Everything Is Broken (7 page)

“It would not be like that here,” one of the men replied. “The
Tatmadaw
[Burmese army] are not brave like those Iraqis. They would only have to see one American soldier on Burmese soil and they would run away.”

There was much laughter at the idea of Burma’s cowardly soldiers being chased by hulking American GIs, and our conversation became almost jolly as we talked about the possibilities of amphibious landing craft off-loading soldiers onto the muddy delta shores and U.S. helicopters air-dropping sacks of rice to hungry villagers. The talk seemed to me to be lighthearted fantasy, but the shopkeeper’s eyes had become wet with tears. “You must authorize the invasion,” he said to me earnestly, as if I was the admiral of the fleet and it was within my capability to issue such a command.

We stopped speaking for a while and I turned to look at the street. A sodden rat climbed out of the water and into the stairwell of a nearby shop-house, where it sat exhausted and panting. The floodwater had turned an ugly gray color and the consistency had thickened—a sign that the city’s sewage pipes were overflowing. As plastic bags and other scraps of rubbish floated past, a fetid, unhealthy smell began to rise off the waters.

 

 

 

THERE IS A BURMESE PHRASE
that perfectly described the limited amount of aid being delivered after the cyclone versus the enormity of the need: As the phrase goes, it was like tossing sesame seeds into the mouth of an elephant.

It took the regime almost a week to grant landing permission at Rangoon airport for planes flying in aid supplies. The first flights that were allowed to land came from nearby Asian countries such as Thailand, China, and India, as well as cargo flights chartered by the UN. A few days later the regime began allowing U.S. Air Force planes carrying relief goods to land each day but only under the condition that the contents of the C-130 planes were unloaded by the Burmese military and distributed through the authorities.

It was clear to everyone involved that this small number of flights was not nearly enough to ferry in the supplies and logistical support needed to set up and maintain a major emergency operation. By comparison, the relief effort launched within forty-eight hours of the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 involved aid from countries around the world, with more than thirty national militaries dispatching troops and providing helicopters, aircraft, and ships. The U.S. government alone had committed eighteen thousand soldiers, sailors, and Air Force personnel. Just a couple of weeks after the tsunami, a fleet of helicopters was flying over 430 sorties a day out of the airport at Banda Aceh, the capital of the worst-hit region of Aceh. In Burma, where it was feared the disaster could be of a comparable scale, there was hardly any activity at the airport, and the regime had so far prohibited the UN from bringing in helicopters to deliver aid.

The limitations were further exacerbated by a lack of speed. It could take an entire day to off-load the few planes able to land, as there was only one forklift available for use at the airport. Security personnel insisted on painstakingly combing through the cargo, filming and noting down exact quantities before letting it pass through customs. And some goods were brazenly confiscated by customs officials, such as communications and IT equipment flown in for UN agencies to use in the delta.

The
New Light of Myanmar
offered up a characteristically faultless version of the goings-on at the airport and documented the arrival of aid in detail. The newspaper ran numerous photographs of planes at the airport with the oft-repeated headline “International Relief Supplies Continue to Arrive.” The paper also displayed cargo lists for each craft. One U.S. plane, for instance, flew in 9 tons of relief supplies (including 6,340 bottles of water, 3,150 blankets, and 4,200 mosquito nets). Most of the descriptions ended with an unconvincing final sentence stating that all goods were being “immediately sent to the storm-hit regions.”

Few people were taken in by this alternative reality. Foreigners and Burmese alike had little faith that the authorities were able to conduct an adequate emergency operation or handle donated goods in a trustworthy manner. An American working at the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon told me that even the embassy’s staff was unsure where the supplies were being taken. “Five C-130s landed yesterday,” he said. “Their contents should be loaded onto big trucks, taken down to delta towns, transshipped into smaller trucks or boats, and headed to villages. Instead, they are being loaded onto Burmese military vehicles, and we have no idea where they’re going. No one is telling us anything. We’re bringing in all this stuff and it’s all going into a big black hole.”

Theories as to where the aid was ending up abounded. Some thought the goods were being repackaged and sold off as regular commodities at distant markets in places like Mandalay, a day’s journey north of Rangoon. Many believed the regime was letting soldiers hand out the aid so that the military could take credit for the donations. It was also suggested that the wives of the ruling generals were out at the airport laying claim to the imported goods, though it was hard to picture the well-heeled women standing on the tarmac picking over stiff blankets and vitamin-fortified biscuits.

Once aid supplies made it past overzealous customs officials and covetous wives, it was still a long and convoluted process to reach survivors. My friend Ko Ye, who had an encyclopedia of stories to share each time I met him, told me about a gem company owner who had raised K40 million (in the Burmese currency,
kyat
, around US$40,000) for donations but had been forced to give K10 million to the Rangoon regional commander. The commander promised him that the money would be turned into aid. (“Yeah,” smirked Ko Ye. “Aid for his own family.”) On his way down to the delta, the donor had to hand over sacks of rice at military checkpoints in order to be allowed past. Disgusted by their greed, he eventually gave up and returned to Rangoon.

Donors who did persevere were careful not to channel any donations in cash or kind through the authorities, preferring instead to work with monks and monasteries. Aung Thein Kyaw, the man who had closed down his tour agency to help with the relief effort, described how he had gone to a delta hospital to donate medicines and was told by the nurses to come back at night, because during the day soldiers were often sniffing around for commodities they could sequester. To avoid having large amounts of food snatched by the authorities, one crafty restaurant owner in Rangoon divided her donation of rice and curries into five thousand small bags to hand out to individual recipients.

