A year after Cyclone Nargis swept away entire villages, turned fertile rice paddies into wasteland and killed nearly 140,000, people across Myanmar marked the anniversary yesterday with quiet remembrance and prayer.
The ruling military junta, however, planned no official ceremonies to commemorate Nargis, the worst natural disaster Myanmar has ever seen and one of the deadliest in recorded history. The state-controlled New Light of Myanmar newspaper did not mention the cyclone in its 16-page edition yesterday.
The cyclone struck with fury in the middle of the night on May 2 last year sending tidal surges as high as 3m some 40km inland that churned for two days. The government’s official toll has never been changed from 85,000 people dead and another 54,000 missing.
Most of the dead were in the low-lying Irrawaddy delta, the country’s once-fertile rice-growing region on the southwestern coast, where tens of thousands of farm families sleeping in flimsy shacks barely above sea level were swept to their deaths.
“My sister and brother died saving my parents and my life without them is never the same,” said Hlaing Bwa, a 34-year-old fisherman, who lives in Thaunglay village in Haing Gyi island where the cyclone first made landfall before pummeling the mainland.
“My parents have not recovered from the loss, but life has to go on and there is no use in crying,” he said. “We cannot bring them back, but we will pray for them and we will share our merit-making with them.”
Low-key ceremonies were held in homes, offices and in Buddhist temples and churches around the country to mourn the victims, many of whose bodies were never recovered or were dumped in mass burial sites.
A group of aid agencies in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, organized a photographic exhibit and invited the public to display their own cyclone pictures.
“We will pray for more development and a better future for survivors of the cyclone,” said Bishop John Hsane Gyi, before an ecumenical prayer service at St Peter’s Cathedral in Pathein, the capital of the Irrawaddy delta.
Myanmar’s secretive military regime was widely condemned for denying foreign aid agencies access to the delta in the weeks that followed the disaster when some 800,000 survivors were homeless.
The junta also punished civilians, especially pro-democracy activists, who rushed to provide assistance without the military’s permission.
New York-based Human Rights Watch called on Friday for the release of at least 21 people who were imprisoned for providing cyclone aid and “shining a spotlight on government indifference to Cyclone Nargis survivors.”
They are serving prison terms of between two and 35 years.
After global condemnation and a personal appeal by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in the wake of the disaster, the junta relented and allowed foreign assistance. Now, 90 percent of survivors have been provided with food, clean drinking water and basic shelter needs, aid agencies say.
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