Control at all costs

 

AP Photo

There’s been a huge setback in relief efforts in cyclone ravaged Myanmar/Burma.

The United Nations suspended relief supplies to Myanmar on Friday after the military government seized the food and equipment it had already sent into the country.

Earlier, in a statement, Myanmar’s military junta said it was willing to receive disaster relief from the outside world but would not welcome outside relief workers.

The military strongmen who have ruled that country for decades is afraid of relief workers coming in from democratic countries and spreading ideas of democracy. For that fear, they will accept hundreds of thousands more human fatalities and disastrous conditions no one can live in even if they do survive much longer.

Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program, said, “all the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated.” He said the World Food Program was suspending the few flights that the Myanmar authorities had so far allowed to enter the country until the matter was resolved.

Myanmar said it had turned back one relief flight because, in addition to disaster relief supplies, it carried disaster assessment experts and an unauthorized media group.

They’re in dread fear of information.

“The frustration caused by what appears to be a paperwork delay is unprecedented in modern humanitarian relief efforts,” said the official, Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program, in Bangkok. “It’s astonishing.”

The paperwork delay is a tactic to keep everyone out.

In New York, United Nations officials all but demanded Thursday that the government open its doors.

They should go all the way and demand it.

“The situation is profoundly worrying,” said Mr. Holmes, the United Nations official in charge of the relief effort, speaking in unusually candid language for a diplomat. “They have simply not facilitated access in the way we have a right to expect.”

Mr. Holmes’s predecessor in that job, Jan Egeland, said, “children are going to die from diarrhea because of this government’s inaction.”

And it’s going to get a whole lot worse than that.

The New York Times’ Lede blog is asking for anyone in Myanmar with access to the internet to send updated reports. People are looking for ways to help there. One way is through the churches already there, and there are many. Here’s one relief effort.