“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?

According to the contract lists, each of these players received a monthly payment of 1500 US dollars to compete in Myanmar. That’s quite a lot more than the domestic players, among whom the highest-paid supposedly received a measly million Kyat, which is less than a thousand US, although some of them received extra money to sign up. It’s also less than some other imports. Two that went to Delta United got 2750 US each, but they don’t seem to have earned it: their club scored only one win and ended up on the bottom of the ladder.

The league’s salary packages are a long, long way away from the multi-million dollar deals that players make in Europe, or even in some other parts of Asia, but are also a big step up on the earnings of its crusty predecessor, which largely consisted of teams belonging to government ministries (Finance and Revenue won again in 2008… how come Army came out on the bottom?) Most of the players in the new league, aside from the imports, were purchased from those teams, and must be happy with the way things are going for their sport, even if by comparison to elsewhere they don’t have too much to show for all that kicking and tackling.

Does anyone know how the system of bringing footballers to Myanmar and other parts of Southeast Asia works? Are these official figures really what the players are getting or is there more to it than that? What else is there to know about the imports business? Maybe New Mandala has some fans—or insiders—who could give more information.

The story resembled thousands of others around the world in the last month or so. Then the intrigue followed. Two overseas news outlets said that a writer for a local weekly news journal had also been quarantined after trying to photograph the girl… or was he detained?

According to Mizzima News, which followed up on a state radio broadcast from a day or two before the papers broke the story, the journalist had bribed hospital staff to get access to the girl. It quoted an unidentified doctor as saying that for both security and health reasons the reporter had also been kept under watch.

Then Radio Free Asia put out further details, naming the patient-cum-detainee as Ko Win Myint Kyaw from the Weekly Eleven journal. Another anonymous source told the station that the young man had bribed security staff to get inside the hospital, but a doctor had accosted him at the infected girl’s room. Thereafter he had been quarantined and reportedly also faced trouble for breaching hospital regulations.

The day after RFA covered the story, the Eleven Media Group posted a strongly-worded denial on its website. The group’s editors said that none of their staff had done anything wrong. Recounting the contents of the two foreign media reports, they said that Ko Win Myint Kyaw and another reporter, Ko Wai Yan Phyo Oo, had gone to the hospital on June 28. Ko Win Myint Kyaw had interviewed a deputy administrator and a doctor about the case. He was allowed in to take photos briefly (which the journal hasn’t published). He and his colleague then went to meet some people living in the vicinity of the infected girl’s house and took photos from outside where she lives too. After coming back to the office, the editors arranged with medical staff for Ko Win Myint Kyaw to go into quarantine.

Having established their version of the facts, the Eleven Media editors chastised the two overseas outlets for not contacting them prior to issuing the story, and accused them both of trying to damage their journal’s reputation. From the language they used, if either Mizzima or RFA had an office or staff in the country then by now they would be getting sued.

So did the Weekly Eleven correspondent pay security staff to get into the hospital? Probably. Was he detained or did he go into quarantine voluntarily? Could have been either. More to the point, did the Weekly Eleven editors get pushed into their unusually public and vociferous rebuttal of the foreign media story, or did they issue their statement out of simple concern for their own interests? Perhaps New Mandala readers have some insights.

Whether or not anyone gets any the wiser about what happened at the hospital, what the incident does show clearly is the distance between local and overseas-based media working on Myanmar. Domestic journals have staff with their feet on the ground but are forced to toe the line and write between the lines. Correspondents working by phone and email from India, Thailand, the US and elsewhere must rely on sources that they can’t verify in person and whose details they usually can’t publicize, but whose information they can write up however they like. Each to some extent relies on the other, but a little bout of swine flu goes to show how far apart they really are. The rest of us interested to keep up with events in Myanmar can but do our best to follow both and then try to figure out fact from fiction for ourselves.

Over a decade later, and the official figure for visitor visa entrants in 2008-09 to the end of January is less than it was a decade before, at a measly quarter-million. According to a recent news report on Department of Immigration and National Registration statistics, 264,639 persons entered on visitor visas in the first ten months of the financial year; a fall from the previous total of 363,976. Out of those, four in five declared themselves tourists while the remainder came for other reasons. Only about 70,000 came via one of the dozen or so flights in and out each day, while most came by land from neighboring territories.

