Myanmar’s junta attacked “unscrupulous” citizens and foreign media yesterday for presenting a false picture of the devastation left by Cyclone Nargis as experts began mapping the extent of the disaster.
The New Light of Myanmar, the mouthpiece of the ruling generals, said people had been selling video footage “of invented stories” to foreign news organizations that tarnished the country’s image.
“The people who are in touch with the situation feel that the despicable and inhumane acts by local and foreign anti-government groups and self-centered persons and their exploiting of the storm victims are absolutely obnoxious,” the newspaper said.
Bootleg copies of DVDs showing the devastation in the hardest-hit Irrawaddy Delta have been snapped up on the streets of the former capital Yangon and smuggled out of the country.
Newspaper, television and radio are tightly controlled by the military government, which also severely restricts international media access in the country.
“Those foreign news agencies are issuing groundless news stories with the intention of tarnishing the image of Myanmar and misleading the international community into believing that cyclone victims do not receive any assistance,” the New Light of Myanmar said.
Dozens of delta villages have yet to receive any relief assistance since the May 2 cyclone swept over the area and Yangon, leaving 134,000 dead or missing and 2.4 million people in desperate need of help.
The newspaper report accused media organizations and local people of “luring naive storm victims” with leading questions on their living conditions a week after the junta began evicting thousands of people from state-run camps out of apparent fear that the tented villages could become permanent.
The first major criticism of foreign media coverage of the disaster followed a recent report on a satellite television network of bootleg video footage being sold at a Yangon market.
A team of 200 international disaster and aid experts fanned out across the delta to assess the extent of the cyclone destruction and gauge whether farmers would be able to plant crucial monsoon rice crops by the end of next month.
“They have begun looking at areas today and will report back in the middle of next month,” a spokeswoman for the ASEAN-UN “Emergency Rapid Assessment Team” said.
Plans to accelerate the delivery of aid to the delta were delayed yesterday when poor weather grounded seven UN World Food Programme helicopters in neighboring Thailand.
The helicopters, part of a fleet of 10 approved by the junta two weeks ago, are urgently needed by relief workers, but only one has so far arrived in Yangon.
Meanwhile, a Thailand-based watchdog said yesterday that dysentery, typhoid and other diseases are spreading through Myanmar’s notorious Insein Prison after the cyclone destroyed inmates’ food supplies.
The cyclone that hit five weeks ago ripped off roofs and flooded wards at Insein, which holds many of country’s nearly 2,000 political prisoners, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) said in a statement.
The group said last month that 40 people died in a riot in the prison during the cyclone after a fire broke out. Security forces opened fire to quell the violence, while four political prisoners were later tortured to death during interrogations, AAPP said.
The storm ripped the roof off the prison’s food warehouse, leaving most of its stocks rotting. The International Committee of the Red Cross delivered fresh food, but these supplies have already run out, the association said.
Now prison authorities are giving inmates rotten food, which has caused outbreaks of disease, hitting female prisoners especially hard, the group said.
“The health situation of prisoners will worsen and become critical if they are fed that bad and inedible food any longer,” association secretary Tate Naing said.
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