United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

The London Independent reported Sunday that "Oxfam warned yesterday that 1.5 million people could die needlessly in Burma as the first outbreaks of disease were reported in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, and many of the worst-hit areas went an eighth day without aid."[1] -- "The U.N. World Food Program said it had never seen such delays in dealing with a modern humanitarian crisis and described the official response as 'unprecedented.'" -- On Friday night, the Financial Times reported that Burma was locked "in a stand-off with the international community after flatly refusing to allow foreign aid workers into the country to tackle the impact of the recent cyclone disaster."[2] -- On Saturday, the New York Times reported that the Burmese officials had "seized a shipment of United Nations food aid on Friday intended for victims of a devastating cyclone, declaring that they would accept donations of food and medicine but not the foreign aid workers international groups say are in equally short supply there."[3] -- "The International Red Cross estimated Friday that the combined efforts of relief agencies and the Myanmar [Burmese] government have distributed aid to only 220,000 of up to 1.9 million people left homeless, injured or subject to disease and hunger after the storm," Seth Mydans wrote. -- Writing for Atlantic Free Press, Martha Rose Crow looked at the situation in Burma with an jaundiced eye by a reading of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.[4] -- In The Shock Doctrine, Klein argues that neoliberalism has in the course of the past several decades become expert in using disaster to impose drastic and unpopular economic reforms upon unwilling populations. -- Crow claimed, excessively, that on the very day the cyclone hit, U.S. President George. W. Bush announced as an "act of agression" a "new executive order that instructs the Treasury Department to freeze the assets of Burmese state-owned companies that are major sources of funds that prop up the junta." -- COMMENT: In fact, Bush's executive order was dated Apr. 30, two days before the storm went ashore, and was prepared at a time when the storm was expected to hit Bangladesh or SE India. -- The thesis of Naomi Klein's book is strong enough to survive without the rewriting of history. -- In fact, Klein explicitly disavows the sort of conspiracy thinking that Martha Rose Crow purveys: "The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. . . . the disaster capitalism complex does not deliberately scheme to create the cataclysms on which it feeds" (The Shock Doctrine, pp. 426-27)....

BURMA DEATH TOLL 'COULD REACH 1.5 MILLION'
By Andrew Buncombe and Nina Lakhani

Oxfam warned yesterday that 1.5 million people could die needlessly in Burma as the first outbreaks of disease were reported in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, and many of the worst-hit areas went an eighth day without aid.

International agencies called on the country's secretive military junta to allow immediate access to those stranded without food, clean water, and medicines. Cholera, typhoid, and malaria could take hold within days as lack of food and shelter weakened the resistance of survivors. More than 100,000 people are believed to have died in the 130mph winds and storm surges that hit the country last weekend.

"Supplies will run out unless more aid is allowed into the country," said Christian Aid's Burma expert, Ray Hasan. "Partners are telling us that there are outbreaks of disease already. There is no time to lose." The U.N. World Food Program said it had never seen such delays in dealing with a modern humanitarian crisis and described the official response as "unprecedented".

The military authorities are continuing to delay giving visas to foreign aid officials, and insist on taking control of such shipments as are permitted.

The U.N. World Food Program said yesterday it was sending more supplies, even though the first two plane loads had been impounded. Twenty-three agencies were providing aid to people in the devastated areas, said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

A U.N. flight with 33 tons of plastic sheets, sanitation items, and mosquito nets got clearance to take off from Brindisi, Italy, last night, but many organizations were awaiting government clearance. "It's a race against the clock," Ms. Byrs said. "If the humanitarian aid does not get into the country on a larger scale, there's the risk of a second catastrophe."

An estimated 300,000 people have received some help since last Saturday, mainly from aid agencies already based in the country.

Burma’s ruling junta was on Friday night locked in a stand-off with the international community after flatly refusing to allow foreign aid workers into the country to tackle the impact of the recent cyclone disaster.

Amid clear indications that between 60,000 and 100,000 people are now dead or missing in the region, the Burmese junta said it was prepared to receive offers of aid from foreign sources, including the U.S.

However, to the dismay of the United Nations and international aid agencies, the Burmese regime insisted it would control the distribution of aid to the 1.5m people now believed to have been affected by the disaster.

The diplomatic wrangling became so fierce that at one point on Friday the U.N. announced it was suspending aid flights to the country claiming the supplies were being appropriated by the junta. The U.N. later relented.