For a country of over 50 million, with the largest landmass of mainland Southeast Asia and unique natural and manmade scenery, situated between the world’s two most populated states and alongside another that has for decades been at the forefront of the global tourism industry, however you look at it, an average of 20,000 tourists per month is pathetic. Even if the statistics aren’t telling the whole picture, it sure isn’t rosy.

While the worldwide economic downturn and recent problems in Thailand will have had some effects, and boycott Myanmar campaigners can also claim a certain amount of success—if it can be called that—the causes of the low numbers are for the most part homemade.

A drop from almost 450,000 during 2006-07 came after the twin international public relations disasters in the wake of the 2007 protests and Cyclone Nargis. But prior to that year, throughout the decade the official figure never exceeded 400,000 anyway: still ridiculously low considering that more people than that flock to the beaches and temples of Thailand every fortnight.

Persistent obstacles to higher numbers include cost and mismanagement. Myanmar is a more expensive and less convenient place to visit than its successful neighbor to the east. Even Cambodia, which now reportedly attracts around 2 million visitors annually, has made things easy for people wanting to see the ruins at Angkor, with up to half of its tourist arrivals coming direct to the temples by plane on short side trips from Thailand or Vietnam. Most of Myanmar’s hotels are of a lower standard than those in its competitors, domestic travel is not particularly easy, and there is less variety and availability of food. Roads are in atrocious disrepair, unless you happen to be going to Naypyidaw, in which case you’re probably not on a holiday. Even places like Chaungthar Beach are hard to reach. Unless you’re an adventure tourist who isn’t put off by military dictatorship and doesn’t mind spending more time and money to get where you want to go then you probably won’t be interested. If you are, then you aren’t the type of tourist whom the government wants anyway, although you won’t be denied a visa; it’ll take anyone it can get.

While visitor numbers decrease, the number of foreigners working in the country has increased, and perhaps it’s a sign of the times that empty and bankrupted hotels are being turned into private hospitals so that Korean businessmen and their wealthy local partners don’t have to send their kids to Bangkok or Singapore every time that one of them gets the sniffles.

Another trend is the proliferating number of overseas employment agencies. As the authorities have made it easier for citizens to get out of the country, more locals are looking for work elsewhere. Young graduates who in the 1990s studied English, French and Japanese with a view to getting jobs as hotel staff and tour guides are now instead applying for places abroad. There are no reliable figures on foreign remittances to Myanmar, partly because there are millions who have gone overseas through the backdoor, but clearly the country is today earning a lot more from its people out in the world than it is from the people of the world who have come to visit it.

A recent edition of Weekly Eleven, for example, carried a front-page story about toxins and fungi in chili powder supplies. It pointed out that whereas in the past most people dried and pounded their own chili, now the trend is towards the prepackaged variety, so the quantity of commercially made powder has increased a lot.

There are at least two big problems with this. First, much of the chili, along with other foods, includes coloring that may be dangerous to people’s health. Companies have been setting up and expanding manufacturing without quality or safety controls. Second, larger amounts of food are getting stored for longer periods, and some attract fungi, especially in the rainy season, which merchants stir into the product prior to sale rather than discard it.

Although an alert consumer may be able to make out signs of fungi, food coloring is harder to detect, harder to know if it may be dangerous or not, and, according to some experts in Myanmar, more likely to pose a threat. Professor Khin Maung Win, a liver specialist, told Weekly Eleven that some food colorings could cause liver or bladder cancer, or kidney disease. Another doctor told the journal that a certain type of poisonous fungi found in tealeaves contains aflatoxins, which could also result in liver cancer.

Government agencies’ reassurances that they’re checking brand by brand and removing those found to be a health risk; are setting up committees to better monitor and regulate food manufacture, and are planning to put labels on those products that pass inspection are unlikely to ease concerns. Food scares have been a feature of life in Myanmar for years, and as more and more factory-produced items make their way into people’s diets without oversight or openness, questions about what’s really in them are only set to increase. The officially-announced withdrawal of contaminated baby formula from the shelves last year, for example, only came after considerable delay, and with few details to aid consumers in their choice of what to buy and what to throw away.

The root problem is not one of food at all. It’s a problem of trust, or rather, the lack of it. People in Myanmar simply don’t believe what their government tells them about what it’s doing. And why should they? Reports on measures to ban unsafe foods are met with the same incredulity as those on Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial. From political machinations to shopfront exchanges, the only thing that is certain is that nobody can believe what they’ve been told. Both the hearings in Insein Prison and toxic food colorings in one way or another profoundly affect people’s lives, but whereas the former seem far removed from daily affairs, the tealeaves look back at the drinker every time he stares into the cup.

