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PATHEIN, Myanmar: Myanmar’s junta held a referendum on a new
constitution Saturday, despite warnings more people would die unless
it focused on delivering emergency aid for survivors of last
week’s cyclone.
In surreal scenes, voting booths were erected
close to makeshift camps for the homeless, and the country’s
military regime continued to hold up tons of urgent relief supplies
at the airport.
The junta, deeply suspicious of the outside
world, has refused to let in foreign experts who specialize in
getting aid to disaster victims, and said that only the government
would be allowed to distribute emergency supplies.
The UN food agency said the junta had released a
plane-load of cyclone aid into its custody Saturday.
“The supplies are in our hands, they’ve been
handed over to us,” said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the World
Food Program (WFP), about the shipment which came on a flight from
Cambodia.
He said there had been a “misunderstanding”
regarding earlier comments about the status of goods on that flight
as well as another from the UN refugee agency, which landed in
Myanmar’s main city of Yangon on Saturday.
The spokesman, based in neighboring Thailand,
said he did not know about the second plane—but that two shipments
seized by the regime Friday were still in government hands.
“They were impounded and we are hopeful. . .
they will be released,” he told Agence France-Presse.
As the junta pressed ahead with a vote which
critics say will only cement its hold on power, the United Nations
said that a week after Cyclone Nargis hit, only one-quarter of the
victims have received any help at all.
“It’s a race against time,” said Richard
Horsey, a spokesman for the emergency relief arm of the United
Nations.
“We’re dealing with lots of bureaucracy,
we’re dealing with a lot of red tape, and possibly we’re dealing
with an environment where the authorities aren’t fully open to a
relief effort of this kind,” he said.
“That’s very frustrating.”
The cyclone, which slammed into the rice-growing
Irrawaddy Delta region in the country’s south, left 60,000 people
dead or missing and as many as two million more short of food, water
and supplies.
Ignoring calls to put off Saturday’s vote and
focus on saving lives, the government went ahead with the referendum
on a new constitution in all but the worst-affected areas— which
will vote later in the month.
The regime says the vote is a key step in its
much-criticized “road map” to democracy and will lead the
country to national elections within two years.
The last time there was a national ballot, in
1990, democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi won in a landslide. She
was never allowed to rule, and instead has been under house arrest
for much of the time since.
Among its provisions, the constitution would
make it illegal for her to ever lead the country.
In a statement Saturday, her National League for
Democracy party said the junta’s aid restrictions were increasing
the death toll “day by day” and called on the international
community for urgent help.
“Even now, it is getting too late,” it said,
condemning the decision to go ahead with the referendum.
The White House opted not to condemn explicitly
Myanmar’s decision to go ahead with its referendum but said the
junta ought to be focused on disaster relief.
“We’ve had concerns about the referendum. .
. but right now, I would say we want the focus of the Burmese
government to be helping the people recover from the cyclone and the
after-effects,” said Spokesman Gordon Johndroe. Myanmar was
formerly known as Burma.
As it has for days, state television Saturday
broadcast patriotic songs urging people to approve the charter,
alternating with images of planes unloading food—and military
officers handing it out to the grateful poor.
But the reality on the ground is sharply at odds
with the government propaganda.
Many survivors of the cyclone, which hit last
Saturday, say they have nothing to eat or drink. Their villages have
been washed away, many of their relatives are dead —and their fury
at the government is at fever pitch.
In the trading town of Pathein, on the edge of
the Irrawaddy delta where ramshackle villages bore the brunt of the
destruction, a voting booth was set up just down the street from a
camp for the homeless.
“Many of the residents here feel so angry at
the government when we see victims of the storm coming to our
town,” one teashop owner said.
“People are not that interested in voting.
What we care about is the storm victims,” he told Agence France-Presse.
“Many of them are disgusted with the government. It has been so
slow to help.”
-- AFP
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