Aid for Myanmar's Cyclone Nargis only a fraction of aid for tsunami

Bangkok - World aid for Myanmar's Cyclone Nargis has amounted to 300 million dollars, or 2.5 per cent of what was spent on the 2004 tsunami, aid agencies said Thursday as the first anniversary of the storm approaches. 'The total tsunami support was 12 billion dollars while the response to Nargis, which was very similar to the tsunami, was 300 million dollars,' David Verboom, spokesman for the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office, said at a press conference marking the anniversary. The December 26, 2004, tsunami killed an estimated 220,000 people in 11 countries rimming the Indian Ocean and left 500,000 people homeless alone in Aceh, Indonesia, the area worst hit by the tidal wave triggered by an earthquake off the coast of northern Sumatra. Cyclone Nargis killed 140,000 in Myanmar, mostly in the Irrawaddy Delta, where 500,000 people continued to live under tarpaulins one year after the storm hit May 2-3. 'In the tsunami in Indonesia, we got in-kind donations double the number we actually asked for,' said Bernd Schell, Myanmar officer for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. 'In Nargis, a family got two tarpaulins, but for the tsunami, victims got five to six tarpaulins because we had so many in stock,' said Schell, who worked for the federation in Aceh before moving to Myanmar. Food also continues to be a problem for the victims of Nargis. 'Twelve months on, we at the World Food Programme find that we will have to continue giving food assistance to many of the most vulnerable people in the delta region,' World Food Programme spokesman Paul Risley said. 'We anticipate providing food rations for a minimum of 300,000 people through the year,' he added. Indonesia and Thailand, two of the countries hardest hit by the 2004 tsunami, had good infrastructure, logistics, public utilities, dynamic economies and a lot of goodwill from the international community. Myanmar has none of these. Myanmar, a military-run country, is ranked as a pariah state among Western democracies because of its poor human rights record and refusal to implement democratic reforms. Some of the initial efforts to assist the Nargis victims, such as the US dispatching of its 7th Fleet to deliver relief aid, were rebuffed by Myanmar's ruling generals, who downplayed the seriousness of the disaster - the worst to hit Myanmar in decades. Much of the initial assistance to the devastated delta region, where 2.4 million people were left homeless and without food, was provided by Myanmar's people themselves. A full-scale international relief effort did not get under way until two weeks after the cyclone hit as the junta eased up on issuing visas for aid workers and logistics were put in place to get assistance out to the countryside. A United Nations flash appeal for emergency aid announced shortly after the cyclone was 67-per-cent funded. Many donors balked at giving aid that might find its way into the hands of the military although aid agencies assured donors that all emergency aid would go directly to the victims. 'It is clear that the political environment was a hindrance for many donations,' Verboom said. The European Union, which provided 39 million euros (51.54 million dollars) in aid for Nargis has proven to be the largest single donor to the disaster relief effort. It was in keeping with the EU's past role in Myanmar, where it has taken the lead as a provider of humanitarian assistance to the Myanmar people while keeping economic sanctions on its ruling generals. 'In 2007, the European Union was already providing at least a third of the assistance to Myanmar, and that figure went up in the wake of Nargis,' European Union head of operations in Myanmar Andrew Jacobs said. The EU is also taking a lead in providing funds for the post-Nargis recovery. It has committed 33 million euros to a trust fund designed to help people in the Irrawaddy Delta develop their own livelihoods and income-generating activities in the aftermath of the cyclone. The target is to raise 100 million dollars for the fund in the next few months. 'The fund will be used for projects implemented by the UN agencies or international and local non-governmental organizations to help people recover their livelihoods not only in the cyclone-affected areas but also in other parts of the country,' Jacobs said.