Well, apparently the pipeline isn’t coping. According to an article (in Burmese) on the New Era Journal website, some residents say that 2009 has so far been the worst for water supply in memory, and it isn’t getting better.

One 15-year resident of 37th Street told New Era that in the past when the electricity supply was on, water also could be pumped, but that in February the pumps have been running dry. Another person living in Botahtaung, down by the waterfront, said that previously from midnight to about 5am they had been able to get piped water but that now there too even when the power is on the water isn’t flowing. Someone at the township municipality speculated that the lack of supply is due to power outages at pumping stations further along, but evidently they’re not sure. Other similarly affected townships reportedly include Pazundaung, Mingalar-taungnyunt and Tamwe: perhaps if any New Mandala readers are living in these areas they could confirm or deny this news.

The New Era article notes that people in 26 townships of Yangon are officially receiving water from four reservoirs—Gyohpyu, Hpugyi, Hlawga and Ngamoeyeik—and from 225 artesian bores. Daily about 135 million gallons are supposedly supplied to around 60 per cent of the population. Everyone else has to make do with private wells, public tanks, ponds and water collected from rooftops. The chairman of the Yangon City Development Committee, Brigadier-General Aung Thein Lin, has been quoted in private media reports as saying that that the current plan is to provide 3.5 million people with water by 2020: given that by official figures the city passed 4 million at the turn of the century, even if the plan works, millions of people would still be going without.

One municipal officer who spoke to New Era said that an added problem is that in supplying water they have to follow the organizing agenda of the quasi-government Union Solidarity and Development Association. This claim is borne out by official media reports like one from the New Light of Myanmar, 18 March 2008, that

As a gesture of hailing the 63rd Anniversary Armed Forces Day, the Union Solidarity and Development Association organized a ceremony to open Ngamoeyeik- Gyobyu water pipe line at the junction of Bayintnaung road and Yarzathingyan road in Dagon Myothit (North) Township.

CEC Members of USDA Mayor Brig-Gen Aung Thein Lin and Vice-Mayor Col Maung Pa, Yangon Division USDA Secretary U Aye Myint, officials concerned attended the ceremony and opened the pipe line by cutting the ribbon. Then, the mayor unveiled the signboard and the CEC members opened the taps of the pipe.

Mayor Brig-Gen Aung Thein Lin gave a speech on the occasion. A total of 1200 USDA membership applications of residents of Nos 49, 50 and 51 wards were presented to the mayor.

Ngamoeyeik-Gyobyu water pipe line opened today runs 1,836,669 feet and will provide residents of 2000 homes with sufficient drinking water.

As the water supply is a matter for the municipality, why is the mayor presiding over pipe openings in his capacity as a member of the USDA? Perhaps New Mandala readers who have been involved in technical cooperation work in Yangon could give some clues about this and other things going on with the city’s water. There are a few bits of information on the web, but not many. For instance, a Mr. Daiji Nagashio in an undated report (PDF) following a Japanese study in 2002 described Yangon’s water supply as “very low in terms of water quality, quantity and pressure”. He continued that

There is a water treatment plant, coagulation and sedimentation, at only Gyobyu reservoir. This treatment facility is not carrying out a function because coagulant is not injected. Therefore water is supplying to Yangon City without treatment and a lot of deposits settle in the pipes and the service reservoirs. Especially in the Hlawga reservoir, which has been operated since 1904, massive floating water plants have propagated since a few years ago (photo-2). Since these plants were supplied with water, the distribution pipes were blocked up by them and the water supply was stopped in the some service area. In addition disinfection is implemented intermittently due to their budget.

Mr. Nagashio estimated that only about 37 per cent of the city was supplied with piped water, a far lower number than the government’s 60 per cent but still probably exaggerated, given that in the areas studied “most” consumers had installed their own pumps to aboveground tanks. He also wrote the YCDC had not actually calculated demand or consumption of water; a fact backed by the empty pie charts assigned for this data in ADB reports (Myanmar was not even included in its most recently published “water development outlook” book).