There were other signs of a softening tone on both sides. Burma’s U.N. envoy, Kyaw Tint Swe, said his government would accept assistance from “any quarter.”

John Holmes, the U.N.’s humanitarian aid chief, said that, as in all disasters, the affected government would take the lead in responding to it. “But it is usual for countries struck by natural disasters to ask for help from the rest of the world.”

The U.S. said it was pleased that Burma had given the green light for a U.S. military C-130 cargo plane to fly to the country next Monday with aid. However, the U.N. believes the Burmese regime lacks the logistical ability to distribute the aid.

Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, said he had been unable to speak to the Burmese leadership, despite repeated efforts to do so. Earlier Noeleen Hayzer, the top U.N. official in Asia, said: “The situation is getting critical and there is only a small window of opportunity if we are to avert the spread of diseases that could multiply the already tragic number of casualties.”

In what appeared to be a bid to get the regime to stop hindering the relief effort, the U.N. launched a $187m program of emergency food and relief for Burma.

The appeal, launched in New York by Mr. Holmes, said contributions by member states would be used to fund 10 U.N. agencies and nine charities working to relieve the suffering of the Burmese.

However, the amount of aid that has got into the country thus far has been severely limited. The U.N. believes that, as of last Wednesday, just 276,000 of the 1.5m cyclone survivors had received any relief supplies from U.N. agencies or nongovernmental organisations.

Some Western governments are considering whether they can carry out humanitarian operations in the country without the consent of the Burmese regime.

“There is no substitute for the regime’s consent for letting in aid,” said one British official. “But if that consent is withheld, the alternative is that tens of thousands of people are left to die.”

MYANMAR SEIZES U.N. FOOD FOR CYCLONE VICTIMS AND BLOCKS FOREIGN EXPERTS
By Seth Mydans

BANGKOK -- The military leaders of Myanmar seized a shipment of United Nations food aid on Friday intended for victims of a devastating cyclone, declaring that they would accept donations of food and medicine but not the foreign aid workers international groups say are in equally short supply there.

The ruling junta continued to permit a small number of aid deliveries and promised to allow the first air shipment from the Pentagon on Monday, a significant concession because the United States has been Myanmar’s leading critic, imposing sanctions and lobbying for a United Nations resolution condemning the nation’s generals for human rights violations.

But the refusal of the country’s iron-fisted rulers to allow doctors and disaster relief experts to enter in large numbers contributed to the growing concern that starvation and epidemic diseases could end up killing people on the same scale as the winds, waves, and flooding that destroyed villages across a wide swath of coastal Myanmar nearly a week ago.

The International Red Cross estimated Friday that the combined efforts of relief agencies and the Myanmar government have distributed aid to only 220,000 of up to 1.9 million people left homeless, injured or subject to disease and hunger after the storm.

“There are problems to get the aid inside, and there are problems to get the aid out to the delta area,” the Danish Red Cross director, Anders Ladekarl, told Danish broadcaster DR. “We are simply lacking transportation. There are almost no boats and no helicopters. This is really a nightmare to make this operation run.”

As foreign aid groups scurried to deliver relief, the generals who run Myanmar continued to focus on a separate priority: a constitutional referendum scheduled for Saturday.

The junta’s plan to go ahead with the vote while restricting aid deliveries drew widespread criticism and concern that soldiers who could be rescuing survivors were likely to be sent to polling places instead.

“It is one of the best examples of the disregard for the people by the military,” said Josef Silverstein an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University.

Fourteen years in the making, the Constitution is formulated to keep power in the hands of military officers, even if they change to civilian clothes. It would guarantee the military 25 percent of the seats in Parliament and control of crucial cabinet posts, along with the right to suspend democratic freedoms at any time.

But while the state-run newspaper urged people on Friday to approve the Constitution, little help was reaching them. 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. Much of that has come from the United Nations World Food Program, which said 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.

After initially saying it would halt deliveries, the agency said later Friday that flights would continue Saturday while the issue is worked out. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the Myanmar authorities to let aid into the country “without hindrance” and said the effect of further delay could be “truly catastrophic.”

His spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, said Mr. Ban had been trying for two days without success to get in touch by telephone with Than Shwe, the junta’s senior general. “We have been told that the phone lines are down,” she said.

