Life and death and Burmese totalitarianism

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The latest -- from The Globe & Mail:

Isolated from the outside world by a military regime ruthlessly determined to control the flow of international aid, and battered again by torrential downpours, the stranded victims of [Burma]'s cyclone disaster are succumbing to hunger, disease and despair.

Two weeks after a cyclone ravaged [Burma]'s low-lying Irrawaddy delta region, killing tens of thousands, international aid is merely trickling into the disaster zone. Planeloads of aid have arrived in the largest city of Rangoon, but the regime has banned foreign relief workers from distributing the shipments, leaving the job to teams of inexperienced local volunteers and the military.

This lacklustre effort has utterly failed to relieve the suffering of hundreds of thousands of increasingly weak survivors, many of them children.

The totalitarians have "increased the official death toll to almost 78,000, with another 56,000 missing," but U.N. and other, less Orwellian estimates put it at 200,000, with 2.5 million people in total affected by the cyclone.

While the totalitarians continue to lie and to brutalize and to deprive the Burmese people of essential aid, the suffering -- on a staggering scale -- continues.

(For my previous posts on the horrific situation in Burma, see here and here.)