“In just about every village I’ve been to, of the Kale Pyaw Neya only the buildings are left. I didn’t see any kids still attending. I was told the reason is that people in the villages can’t pay the salaries of the staff for the Kale Pyaw Neya.”

The author also quotes a farmer from Methila Village in Taungkale Tract, Ngaputaw as commenting that:

“To give a monthly salary of about 25,000 to 30,000 Kyat (USD 25-30) for a youngster to take care of the children, each household in the village had to put in about 500 Kyat. Now that the village economy isn’t good, people can’t put in money so the Kale Pyaw Neya kindergarten had to be shut.”

The article continues that these and other kindergartens were constructed after Cyclone Nargis with funds from UNICEF as well as donations from local groups and businesses, and with help from parents. The project included not only the buildings but also provision of toys, books and food, but after completion, responsibilities fell entirely to the local authorities, women’s groups, health and education officers, and parents.

Are the Kale Pyaw Neya another example of an internationally-funded project without legs? Are they failing everywhere, or does this article give the wrong impression? Do any New Mandala readers working in the delta, or who have been to these areas recently and perhaps seen the kindergartens (there’s a photo of one in the original article) care to comment?

Tragedies such as last year’s cyclone and this spring’s sham trial inevitably draw the world’s eyes to Burma. We should maintain our gaze. Given that the United Nations is aware of the scale and severity of rights abuses in Burma, it is incumbent on the Security Council to authorize a commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma.

- Pedro Nikken and Geoffrey Nice, “What the U.N. Can’t Ignore in Burma”, The Washington Post, 2 June 2009.

What do readers think?  Is there any chance of “a commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma”?  Would the Security Council ever authorise such a body?  If so, who would they be hoping to target?  Just Than Shwe and the other, say, State Peace and Development Council members?  I suppose there would have to be efforts to go through lists like this one.  Gathering evidence would be a moumental job.  Is it feasible?  Or is this, in fact, a pipe-dream from Nikken and Nice?  Are we going to see a Burmese deck of cards any time soon?

Much of this debate has focused not only on the effectiveness of the response itself, but on the various ways in which achievements (or failures) over the past year prove or disprove the political claim that humanitarian aid can be given to Burma without bolstering what The Economist, for one, has called “the dreadful regime”. Whether explicitly or not, the debate hinges on the principle of “Do No Harm”, which Mary Anderson argues should be central to humanitarian aid.

International aid to Burma has often been heavily criticised, despite evidence to support claims that aid can still be delivered within a restricted “humanitarian space” and without “doing harm”. Especially vocal in their criticisms are exiled Burmese dissidents, and particularly some of the agencies and opposition groups based on the Thailand-Burma border. Since the crushing of the student demonstrations in 1988, the latter have been involved in providing assistance to Burmese refugees in Thailand and, subsequently, in delivering essential cross-border humanitarian aid to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) affected by the chronic emergency in the eastern ethnic states of Burma.

One year after Nargis, the increasingly fiery debate between international aid organisations working within Burma and organisations based on the Thailand-Burma border reveals fundamental ideological divides that need to be taken into account by those interested in the politics of aid in Burma.

In his New Mandala post of 3 May2009, Dylan Grey highlights the vigorous public debate, which was sparked by the publication in March 2009 of After the Storm: Voices from the Delta by Emergency Assistance Team-Burma (EAT-Burma) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Centre for Public Health and Human Rights. EAT-Burma was created in response to Cyclone Nargis, through the collaboration of several Burmese Community-Based Organisations located on the Thai-Burma border. Since its inception, EAT-Burma has worked covertly (i.e. without state authorisation and going through “unofficial” channels) with local organisations and individuals inside Burma to provide relief to those in need. EAT-Burma argues that this extra-legal humanitarian aid effectively reaches “those not receiving aid or not receiving sufficient aid from the military regime or international humanitarian operations”.

