Daily News - July 7, 2008 - Monday
  • Bush urges Burma to free Suu Kyi
  • Myanmar to build 37 embankments in cyclone-hit areas
  • Storm Survivors Cobble Together a Meager Future
  • Thailand: Third of Burmese fail to return home
  • Myanmar stepping up prevention against dengue fever
  • Supercomputing experts guide Burma's relief efforts




    • Bush urges Burma to free Suu Kyi

    TOKYO, (AFP) - US President George W. Bush on Sunday renewed his call for Burma's military regime to free opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.

    Bush said he intended to raise concerns about Burma as he opened talks in Japan ahead of a summit of the Group of Eight major powers starting on Monday.

    "I'm deeply concerned about that country," Bush told a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, the host of the summit.

    "And we urge the regime to free Aung San Suu Kyi," Bush said.

    The junta, defying international pressure, in May extended the house arrest of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent most of the last 18 years confined to her home.

    The military government also came under criticism for waiting weeks before accepting international relief workers after Cyclone Nargis, which left more than 138,000 dead or missing when it pounded ashore on May 2.

    "Their response to the recent natural disaster was unwarranted, at best," Bush said.

    The Group of Eight includes Britian, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

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    Myanmar to build 37 embankments in cyclone-hit areas

    People's Daily, China

    Myanmar will build and renovate 37 embankments in cyclone-hit areas to fight against flood in the future, a local weekly journal reported Sunday.

    The embankments, to be built 2 to 5 feet higher than the height of the original ones, are estimated to cost about 110.56 million U.S. dollars and the project will be implemented in ten townships in Yangon and Ayeyawaddy divisions, the Voice said, adding that the new embankments can prevent 484,109 acres (196,064 hectares) of farmland from being flooded in case of storm.

    The ten townships are Kungyangon, Kawmu, Kyauktan, Khayan and Thonekhwa in Yangon division and Ngaputaw, Laputta, Bogalay, Dedaye and Phyapon in Ayeyawaddy division.

    Due to early May's cyclone storm, over 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of farmland in 7 townships in Ayeyawaddy division, 3 in Yangon division, 2 in Bago division and 3 in Mon state were flooded by sea water with more than 200,000 cows and cattle killed, earlier statistics showed.

    Meanwhile, according to a latest official report, up to now, a total of 1.17 million acres (4,738,500 hectares) of farmland in Ayeyawaddy division alone has been put under monsoon paddy.

    Myanmar is now entering into a second phase of resettlement and reconstruction after its first phase of rescue and relief was claimed to have finished up to a certain extent.

    Deadly tropical cyclone Nargis, which occurred over the Bay of Bengal, hit five divisions and states -- Ayeyawaddy, Yangon, Bago,Mon and Kayin last May. Among those, Ayeyawaddy and Yangon suffered the heaviest casualties and massive infrastructural damage.

    Myanmar estimated the damages and losses caused by the storm at10.67 billion dollars with 5.5 million people affected.

    The storm has killed 84,537 people and left 53,836 missing and 19,359 injured according to the latest official death toll.

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    Storm Survivors Cobble Together a Meager Future

    The Washington Post

    BOGALAY — - Two months after a cyclone ravaged the fertile Irrawaddy Delta, in Burma's southwest, the bones of drowning victims still clutter the muddy banks of waterways.

    One bamboo stick at a time, survivors in hundreds of flattened villages are struggling to rebuild their homes. For shelter, they squeeze several families into a single tent. For drinking water, they collect monsoon rainwater that trickles off tarpaulin roof coverings into buckets or salvaged ceramic vases. For food, they cook communal meals with rice, beans and oil from handouts. Sometimes it is spoiled.

    On a recent visit, one village looked as if it had been carpet-bombed, a craterous landscape of muddy pools, debris and the remains of water buffaloes. A few hundred feet away, villagers sawed and hammered at planks salvaged from the wreckage. A teenage boy in an oversize shirt donated by a Buddhist monastery picked through piles of smashed wood.

    "To work is to be busy, and to be busy helps them forget," said Soe, the village leader.

    Nine hundred and forty-three people used to live here, he said. In the storm that came ashore the night of May 2, 660 of them disappeared. Across the vast, maze-like delta, an estimated 130,000 people were killed and 2.4 million affected.

