work in Burma’s delta, from general to “targeted” distributing of rice. (more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UN · UPI · dictatorship · economy · human rights · poverty
Tagged: Ayeyarwaddy, Cyclone Nargis, FAO, Food and Agriculture Organisation, IRIN, Irrawaddy, Nargis, Naypyidaw, WFP, World Food Programme, Zargana, Zarganar
Burma’s military government has by now dramatically compounded the death and misery brought to its country with Cyclone Nargis. While carrying on with the same sort of games it has played against the global community for years, it has caused untold needless loss of life and greatly magnified people’s suffering today and tomorrow.
The regime has failed to open the door to sufficient foreign aid for the millions who need help. Its agents, whether under orders or of their own accord, have also obstructed local and overseas efforts to deliver relief and have misdirected their energies at futile exercises like the holding of the May 10 constitutional referendum and the arrests of state officers accused of not staying at their posts throughout the havoc of that day.
The authorities have been scrambling to get back on top and at least give the appearance of being in control. Once they’ve obtained a semblance of normalcy and official behavior becomes a little more coherent, human rights abuses directed against storm refugees and people in nearby areas especially will increase. (more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UN · UPI · army · dictatorship · economy · human rights · human rights groups · military · poverty
Tagged: cyclone, Cyclone Nargis, ILO, International Labour Organisation, Nargis
(Latest roundup of some Burmese language news reports on Cyclone Nargis)
(ลักเล็ก ขโมยใหญ่)
International groups in Burma are reportedly acknowledging that the army is “diverting” or “pilfering” aid (euphemisms for thieving) to Cyclone Nargis victims but are declining to give details for fear that they will be locked out completely.
Much of the concern is rightly with the army stealing big at the top end of the chain. But there will be theft at every level and among all agencies. An article by Yoma 3 has an example of stealing little in Kyimyindaing, just across the river from Rangoon, where village council officials are allegedly taking relief supplies being sent for homeless villagers. According to one,
“On the 14th, there was donating through the Red Cross for refugees at Dalechaung village. When the donors were present, there were 17 mosquito nets, yet when given by raffle to the villagers there were only 10. Where’d the other seven go? When the villagers investigated they found that the three-village chairman U Kyaw Soe took two, and fire brigade chief Aung Min, Tin Oo of USDA, then fireman Sein Hlaing took one each. The other [two] couldn’t be located.”
According to the villager, U Kyaw Soe is refusing to allow aid to be distributed to the villagers from outside without his involvement. A donor told Yoma 3 that 44 houses in Dalechaung were washed away as the river rose during the storm. The others are without rooves and the villagers are staying in an old rice warehouse but have been told that they will be thrown out. Maybe they have to go and vote.
To be sure, under the circumstances this is a very small theft, and the families of the officials may themselves be in need, but as this sort of behaviour will be repeated everywhere, the question for international aid groups is, if 10 out of 17 items delivered to the local level (from an unknown number originally) reach the people who really need them, is that enough? (more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · army · crime · dictatorship · economy · human rights · military · poverty
Tagged: Bi-Weekly Eleven, cyclone, Cyclone Nargis, Kyimyindaing, Labutta, Laputta, Nargis, NEJ, New Era Journal, New Light of Myanmar, Rangoon, Red Cross, The Mirror, Yangon, Yoma 3
Around the suburbs of Rangoon small scraggly bushes now occupy plots of land that once were used for growing vegetables or beans. They look miserable. Unattended among weeds and debris, they show no signs of growth and bear few leaves. Some are used for hanging laundry. Others catch plastic bags in the breeze.
They are also a flagship state project. The order to grow these physic nut plants, which belong to the same family as castor oil, is said to have come directly from Burma’s military supremo, Senior General Than Shwe. His supposed idea is to alleviate the country’s fuel shortages through biodiesel, although some speculate that the order may have had as much to do with astrology as the economy.
People all around the country have been given seeds and pressed into planting them [or, the Myanmar Times suggests, "at the government's request"] along roads, football fields, schoolyards and government compounds. Some bear the signboards of government departments, police stations and military units. Television broadcasts reassure viewers that the bushes will soon bear a great bounty, and demonstrate how simple it is to extract their oil and use it for fuel.