Back on 37th Street, the YCDC staff attributed the lack of water coming out of people’s taps in February to, wait for it, empty pipes under the roads! Their alternative proposal to disgruntled consumers was to hook up directly to the mains for a cost of 170,000 Kyat. As more and more people with money have been doing just that, they will be further contributing to the shortages that the majority of people are experiencing. Those who can’t afford to pay for a privileged connection will increasingly be left to find water wherever they can, including by digging holes around junctions on pipes to catch leakages in buckets and bowls, and if necessary, by vandalizing pipes. Without any reliable data on water demand and use through authorized channels who knows how many thirsty residents are siphoning off Yangon’s water, and how much of the stuff they really need right now, let alone how much they’ll need in 2020? And as private magazines have been unable to publish stories on water problems, like usual people have been left to find out for themselves what’s going on, and what they can do to get enough water for a bath and dinnertime.

Stephen commented on NM that, “A tragic aspect of this issue is not so much that [the consul] Ye Myint Aung reflects the ‘official Myanmar position’ (which he does…), but that he reflects a view widespread in civilian circles.” Unfortunately, this is true. Decades of institutionalized chauvinism and historical memories built around communal conflicts from the last century and before ensure that the Rohingyas attract resentment among people from all walks of life in and from Myanmar, most of who may never have met one.

Some of the blame for this hostility lies not with army officers or diplomats, but with academics that have either joined in Rohingya-bashing or have published works that have been used to counter Rohingya demands for recognition. One scholar that spends much of his time coming up with material to deny the historical existence of the Rohingya is Dr. Aye Chan at Kanda University of International Studies, in Chiba City, Japan. Aye Chan asserts that there is no known reference to Rohingya before the 1950s. He has written a variety of pieces on this point, including in the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research. Although most of his work is crafted to avoid sounding prejudiced, anti-Rohingya activists use it to advance bigoted attacks on their opponents. His comments in online articles and radio interviews also come closer to revealing his true opinions. For instance, in December last year he wrote on the granting of refugee status in Japan to the author of a book on the Rohingya, ironically accusing him of abusing “the academic platform for political purposes” and continuing that,

The bizarre phenomenon created by [the author] Zaw Min Htut and his precursors is the literary wing of the political scheme that aims at changing the northwestern part of Arakan (Rakhine) State of Union of Myanmar, the original homeland of Arakanese (Rakhine) people into the Rohingya State.

This article is found, among other places, on Rakhapura.com, which includes a variety of contents, many of which can only be described as hate-mongering, like, “Bangladeshis: Unwanted guests in its [sic] neighboring countries” and a “report” that begins with “Muslims of Maungdaw are illegal intruders from Chittagong and from other sides.” The site’s designer has also sown his political colours to the side column by linking with the website of a Hindu extremist group.

Then there is U Khin Maung Zaw, a former lecturer at Rangoon Institute of Technology and Humboldt University, who in 1993 presented a paper inquiring after the identity of the Rohingya at a conference in Berlin, in which he wrote that,

The so-called ‘Rohingyas’ nowadays are real illegal immigrant [sic] and most of them are illiterates, know nothing about history but have only heard about the name ‘Rohingyas’ and they claim themselves to be ‘Rohingyas’. Some Muslims in Burma and Bangladesh helping them also don’t know the origin and created the fabricated and fanciful stories mentioned above. The people backing the so-called ‘Rohingya Movement’ are fanatic Muslims and some Muslim countries, who do not know the reality but help them because of Muslim solidarity and brotherhood.

Shamefully, the organizers published the paper (uploaded to NM here) among the conference proceedings, in which Khin Maung Zaw concluded that the Rohingya should compromise on their insistence of being people native to Myanmar and instead “only request for residential permit [sic] in Burma as foreigners.”

The academic hostility to the Rohingya seems to boil down to the arguments that they didn’t exist more than 60 years ago and that they are really Bengali Muslims, who, it can be inferred if it isn’t said directly, aren’t entitled to live in Myanmar as one of the officially-designated national races: those groups whom in the state propaganda have persevered across the generations, through weal and woe, etc., etc., to build the Union up to what it is today. With all the study done around the world on constructed identities in the last few decades it’s a wonder that these arguments have any credibility at all. They make no reference the huge amount of work on how the institutions and communities that we take for granted are to one degree or another comparatively recent products of social and political change. And there have been plenty of studies in the last few years on the inventing of traditions and beliefs in Myanmar too, which is itself an exemplar of the imagined community, a product of the colonial enterprise in map-drawing and tribe-making. Which ethnic or religious group in its borders is not in some form a modern construct? Which of them is not being recreated daily through propaganda? Why do the Rohingya attract greater ire for doing no more or less than any of the others?