Myanmar’s military junta said in a statement on Friday that it was willing to receive disaster relief from the outside world but would distribute supplies itself rather than allowing in relief workers. Aid agencies want to coordinate and control their own aid.

Already Myanmar has turned away one fully loaded flight because the supplies were accompanied by disaster experts and press.

“Myanmar is not in a position to receive rescue and information teams from foreign countries at the moment,” a Foreign Ministry statement said. “But at present Myanmar is giving priority to receiving relief aid and distributing them to the storm-hit regions with its own resources.”

Even so, some agencies and nations were delivering supplies successfully. India sent two ships loaded with relief supplies, and the United Nations Children’s Fund said it was not meeting problems with its deliveries of aid.

A spokesman for Unicef, Christopher de Bono, said in an e-mail message that millions of water purification tablets had been delivered Thursday, and that although customs clearance could take two days, “as far as we know there has been no indication of any problems so far.”

In a telephone call from Myanmar, an official of the International Red Cross, Michael Annear, said delivery work was proceeding normally in cooperation with other agencies and local businesses.

Doctors Without Borders, which had been running large H.I.V. and malaria programs in Myanmar, has about 80 staff members in the Delta region and is sending more in, said Frank Smithuis, the group’s head of mission. He said the group was distributing food and medicine from the stores it already had in place.

In the worst-affected areas, he said, 95 percent of the people had lost their homes and everything they owned, and were in desperate need of food, water and shelter.

Dr. Smithuis said his group was dispatching teams of six -- a doctor, a nurse, a medical assistant, two water and sanitation workers, and a food distributor who would hire local people to help distribute food.

The teams are seeing many people injured by the storm who have infected wounds that need to be drained and treated with antibiotics, he said.

“It sounds like we have everything under control, and that’s not true,” Mr. Smithuis said. “The area is wide, and there’s a lot of people. We don’t see other players, we don’t see other help.” Most relief workers on the ground are local people and would be less likely to encounter the suspicion with which authorities view foreigners.

Save the Children reported that its staff members in the Irrawaddy delta region had come across many rotting bodies where the waters had receded. In the Pyinkaya area southwest of there, they said, people were dying of hunger and thirst.

Mr. Risley of the World Food Program said he had never seen delays like those being encountered in Myanmar. In Indonesia after the tsunami in 2004, he said, an air bridge of daily flights was established within 48 hours.

“The frustration caused by what appears to be a paperwork delay is unprecedented in modern humanitarian relief efforts,” he said. “It’s astonishing.”

He said his agency alone had submitted 10 visa applications for relief workers but that none had been approved before consulates shut down for the weekend.

“We strongly urge the government of Myanmar to process these visa applications as quickly as possible, including working over the weekend,” he said.

John Holmes, the United Nations chief aid coordinator, appealed to countries for $187 million in emergency aid on Friday. But Bettina Luescher, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, turned aside repeated questions about what had led her agency to make its original decision to suspend relief and then rapidly reverse it.

“All I can say is that at our headquarters in Rome, there were discussions going on and it was decided that we should send in those planes tomorrow,” she said.

She said that of the 16 visas for entry into Myanmar sought for international staff members, only one had been granted, and it had been requested prior to the storm.

The White House welcomed the news on Friday that Myanmar would allow some American aid on Monday. “We hope this is the beginning of major U.S. assistance to the Burmese people,” said Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman. He added, “We are very concerned about the people of Burma, and we’re going to keep on working with the government of Burma to do what we can to help the people there.”

Among the forces the United States could call on is the Essex Strike Group, which was in the region for Cobra Gold military exercises with Thailand. The group transferred a dozen transport helicopters to Thailand, where they could fly to Myanmar in a matter of hours with relief supplies. The ships are moving toward waters off Myanmar to be available with medical and other relief or reconstruction capabilities on board.

Aboard the ships are amphibious landing craft that can move onto battered shorelines and carry personnel and supplies to remote locations, inaccessible by road.

“We will come, provide assistance, and then leave -- just like in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and other places where we have provided assistance,” said Maj. Stewart Upton of the Marine Corps, a Pentagon spokesman.

--Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations, Thom Shanker from Washington, and Denise Grady from New York.