The report published by EAT-Burma in March 2009 denounced human rights abuses by the military junta in the wake of the cyclone and called for “the international community to more carefully review the political reality in the delta region in the military-ruled country before further assistance is delivered. Dylan Grey notes in his post that such arguments provoked a strongly-worded reaction from INGOs in Burma.

After the Storm, the INGO response, and subsequent public statements of EAT-Burma are interesting texts for what they reveal in terms not only of the politics of aid in Burma, but also competing definitions of and claims to legitimacy by humanitarians.

Perhaps what is most immediately visible in these reports and statements is the idea that EAT-Burma is an organisation of the people, speaking for the people of Burma. The very title of the report — After the Storm: Voices from the Delta — presents EAT-Burma as the porte-parole of the cyclone victims. The rejoinder to the INGO attack on this report includes statements such as: “having truly independent community members conduct human rights interviews in settings of anonymity and maximum protection from the SPDC, USDA, and other junta-related entities, has meant that people felt free to report what they had witnessed or experienced first-hand. This is why we maintain that these voices from the Delta are exceptionally candid, uncensored and cannot be dismissed.”

Linked to this is the explicit argument that, because they are of the people and for the people, EAT-Burma aid workers can more effectively empower a community-based response to the cyclone and involve local communities in the reconstruction efforts, thereby making the latter more sustainable.

Also emerging from these public statements is the idea that, because they do not have to accommodate their work to the dictates of the regime, organisations providing aid through unofficial channels, are a “purer”, and therefore more legitimate, form of humanitarianism. The image of being above corrupting political influences is further reinforced by appealing to a discourse of human rights, which in the contemporary world is more often than not taken as belonging to the realm of the sacred and unquestionable — as opposed to the profane world of politics.

However, while groups providing aid through channels that are not sanctioned by the SPDC can indeed be seen to be carving out “humanitarian space”, the way in which they carve out this space is — as Ashley South has argued — in no way politically neutral. Through the very act of providing aid outside of channels that have been approved by the state and thereby undermining state sovereignty, organisations such as EAT-Burma are making a fundamentally political statement. Humanitarian legitimacy here is intricately linked to the demonstrated illegitimacy of the regime – and by association, of those who engage with it.

What does this mean? There are several fundamental issues here.

While international humanitarian organisations might not agree with the arguments put forward by organisations such as EAT-Burma, these organisations can and do work effectively with communities in need — thereby carving out significant humanitarian spaces inside Burma — and have considerable influence within the country and beyond. And since legitimacy is such a core issue in humanitarianism, international aid agencies working inside Burma should perhaps stop to consider how their own claims to legitimacy are judged (and often dismissed) by others and how this might in turn be determining the types of reactions to their work.

Groups working through extra-state and extra-legal channels might also benefit from recognising that while international aid organisations working within Burma don’t have the same types of legitimacy and don’t make the same political statements as they do, this does not mean that they necessarily have no legitimacy, that their ultimate goals are no less “good” in humanitarian terms, and that their work cannot be seen as potentially complementary efforts to expand humanitarian space. Some organisations working inside Burma (e.g. ICRC) legitimise their work through the ideology of a-politicism. While a different tactic to taking a political stance against a regime perceived as illegitimate, this legitimisation is nevertheless useful for the particular type of ‘humanitarian aid’ that organisations such as ICRC provide.

Finally, public debate is good. It brings different opinions into contact and provides a forum for the exchange of ideas. Critical appraisals of post-Nargis relief efforts have provoked a much needed dialogue between those “inside” and those “outside” Burma. However, what is needed now is not only greater debate but also efforts towards increased understanding and collaboration — otherwise there is a risk of the current discussion becoming what is called in French a “dialogue de sourds“.

Burma’s Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD) has severely restricted Rangoon weekly journals publishing reports marking the anniversary of Cyclone Nargis, which devastated the southwest of the country on May 2-3 last year, leaving about 140,000 people dead in its wake. According to several editors and reporters, the notoriously draconian censorship board did not allow reports to carry any criticism of the Nargis recovery effort by the military government, United Nations’ organizations, International NGOs and local NGOs.

