The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer (18 page)

The British were responsible for starting rice farming in the delta and had drained many swampy areas, built levees for flood control, and removed extensive mangrove stands. But more than that, they made people migrate from the northern areas into the delta to help grow rice for export. Rice is a very labor-intensive crop. So the population of the delta grew and grew until it became one of the most densely populated regions in Myanmar. The British colonials have to take some responsibility for Nargis's high level of casualties.

Nargis was never a superstorm; it had nothing close to the strength of Typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Philippines in 2013. At its top strength, it reached category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, the same strength Hurricane Katrina was when it made landfall east of New Orleans. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service classifies category 3 as a “major” storm, and its website states: “Devastating damage will occur: Well-built framed homes may incur major damage or removal of roof decking and gable ends. Many trees will be snapped or uprooted, blocking numerous roads. Electricity and water will be unavailable for several days to weeks after the storm passes.”
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Hundreds of trees fell in Yangon, but there were few recorded deaths in the city. Businesses there were up and running pretty quickly. Not far away, across the Yangon River in the delta, the story was very different. Nargis came nowhere near the new seat of government, which is well inland.

The true death toll, according to the Red Cross, was 84,500 with 53,800 people unaccounted for.
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If it is accurate, those figures are unusually large. Assuming most of the missing are actually dead, that would place the death toll as high as 138,300.
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What is so disturbing
about Cyclone Nargis is not this very large mortality figure—we have grown inured to reports of high death tolls from poor countries—but rather how the junta reacted to the storm or, more precisely,
didn't
react. First, the government largely ignored warnings from the Indian Meteorological Agency, a government institution that has the responsibility for issuing warnings to several countries in the region with lesser forecasting capacity. These warnings included detailed reports and forecasts as well as personal e-mails that were apparently never acknowledged or answered. Of course, the government of Myanmar says it
did
broadcast timely warnings, but there was certainly no attempt to systematically evacuate the area in the path of the storm. In contrast, the Philippine government, well used to the danger of typhoons, evacuated tens of thousands as Haiyan approached in November 2013 and undoubtedly saved countless lives. Evacuation was difficult because that part of the Philippines is made up of numerous small islands, and travel is not easy at any time. The death toll there from the much stronger storm in an equally densely populated area was around 6,000,
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20 times fewer than the toll of Cyclone Nargis. Even so, the prime minster of the Philippines grumbled that the figure would have been zero if local government had evacuated more effectively. This recalls the mood of the government officials in Taiwan who viewed deaths from typhoons in their country as embarrassing and avoidable.

Though I wasn't able to go to the delta region in March 2012 due to unanticipated permission issues, I talked to many people who had lived through the cyclone and was able to piece together some sense of how recovery was progressing. The most common answer I received was: not much at all. And what recovery there was came with almost no help from the government.

One thing I found somewhat surprising was that although everyone was very critical of the government for its miserable relief and recovery actions, no one was critical of it for failure to provide a warning. Why would that be? Most likely it was a combination of two things. One was the complete uniqueness of the storm. It was described as a once-in-500-year event by Jeff Masters, cofounder of the US Weather Underground.
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No one was surprised to be surprised. Such things didn't happen. If you live in London and are told to anticipate a volcanic eruption on the Strand, you would treat the information rather skeptically. The people who lived in the Irrawaddy Delta would have felt the same way about an evacuation order, had they received one, just as people in Port-au-Prince would have been skeptical about a vague earthquake forecast.

The second and probably more important reason is that common people in Myanmar, as in Haiti, have come to expect very little of their government. They are, I heard numerous times, extremely distrustful of anything the government says. If your government does nothing for you, either by intent or by incapacity, and even acts to suppress the ethnic group to which you belong, it is highly unlikely that you would heed a warning for your safety issued by that same government. Lack of trust in the government could, in fact, be part of the reason some people did not try to evacuate New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached.

Poverty traps, like the one that the people in the delta of Myanmar live in, are like time traps, where people are locked in ancient settings in a modern world. Their homes or businesses are typically much more fragile and more easily damaged than buildings in richer countries. Few buildings in the delta could withstand a storm like Nargis. Government institutions and emergency management services are equally inadequate. There are few safe places to seek shelter and few workers to help people find shelter. People of the Irrawaddy
Delta in 2008 had little useful information about the approaching storm and few means of escape. Even if they had been warned, many would have died, but the extremely high total—even admitting the uncertainties and distortions—could have been mitigated.

For people in the delta, the government was remote in distance and in caring. As noted, Naypyidaw was almost completely unaffected by Nargis. It is entirely possible that accurate reports of the scale of devastation in the delta did not get to the highest level of government for quite some time. There were no Weather Channel camera crews taking real-time video. Just as the generals don't generally acknowledge that earthquakes happen in Myanmar and very probably understate fatalities from earlier tsunamis, their impulse, like that of Mayor Daley in Chicago in the heat wave discussed in chapter 1, was to understate the extent of the crisis and act as if they could handle the situation by themselves. Chile's president had a similar reaction to the situation in Concepción discussed in chapter 3.

