PSLweb: Washington exploits Myanmar's cyclone tragedy

Washington exploits Myanmar's cyclone tragedy
Friday, May 16, 2008
By: Lacei Amodei

Disaster relief must be unconditional

On May 2, Myanmar suffered its deadliest natural disaster when Cyclone Nargis hit the country. According to the May 14 China Daily, official government counts show 31,938 dead and 29,770 still missing. The country is widely devastated in the rural and urban centers.

Soldiers unload supplies destined
for the victims of Cyclone Nargis.

Nargis developed over the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern part of the Indian Ocean. The deadly tropical storm hit five divisions and states within Myanmar: Yangon, Bago, Ayeyawaddy, Kayin and Mon. Ayeyawaddy and Yangon sustained the heaviest casualties and damage.

When the cyclone hit, the victims’ needs took a back seat in the eyes of the Bush administration, which seized the opportunity to attack Myanmar’s governing military junta. Laura Bush, who usually shies away from U.S. foreign policy, immediately made a statement labeling Myanmar’s government illegitimate and blaming it for the human cost of the disaster.

However, the United States—the richest country on the planet—offered a pittance in aid when the tragedy first struck. The Bush administration offered only $250,000 in emergency assistance—an outrageously low amount that had to be quickly raised to $3.25 million in a save-face move.

The sum amounts to just over $3 for each of the one million people believed to be left homeless by the disaster—chump change for a country with bottomless pockets to spend advancing imperialist projects such as the war in Iraq. The money will scarcely make a dent in the large-scale relief that Myanmar desperately needs.

The front pages of major newspapers are splashed with the tragic state of Myanmar, all lambasting its government with accusations of causing the high death tolls by not letting aid into the country. The accusations against the government of Myanmar are disingenuous and false.

The Bush administration immediately conditioned any additional aid upon Myanmar allowing a Disaster Assistance Response Team into the country. Like all U.S. "disaster assistance" teams, DART is a military unit. The government of Myanmar, targeted by an imperialist demonization campaign, is understandably less than eager to allow U.S. troops on its grounds.

Soe Tha, Myanmar’s minister of national planning and economic development, has repeatedly stressed that financial or material aid from any nation will be accepted. However, outside individuals and governments may not enter and distribute aide themselves—a more than reasonable objection given the attacks against Myanmar’s government.

Conditioning aid upon permission for U.S. military personnel to enter the country is a criminal act. U.S. officials do not care about the mounting death tolls and dire conditions. The only service Washington seeks to provide is the conversion of Myanmar into a neocolony.

Armed ‘humanitarian’ intervention a possibility

Washington is playing its typical game of aggression against a country it seeks to dominate and calling it "aid." While the large destruction caused by the cyclone has received much play in the media, the greatest danger to Myanmar is Washington’s true intentions.

In a May 14 New York Times op-ed appropriately titled "Aid at the Point of a Gun," Robert Kaplan discusses the chatter around a potential U.S.-led "armed humanitarian intervention." Kaplan reminds his readers that U.S. forces are in nearby Thailand in large numbers for an annual military exercise known as Cobra Gold.

"Navy warships could pass from the Gulf of Thailand through the Strait of Malacca and north up the Bay of Bengal to the Irrawaddy Delta," Kaplan writes. "[A] humanitarian invasion could ultimately lead to the regime’s collapse," he astutely observes.

Kaplan’s point certainly has not been lost on U.S. war planners. President George Bush has said he is prepared to send U.S. Navy ships to help the South Asian nation "recover" from the effects of the tropical cyclone. The threat of a military intervention is quite palpable.

Independent path unacceptable to Washington

Myanmar, once a part of the British Empire, has had to cope with the underdevelopment characteristic of former colonial subjects. Additionally, sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU governments have contributed not only to the lack of infrastructure that is now complicating relief efforts, but also the economic hardship faced by the people of Myanmar even in the absence of natural disasters.

The U.S. government wants to overthrow the government of Myanmar and install a pro-U.S. regime in this large and important country—one that will allow unfettered economic plunder for the benefit of U.S. imperialism and at the expense of the local population.

Myanmar was formerly known as Burma. From 1824 to 1948, it was conquered, colonized and incorporated into the British Empire. Having achieved independence in 1948, the new Burmese government was a civilian-based capitalist government. Acute problems of poverty, ethnic divisions within the country and other legacies of the colonial period led to the overthrow of the civilian government by a military junta in 1962.

The military junta has moved at times to the left and later to the right as it was buffeted by the storms that raged throughout the region in the 1960s and 1970s. Caught

between the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam, which expanded all over Southeast Asia, and the revolutionary upheaval that swept the region in response, the military government declared the "Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma" on Jan. 4, 1974. While the military government carried out extensive nationalizations of property, it was not a workers’ state or socialist country such as existed in Vietnam, North Korea or China.

The military junta shed the socialist label by reverting to the Union of Burma in late 1988. It embraced an openly pro-capitalist orientation. Still, Washington’s orientation was to look for ways to overthrow the Burmese government and put a pro-Western proxy regime into power. This was precisely what happened to all the governments in Eastern and central Europe, with the exception of Yugoslavia, in the period between 1988 and 1989. Most of those governments were incorporated into NATO, the U.S.-led military alliance.

Bush and the Democrats and all the corporate-owned media see the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis as a wonderful opportunity to intervene, under the banner of humanitarian aid, with the goal of carrying out the overthrow of the government.

Opposition offers no alternative

In that spirit, Washington is exploiting the shocking tragedy to the fullest. The government and media are picking up the demonization campaign against Myanmar where it left off in September 2007.

At that time, anti-government protests broke out in the main urban center of Yangoon under a leadership aligned with imperialism. The demonstrations were used by the U.S. government to push for economic sanctions against the entire country. Laura Bush acted as a spokesperson against Myanmar’s government then just as she has now.

Though the people of Myanmar have legitimate grievances against the military government, Washington’s meddling seeks to further its own imperialist interests. To the poor people of Myanmar, U.S. intervention can only bring further impoverishment and suffering.

The country’s opposition movement, by virtue of its alignment with U.S. imperialism, offers no real alternative. On May 6, just days after the Nargis tragedy, President Bush presided at a ceremony presenting the Congressional Gold Medal to detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi—a recognition the U.S. government generally reserves for its allies.

Suu Kyi’s ties to U.S. imperialism are hardly covert. The National Endowment for Democracy openly funds Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy. The NED has been instrumental to Washington’s destabilization campaigns around the world, channeling funds allocated by Congress to U.S.-aligned "pro-democracy" forces.

In 2003, Brian Joseph, the NED’s program officer for Asia, proudly reported that the NED was funding 35 "pro-democracy" groups in Myanmar to the tune of $2.5 million a year. Joseph highlighted Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy as the viable alternative to the military regime, deserving "our full support."

As aid shipments continued on May 10, a spokesman for the World Food Program, Paul Risley, said it amounted to about one-tenth of what was needed. In addition, a major logistical operation was necessary. (International Herald Tribune, May 11)

The U.S. ruling class let Hurricane Katrina wreak havoc on the residents of New Orleans when they had the resources not only to provide relief but also to prevent the disaster. Now, they are seeking to turn the tragedy of Cyclone Nargis into a tool for imperialist intervention. Their goal is not aid, but only the subjugation and domination of an entire country.

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