- Extracted from Min Lwin, “Junta censors Nargis anniversary reports”, The Irrawaddy, 4 May 2009.

At a press conference in Yangon last week, Save the Children’s Guy Caves appealed for more funding to meet the “urgent needs” in the delta, saying the relief effort showed aid could be delivered in an “effective and independent way”. Similarly, former Tripartite Core Group spokesman Richard Horsey told AFP: “If the world doesn’t come through with the necessary resources it is abandoning victims,” pointing out Myanmar got “one-tenth” of the funding Aceh received following the 2004 tsunami. The ability to work properly here in Myanmar has been a point of contention since before last year’s cyclone and debated every time a scandal blew up that threatened to throw the relief effort off course. (First there was the denial of visas for international aid workers, then the currency exchange problem, and in recent months we’ve seen a new tightening of visa restrictions for foreign NGO staff.)

The UN and NGOs have stuck to a pretty steady line – that aid can be distributed properly and so should be given, citing the examples of the 3D Fund and Nargis work. The Economist last week had a wonderfully succinct piece that summed up the argument far more eloquently than I can; I highly recommend you check it out. One commonly cited argument for increased support is the miniscule amount of development aid given annually – less than US$3 per head – compared to neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. The latter example is particularly galling for many people living here, given lack of democracy and political freedom is often cited as a reason for not giving more aid to Myanmar.

There are some signs this is changing but more work needs to be done to depoliticise aid, says Dr Frank Smithuis, the head of Medecins Sans Frontieres Holland in Myanmar for more than a decade. He told me last week he has noticed a gradual increase in aid to the country that predates Nargis and, while he’s worried about the effect the global financial crisis will have on funding, he said the future for Myanmar people is now looking slightly more positive. “Many in the West now realise that the Myanmar people have been neglected and that that is a great injustice,” he said.

While criticising the lack of support for their programs — and those calling for a moratorium on aid — NGOs haven’t shied away from condemning the government. The World Food Program’s national director, Chris Kaye, said last week that the junta’s response to Nargis has been “inadequate”, while Horsey said they “clearly … could and should be doing more”.

The current visa situation is certainly a problem, but there are other areas where government policy is holding back the recovery. Several articles in the past few days have highlighted the major difficulty in the delta — rural indebtedness — which has been brought about principally because of the government’s inability, or unwillingness, to provide access to affordable credit.

This was a major issue even before Nargis – more than 60 percent of households in Ayeyarwady Division were already in debt one year ago, principally because landholders usually borrow money to buy inputs like seeds and fertiliser and then pay the money back when they harvest the paddy. But, with new credit almost impossible to get and interest rates of up to 30 percent a month, indebtedness has become an even more pressing problem.

This monsoon harvest season could make or break thousands of livelihoods in the delta. About 85 percent of people there are dependant on this single harvest – for landless households, its one of the few ways to find work and earn an income. But the lack of credit means that landowners are struggling to buy the inputs they need. This will certainly reduce yields and might create food shortages in some areas, says Sean Turnell, from Burma Economic Watch. But it is also likely to reduce casual employment for thousands of people, at a time when they need it most. Microfinance programs and agriculture projects can play a role here but this is one instance where the government could step in and make a real difference to lives in the delta.

“What’s needed is an urgent recapitalisation of Burmese agriculture via the creation of effective institutions dispensing rural credit. There is a desperate need to break the debt cycle, to open the gates for affordable finance. The creation of such institutions is difficult to foresee however,” Turnell, an associate professor at Australia’s Macquarie University, said. He paints a bleak picture for delta communities, which he expects will take about five years to recover from Nargis. “In the absence of an injection of capital into rural areas it’s easy to imagine conditions getting much worse.”

