As the government tried to coax more aid from donors Sunday at a conference in Yangon, the country's principal city, Buddhist monks in Bogalay were secretly organizing six boats to carry out their next unauthorized relief mission.
After evicting thousands of people from Bogalay's relief camps, the government is trying to cut off the monks' aid to delta villages, said a local abbot, who is a leader of the underground effort.
He spoke on condition he not be named, fearing military reprisals against him and the relief operation, which thousands of survivors in remote villagers are depending on for support.
When they can, the monks gather donations secretly because authorities insist that all aid must be channeled through the military. On May 19, when private donors tried to deliver a few truckloads of supplies to the abbot's monastery, security forces attempted to turn them back.
"All the soldiers and police locked arms and blocked the street in front of our monastery," he said, as a military helicopter hovered before landing across the river. "The driver panicked, so I pulled him out and drove myself, shouting through a loudspeaker, 'Get out of the way or I'll hit you with the truck!' "
The abbot showed video, which he said a colleague shot with a camera hidden under his maroon robes, to support claims that the military is evicting cyclone survivors from private relief camps.
In one video, a soldier slaps an elderly woman in the face with a paper listing the names of the expelled. She was pleading for permission to stay in a Hindu temple over the weekend, the monk said. It was the last of several private relief camps operating before authorities closed it, he said.
"Most of these refugees are not educated," said the abbot, trying to explain the soldiers' disdain for the villagers. "They don't even know how to sign their names. They just use fingerprints. So the military thinks they're not human."
The evictions have resulted in a number of deaths, the abbot said. Dozens of survivors died May 18 when three riverboats capsized in a storm as they were heading back to villages flattened by the cyclone, he said.
Military officers told those returning to their destroyed villages to sign forms that said they were doing so willingly, the abbot said.
Soldiers herded thousands more onto trucks to be taken north to Mo Oo Pin, where they are being forced to make jute and do roadwork for less than $1 a day, the abbot said.
