Cyclone aftermath: 1 mm survivors still without basic relief

“People need basic relief, which is shocking after four weeks,” said Sarah Ireland, the regional director of Oxfam, a U.K.-based humanitarian agency that is still trying to gain permission to work in Myanmar.

“If we were in a normal response by week four, those affected should be working toward recovery,” she said Monday. “They would be in a position perhaps to think about what they need to restart their lives. But we know people on the ground don’t have food to eat.”

Tidal surges as high as 12-foot (3 1/2-meter) on May 2-3 reached some 25 miles (40 kilometers) inland, laying waste to entire villages and leaving 78,000 people dead and another 56,000 missing, according to the government’s count.

But the relief has yet to match the scale of the disaster.

“There remains a serious lack of sufficient and sustained humanitarian assistance for the affected populations,” the United Nations said in its latest assessment report. It said the world body also lacked “a clear understanding of the support being provided by the Government of Myanmar to its people.”

Aid groups were still unable to reach 1.3 million of the 2.4 million survivors with sufficient food and clean water, while trying to prevent a second wave of deaths from malnutrition and disease, the U.N. said. And of the million getting help, most have been “reached with inconsistent levels of assistance,” it said.

A big obstacle in providing relief has been reaching the delta.

With only seven government helicopters flying, relief supplies are mostly being transported along dirt roads and then by boat. Boats able to navigate the debris-filled canals are also scarce and efforts to import trucks and other vehicles have been hampered by government red tape.

“For aid agencies it is very important that those affected receive a full complement of appropriate aid,” said James East, a spokesman for World Vision, a major private aid agency that had operations in Myanmar even before the disaster. “To say that a certain percentage of people have received aid means little because some survivors may have received a tarpaulin but no food and vice versa.”

One small sign of progress was registered Monday: except in the areas most devastated by the cyclone, most schools opened as scheduled at the end of the hot season vacation, that started in March.

In many cases, the school buildings were still missing windows and parts of their roofs blown off by the storm, but UNICEF and other educational experts agreed that getting children back to their studies as soon as possible was an important part of the healing process.

The junta’s response was in stark contrast to that of Indonesia’s Aceh province during the 2004 tsunami and Pakistan during the 2005 earthquake. Both countries opened the doors to hundred of international aid groups and set aside their suspicions to allow American troops to ferry aid and help evacuate survivors from remote areas.

Myanmar’s xenophobic military regime – rivaling only that of North Korea – left survivors to largely fend for themselves. It barred foreigners from the delta until last week and refused entry to U.S. and French naval vessels, which have been off the country’s coast, laden with aid.

Compounding the logistics challenges has been a shortage of foreign experts in the field. It has resulted in a chaotic and uneven aid effort, with charity groups complaining it has nearly impossible to asses needs of survivors or set up systems that are normally in place by now to provide clean water and sanitation.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is still waiting for government approval to send six foreign experts into the field to help run its water treatment facilities. Until now, it has been able to provide only 5,000 people each day with clean water.

“It was much easier to get medical supplies, clean water, engineers and psychological consultants into the field in Aceh within the first month,” IFRC spokesman France Hurtubise said.

“Human resources and expertise remain a challenge in Myanmar.”

Stories continue to emerge of survivors going days without food or being forced to drink from dirty canals. The Associated Press has interviewed survivors in recent days who still have not received any government or international assistance and turned to the country’s revered monks for help.

Human rights groups have also accused Myanmar’s military rulers of kicking homeless cyclone survivors out of schools and monasteries and sending them back to villages as part of an effort to restore the country’s devastated agriculture sector.

“It’s unconscionable for Burma’s generals to force cyclone victims back to their devastated homes,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Claiming a ‘return to normalcy’ is no basis for returning people to greater misery and possible death.”