Although the pro-democracy exiled community doesn’t want to hear it, the fact of the matter is that there have been remarkable achievements in Cyclone Nargis disaster relief by the UN, INGOs, and ASEAN, and that the Myanmar government has cooperated extensively with the international community in allowing access for NGOs to operate. That said, there have been many severe stumbling blocks, and in general there are many limitations to humanitarian work in Myanmar. Notably, in the first month after the storm hit, the government blocked access to the Delta, and was wary of international aid. [As an aside, some academics - such as Andrew Selth - have argued that for a regime with a distinct fear of invasion, the United States, France, and Britain's decisions to position aid on warships in the Bay of Bengal hours after the storm hit was probably not the most sensible move.]

It is integral to recognise that after the first month of heavy-handedness and obstruction on the Government of Myanmar’s part, NGO and UN access to the Delta was comparable to other disaster relief situations in developing countries around the world. The creation of the Tri-partite Core Group (TCG) made up of the Government of Myanmar, ASEAN, and the UN, has been an integral component to the success of functioning relief, early recovery, disaster preparedness, and development work in the Irrawaddy Delta. The accommodation and cooperation post-Nargis on the part of the regime in Naypyidaw is unprecedented. As such, it needs to be built upon.  As Jake Kurtzer has recently advocated, the international community should “capitalize on the gains” made in the past year and aim to normalise aid relations with Myanmar.

Regrettably, exiled Burmese pro-democracy based in locations such as the Thai-Burma border and United States, have campaigned for a moratorium on humanitarian assistance to Myanmar in line with the sanctions policy against Myanmar enacted by the U.S. and EU. Some lobbyists claim that any UN agency or INGO that acts in Myanmar is complicit with the controlling regime and contributes to its hold on power. This is simply not the situation. If one is concerned with the human rights of people living in Myanmar, suggesting a cessation of apolitical development aid is counterintuitive.

In February, Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and EAT-Burma (Emergency-Assistance Team Burma) joint-published a report entitled After the Storm: Voices from the Delta, which can be found here. In a press release for the report, it is asserted that the “…SPDC should be referred by the UNSC for investigation by the ICC for its human rights abuses in the wake of Cyclone Nargis last year.” [Bear in mind, that this report was published at the same time that the ICC indicted President al-Bashir, prompting his response of booting out 13 INGOs from aid-dependant Darfur.]

Regrettably, the report is clumsy, non-academic, amateurish, unprofessional, and politicised at best. At worst, it is potentially damaging. The report uses questionable methodology and paints a misleading and poorly contextualised picture that the present state of affairs in the Delta involves forced labour, confiscated relief supplies, and systematic obstruction of humanitarian action.

The report prompted a response from a cohort of INGOs operating in Myanmar. Signatories include Save the Children, CARE, NRC, and PSI. It is well worth reading, in order to get a balanced and accurate view of the realities of the humanitarian situation in Burma post-Nargis. The 21 INGOs state the following: “The implications and conclusions of the EAT-Johns Hopkins report that abuses are systematic, ongoing and being ignored, are inaccurate and without basis. We found a number of shortcomings in the report, including its premise, methodology, and most of its findings.”

EAT-CPHHR published a rejoinder to the INGO statement, signed by Dr. Cynthia Maung, as well as Dr. Chris Breyrer. While a full-scale discussion of the letter is outside the scope of this short article, a look into it is an interesting exercise into the politics and emotions that arise from the divisions between the exiled communities in the Burmese diaspora and those who live in and can access Myanmar.

The fact of the matter is that neighbouring Laos receives around US$49 a head for development each year. Sudan, a region with a similar HDI Index rating, receives $55. Because donors from Western nations are wary of dealing with the junta, Myanmar receives $2.80 a head per year in aid. How can this be justified when Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the world, let alone Asia?

The picture is certainly not perfect. There are intensive limitations on what INGOs are allowed to do in Myanmar, and in order to provide disaster relief there are still intensively over-bureaucratic and clumsy procedures. However, INGOs themselves are reporting that the government is cooperating better than it ever has in the past, and it seems that one year on, the international community and the media, is starting to recognise what the stakeholders have been saying.

