U.S. Navy Ships Leave Myanmar’s Coast after Government Refuses Aid (Myanmar update 8)

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U.S. Navy Ships Leave Myanmar’s Coast after Government Refuses Aid (Myanmar update 8)

Navy photo by Airman Benjamin Dennis

The U.S. Navy offered ships and helicopters to the Myanmar government to help with cyclone disaster relief efforts. After trying for a month to gain access to Myanmar—but meeting resistance from the government—the American ships turned away yesterday.

NO MILITARY: After trying 15 times to help with cyclone relief efforts and being turned away by Myanmar's leaders, U.S. Navy ships headed home yesterday. Myanmar's government-run media had warned citizens that the American military planned to invade the country for its oil.

by Thea Deley
Informify Staff Writer
June 5, 2008

U.S. military ships anchored off the coast of Myanmar carried 22 heavy transport helicopters that could have delivered aid to remote villages or rescued cyclone survivors trapped in flooded delta regions. After a month of waiting to be allowed into the country, Pacific Commander Admiral Timothy Keating ordered the ships to leave Myanmar's coast.

Cyclone Nargis: Quick Facts

Storm Hit:	May 2, 2008
# Dead:	78,000
# Missing:	56,000
# People Needing Food/Shelter/Medical Care:	2.4 million
# People Receiving Aid:	1.3 million
Damage Estimates:	$10 billion
Aid Needed:	food, water, shelter, medicine, medical attention, evacuation from flooded areas

Myanmar Regime Turns Back Foreign Military Assistance

Much of the Irrawaddy Delta—one of the hardest hit areas—remains inaccessible to vehicles. The only way to deliver aid to hard-to-reach villages would be by helicopter.

Generals running Myanmar's government refused help from foreign military helicopters, however, even those from its Asian neighbors and fellow ASEAN members Thailand and Singapore.

Aid agencies needed to find privately owned helicopters instead. The UN chartered 10 commercial helicopters. They cost more, though, and getting them to the region delays aid to people who have already waited a month for help.

The private choppers also don't have the same heavy-lift capabilities military choppers do. Myanmar has only seven of its own heavy-lift helicopters.

American, French and British Military Ships Leave Myanmar

When Cyclone Nargis hit last month, the U.S. Essex and its fleet were running exercises in the region. Keating sent them to Myanmar's coast to see if they could help. But Myanmar's leaders refused to allow the American ships into the country's waters.

French and British navy ships have already left the area after encountering the same roadblocks from the junta.

Military Helicopters Historically Help Disaster Victims

After the Asian tsunami in 2004 and the Pakistan earthquake in 2005, military helicopters from around the world flew in emergency supplies and medical staff. The UN had hoped to use them again for Cyclone Nargis.

Original Story

Myanmar Cyclone Disaster (update 7)

Question for Readers:

Do you think the U.S. Navy ships should have waited longer before leaving just in case Myanmar's leadership changed its mind?

"I am both saddened and frustrated to know that we have been in a position to help ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people and help mitigate further loss of life, but have been unable to do so because of the unrelenting position of the Burma military junta. "

—Admiral Timothy Keating,
commander of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Command
BBC, 6/4/08)

Sources

Unable to help Myanmar relief efforts, U.S. Navy vessels sailing away (International Herald Tribune, 6/4/08)

US aid ships to leave Burma (BBC, 6/4/08)

Today's Other Stories

Myanmar, just a few months ago, the first harvest of jatropha beans came in after the Myanmar government had gone to great pains to force them to be grown upsetting many of their citizens because they replaced desperately needed food crops in many areas. And now the government has become a laughing stock for having grown the beans without having built refineries to turn them into biodiesel fuel. But when I look at the track of that storm heading into regions strictly controlled by the Myanmar military, I’m reminded how in my line of work, when a government looks like it’s totally inept, there’s often something missing from the story that makes everything fit together.

It’s not complicated to make biodiesel fuel from jatropha beans. But if it’s done hastily or controlled by inept personalities that only care about the financial aspects of their endeavor where they dumped the waste from washing the pressed oil from the beans in acid into rivers or on the ground, there would be a huge amount of the kinds of pollutants that react with atmospheric water vapor to cause horrific storm movements flowing downwind or stream of where the refinery was located.

This could be why the junta has been so closed off to aid, especially to the US, to keep the world from finding out that they are refining jatropha beans to sell biodeisel secretly keeping the procedes for themselves without sharing it with the people that grew the beans

June 05, 2008

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