Reality suggests otherwise. (more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UPI · dictatorship · economy · human rights · other countries · poverty
Tagged: Than Shwe, Tin Kyi, China, physic nut, James C. Scott, Mao, Great Leap Forward
The latest report of a United Nations independent expert has rightly inferred that the deepening poverty of millions is the most endemic human rights abuse in Burma today.
The report, by Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, notes that even government figures reveal that citizens spend around 73 percent of their disposable incomes on food alone, while international agencies estimate that one child in three aged under five is malnourished.
The preponderant cause of this misery is the government itself. Pinheiro observes that, for instance, the confiscating of land is often followed by new big projects which in turn bring more suffering. He points to seven new hydroelectric schemes in the north that have been accompanied by military demands for labor, money and goods from people living in their vicinity, to say nothing of the environmental damage caused.
All of this is very far removed from the unceasing images in state-run media of generals standing resolutely above new dams, cutting ribbons at the entrances of schools, and strolling over carpets of petals strewn by maidens across big bridges. In their world, national development is measured in terms of cubic meters of concrete poured and machines itemized. What can be seen to have been done is what matters.
The propaganda is striking because it is in these fields that the regime is failing spectacularly. The new bridges span rivers which are reached by roads of such poor condition that hire vehicles refuse to travel them. Schools have classrooms and chairs but lack teachers, and for that matter, students. Power lines run to houses without metering devices, and the dams anyhow are not supplying those with them: households boil rice with charcoal because constant outages mean that an electric cooker switched on for dinner may not be ready until breakfast.
Moreover, as Burma’s people have been forced to continue treading rocky roads, so too has the U.N.’s expert. (more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UN · UPI · army · courts · dictatorship · economy · human rights · military · poverty · rule of law
Tagged: Commission on Human Rights, Human Rights Council, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, Pinheiro, Special Rapporteur
Within the last decade, the cost of a bus trip across Rangoon, a cup of tea, or a bottle of peanut oil has risen tenfold. One sack of the lowest quality rice in Burma today sells for around US$12: half a month’s wages for a construction worker; an unimaginable amount for the children picking over rubbish heaps in search of a cabbage leaf or some discarded grains.
Persistent acute increases in the cost of living across Burma have been spurred on by the rise in fuel prices of last August, which precipitated nationwide protests the following month.
But while the spreading poverty has been documented and raised by international groups, the contrasting displays of extravagant riches by its small elite have attracted less attention abroad. In the country, they are increasingly hard to ignore. (more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UPI · army · dictatorship · economy · human rights · military · poverty · protest
Tagged: Mary Callahan, Myanmar Times, Rangoon, Yangon
Note: This comment appeared in Jurist on November 7
The renewal of small protests in Burma during recent days should come as no surprise to anyone other than those persons who have written foolish articles making out that what happened in September was somehow not the doing of the people there themselves but rather a consequence of covert American foreign policy.
Every society has its threshold, the point after which it will no longer tolerate things going on as before. The threshold for people in Burma is much higher than that of many other societies today, and thus they have put up with a lot more for a lot longer than might otherwise have been expected. This does not mean that they have not fought back, but rather that their forms of resistance have not attracted much outside interest, nor seriously threatened the army’s hold on power. Rather, many have served to keep the country back from the threshold for so long.
But it is no longer possible for people there to use ordinary methods of defiance to alleviate their problems. The conditions under which they are being forced to live have become intolerable. The protests are a consequence of the threshold being reached, not engineering from the outside. The struggle that is on now in Burma is ultimately a struggle for survival.
(more…)
Categories: Burma · Jurist · Myanmar · army · dictatorship · economy · human rights · military · protest · religion · rule of law
Tagged: ICRC, International Committee of the Red Cross
While hundreds of persons remain detained or are missing in the aftermath of the uprising that gripped Burma in September, and new sporadic protests emerge [and here], its national newspapers have consisted of the usual phalanx of army officers forcing their largesse onto Buddhist monks and attending an all-important performing arts festival.