An interview with the Country Director of Save the Children in Myanmar points towards the general feeling. When asked what difficulties and restrictions his organisation faced in delivering aid in the Delta, Andrew Kirkwood responds that the biggest challenges Save the Children faces are logistical; the difficulties and dangers of reaching villages only by small boats, navigating the tides and the weather of the Delta. Note that visa restrictions, travel restrictions, and the government stealing supplies, are nowhere to be found on his list.

The New York Times just published a short piece recognising the “subtle changes” in policy and practice in the Delta, but not before describing the challenges still faced in the region, including “salty fields, wells and reservoirs; a dependence on food handouts; strangled local credit; [and] another monsoon season approaching.” Dr. Frank Smithius, a long-term resident in Myanmar and country director for Medecins Sans Frontieres – Holland (AZG), states that “the human rights record is shaky, yes, and it’s politically nice to beat up Burma, but the military has actually been quite helpful to us.”

The time is ripe for opportunity to be wasted. ASEAN and the UN need to build upon the gains that have been made in the past year. The international community, including the media and exiled Burmese, should be encouraging this rather than obstructing progress with misleading reports such as After the Storm. If not, there is the possibility of a complete breakdown in the improvements. It is possible that this is already starting to happen.

In the past few weeks, there have been numerous signals that the government is starting to wane on its commitments. In February, U Kyaw Thu, the chairman of the TCG had has position changed from Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs to Minister of the Civil Service Selection and Training board. Some of the initial speculation came true – it seems that this was a signal from the Government of Myanmar that they were going to begin to revert to tightening limitations on international aid delivery. In the past few weeks, UN staff and NGO aid workers have been facing severe difficulties in obtaining work visas to enter Myanmar, with many being stuck outside the country after the Thingyan holiday.

It remains to be seen what the outcome will be for the bigger picture in terms of politics in Myanmar. The next few months will be crucial; the Obama administration is reconsidering their Burma strategy, and the Government of Myanmar is expected to announce the details of its planned 2010 national election. One can only hope that for the sake of the residents of the Irrawaddy Delta, the international community will wake up and contribute to the UN Revised Appeal for US$691 million in order to meet the relief and early recovery needs for Cyclone Nargis’ many victims.

Dylan Grey lives in Yangon.

Immediately after the cyclone, Burmese civil society groups, Buddhist monks, Christian charity organizations, and local staff from international agencies already operating in Burma responded in affected areas, often having to circumvent official restrictions on movement and access under extremely difficult circumstances. Without their work, the disaster response would have cost many more lives. The government’s response to these efforts in ensuing months was to arrest at least 21 of those involved…

- Extracted from “Burma: One Year After Cyclone, Repression Continues”, Human Rights Watch, 30 April 2009.

Despite its poverty, Myanmar has more than 30,000 community libraries in addition to 150 college and university libraries. Burmese have a value for reading which is supported and encouraged by their history and culture. One of the casulties of Nargis has been many of the libraries.

In 2008, the Nargis Library Recovery Project was born out of the vision of John Badgley, retired librarian/professor from Cornell University and founder of the Institute of the Rockies, and U Thaw Kaung, founder of Burma’s library diploma program and retired Central  Universities Librarian. The project is jointly sponsored by the Institute, the Myanmar Book Aid Foundation, and Ashin Nyanissara, abbot of Sitagu International Buddhist Academy.

Thanks to Ian Holliday for drawing my attention to this important work.  If any New Mandala readers are in a position to help out I’m sure that the Myanmar Book Aid team would be delighted to hear from you.

The first periodic report of the Tripartite Core Group—which comprises representatives of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the government of Myanmar and the UN—has the hallmark branding of an international development project, with a cover image of smiling children juxtaposed alongside pictures of reconstructed dwellings. But in spite of its uplifting exterior and its bearing the signature of the deputy foreign affairs minister, it contains quite a lot of details on shortfalls in food, housing, health and schooling among people who were in the cyclone’s path, and does give a sense of just how much remains to be done if hundreds of thousands of people are to have even a bare minimum standard of living.