    Persistent obstruction by the country's military rulers has kept aid at tragically meager levels. International efforts to quickly dispatch emergency assistance were delayed as the country's xenophobic military rulers rebuffed offers of help, denied visas to foreign aid workers and required permits for travel within the country.

    Aid workers say that the majority of survivors of Tropical Cyclone Nargis have received at least some help but that few are even remotely equipped to make their way in coming months. Some communities have only recently been reached by aid teams, who had journeyed for hours on foot, by motorcycle and by boat.

    Many of the restrictions have been eased, but relief workers say they still operate under erratic and constantly shifting constraints. The logistical challenges remain formidable as they scramble to dispatch seed, tractors and tillers to farmers before the rice-planting season ends this month.

    "We have time to farm, but no tractors, no buffaloes and no seed," Soe said.

    To reach his village required a seven-hour drive along a potholed, tire-shredding road from Rangoon to the rural hub of Bogalay, past four police checkpoints where documents were rigorously scanned. Against a backdrop of peaceful rice paddies, strange touches stood out: A patchwork of blue and red tarpaulins stretched across delicate palm-thatched huts; decapitated golden pagodas; and peaked iron roofs blown like dead leaves onto the roadside.

    From Bogalay, where electricity has barely crackled back to life, the journey continued aboard a motorized boat loaded with supplies. The riverbanks form a cemetery for cyclone victims whose bodies floated for weeks along the waterways and whose remains, at low tide, now whiten in the mud.

    A boatman pointed to an empty stretch of riverbank interspersed with bare-branched betel and coconut trees. "That used to be a village," he said. "There, too," he said minutes later, gesturing at the opposite bank.

    In Soe's village, about four hours south of Bogalay, survivors gathered to greet a rare foreign visitor. About 30 crowded into a newly built hut to hear the headman tell their story.

    During the storm, 26 entire families vanished, he said. None of their bodies has been recovered.

    The rest of the villagers clutched floating wreckage or grasped at tree trunks or piled into a leaking boat and fled to a monastery in a distant village. Days later, local authorities told them to leave, handed them the equivalent of $10 per household and ferried them in military boats to another village hours upriver. Almost 300 have now made it back.

    No one was supposed to be living here. The village is located in an area marked as uninhabited, a forest reserve, on the government map used by aid agencies. But field workers have discovered about 12,000 survivors in 60 villages across the area, all of them almost entirely wiped out. An estimated 20,000 people died.

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    Thailand: Third of Burmese fail to return home

    Bangkok Post

    TAK - Nearly one-third of the Burmese who entered Thailand through Mae Sot district this year did not return to their home country.

    The provincial immigration office reported that 298,847 Burmese nationals crossed from Myawaddy to Mae Sot district over the Friendship Bridge in the first half of this year, and 86,517 had not gone back.

    In May and June alone, a total of 29,150 Burmese people did not go back through the same checkpoint.

    The two-month period coincided with the disaster caused by Cyclone Nargis, which devastated the Irrawaddy delta and Rangoon in May.

    Provincial immigration chief Pol Col Tassawat Boonyawat said some of them might have crossed back through other checkpoints or outside normal channels. Others might have overstayed their border pass and faced being arrested and deported.

    "Illegal immigrants will remain an issue so long as the two countries differ economically and politically. We don't have enough funding, manpower or equipment to properly guard the border, which is more more than 500 kilometres long," he said.

    In the first six months the province deported 72,124 Burmese who entered Thailand illegally, worked without a permit or overstayed their border pass.

    A border security officer, who asked not to be named, said most illegal Burmese were fleeing economic hardship at home.

    He attributed the rise in illegal Burmese to the government policy to bring long-term illegal residents into the house registration system.

    Deputy district chief Kowit Kruewong said the project, approved by cabinet in January 2006, was aimed at addressing the unresolved status of those living in Thailand prior to January 2005.

    Village heads and kamnan would list the name of eligible residents in their communities and present the list at a public hearing by September, before seeking the Interior Ministry's approval.

    "Illegal immigrants may submit an application, but they must pass a strict screening process," he said.

    The education office responsible for Mae Sot area said foreign students in five border districts rose from 7,000 to 10,000 after the cyclone struck Burma.

