Cyclone survivors clog roads

2008-05-27 11:07

Yangon - Myanmar police are trying to clear the roads of thousands of cyclone survivors whose desperation has reduced them to begging for food from passing cars.

With little official aid reaching the hardest-hit parts of the Irrawaddy Delta, volunteers from Yangon and other cities have been driving to villages to deliver aid themselves.

Less than half of the 2.4 million cyclone victims have received any official aid, according to the United Nations, leaving many people forced to survive on handouts from these volunteers.

Police, soldiers and immigration officers have staged roadblocks to question foreigners on the main route from Yangon into the devastated town of Dedaye in the Irrawaddy Delta, which bore the brunt of the storm that left 133 000 dead or missing.

Now police are warning volunteers against making donations, threatening to suspend their driving licences.

'People should learn to feed themselves'

"Aid goods should be given out at relief centres only," one officer told a volunteer trying to give food to cyclone victims.

"The people should learn to feed themselves. They should return to their homes," the officer said. "We do not want foreigners to think we are a country of beggars."

"Your driving licence will be suspended for one year if you are caught giving out food," he warned, jotting down the number plate and the volunteer's ID number.

Police say they are trying to ensure the safety of the crowds of people who now line the region's few roads, hoping for handouts.

Desperation has grown so intense that hundreds of people stampede every passing car, hoping to grab even a scrap of food.

"Give me something. Give me the rice," a barefoot five-year-old boy screamed with his hands stretched out at a passing car.

Months before returning to normal

Other survivors are relying on their own meagre resources, catching fish in canals that are now flooded with debris and rank with the corpses of rotting animals and human waste.

But along the road leading to Dedaye, thousands of people - breastfeeding mothers, children, elderly men and women - wait under the tropical sun and daily monsoon showers, hoping for someone to give them food or clean drinking water.

"It will take months for the situation to return to normal. Before the cyclone, you did not see these large groups of people begging for food," one volunteer told AFP.

"Their houses have been destroyed, their rice lost in the storm and they have nothing to wear except what is on them," the volunteer said.

"Also, after the storm many can't find a job. Businesses have no more money to employ them," he said.

"It is not that they like to come out and beg."

- AFP