Everything Is Broken: A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma,
by Emma Larkin, centers on Cyclone Nargis.
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In the book, Larkin describes what I heard repeatedly in Myanmar: that the top generals never were told about anything bad occurring in the country, from the economy to domestic unrest to election results to food security to literacy rates. As information is passed up from the lower ranks, from people who typically
do
know the situation on the ground, it is constantly adjusted to put everything in the best light. By the time information about Nargis reached the top general's desk, it was uniformly good news. It's possible that all the generals actually thought the storm was nothing much to worry about.

The reformist current president of Myanmar, Thein Sein, was born in a small village in the Irrawaddy Delta, and at the time Cyclone Nargis hit, he was the head of the country's disaster preparedness
committee. It is not very clear what Sein's committee actually did in the years prior to Nargis.

An article about Thein Sein in the
New York Times
under the headline “A Most Unlikely Liberator” tells of how he visited the region of his youth after the storm and was appalled at the scale of devastation. According to U Tin Maung Thann, the head of the NGO Myanmar Egress, Nargis “was a mental trigger. It made him [Thein Sein] realize the limitations of the old regime.”
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Thein Sein has not openly admitted this, but I heard it said several times while I was in Myanmar.

The limitations of the operational capacity of the Myanmar government to carry out relief work were starkly evident in the days after Nargis. The inaction stemmed from a deadly mixture of indifference, incapacity, anxiety, and outright cunning. The junta running the government was made up mostly of senior army commanders—the navy and air force are small in comparison to the army and mainly provide support for army actions against insurgents and in securing the country's borders. The Myanmar Police Force, formerly independent of the army, is now an auxiliary military service. Myanmar spends almost 25 percent of its revenues on the military.
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(The equivalent figure for the United States is 20 percent.
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) The army has a reputation for being one of the best trained and having the toughest fighters in the region.

The army did not prove to be tough when it came to rescue and relief operations, however. Once the generals found it necessary to act, they did so in what appeared to be an almost random and erratic way. No doubt it was complicated and difficult; the delta region is hard to access at the best of times. There are few roads and transportation is often by small boats, so even a well-organized relief effort would have faced problems. An evacuation would have been difficult and could have achieved only partial success, even if a timely and well-distributed warning had been issued. The situation must have been
akin to the fog of war, in which harrowing circumstances make it all but impossible for people, even well-seasoned commanders, to make good decisions. With winds blowing well over 100 mph and water rising, it is surely difficult to make decisions in the fog of disaster.

What I heard from a large number of people was that those in the cyclone-affected region for the most part helped themselves. That included local soldiers based in the region who acted on impulse, without waiting for orders from the top that they may have expected would not come. The local NGOs, often with ethnic roots, were able to provide some measure of relief for their people. In fact, I heard that the ability of these NGOs to act without the usual constraints and oversight by government gave them a sense of empowerment they had not experienced before. Many told me that the storm gave them a way of proving to themselves and to others that they had an important and effective role in Myanmar's civil society.

But the generals seemed to want to do as little as possible for the people of the delta. In fact, they refused offers of aid from foreign nations. The generals sought to give the appearance that they were in control and didn't need help. One way they did this was by trying to diminish the problem to something relatively small scale and manageable. To “prove” this, they went ahead with a national constitutional referendum just eight days after the cyclone hit. Some people in the delta region during or immediately after the cyclone said they never saw any evidence of relief operations from the military. And very little has happened since then.

All one can do is speculate about what was in the minds of the generals in those days. Perhaps in years to come someone will tell the story from the inside. People who make devastatingly bad decisions about the numerical denomination of their currency and move their capital city on a whim should not be expected to make brilliant decisions during a disaster.

The morally reprehensible generals latched onto the opportunity to gain advantage by doing nothing, and they almost got away with it.

But why do nothing? One reason is to hide incompetence. Members of the Myanmar military are not experienced in civil search and rescue. What they do is more or less the opposite. The military controls all economic activity in the country, funneling the benefits to themselves and their cronies. That is not a military action but a political one. Their primary military function is to suppress insurgents so they can hold onto political power. The government's capacity to act in response to the cyclone was weak, and no one in government wanted that weakness to be exposed. In the tortured logic of the generals, doing nothing made it appear as if nothing needed to be done. By the time the cyclone struck, Myanmar's relationship with China had begun to collapse, so the generals could not rely on a capable ally for assistance, and they were on poor terms with all their neighbors to the east and west.

Why thwart others who are trying to help? Part of the reason relates to the first. If you allow people in, it will become clear that something
does
need to be done, and the ruse that things were not so bad and that everything was under control would be exposed. The generals would have had to explain why they did nothing.

But mainly, bizarre as it may seem to people outside Myanmar, the generals did fear an invasion. In a very insightful article in the journal
Contemporary Southeast Asia,
Andrew Selth reminds us that Myanmar had been invaded numerous times in its history.
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In fact, the three most recent invasions occurred within living memory. Myanmar is subject to severe international sanctions, and those imposing the sanctions couch their rhetoric in terms of the desire for regime change. The generals believed outside influences determined
to overthrow the government fueled the riots of 1988, and they earnestly believed that a flood of international aid workers would be nothing more than a pretext for a US invasion. (Selth says they had watched the US invasion of Iraq closely.) They were aware that the French minister for foreign and European affairs, Bernard Kouchner, had called for coercive humanitarian intervention after the cyclone under “the responsibility to protect,”
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an action that would amount, in the generals' thinking, to invasion under a humanitarian pretext. The arrival of US warships (to lend humanitarian support) off their coast would only have supported that belief.