On Oct. 20, newspaper headlines declared that the new prime minister, Lt.-Gen. Thein Sein, had the day before watched a performance of the Suwannasama legend, one of ten allegories about previous lives of Gautama Buddha that is known to the majority of people in Burma by way of religious homilies and primary school lessons.
Suwannasama, the story goes, is a young man who lives with his blind parents in a forest. One day a king on a hunting trip accidentally shoots him dead, but a sympathetic deity brings him back to life. The king is remorseful and devotes himself to the family, thereafter being reborn in a higher plane of existence. The elderly mother and father even regain their sight.
The choice of drama appears to have been intended as a message that with a little bit of compromise everybody in Burma, like the play’s protagonists, can come out ahead. A long-winded feature article belabored the point, concluding that it would be in the interests of all to heed the folktale’s lessons. And on the days before and after there were other equally gripping reports of senior officers watching the play.
But the spirit of compromise has itself quickly turned to myth.
(more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UN · UPI · army · dictatorship · economy · human rights · military · religion
Tagged: World Food Programme, WFP, International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, Charles Petrie, Jataka, Suwannasama, Thein Sein, Gautama Buddha, Gautama, Buddha
October 11, 2007 · 1 Comment
The Hong Kong University this week hosted a talk on recent events in Burma by its dean of social sciences, who was billed as arguing “for new forms of intervention that take policy responses beyond the bankrupt strategies of sanctions imposed by Western states and constructive engagement undertaken by Asian states.”
Unfortunately, the professor gave no such argument. His comments, although well intended, foundered on the ground over which they were supposed to pass: sanctions don’t work; some kind of engagement is necessary. He pinned his hopes on a different sort of corporate involvement, while acknowledging that there exist no legal or institutional arrangements in Burma through which investors can be held accountable or upon which they can place their trust.
There is nothing new in any of that. Long before the United States first imposed a formal ban in 1997, arguments were raging about its practical use, given that Burma has few direct economic ties with the West. The disagreements have continued for the last decade. But genuine debate has long since given way to the tired reiterating of immoveable opinions.
(more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UN · UPI · army · dictatorship · economy · human rights · military · other countries · politics · protest · rule of law
Tagged: Geneva Conventions, HKU, Hong Kong University, Ian Holliday, ICRC, International Committee of the Red Cross, National Bureau of Asian Research, NBR, North Korea, UN, WFP, World Food Programme
September 21, 2007 · 5 Comments
When a group of Buddhist monks in Pakokku, upper Burma, a fortnight ago joined public protests against drastic increases in nationwide fuel prices, they were met with shocking violence. At least three suffered injuries; one is rumored to have died.
Afterwards, some decided to go after the ringleaders of the gang responsible for the assault. They knew exactly which shops and houses to visit. There was no secret about who was involved. Like everywhere else in the country, the gang leaders are locally known and established.
Want to get a gang together on short notice in downtown Rangoon? Just call up the nearest township leader. Where? Let’s say Bahan. There it’s U Min Htun, a 45-year-old trader residing in 38th Street. Or try his deputy, U Naing Tint Khaing, who can be reached at his office. How about Mayangone? Ironically, the person in charge there, U Soe Aung, is a law student. Need someone in Hlaing? Kyauktada? Sanchaung? No problem: names, phone numbers and other details are all available on lists that have been compiled and kept by township councils, with orders and training from above.
But while the identities of the people managing and deploying the thugs that have for the last month been photographed and videotaped beating people to the ground before dragging them to waiting Dyna light trucks are not a mystery to anyone in Burma, among foreign correspondents and others abroad there remains some misunderstanding.
(more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UPI · army · dictatorship · economy · extrajudicial killing · human rights · military · other countries · protest
Tagged: Aung San Suu Kyi, Depayin, Gujarat, India, Indonesia, Monique Skidmore, Pakokku, Rangoon, Swan-arshin, Than Shwe, Union Solidarity and Development Association, USDA, Yangon
Over two weeks of rallies against rising prices in Burma have been met with familiar violence. In the former capital, Rangoon (Yangon), government-organized gangs consisting of plainclothes officials and hired thugs have set upon protestors with increasing speed and severity. Hundreds are now in illegal detention — few, if any, have been arrested and held in accordance with the law; the whereabouts of many are unknown.