The 118-page report is the first in a series to be published over a year, and it doesn’t, its authors hasten to add, set out to evaluate in detail how things are going but just to present the findings of a survey covering 2376 households consisting of 13,546 members conducted last October and November.

For a government-endorsed public document the data contain some unusually plain facts about the decrepit shape of the national health system, such as it is, with only a third of respondents reporting that medicine was available in local clinics (no mention of how much it costs them where available). The report tentatively points to a lack of nutritious food for kids around Yangon as a chronic problem rather than a consequence specific to the cyclone, implying that it is not peculiar to the disaster-hit towns and villages but indicative of the much larger malaise afflicting the lives of millions across the country. And the authors also admit from the figures that assistance is still not getting through to many parts and that very large numbers of people continue to live under plastic or canvas, remarking that, “In only around 10 per cent of communities surveyed did every household report adequate living conditions.”

The report casts some light on the lasting damage to agricultural land, and on the lives of thousands of small farmers and their seasonal labourers. According to its findings, 215 of the households surveyed had “owned” paddy prior to the cyclone: a misuse of the term, given that in Myanmar the state still legally owns all land (along with other resources) and farmers are its tenants. Of these households, whereas before the cyclone the median productive holding was 10 acres, six months after it was a mere three, while 26 per cent of families had lost everything. This data contrast sharply with the rosy picture of a quick recovery that the government and some international experts painted some time back last year, and do not also take into account many other factors, such as the likelihood of far lower yields from those areas being planted. The report adds that the losses for owners of orchards were even greater than those for paddy and will require a much longer period to recover, given the time and expense of planting and growing trees before there is a product. And of those households that had home gardens, more than two thirds now have none.

Similarly, the data on livestock indicate that around half of the households had a median of 20 chickens and ducks but that figure is now a solitary bird per family, with 43 per cent left with nothing. Likewise, 44 per cent of those who had had buffalo or other cattle now have none, and of the 449 families among those surveyed that had pigs before May, 68 per cent either lost them in the cyclone or in a few cases sold them after. Among fisherfolk, around three-quarters are yet to replace lost boats and nets. They probably account for some of the increase in the number of casual laborers cited elsewhere in the findings.

The report contains annexes that include a copy of the questionnaire used and, as an afterthought, some stories of affected persons from which a few quotes are sprinkled throughout the document. The stories are typical. Thawtar Khin’s family is still living under tarpaulin nearby stinking water. Her younger brother and sister are not attending school. They had to wait three months to get some assistance. Daw Mya Sein’s family have gone into debt to try to plant paddy and regain lost income. They have planted betel nut but insects are eating the seedlings. They are relying on other people for food. Only one of Daw Thet Thet Swe’s five kids is in school. Her husband is working someone else’s fields for a small share of the crop. They are broke and unable to rebuild their house. U Khin Moe had been on the verge of getting electricity into his village when the cyclone swept everything away. Much of his paddy land was destroyed. He suffered a breakdown and walked the streets, talking to himself; with the support of concerned villagers he was able to recover. These are just a few of the real lives behind the statistics that make up the tripartite group’s report.

The December volume of Humanitarian Exchange contains a variety of articles examining different aspects of international relief in Myanmar after Nargis, including the problems of negotiating access, the role of Asean and other parties from abroad, the response of people in the country to the disaster, and the hands-on work of different agencies in affected areas. Some of the writing here is burdened with too much development jargon for readers from outside the aid business to comprehend (what does it mean that Myanmar’s population was “not previously exposed to the plethora of quality and accountability initiatives currently available”?), or perhaps stomach, while other articles come off sounding self-congratulatory. But most of the pieces are readable and relatively forthright.

The authors of the first item are Julie Belanger and Richard Horsey. Belanger was with the UN in Yangon throughout the cyclone and up to October, while Horsey was stationed in Bangkok but earlier had the difficult job of representing the International Labour Organisation in Myanmar. In a carefully worded piece they examine the reasons for the government’s obstinate response to international offers of assistance in the days and weeks immediately after the disaster, and ask whether or not anything more could have been done.