ARE VAMPIRE CAPITALISTS ABOUT TO DESCEND ON CRISIS-WROUGHT MYANMAR
By Martha Rose Crow

Nowadays, most important news gets ignored, buried, or goes under the radar by corporate-owned media, especially when this news reveals the dark side of the “free market” or the dark plans for more parasitic, predator capitalism unleashed against a weakened populace or country.

Myanmar is the modern name for a country the English-speaking empires still call Burma.

On May 2nd, U.S. President George W. Bush ordered a new round of sanctions on Burmese state companies to pressure the military leadership there over human rights abuses and to push for political change. [NOTE: Actually, this executive order was signed on Apr. 30, at a time when the storm was expacted to hit Bangladesh or southeastern India. --H.B.]

Few wires picked up this act of aggression from Washington. Instead, the whole world watched with wonder as Tropical Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar on May 2nd and May 3rd.

For over a week, meteorologists knew that Myanmar would be hit, so it is either ironic or planned that Bush would sanction Myanmar the same day it was to be devastated.

Bush announced in his statement on May 2nd, "Today I've issued a new executive order that instructs the Treasury Department to freeze the assets of Burmese state-owned companies that are major sources of funds that prop up the junta."

The sanctions were targeted at companies and industries that produce timber, pearls, and gems. Notice that gas and oil were not on the list of sanctions.

Myanmar is one of the world's oldest oil producers. It exporting its first barrel in 1853. Rangoon Oil Company, the first foreign oil company to drill in the country, was created in 1871. Between 1886 and 1963, the Myanmar's oil industry was dominated by Burmah Oil Company (BOC), which discovered the Ychaugyaung field in 1887 and the Chauk field in 1902. Both fields are still in production.

The oil and gas industry was nationalized after a socialist-leaning military regime seized power in 1962. As in many other countries, the State assumed ownership of the resources, either operating them itself or delegating this task to private operators, who were paid for their outlay and work in oil or gas under production sharing contracts called PSCs.

The article, ‘Big Oil Fuelling Burma’s Junta?’ says, “. . . global oil companies are falling all over themselves in the cue to gain access to what may be substantial oil reserves in that fractured country.” If Myanmar was fractured before, it is shattered from Tropical Cyclone Nargis.

French oil giant TOTAL is the fourth largest oil company in the UK, and the fourth largest oil company in the world. On February 21, 2005, the Burma Campaign U.K. published a hard-hitting new report exposing how oil giant TOTAL plays a crucial role in funding and protecting Burma’s brutal military dictatorship.

The report said, “There has been little relief for villagers living in the Yadana pipeline region in southern Burma since the Chevron Corporation became a partner to this natural gas venture in 2005.” "Chevron and its consortium partners continue to rely on the Burmese army for pipeline security and those forces continue to conscript thousands of villagers for forced labor, and to commit torture, rape, murder, and other serious abuses in the course of their operations," revealed the 76-page report, 'The Human Cost of Energy.' “Chevron should act on "its moral and legal obligations to human rights rather than profit from human rights abuses," the report added of this project that earned the Burma's junta about 1.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2006, over half of its total earnings from the sale of gas to neighboring Thailand, which was 2.16 billion dollars that year.”

The Yadana pipeline has been dogged by controversy and human rights abuses since its inception in 1991. The venture, to extract offshore natural gas in the Andaman Sea and have it flow along an overland pipe to Thailand, was backed by a consortium that included the U.S. company Unocal, French company Total and a subsidiary of Thailand’s state-owned gas and oil company. The local partner was the Myanmar Gas and Oil Enterprise, an affiliate of Burma’s energy ministry.

In developing Burmese energy resources, the ruling Myanmar junta has forcibly relocated villages and uses villagers as slave labor.

This keeps profits high for foreign oil companies and the ruling junta who get their cut. Soldiers are contracted by foreign investors to protect energy project sites and pipelines. Violence by these is commonplace, perpetuating the cycle of human rights abuses. Soldiers have been implicated in killings, beatings, rapes and arrests of the villagers living on or by energy fields and pipelines.

On Tuesday, May 6th, President Bush requested the country's junta to allow the United States to provide disaster assistance, saying Washington was prepared to move naval assets to help search for the dead and missing.

Barbara Starr, Pentagon reporter for CNN, reported the same day (May 6) on CNN Business Report that Myanmar could receive all kinds of “help” from the U.S. Navy including help with delivering and sanitizing water.