In addition to hurdles set up by the government, aid agencies also had to deal with the formidable logistical challenges of delivering supplies across a vast flooded area where much of the infrastructure had been damaged or totally destroyed. As there were no roads in the southern stretches of the delta, a significant portion of the deliveries had to be made by boat, but many boats had been sunk or rendered useless during the cyclone. The daily storms also conspired to make water routes dangerous, and there were frequent reports of smaller vessels capsizing due to waves or unpredictable currents. The roads and bridges that did exist before the storm were deteriorating rapidly under the traffic of aid convoys and the constant rain.

I kept thinking back to the shopkeeper’s question:
With nothing, how will they survive?

 

AT A WET MARKET
somewhere in Rangoon, a fishmonger reached into a bucket of still-writhing fish. His expert hand moved patiently through the mass of bodies, stroking scales and caressing wriggling bellies. When he found a fish the size and weight he was looking for, he slid his fingers tightly around the tail and lifted it out of the bucket, slapping it onto a wooden chopping block that was already slippery with fish gut and varnished pinkish red with blood.

With well-practiced delicacy and speed, the fishmonger slipped the sharp point of his knife into the fish and cut a fine slit along the silvery underbelly. A fist-sized tangle of innards plopped out onto the chopping block. As he swiped his knife to one side of the pile to dispense the unwanted parts into a waiting bin, he discovered something that should not have been there. Amid the quivering mound of steaming fish gut, he saw a human finger.

This being Rangoon, word spread quickly.
A finger has been found inside a fish.
The fish, people said, was a freshwater fish. It was assumed that it must have come from one of the many waterways coursing through the delta. The fish had probably been swimming along the creeks where thousands of dead bodies were still floating. The bodies were disintegrating in their watery graves, and fish were beginning to nibble on the loosened appendages.

As this story of the human finger found inside the belly of a fish was passed on, it was rapidly transformed from rumor into fact. People stopped buying fish. In restaurants there was uncomfortable laughter when someone suggested ordering fish; most people shook their heads emphatically. People also abstained from eating crabs, lobsters, or prawns—it became another much-touted fact, a fact that everyone seemed to have always known, that crustaceans feast on the flesh of the dead.

And the dead were now everywhere. They had found their way out of the delta and into the city.

 

 

 

AS THE STRANGLEHOLD
on news was drawn ever tighter, it became increasingly tricky to sort fact from fiction. Every day I heard unverifiable tales that began, in my mind, to take on the elements of myth.

Perhaps none of these stories were true; perhaps all of them were. In the hothouse environment of Rangoon, where the truth was malleable and facts and figures could be plucked out of thin air, anything seemed possible. As there are so few reliable sources of news in Burma, rumors take on an added significance and act as a barometer of people’s hopes and fears. What becomes important in this context is not whether they are true but whether people believe them to be true.

During the chaos immediately after the storm, a handful of gung-ho foreign correspondents were able to get to the delta and file news reports. The authorities, however, had been quick to muster their resources and blockade road and river access. For a short while, a few journalists still managed to slip past them, hidden beneath rice sacks or wrapped in tarpaulin sheets. Some Asian journalists donned Burmese dress and traveled freely past the checkpoints. But within only a week or so, the restrictions on movement were, like the restrictions on news and information, firmly in place.

I met a British journalist in Rangoon filing for the
Daily Telegraph
who told me he had tried every way possible to get down to the delta and had been rebuffed at every turn. He was halted at roadblocks and prevented from boarding passenger ferries. And he had not been able to hire a Burmese fixer to arrange transport for him no matter how much money he offered—the job had become too dangerous. Traveling to the cyclone-torn areas with an aid organization was also out of the question, as aid groups were not willing to risk what little access they had negotiated for themselves. In the end, the journalist had resorted to reporting on Cyclone Nargis from his hotel. He was staying at a prominent business hotel in Rangoon where some UN agencies are headquartered. “There’s a lot of aid agencies working out of the hotel, so I can pretty much cover the story from there, and in considerable comfort,” he cheerfully admitted.

A number of foreign journalists had been caught by the authorities and deported. Teza Oo, a Burmese writer who also acted as a fixer for visiting foreign correspondents and was used to working undercover, had a close call while assisting some French reporters. Leaving Rangoon at 3:00 A.M. to avoid checkpoints, he had taken the reporters to the delta town of Bogale but was stopped by a soldier as soon as they reached the town. The soldier took the Frenchmen’s names and passport details and ordered them to return to the city. When Teza Oo went to meet the reporters at their hotel that same evening, he saw them in the lobby being questioned by a group of Burmese men he did not recognize; though they wore plain clothes he knew instinctively that they were government spies. The soldier in Bogale must have filed the newsmen’s details with his commanding officers, and from there it was a simple step for the authorities to check hotel registration lists and confirm where they were staying. Luckily for Teza Oo, the soldier had been focused on the foreigners and had neglected to note down his identity. To avoid seeming suspicious to any curious onlookers in the lobby, he went up to the front desk and made a mundane inquiry about room rates before quickly leaving the hotel.

“It’s of absolute importance to me that this story stays in the international news, so that we can keep the pressure up on the generals,” Teza Oo said, clearly frustrated that he was no longer able to play his part in making that happen. “I feel it’s my duty to help document these events and get the information out of the country but, at the end of the day, I must also think of my family and keep them safe.”