By AFP,
Pathein, Myanmar : Myanmar’s junta held a referendum on a new constitution Saturday, despite warnings more people would die unless it focused on delivering emergency aid for survivors of last week’s cyclone.
In surreal scenes, voting booths were erected close to makeshift camps for the homeless, and the country’s military regime continued to hold up tonnes of urgent relief supplies at the airport.
The junta, deeply suspicious of the outside world, has refused to let in foreign experts who specialise in getting aid to disaster victims, and said that only the government would be allowed to distribute emergency supplies. The UN food agency said the junta had released a plane-load of cyclone aid into its custody Saturday.
“The supplies are in our hands, they’ve been handed over to us,” said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the World Food Programme (WFP), about the shipment which came on a flight from Cambodia. He said there had been a “misunderstanding” regarding earlier comments about the status of goods on that flight as well as another from the UN refugee agency which landed in Myanmar’s main city of Yangon on Saturday.
The spokesman, based in neighbouring Thailand, said he did not know about the second plane — but that two shipments seized by the regime Friday were still in government hands. “They were impounded and we are hopeful… they will be released,” he told AFP. As the junta pressed ahead with a vote which critics say will only cement its hold on power, the United Nations said that a week after Cyclone Nargis hit, only one-quarter of the victims have received any help at all. “It’s a race against time,” said Richard Horsey, a spokesman for the emergency relief arm of the United Nations.
“We’re dealing with lots of bureaucracy, we’re dealing with a lot of red tape, and possibly we’re dealing with an environment where the authorities aren’t fully open to a relief effort of this kind,” he said. “That’s very frustrating.” The cyclone, which slammed into the rice-growing Irrawaddy Delta region in the country’s south, left 60,000 people dead or missing and as many as two million more short of food, water and supplies.
Ignoring calls to put off Saturday’s vote and focus on saving lives, the government went ahead with the referendum on a new constitution in all but the worst-affected areas — which will vote later in the month.
The regime says the vote is a key step in its much-criticised “road map” to democracy and will lead the country to national elections within two years. The last time there was a national ballot, in 1990, democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi won in a landslide.
She was never allowed to rule, and instead has been under house arrest for much of the time since. Among its provisions, the constitution would make it illegal for her to ever lead the country. In a statement Saturday, her National League for Democracy party said the junta’s aid restrictions were increasing the death toll “day by day” and called on the international community for urgent help. “Even now, it is getting too late,” it said, condemning the decision to go ahead with the referendum .
The White House opted not to condemn explicitly Myanmar’s decision to go ahead with its referendum but said the junta ought to be focused on disaster relief. “We’ve had concerns about the referendum… but right now, I would say we want the focus of the Burmese government to be helping the people recover from the cyclone and the after-effects,” said spokesman Gordon Johndroe. Myanmar was formerly known as Burma.
As it has for days, state television Saturday broadcast patriotic songs urging people to approve the charter, alternating with images of planes unloading food — and military officers handing it out to the grateful poor. But the reality on the ground is sharply at odds with the government propaganda. Many survivors of the cyclone, which hit last Saturday, say they have nothing to eat or drink.
Their villages have been washed away, many of their relatives are dead — and their fury at the government is at fever pitch. In the trading town of Pathein, on the edge of the Irrawaddy delta where ramshackle villages bore the brunt of the destruction, a voting booth was set up just down the street from a camp for the homeless.
“Many of the residents here feel so angry at the government when we see victims of the storm coming to our town,” one teashop owner said. “People are not that interested in voting. What we care about is the storm victims,” he told AFP. “Many of them are disgusted with the government. It has been so slow to help.”