The bodies of tens of thousands of people killed in Myanmar’s cyclone will probably never be identified because they were washed far from their homes and have decomposed so badly, an aid agency said yesterday.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said burying the estimated 78,000 killed when the storm hit has taken a back seat to trying to assist the 2.4 million survivors, many of whom are still without adequate food, water and shelter. Government’s restrictions on aid workers accessing the delta has made that task all the more difficult.
As a result, bloated bodies still litter the Irrawaddy delta more than five weeks after Cyclone Nargis struck. Some have been dumped in canals and unmarked mass graves or cremated, while others remain untouched.
“Identifying bodies at this stage will be incredibly difficult,” said Craig Strathern, a Red Cross spokesman in Myanmar.
“Many now are in advanced stages of decay and the information we have been able to gather is that many of the bodies that were affected by the tidal surges were stripped of clothing and any identifying items,” he said. “We have reports that some bodies ended up 7km from their place of origin.”
Survivors in the delta said they initially attempted to identify bodies but were overwhelmed by the numbers of corpses clogging the rivers and washing up on the beaches.
“Initially, the bodies were identified by relatives and we cremated them after holding religious rites,” said Myint Thuang, a survivor from the delta town of Bogalay, referring to Buddhist traditions.
“However, after more bodies washed up on the shore and with no one to identify them, we buried them in mass graves,” he said, describing how they sprinkled lime powder on the graves of 10 or more bodies and marked some with a wooden stick.
Strathern said the Red Cross last week began distributing kits — with body bags and forms to list where a body is buried and any details identifying it — for volunteers wanting to dispose of the dead.
But he said he doubted there would be any large-scale effort to identify victims, mostly because there is no motivation. Myanmar law allows families to declare missing persons dead after only three weeks, clearing the way for relatives to claim death benefits and land ownership and other inheritance issues.
“We’re certainly not aware of any initiatives that try to achieve positive identification of bodies,” Strathern said. “I don’t know what the reason would be. If there is not a demand from the families or legal imperative in the system, it’s not going to achieve too much.”
The situation differs greatly from the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed nearly 230,000 people. In worst-hit Banda Aceh, Indonesia, bodies were a top priority early on, driven largely by Muslim tradition that calls for burying the dead within the first day.
Corpses were dumped in mass graves as big as soccer fields, with aid workers, soldiers and volunteers all working together to mark the graves and identity the dead.
Disposing of the dead is just one of the many hurdles that have plagued the relief effort in Myanmar since the storm. The UN estimates that almost half of the 2.4 million survivors are still not getting adequate assistance, mostly due to the scale of the disaster and difficulty accessing the delta.
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