May 09, 2008

Hard to believe

It seems impossible, but the military men who hold power in Myanmar have confiscated aid meant for the country's people.

To date, Myanmar has allowed 11 airborne deliveries of aid, which experts say is a fraction of the relief needed if the scale of the disaster is even close to what the Burmese government has claimed. And much of that has come from the United Nations World Food Program, which said on Friday that the aid it had delivered — and intended to distribute to hard-hit regions along the coast — had been seized. “All the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated,” said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program in Bangkok.

I recently read David Maraniss's wonderful biography of Roberto Clemente, who died in a plane crash while trying to get aid to Nicaragua after a devastating earthquake. One of the reasons he decided to personally ferry the goods to that country was that he'd been told that Somoza's government was diverting the aid coming in to its supporters, and he thought that his stature in Latin America was such that the dictator wouldn't dare interfere if he went along.

Eerily familiar circumstances, no?

Posted by Linkmeister at May 9, 2008 01:09 PM | TrackBack
Comments