Belanger and Horsey point to four causes for the delay in granting access, namely the ‘self-reliance’ doctrine of the ruling regime, its limited familiarity with international disaster response, the domestic political circumstances in the lead-up to the staged referendum on a new constitution, and international political relations in which a junta that is cast in the role of the baddie treats any overseas agenda as suspect. Although the authors don’t rank the four, the last two were probably most telling. Unfamiliarity with the work of international agencies during crises of this sort as well as with tragedies in the order of Nargis would have contributed to the delay too, but the self-reliance doctrine is a red herring. The only doctrine of real importance to the generals in Naypyitaw is that of self-survival, which when coupled with an outward disdain for the general public and corresponding disregard for the role and responsibilities of government ends up in things like the ‘let them eat frog’ editorial that appeared in state-run dailies after the cyclone. This is not self-reliance, just plain contempt for others.

Kerren Hedlund and Daw Myint Su offer a view from what they describe as the fringe of the relief effort, among local self-help groups and concerned individuals who fought to get and use a small amount of the money flowing in from abroad for the recovery. While government officials resorted to various methods to obstruct, direct and control private donors and local groups trying to assist affected people, they suggest that (as in many other operations of this sort around the world) the big donors and aid delivery agencies in Myanmar had the same effect. “Participation by local NGOs was severely limited given the language, location and attitudes of main players in the international response,” they write, which was “particularly disappointing given that… the early response was largely by national actors”. They give as examples that in the weeks after the cyclone only a handful of local groups’ representatives were issued with the ID cards necessary for access to the UN coordinating offices, and that nearly all documents were produced in English, with few ever translated. A call at a meeting in June for funding of some 30 new groups that local people had set up after the cyclone was met with silence. Hedlund and Myint Su admit that such funding would have entailed risk, but wonder if under the circumstances it wouldn’t have been worth it.

Strangely, in neither of these publications is there any significant reference to the psychological consequences of the cyclone. The tripartite group report, for instance, describes the main barrier to school attendance in affected areas as the costs associated with getting students into the classrooms, such as for a school uniform (to say nothing of the extra fees that teachers demand and mandatory tuition to supplement their meager incomes). It omits any reference to the mental health of kids who may have lost parents and siblings, who may have seen them washed away, as a barrier of an altogether different sort. It makes only passing comments on psychological health at all (on page 65), citing the very conservative finding of an earlier assessment that 23 per cent of households had reported “psychosocial distress” and adding that interviewees in October and November regularly exhibited post-traumatic stress, such as by crying “when answering even simple questions” and laughing out of place. In Humanitarian Exchange a program manager for MSF Switzerland remarks that, “Mental health needs were evident, and psychological interventions were found to be highly pertinent,” but offers no more than that. Which mental health needs were evident and what psychological interventions were found to be highly pertinent? We don’t find out. Myanmar is a country full of people already psychologically disturbed by 50 years of repressive government and increasingly strained economic and social life. Add to that the consequences of this cyclone, and if these publications make clear that efforts at material rebuilding are far behind what they should be, then by comparison the immense job of psychological rebuilding seems to have barely even been begun.

Readers familiar with the ICG publishing style will move swiftly through the usual preliminary contents and into the guts of the report, Burma/Myanmar after Nargis: Time to Normalize Aid Relations, which the group says has been written following talks with “government officials, activists, diplomats and representatives of international and local aid groups.” The report documents domestic, regional and global responses to the disaster; posits reasons for certain aspects of the government’s behaviour, and, its authors assert, makes a case for normalizing aid relations through high-level dialogue, policy openings and new partnerships.