The answer comes down to what Ye Myint Aung made plain in his letter to the Hong Kong press: skin color. Returning to Stephen’s comment, and the admonishment in Burmese at the end—“Indians, kala, are also human; catfish are also fish”—the issue is not that the Rohingya are not human but rather that they are not Myanmar People, which is also what is implied by the analogy to catfish. The claim to humanity is not challenged, because being human doesn’t entitle them to a place in Myanmar. It requires more than that. And it is the attempt at being classed among the national races that offends the nationalists, the academics and the diplomats. That the Rohingya have invented a past for themselves is neither remarkable nor in itself problematic, but that they have done this without official approval, as kala and Muslims, is insulting. And that they have had the impertinence to insist that for this reason they belong to Myanmar in the present is unacceptable.

In the end, this is less about the Rohingya than the people are who are writing and speaking against them, and the racist underpinnings of the state that has made these people who and what they are today. Speaking while drafting the 1982 citizenship law that effectively made the Rohingya stateless by virtue of its section 3 (“Nationals such as the Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Chin, Burman, Mon, Rakhine or Shan and ethnic groups as have settled in any of the territories included within the State as their permanent home from a period anterior to 1185 B.E., 1823 A.D. are Burma citizens”), the chairman of the commission writing the law remarked that citizenship is not about whether an individual is entitled to be a citizen or not, but rather, about national sovereignty. Ye Myint Aung merely expressed this idea in more colorful and direct words. If we take issue with him, we have to take issue with the idea of so-called ‘Myanmar’.

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.

All that striving is of course not going on willy-nilly but in accordance with a law introduced in 2004, the Electronic Transactions Law. The law aims,

(a) to support with electronic transactions technology in building a modern, developed nation;

(b) to obtain more opportunities for all-round development of sectors including human resources, economic, social and educational sector by electronic transactions technologies;

(c) to recognize the authenticity and integrity of electronic record and electronic data message and give legal protection thereof in matters of internal and external transactions, making use of computer network;

(d) to enable transmitting, receiving and storing local and foreign information simultaneously, making use of electronic transactions technologies;

(e) to enable communicating and co-operating effectively and speedily with international organizations, regional organizations, foreign countries, local and foreign government departments and organizations, private organizations and persons, making use of computer network.

Sounds great! But wait, there’s more. The first article of Chapter XII, Offences and Penalties, reads as follows:

33. Whoever commits any of the following acts by using electronic transactions technology shall, on conviction be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend from a minimum of 7 years to a maximum of 15 years and may also be liable to a fine:

(a) doing any act detrimental to the security of the State or prevalence of law and order or community peace and tranquillity or national solidarity or national economy or national culture.

(b) receiving or sending and distributing any information relating to secrets of the security of the State or prevalence of law and order or community peace and tranquillity or national solidarity or national economy or national culture.

Clearly, just about anything could be a violation of this section. If you’re one of the estimated 300,000 people in Myanmar who now goes within reaching distance of a computer with an online connection, then you can be found guilty of something.

That’s the lesson of blogger Nay Phone Latt (middle name pronounced “pone” not “fone”), who was sentenced this week to over 20 years in jail under section 33(a), and a couple of other laws to boot. (His photo has already been put on New Mandala and he has made it onto the BBC.) Apparently, after the police opened up his account they found a bunch of stuff inside it that in their opinion did not enable communicating and cooperating effectively and speedily with people in international and regional organizations, foreign countries and foreign government departments and organizations, etc. etc.. These included what they deemed not-so-funny cartoons and doctored pictures of Senior General Than Shwe. 15 out of the 20-odd years’ imprisonment came from Nay Phone Latt’s Inbox.

Nay Phone Latt is, as is obvious from the photo, just a kid. He’s a kid from Myanmar’s small middle class who was doing what millions and millions of kids are doing across the world right now: mucking around with things on the Internet. Like the other 299,999 or so current users in Myanmar, he came into it late but caught on fast, maybe too fast to notice that he was still on the wrong side of the cyberspace superhighway. So while the government carries on with its aims to join in the World Wide Web party (If China can do it, why not us?), Myanmar will have to WiFi on without Nay Phone Latt for a while.

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.