Suspicion trumps aid in Myanmar
Witnesses say officials have evicted cyclone victims from a monastery and other places offering food and refuge, fearful that some survivors may pose a threat.
MOULMEINGYUN, MYANMAR — Among the hundreds of cyclone survivors who staggered through the doors of a monastery here, staring straight ahead and too traumatized to even blink, was one village's last living man.
The abbot was quick to care for the group, feeding refugees from rice stockpiled for students who, in better times, came to learn meditation and the wisdom of the Buddha.
Within a few days, however, local officials barged into the monastery. They argued with the abbot and ordered stunned and frightened survivors to leave, said Pone Nya, an assistant to the abbot.
"They were informed that if they continued to stay in this monastery they would be put in jail," the 25-year-old monk said in an interview Wednesday.
"These local officials told us the refugees are from all walks of life, good men, bad men and rebels," Pone Nya added. "They said, 'If those people live in the town for a long time, it's dangerous for the town.' My abbot absolutely hated those words."
But he was powerless. By May 13, just 10 days after Tropical Cyclone Nargis had washed away whole villages, 1,500 survivors had been evicted from the monastery, along with thousands more from six other relief camps in this Irrawaddy River delta town.
On Thursday, the day after the monk spoke, officials brought U.N. Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon on a carefully orchestrated tour here. Myanmar's minister for border areas, Thein Nyunt, told Ban that everyone had gone home because the water had receded. A tent remained as an apparent distribution center for bags of rice and noodles and cartons of drinking water.
The effort to break up the relief camps so soon reflects the deep suspicion in which Myanmar's military rulers, who have been in power for 46 years, hold their own people, even sick and hungry victims of a natural catastrophe.
Survivors and volunteer aid workers describe similar moves in other areas. If displaced people aren't ordered to leave relief camps, officials controlling aid make sure they get so little food and other support that going back to demolished homes seems a better option, said witnesses interviewed in several delta towns and villages.
In a village near Yangon, the commercial hub, an official shutting down a relief camp in a state-owned restaurant said he was enforcing a long-standing ban on public gatherings of more than five people.
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