Critics will find no shortage of errors and lacunas in Burma/Myanmar after Nargis. For example, it is simply not correct to say that “nobody anticipated, or could reasonably have anticipated, what was going to happen” on May 2 (in footnote 7). The Mirror newspaper of that morning carried a half-page interview with the head of the meteorological department, U Htun Lwin, predicting that the coastline could by afternoon be hit with 100-mile/hour winds followed by a surge in the sea level, and that the effects could extend to Yangon. Perhaps the size of the storm was unanticipated but that the people in its path could and should have been better prepared there can be no doubt, and it is unnecessary and inappropriate for the report’s authors to be apologizing on behalf of the government for this failure.

More seriously, repeated references to the problems of “petty” thievery and corrupt “local” authorities also suggest that the authors are for some reason misrepresenting the nature of corruption in Myanmar, which grows as the money increases towards the top end of town, among the heads of army commands and ministries. This may be an unintended result of interviewing people high-up whose interests are served by giving the impression that theft of aid is basically a problem of errant subordinates selling ration biscuits in marketplaces, rather than something they do themselves. In any event, it gives readers the wrong idea.

Nor is there anything about the sorts of capricious official orders to the World Food Program to buy rice from other countries and cut back on deliveries in coming months that were cited on New Mandala recently, or the harassment of private Myanmar citizens whom the report lauds for their efforts at helping others in the first days and weeks after the cyclone struck, when the government blocked assistance from abroad.

Whether or not one agrees with the report’s insistence that the relief effort is a “window of opportunity” for new initiatives on Myanmar, and despite its inaccuracies and blind spots, only the most rabid proponents of sanctions will disagree with its basic premise that there needs to be more, not less, humanitarian assistance going into Myanmar. This is a premise which, the report’s authors admit, the ICG has held in one form or another since 2002. But that being the case, readers are entitled to ask what the group proposes this time around that is really different from what has come before, apart from the need for the U.N. Secretary General to have a continued personal role and the insistence that “it is now time to act.” The report doesn’t give any clear answer.

The difficulty boils down to the report’s title. What does “normalizing” mean when it comes to Myanmar? The ICG doesn’t say. In fact, the word “normalize” only appears once in the body of the report, without any sense of the need to clarify or locate it. This is disturbing. That the report’s authors seem to think that they don’t need to explain the concept that lies behind what they are proposing suggests that they haven’t really thought it through for themselves. The end result is that notwithstanding a few pages of “next steps” and a box of “operational principles” (which would be unobjectionable anywhere in the world), the normalizing of aid remains elusive and the closing arguments for it uncertain, despite the authors’ attempts to have it otherwise.

Post-Nargis Analysis: The Other Side of the Story sets out, as its title suggests, to give an alternative view of the cyclone relief effort, with a concern for “the obstructions to aid and human rights abuses” that have not been reported in U.N. documents or, for that matter, the ICG report. Although it is made to look like the work of “civil society organizations,” the groups listed as being behind it are affiliates of political groups in exile. That in itself is not problematic. There is clearly a strong need for more reporting on issues and incidents related to the cyclone and relief effort that are either inadvertently or deliberately kept out of the reports of official agencies and big international groups, and opponents of the military government have a role to play in collecting and distributing news.

Unfortunately, the short document doesn’t live up to its promise of telling the other side of the story. Its author has written the contents mostly in response to specific points in the Post-Nargis Joint Assessment report of agencies working on the recovery effort, and the sum of its parts is less than its whole. The report has no consistent narrative or urgent message to deliver. More disappointingly, while its producers boast of having valuable networks in Myanmar, there is nothing fresh in it at all. Having stitched together a few news items with unremarkable comments, it ends abruptly with some hollow recommendations, like, “We urge the international community to consider having independent civil society groups as additional counterparts in the post-Nargis assessment and recovery implementation processes.” Ho-hum.

The six-month anniversary of the cyclone is an important time for review of what has been done so far and for renewed vigor. These two reports are well-timed but disappointing. Of the two, the ICG one will inevitably travel further and cause some ripples by virtue of the organization’s size and reach, but by next year it will be forgotten, along with so many others before it. Hopefully the same will not be the case for Nargis’s victims, and that instead during the coming six months there will be important and original work done to enable a better understanding of how international agencies can find the room they need to operate in Myanmar.