Myanmar

If you have been following news of the Myanmar Cyclone Nargis disaster, or have donated to the relief effort to help the Myanmar victims, you would know that the Myanmar government is preventing the relief organisations from using their own experts/equipment to handle the donated supplies. Instead, the Myanmar government has told these organisations to hand over the supplies to the army, who will then distribute the supplies to the victims. The Myanmar government does not want the relief organisations personnel to distribute the donated supplies to the victims themselves.

1. According to this New York Times article, a local official found that good rice donated from Thailand under the United Nations auspices have been kept by the army. The army instead gave poor quality/rotting/waterlogged rice from its own inventories to the victims instead:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/world/asia/12myanmar.html

2. This blog entry from a Myanmar dissident says that donated supplies are now found on sale in the black markets in Yangon. Since all donations must be handed to the Myanmar army as commanded by the Myanmar government, it is obvious who is re-selling these donated relief supplies for their own profit:

http://baydah.blogspot.com/

3. A report from Burma Campaign UK states that Myanmar earned about ₤1.35 billion (about US$2.7 billion) per year from the sale of gas. However, the Myanmar government, in a meeting with UN officials on 5 May, stated that they are spending ₤2.5 million on the disaster. The Myanmar government won't need to cough out more of their own money, not with the generous cash donations pouring in from UN, US, and other countries totalling hundreds of millions of dollars:

http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/pm/weblog.php?id=P348

4. So, if the Myanmar government is going to use only ₤2.5 million from their yearly earnings of ₤1350 million from gas exports for the relief effort, what should the balance ₤1347.5 million be used for? Well, how about a wedding? According to this BBC report, when General Than Shwe (the leader of the Myanmar government) married off his daughter in 2006, just the gifts for the couple came to ₤50 million:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6109356.stm

You can get a sense of the opulence that was lavished on Than Shwe's daughter from this YouTube video. Mind you, while 90% of Myanmar's population live below the poverty line, the military government is apparently using the country's wealth to benefit themselves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWj0tDpLAaI

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It's too bad the UN, Singapore, and the other Asean countries will not interfere in how the Myanmar government treats its people. Yup. The policy of non-interference in another country's "internal affair" is sacrosanct, even if the Myanmar government actions (or lack thereof) can potentially kill hundreds of thousands of people. If hundreds of thousands of people were to die due to diseases or hunger because of the lack of relief supplies reaching the victims, this would be nothing short of genocide. And the UN, Singapore government, Asean members would all be partially culpable, because they would have foreseen that the deaths would be the end result, but didn't do anything to prevent it.

Tragic.