Some protests have continued in places where authorities have been slower to respond. In the western port of Sittwe, a column of monks and novices marched across town and chanted slogans, prompting warnings to those elsewhere not to follow suit. In the far south, students took to the streets in a line of motorcycles.
In the delta, a man stood alone with a placard in front of a filling pump before a policeman came and ordered him on to the back of his bike. On the way to the station, he reportedly continued to wave the sign, making the officer look like a fellow conspirator rather than custodian, to the amusement and applause of passersby. [News on his release: DVB]
As security has been tightened, new forms of protest have been emerging. Posters and fliers have appeared here and there. One, cleverly designed and written like an announcement for a religious event, calls on people to stay inside their houses at three auspicious times during September and bang pots and pans to drive out evil spirits emanating from the new capital.
Given the depth of frustration felt about virtually all aspects of life in Burma, it is not surprising that some persons have taken the risk of expressing outwardly what everyone else is feeling inwardly. But what is perhaps surprising is how little these expressions have been heard abroad. Although world media reported on them for a few days and some governments have issued stern pronouncements, the United Nations and other important international bodies have remained circumspect at best.
(more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UN · UPI · army · dictatorship · economy · human rights · military · other countries · protest · rule of law
Tagged: Ban Ki-moon, Gwangju, Korea, Kwangju, May 18, Rangoon, Sittwe, UN Secretary General, US State Department, Yangon
If you are among those fretting about the global financial slump that has taken up so much news time in recent days, spare a thought for the people in Burma. On Aug. 15 the military regime there, which holds a monopoly on the sale of vehicle and generator fuels, multiplied prices without prior announcement. The cost of diesel was doubled. Ordinary petroleum was raised by two-thirds. Compressed natural gas was increased five-fold.
A lot of buses just didn’t run that day. Where they did, fares were immediately increased in line with the new tariffs. Millions of folk who ordinarily venture out with just enough money to arrive at work or school and perhaps get back again were left with a stark alternative: go home or walk. Two young men who took photographs of crowds waiting on the curbs in Rangoon were reportedly detained until that night. In a country without unions, employees in an industrial area demanded more wages.
Four days afterward, around 500 people walked together across Rangoon to urge that the price rise be revoked. One woman tearfully told an outside radio station that she was with them because she was sick and tired, but also determined. Security police took photographs. Onlookers applauded.
On Aug. 21, hundreds again marched, and were this time met by government-organized gangs armed with sticks and slingshots. That night, at least a dozen were arrested at their houses. But that did not deter others: the next day hundreds more, mostly women, took to the streets. At time of writing they too were blocked by thugs acting for police and soldiers.
The price increases come on top of an annual inflation rate of about 40 percent, and at a time that people in many parts of the country have been struggling with floods. Small civic groups have been set up in urban centers to alleviate the needs of the hungry. In rural areas things are far worse; according to one news report (and here), a man in Sagaing Division died in police custody at the start of the month after stealing some instant noodles and a soft drink. Sporadic protests against runaway commodity prices earlier in the year had already been met with arrests and inquiries.
When asked about the unexpected hike, economists were at a loss. Some put it down to sheer incompetence. Most pointed out that it will obviously affect other basic commodities; and jumps in rice, oil and salt prices have already been confirmed. An analyst in Bangkok said the move was in the opposite direction to the rest of the world, and didn’t make sense given that Burma exports natural gas.
Economists cannot and will not be able to explain adequately what happened last Wednesday because their science is rational. It attributes a type of reasoning to the making of choices that is largely absent from policymaking in Burma.
(more…)
Categories: Burma · Myanmar · UPI · army · dictatorship · economy · human rights · military · poverty
Tagged: Maha Sammata, Mary Callahan, Ne Win, Nepal, Pakistan, Rangoon, Rousseau, Sagaing, Swan-arshin, Yangon
