Aid and Hypocrisy

Response to the tropical cyclone Nargis, which hit Myanmar on 3 May 2008 has been hijacked by vested interests on all sides, leaving millions of Asia’s poorest people without any effective aid.

The greatest responsibility rests with Myanmar’s military government, which failed to warn the population of the cyclone, and has still not mounted an effective disaster response programme. The country’s huge army and police forces were completely absent from the streets of Yangoon . . . overall, the disaster response has demonstrated once again that Myanmar’s junta is arrogant, out of touch and parasitical, and completely unable to meet the basic needs and rights of the population. International media and humanitarian charities have rightly condemned this failure to protect.

The behaviour of Myanmar’s business and middle classes - the main supporters of the pro-western opposition around their symbolic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has shown that they are completely unfit to take charge of the country, despite their undeniable popular support. Commercial enterprises large and small jacked up the prices of all essential commodities by 200 to 400% immediately following the cyclone. . .

One of the few public policies that does help the country’s poor - the provision of government-subsidised petrol and oil, would be abolished if Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-western National League for Democracy took power.

Western interests have also exploited the cyclone to advance their own agenda - opening Myanmar to western investment on the same unequal terms as in Cambodia, and imposing a more malleable government. . .

US officials - coordinating the hundreds of aid workers and journalists now massed in Bangkok waiting for the green light, have started circulating widely exaggerated estimates of the number of victims, in order to marshal the humanitarian charities and journalists behind the US’s aggressive plans for regime change.

Not that many of the private aid agencies and charities need much persuading. Closely linked to missionary groups that have been working in the Burmese border region since British colonial times, and expecting to receive tens of millions of dollars of easy money when the Myanmar junta caves in, most of the aid industry is unable to distance itself from great power interests in the region.

A smaller number of international solidarity campaigns are going against this depressing general pattern. Buddhist groups across Asia have found ways to channel support through Myanmar’s monasteries and temples - where many of the cyclone victims have taken shelter. Others have linked to émigré and underground student and pro-democracy groups, not all of whom have been fooled by the US charm offensive and dollar largesse towards the émigré circles.

http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1469