A New Mandala reader has sent through these comments on the period immediately before Cyclone Nargis hit the Irrawaddy Delta. It will, I’m sure, be of interest to many.
I was due to go to Yangon on the Sunday but was told by the Burmese friend I was going to meet there that they were expecting bad weather, but that it was all expected to be over by Saturday. With this warning in hand, I went to Bangkok on Wednesday evening to stand in the visa queue at the Burmese Embassy the next day but decided to keep a close eye on the weather forecasts, and, amazingly enough, on CNN they were already including warnings of an impending cyclone with increasing wind speeds (and a satellite image of it) with a landfall close to Yangon on their hourly weather forecasts. It was sufficiently bad-sounding to deter me from going to the Embassy but I watched regularly all the next day to see how things progressed in case there was still time to change my mind – and CNN continued their hourly reports. The reports continued to come through all day Thursday on CNN news/weather bulletins.
I asked <name deleted> to check repeatedly on the BBC Burmese website for their weather report and other Burmese sites during this time. Confusingly, there was nothing on them – the BBC five day forecast said ‘Fair’ (and remember, this was when CNN was giving hourly warnings). By Friday morning CNN was reporting wind speeds of up to 200km and they were trying to predict the landfall and it had become a main weather bulletin item. I decided to leave Bangkok and abandon the visit – but <name deleted> was actually telling me I was stupid not to go because there was nothing reported anywhere on the BBC Burmese site. I got back on Friday evening and the BBC Burmese weather site still had a 5 day forecast of FAIR and there was not a single reference to the weather which was being tracked as a storm on CNN’s satellite images on the BBC’s main pages.
By Friday night, as I continued to scour the web for some clarification of these really oddly contradictory messages, a couple of bloggers had started to pick up about the cyclone – but they were weather freaks rather than Burma watchers. Result for me – total confusion, which was sadly resolved by the events that subsequently did get reported by the BBC with, shockingly to me, shock.
My conclusion? Everyone was so obsessed with the referendum that they took their eye off every other ball bouncing around on the tennis court – and there are surely some serious lessons to be learned from this about the way that news is collated within the Burma-related media. If as big a news channel as CNN was reporting this hourly for two-three days beforehand, why did BBC weather and BBC Burmese at the very least not pick this up? As I said, I’m not mentioning this now to ‘blame’ people, and didn’t raise it at the time for fear that it might be seen in that way, but rather that it is something that the Burmese media needs to think through, I would have thought.
This is a fair comment. Yes, Burmese media like activists and groups may be described as soccer players (I have this thought not just because of Euro 2008, but I have had this long ag0). They all are after one ball, which usually is kicked by the junta. If we look at te entire 15-20 years history of pro-democracy movement, we hear everybody taking about one particular issue.
For example, depayin incident (attempt to assasinate Aung San Suu Kyi). Also, when the junta announced its 7-piont road map for the first time, the entire oppositioni communities started talking about this. SOme of them came up with their own road map. The question is what were they doing before the junta’s roadmap? After awhile, the focus became national convention because the junta announed it would reconvene the NC. It’s not only one/two times. It’s been always like this. Opposition groups rarely move ahead of the junta, but keep following the ball kicked by the junta.
Now, prior to cyclone Nagris, the focus was on referendum. Everytime i turned on radio or log on to websites, it was all about this. Yes, referendum was important, but it was not about the whole world.
Now again, the focus is on fundraising for cyclone victims. We see many organizations and self-elected/self-reproduced “leaders” , now as humanitarian experts, talking over and over about emergency relief work (I don’t think they are ‘experts’ of relief work either). Some of them sound like becoming humanitarian aid workers from political activists.
I think Burmese pro-democracy groups need to rethink their strategies and the culture of doing things. They need to start looking at many different issues from different angles. Most importantly, they need to start thinking about material issues.
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It’s not just the BBC that had its eye off the ball when it came to the cyclone. My husband is a meteorologist, and as such belongs to an internet user group whose members exchange data about impending weather events. Before Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh in 2007, meteorologists from around the world were warning that Bangladesh could have a catastrophe on its hands, and were hoping that the Bangladesh government was aware of the approaching calamity. When it came to Nargis, the international community of meteorologists was, apparently, strangely silent. I’m not sure whether they didn’t have the data, whether the data was unclear or whether they simply regarded Burma as an unknown place and therefore unimportant – whatever, it is interesting to note the different responses to the two situations.
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