Why the flip-flop? Why does Bush freeze Myanmar’s assets the day it is hit with a Hurricane Katrina-size cyclone and four days later Bush wants to help this crisis wrought country? It’s like beating someone to a pulp (freezing assets) and then leaving them on the sidewalk for violent nature to finish the job! And both happened on the same day! Now that the country is properly beaten, Bush wants to help them? This kind of mindset is psychopathic to say the least!

Thankfully, the Myanmar military, which regularly accuses the United States of trying to subvert their regime, is unlikely to allow U.S. military presence in its territory. How would the junta make the Navy leave after it and U.S. oil carpet-baggers become entrenched in the rivers and sea around Myanmar, especially since the country is so weakened by cyclone devastation? Think how weakened and powerless New Orleans was after Hurricane Katrina and apply this same dynamic to Myanmar.

But with tens of thousands of Burmese dead, more injured and up to a million are homeless, this may be the “Perfect Storm” for proponents of the Friedian Chicago School of Economic’s “Shock Doctrine” where western capitalists, the World Bank, and the IMF are always poised to descend on third-world countries devastated and paralyzed by shock, despair, huge losses of life and destroyed infrastructures from natural or other disasters.

The article “Turning a Tsunami Into a Windfall -- For Some" begins: “The Christmas tsunami of 2004 left a devastating trail of destruction but for some it opened up huge business opportunities. It created a blank slate for what Naomi Klein calls “shock doctrine.” This is how shock doctrine works. First there is a disaster, a coup, a terrorist attack, a tsunami, a hurricane: the population goes into shock, the economy is in a shambles, it’s a perfect opportunity to push through unpopular economic shock therapy. This means privatizing resources and selling state assets.”

If you’ve read Naomi Klein’s book *The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism*, you will know that half a million Sri Lankan fisher folk were moved inland to free up the beaches for “development” the tourist market. This left a half million people without their traditional land to live on and without a way to make an income.

The Washington Consensus has been pushing for a “regime” change in Myanmar for a long time. They base it on “abuse” of human rights and endless Western propaganda that the “majority” of Burmese want “democracy.”

Who is Bush to push for “human rights” reform when most of the world regards America as the worst human rights abuser on the planet? This is evidenced by the fact that the U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations, the illegal detainment and torture of inmates in Guantanamo, illegal wars leaving over 2 million Iraqis dead and more injured (for “regime change”), and torture of its prisoners internationally and nationally to name a few offenses.

American “human rights” reform is always done by the barrel of a gun or economic genocide (like freezing assets) or both.

The current junta had scheduled a May 10 referendum as a key stage in a seven-step "roadmap to democracy" that should culminate in multi-party elections in 2010, as a replacement to the absolute power wielded by the army since their 1962 coup.

With Myanmar lying in ruins, Tropical Cyclone Nargis has delayed this vote. Myanmar state radio announced that Saturday's vote on the military-backed draft constitution would be delayed until May 24 in 40 of 45 townships in the Yangon area and seven in the delta. It indicated that the balloting would proceed in other areas as scheduled. Not only is freezing a country’s assets an Act of Aggression, it can also be interpreted as an Act of War.

On March 30th, another “under the radar” important news story was released and few news wires picked it up. In, ‘Day of Infamy: The March 20, 2008, U.S. Declaration of War on Iran’ Global Research reported the American government used its political muscles to freeze Iran’s assets through the FinCEn unit of the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Global Research’s article says that this sanction will “. . . deliver the ultimate death blow to Iran's ability to participate in the international banking system . . . What it really means is that the U.S., again through FinCEN, has declared two acts of war: one against Iran's banks and one against any financial institution anywhere in the world that tries to do business with an Iranian bank.”

Although Myanmar’s oil output is small (9,500 barrels a day), the oil industry believes that there are billions of untapped reserves below Myanmar’s soil and sea.

By its structure, Western capitalism constantly needs new “markets” to keep itself afloat. Predatorial and without conscience, the Lords of the “Free Market” either wait like vultures in the treetops for wounded and weak prey or they wait “in the cue to gain access to what may be substantial oil reserves in that fractured country.”

However they do it, it seems that vampire capitalists are about to rush in on crisis-wrought Myanmar and plunder it like they’ve done to countless other countries when they were in severe shock.