Everything Is Broken (31 page)

This vision was especially wise, stated the article, because it had a dual purpose: A road system in areas previously accessible only by water would boost trade routes and people’s livelihoods and, therefore, their ability to recover from the disaster. A good idea in theory, but as one Burmese friend pointed out, how were people supposed to get up to roads floating fifteen or twenty feet in the air? “Are they going to build a ramp every mile or so? Or maybe they have plans to elevate the entire delta!”

Though the
New Light of Myanmar
featured a map detailing how the road network would link towns like Laputta, Pyinzalu, and Mawlamyainggyun, nothing ever came of the ambitious plan. I saw no road construction anywhere in the lower reaches of the delta, and there was not a man-made hillock in sight. Neither was there any mention of the senior general’s elevated road network in the government’s final Program for Reconstruction after Cyclone Nargis, a plan for “Preparedness and Protection from Future Natural Disaster.” Despite the eager posture of the generals around Than Shwe in the original meeting, his idea seemed to have been quietly ditched, though probably no one had yet mustered the nerve to mention that to the senior general.

 

 

 

A FEW DAYS
after Cyclone Nargis, Laura Bush, then U.S. First Lady, issued a statement that said, “Although they [the regime] were aware of the threat, Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path.” Others followed suit, and before long it became a much-touted truism that orders had come from the capital, Naypyidaw, imposing a media blackout on weather reports so as not to cause a panic about the approaching storm, an order that also could be reinterpreted in its most simple and horrifying form as,
Let them die
.

In fact, the storm’s path was not known with any surety until less than two days before it made landfall. When Cyclone Nargis was brewing in the Bay of Bengal, it was a middling-sized storm that appeared to be traveling north. The Bangladesh government issued a series of storm warnings and prepared for the worst; aid organizations began preparations to stockpile food and evacuate people from vulnerable coastal areas to storm shelters. It had seemed almost certain that the cyclone was going to strike the storm-weary shores of Bangladesh.

But cyclones are beholden to slight changes in temperature and the push and pull of distant winds; their movements can be erratic and hard to predict. For about twenty-four hours near the end of April, the storm stopped moving entirely and hovered ominously in the middle of the bay, poised between India, Bangladesh, and Burma. It was not until midnight on April 30 that the U.S. Joint Typhoon Warning Center recorded the cyclone making an abrupt turn to the northeast, after which it began to track a path that would have led to Arakan State in northwestern Burma.

But, as the hours passed, the cyclone spun farther eastward, lining up with the Irrawaddy Delta. Only in the final twenty-four hours before it hit land did the cyclone begin to intensify. Staff of UN agencies in Rangoon who monitored weather sites on the Web told me that on May 2, the morning of the storm, it was still unclear as to where it was going to hit land.

Local weather reports reflected this uncertainty. Beginning on April 27, the state media ran warnings that there was a cyclone in the region and (incorrectly) predicted a relatively mild storm with 40 to 45 mile-per-hour winds. On the day of the storm, updated radio alerts warned of winds up to 120 miles per hour. Villagers I spoke to in the delta said they knew of the cyclone’s impending arrival—either through the newspaper or radio—but had assumed it wouldn’t be too bad and thought they would be able to hunker down in their homes.

The head of Burma’s Department of Meteorology, Htun Lwin, had a clear conscience. Though he didn’t respond directly to the international accusations that appropriate weather reports had not been issued, he spoke to the local media in Burma and wrote articles designed to clear his name and that of his department. Htun Lwin stated that he had followed up his regular broadcasts with personal phone calls to authorities on Haing Gyi Island—the first piece of land in the cyclone’s path—and had maintained half-hourly phone contact until the last possible minute. He also made it known that his department had been cleared of any wrongdoing by the World Meteorological Organization. Representatives of the UN’s weather-monitoring arm had come to Rangoon and ascertained that the Department of Meteorology had done an adequate job, especially given the out-of-date equipment they had to work with.

The problem, said Htun Lwin, was not the lack of any warning; the problem was that there had been no effective system in place to tell people what to do in such circumstances. He reminded readers that the delta had never been hit by a storm anywhere near the size and ferocity of Cyclone Nargis, and it could not be expected that there would be early warning systems or cyclone shelters in place to protect people in the area. In one article the weatherman wrote that it was an ill-fated combination of conditions that made the cyclone so lethal to so many people: the high population density; the low-lying land of the delta; the many waterways along which the storm surge could travel; the waterlogged land on which the cyclone could feed and maintain strength; and the denuded mangrove that could have absorbed some of the surge.

Throughout the time I researched the story of Cyclone Nargis, I always imagined that, one day, a great reckoning would come; not quite a thunderbolt from the sky that would strike down all evil forces from the land, but at least some record or true assessment of what had happened in the wake of the storm. Given the international outcry after the cyclone—the accusations of a crime committed against humanity and the calls for delivering aid by force—I had assumed there would have been some effort to establish exactly what had taken place and what the ruling generals were culpable for. But the outrage had somehow been retracted, and the crime, if it had ever been committed, was now forgotten or absolved.

Yet even the most basic questions remained unanswered. How many people had been killed during the cyclone? The final death toll used by both the Burmese government and accepted by the aid community and media was the official toll of 84,537 dead and 53,836 missing, considered to add up to over 138,000 dead.

Many people believe the death toll was much higher. A boatman in Bogale who had been hired by an aid agency to make deliveries across the township was conducting his own unofficial and private tally, and he told me that at least 100,000 people had died in Bogale Township alone.
“Minimum
,” he emphasized. The official number in Bogale Township was recorded as 34,744 dead and 3,198 missing.

