Myanmar: Cyclone Nargis
Very shocking news from the cyclone that ravaged through Myanmar over the weekend – almost 22,500 dead with a further 41,000 missing, and hundreds of thousands without food, water and shelter. The military government is seeking help from the international community, yet they are placing excessive and unnecessary conditions on aid. The problem is compounded with bad transportation to many afflicted areas, mainly in villages around the Irrawaddy delta. Scenes of mass destruction and corpses strewn across rice fields can be seen in most of these places; one town suffered almost 10,000 deaths.
I hope that the military junta relents and let aid in. They cannot just sit back and watch the entire country suffer.
(via Yahoo! News)
I also hope that opening up to aid will bring about dialogue to the country.
It is beyond me that we let these people suffer for decades under rulers who are just a mafia of paranoid gangsters in uniform. It is probably the easiest regime to destabilize as there is no loyalty among the military ranks. But there is nothing to gain save a people’s freedom and dignity, which is not enough, apparently.
the military leaders shifted the capital to some far-flung place earlier in the year to escape from possible international intervention and revolts by the people.
@herve: Myanmar actually sits on a good amount of natural resources, e.g. oil, minerals, but money received goes to the government officials. Which is sad, considering how badly they run the country!
China and neighbours uninterested in the dignity of human beings, let alone their rights, on their sub-continent is the mainreason why Burma is abysmally left to its own thuggish devices.
It is true that Myanmar in the 50′s had the resources of being the success story for the entire region, but unlike the Middle East, it has little strategical interest in the world as it is geo-politically shaped now.