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    Myanmar stepping up prevention against dengue fever

    YANGON, July 7 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar is stepping up prevention against dengue fever, especially in two populated suburban townships in Yangon division, following reports on the outbreak in some wards in the townships, according to Monday's official newspaper New Light of Myanmar.

    Preventive measures are being carried out at basic education primary schools and wards in Thakayta and Dagon Myothit-South townships with medical inspection teams giving educative talks and demonstration on the measures, the report said.

    Fresh dengue fever occurred in late last June in Dagon Myothit (North and South) and Hlaingtharya townships in Yangon division, affecting children of five years of age and above, earlier reports said.

    The World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), in cooperation with the Myanmar Maternal and Child Welfare Association and the Myanmar Red Cross, launched a 700,000-US-dollar anti-dengue-fever campaign in 11 storm-hit townships in Yangon and Ayeyawaddy divisions, giving priority to the two areas where disease-carrying mosquitoes have become a major concern.

    According to the WHO, there registered 781 dengue patients in Yangon division and 481 in Ayeyawaddy division as of the end of May.

    Meanwhile, the state media reported no outbreak of other contagious and epidemic diseases in the storm-hit areas, saying that a total of 206,039 storm patients had received medical treatment during a month after the cyclone storm hit the country on last May 2-3.

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    Supercomputing experts guide Burma's relief efforts

    Arizona State University

    Arizona State University (ASU) is using its supercomputing capabilities to aid humanitarian organizations attempting to provide disaster relief to victims of Cyclone Nargis that hit the Southeast Asian country of Burma May 2.

    ASU’s High Performance Computing Initiative (HPCI), a part of the School of Computing and Informatics in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, has established a Web site to provide aid organizations with up-to-date satellite images of conditions on the ground in Burma.

    “The people planning relief efforts can use this data to determine if and how aid workers can gain access to areas where victims are,” says HPCI director Dan Stanzione. “The imagery is sharp enough so that they could determine if aircraft could land in an area, if roads remain open or are blocked by debris or flooding, and if heavy equipment is needed to open those roads.”

    Recent reports estimate more than 130,000 people dead or missing in Burma as a result of the cyclone, with close to 2.5 million struggling to survive in the hardest-hit areas of the country.

    HPCI is providing highly detailed “geospatial visualization” of Burma, using digital imagery provided by the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency satellites, says Perry Miller, HPCI’s visualization director.

    It is not typically data that the U.S. government makes widely available, but an exception is being made to support disaster relief, Miller says.

    HPCI’s visualization team has developed a three-dimensional geospatial viewer called “Minerva” that allows for large, geo-referenced images to be loaded onto a computer. Users can zoom in to find areas damaged by the cyclone, then take “screenshots” that are posted to the Internet for humanitarian aid workers to use.

    The Web site can be found online at http://serv.asu.edu/myanmar.html.

    “This is now ‘open-source’ data, which means people and aid groups are free to download it, and it can be formatted and modified for their particular purposes,” says Joseph Adams, an academic associate at ASU’s Biodesign Institute who is involved in geospatial data visualization research. “It gives the aid planners a portal through which they can get information they need to assess the situation (in Burma).”

    The data is being gathered and processed by a team from HPCI and the Biodesign Institute.

    “There’s a network of people within the supercomputing community and the humanitarian organizations through which the relief groups will become aware of what ASU is making available to them,” Adams says.

    The project is an example of what computing experts and others at ASU hope to be doing on a larger scale someday.

    “We think ASU can put together the resources to become a unique repository of this kind of geospatial data that will make humanitarian efforts more effective,” says Kevin Baugh, an industry and government research liaison for the Biodesign Institute.

    Baugh and others envision an ASU-led consortium of other universities, along with international and philanthropic organizations, partnering to help prepare crisis response efforts worldwide.

    “The goal would be to understand when, where and how to employ humanitarian aid resources to maximize their effectiveness,” Baugh says.

    ASU’s high-performance computing technology can provide the “cutting-edge analysis tools” to support such a consortium, he says. Baugh foresees the university’s expertise in computing, sustainability, biotechnology and microelectronics being combined to provide “the ability to obtain real-world data in real-time so that it can be integrated into the decision-making processes of humanitarian service providers.”

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