Estimates of the true number of people killed by Cyclone Nargis were three or four times higher than the government’s final count, which would bring the number of dead to over half a million.

There were also more complex questions that may always have been hard to answer: How many people died because of the regime’s negligence and reticence in allowing foreign aid into the country? Many survivors I spoke to who had witnessed deaths in the first few days immediately following the storm. People had died of injuries sustained during the storm, and those who were unable to walk to places where they could get help died of dehydration. Would these people have lived if the regime had acted more quickly or if it had allowed foreign military helicopters to conduct search-and-rescue missions? A seasoned UN logistics expert who had worked in emergency operations throughout the region told me that thousands of people could have been saved.

As time passed, though, the possibility of a fair and comprehensive reckoning became less and less likely. The facts were already bloated with hindsight, overblown by rumor and sound bites from the more sensational elements of the international media and activist groups, and underplayed by the regime’s own meticulously archived propaganda machine.

Perhaps I was spending too much time under the gloomy delta skies, but I did not share the optimism I read about in some of the international news stories written to mark the passing of six months since Cyclone Nargis. Headlines like “Hope Returns to the Delta” seemed trite, especially when everything I saw indicated the exact opposite. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization stated that 97 percent of paddy fields had been restored. Yet I must have coincidentally spent my time traveling exclusively in the 3 percent of the area with failed crops and speaking with farmers who were unable to properly plough their fields—a strange coincidence given that my travels took me to so many disparate parts of the delta.

Aid workers spoke to the foreign press about a new and improved relationship between the aid community and the regime. It was true that access had become possible in the delta, but assistance in other areas of the country was still subject to restrictions.

In Chin State, bamboo had flowered—an unwanted occurrence that happens once or twice in a century and causes a massive increase in the number of rats. The multiplying rats were munching their way voraciously through crops and food stocks, and the threat of famine was looming in Chin State. Yet the authorities would not allow international NGOs or the UN into Chin State to see what could be done to alleviate the disaster.

One aid worker I met at a UN office had been waiting over a month for permission to leave Rangoon and travel to Magwe in central Burma, where there were also reports of food shortages. These areas did open up eventually, once the regime felt confident it had enough control over the situation on the ground, but the initial restrictions were a replay of what had happened after Cyclone Nargis, albeit on a smaller scale.

Whenever a door opens in Burma, another one is surreptitiously closed. It seemed like a very military tactic:

It was the kind of move I would have expected to find described in Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
; some archaic wisdom that provided counsel on how to wrong-foot an opponent by keeping his attention fixated on one target so that he would not notice that other areas were being bolstered and strengthened.

I took my counsel elsewhere, in an anthology of poems called
The Way of the Hyacinth
by a late, great poet of the delta region known as Zaw Gyi. One of the poems describes the challenging journey made by the
beda
, or water hyacinth, that is ubiquitous in the delta’s waterways. The
beda
’s journey is not easy; it is tugged by tides and attacked by palm fronds and other haphazard flotsam. Yet, the
beda
always overcomes these obstacles, and even manages to flower in the face of adversity, displaying silky lilac petals above its tangled raft of verdant leaves.

Though the poem was published in 1960, long before Aung San Suu Kyi came to the fore of Burmese politics, it is sometimes read as a reference to her strength and grace; whenever she appeared in public she almost always wore fresh flowers in her hair. I also read the poem as a treatise on endurance in general—the kind of endurance people throughout the country had to exercise as they recovered, regrouped, and rose above the ever-rising waters. The poem’s last verse portrays the hyacinth resurfacing after a spell underwater:

I WAS LATE
leaving Pyinzalu. The sun was already beginning to fade and the boatman was worried about getting us back to Laputta before nightfall. We set off, sailing rapidly back upriver past the empty salt fields. The late afternoon light threw long, twisted shadows across the land. The boatman gunned his engine against the setting sun, but he was fighting a losing battle. The sun had already turned a livid red and began to accelerate its descent as it neared the horizon. The waters flushed pink for the briefest of moments and then the light was gone.

For a short while the boatman was able to navigate in the gray half light by checking the black lines on either side of us that marked the edges of the narrow creek we were traveling along, but soon it was too dark to do even that. And then I realized why the boatman had been so concerned when we left Pyinzalu—the light on his boat was broken and large parts of the delta were entirely without electricity.

I had my headlamp with me, and we took turns putting it on and lying at the front of the boat peering out into the darkness, shouting if we spotted the bamboo poles of a fishing net or buoys that marked traps beneath the water. The boatman had slowed down and was moving at a walking pace. After about an hour, we saw a weak, yellow light in the distance. It turned out to be a flashlight used by a fisherman who was laying nets. He gamely climbed onboard to direct us to the nearest village. It was still a slow journey, and I leaned back against the side of the boat, my services with the headlamp no longer needed. As the boat engine puttered along, the setting took on a magical air: the black waters, the silent wetlands all around us, the star-filled sky above. I felt very far away from anywhere and oddly calm.

When we arrived in the darkened village, the Burmese aid workers I had been traveling with realized they had worked there before and knew some of the villagers, so we were able to arrange a room for the night. We were taken to a part of the village that had not been badly affected by the storm surge, where some of the bigger wooden houses had survived intact. The house we stayed in was empty that night—it was a one-room wooden house on stilts. There were few contents other than a couple of live chickens tied to a railing and some rolled-up, weevil-ridden, rattan sleeping mats.