The Shock Doctrine in Myanmar:
“The people there (Myanmar) have the right to demand international assistance free of U.S. demands or sanctions.” This is the last sentence in an article by Sara Flounders (” U.S. Hostility Blocking Relief”). It postulates that the U.S. plans to supply humanitarian aid to the survivors of Cyclone Nargis as a prelude to a military, eventually corporate take-over of Myanmar, much like that in Iraq.
By “the people of Myanmar”, the author might as well substitute “the junta” since the people have been under the control of this dictatorship for over forty years and have no rights at all to demand anything. Whether the junta actually has requested aid or is merely “accepting it” is a question of semantics. Unimportant. What is important is that the cyclone has claimed thousands of victims, alive, dying, and dead, and that the government is, to a large extent, blocking foreign governments and NGO’s from distributing any aid allowed into the country. Two questions are 1) whether “U.S. hostility” is blocking relief from entering the country, or, more cogently phrased 2) is the Myanmar junta’s hostility to the U.S. doing the blocking?
To start with 2): Myanmar as blocker is born out by reports from every type of news media from the leftist Aljazeera to the rightist International Herald Tribune with the French Monde somewhere in the center. Flounders’ article lists many countries outside the U.S. whose supplies are in fact landing in Myanmar, but whether they are then distributed to any of the myriad villages engulfed in the Irrawaddy Delta has only rarely been verified.
One courageous reporter from the Monde hid in the bottom of a boat and travelled up some waterways, noting the total destitution of every village he passed, no food, water or shelter, but festering human and animal bodies. Aljazeera has two anonymous reporters in the area (the Junta does not allow foreign journalists) who took the camera to a village, also destitute, where a young resident led to a pile of dead bodies covered with flotsam, and said: “You can smell them.” But the village wanted to give them honorable burials instead of burning them. Here, by the way, foreign aid workers could be of help, precisely because they were foreign, and could take on the task of burning bodies, which is against the culture of the country.
Much aid is warehoused, some substituted for by placebos: for example, the nutritious biscuits specially fabricated to supply immediate food deficiencies are replaced by crackers. Aid distributed by the Burmese military sometimes only goes to people in the canton known to support the regime. Women’s dead bodies have been found with ears and fingers cut off for their jewellery.
To summarize: where there is crisis, there will be exploitation, pillage, and sheer inefficiency. These must be overcompensated for by massive aid, on a scale that no one country can supply. The United States could be an exception but for economic reasons and sheer inefficiency, was incapable of doing so during its own hurricane, Katerina (cf. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine). China, on the contrary, is doing a good and home-controlled job in its recent earthquake disaster in Sichuan province but has long benefited from a basically efficient socialist government. Both the U.S. and China are large countries–and their ability to “go it alone” cannot be compared to that of countries like Sri Lanka (see also Klein) or Myanmar.
Now 1): the U.S. is all ready to help Myanmar, and very conveniently (article in the IHT by Robert D. Kaplan) “American armed forces are now gathered in large numbers in Thailand for the annual multinational military exercise known as Cobra Gold.” Kaplan explains that, as during the 2004 Tsunami, warships (with hospital facilities, landing platforms etc.) could go through the straits of Malacca and the Bay of Bengal to the Irrawaddy Delta where ” a carrier strike group or even a smaller Marine-dominated expeditionary strike group headed by an amphibious ship could get close to shore and ferry troops and supplies to the most devastated areas on land…concomitantly, drops can be made from directly overhead by the U.S. Airforce without the need to militarily occupy the Burmese airport .” Mr. Kaplan has nothing against a U.S. invasion but warns the reader that it might leave us stuck with Burma–like Iraq, although Iraq “might have been (simple) had we planned for the aftermath.”
So the first horn of the dilemma is whether the U.S. and other foreign countries should be prevented from dropping their aid packages (once landed, NGO’s would do the physical transporting), thus saving thousands of lives. The Junta, repeat, has not the money or the infrastructure to handle the crisis. Why would it have? Burma is a poor country.
Burmese official counts of the dead are over 45,000, unofficially over one million. The Junta is letting aid trickle in, and “sauve qui peut.” The Monde postulates the latter solution: under the British colonial government, the Irrawaddy Delta was drained enough to allow cultivation, mostly rice, a clever and cheap-to-maintain economic microcosm because the people are very poor and provide cheap labor with little cost or trouble to the government. Their bamboo villages are easy to rebuild, and those people that are left after Cyclone Nargis can rebuild them and go back to farming. Saving more or less of their lives may be deemed hardly worth a U.S. take-over. And if facts on the ground are any indication, this decision has its advocates. Two days after the cyclone the Burmese military was up in the North of the country, monitoring a referendum to confirm the present government in its functions. It was not down saving lives in the Irrawaddy Delta.
The second horn of the dilemma is whether to let the U.S. warships with all their facilities for rescue and for war stay at anchor off the coast of Myanmar; whether to let the western NGO’s with their doctors (Medecins sans Frontiers, the Red Cross, the Red Crescent) and reconstruction experts (all the relevant UN and other agencies) see that aid is not only dropped, but distributed to the farthest villages, whose sick will be brought to hospitals, and whose families will be helped and set on their feet again; like the woman who gave all the family savings to buy fertilizer for the rice crop, now homeless, with only the clothes on their backs: “Now we can die of cholera.” (Aljazeera).
The people in the Irrawaddy Delta will not be offered a referendum on this dilemma: vote for death or foreign domination. The choice will be made by the Burmese government, the United States and the European community, possibly China. It is a choice without a foregone conclusion that saving lives necessarily involves changing the power structure. It will remain a dilemma until those who have the power decide.