Book extract: the hidden horrors of Cyclone Nargis

In this extract from her book Everything Is Broken: The Untold Story of Disaster Under Burma’s Military Regime, Emma Larkin describes how she got past the Burmese authorities to witness the terrible aftermath of the cyclone.

A few days after Cyclone Nargis made landfall at the south-western tip of Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on Friday May 2, 2008, Nasa released a set of before and after pictures taken by satellite.

In the image taken before the cyclone, the delta’s myriad waterways were perfectly etched on the landscape, like dark and delicate veins. Towards the lower edges of the delta, in the coastal stretches, these veins broadened and merged into the inky- blue waters of the Andaman Sea. Large swaths of vibrant green indicated fertile rice-growing land. Deforested areas and urban centres such as Rangoon and its surrounding sprawl of slums showed up as dun-coloured patches. In the delta, towns such as Laputta and Bogale were barely visible amid the pastoral palette of greens, browns and blues.

The satellite image taken shortly after the cyclone depicted a landscape that had been changed dramatically. The fact that the area around Rangoon was now a marbled swirl of aquamarine suggested that it was heavily flooded. The waterways of the delta, so distinct in the earlier image, had become blurred and hazy. The blue of the Andaman waters showed up as a luminescent turquoise that had seeped on to the land, an indication that parts of the delta now lay under water.

These images showed that Cyclone Nargis had caused substantial damage. Yet, in those first days after the cyclone, hardly any news emerged from Burma. The storm severed phone lines and electricity cables, and it was almost impossible to get information from inside the country.

Over the following week, news began to trickle out as generators were activated and electricity and phone lines were restored to some parts of Rangoon. Photographs of the city looked as if they had been taken in the aftermath of a massive explosion. Roads were blocked by fallen trees. Cars had been crushed by logs and telephone poles. Cement walls had caved in and pavements were cracked open. The destruction in the city was catastrophic, but it soon became apparent that what had happened in Rangoon was nothing compared with the devastation of the Irrawaddy Delta.

Within a couple of days, the Burmese regime announced on state television that as many as 10,000 people could have been killed. The next day an official death toll was released: more than 22,400 people declared dead and at least 41,000 missing. From these initial snatches of information, it was clear that Cyclone Nargis had been a disaster of epic proportions. In the delta, many hundreds of thousands were trying to survive without food, water or shelter. As the scale of the disaster became apparent, foreign governments offered aid and assistance. Astoundingly, the Burmese government turned them down.

In neighbouring Thailand, the US government had loaded a C-130 cargo plane with lifesaving relief supplies that would have taken just under an hour to reach Burma, but the aircraft was not given clearance to land at Rangoon’s airport. The United Nations World Food Programme had three planes loaded with vitamin-fortified biscuits ready to fly in from Bangladesh, Thailand and Dubai. These also were denied clearance. A flight from Qatar carrying relief materials and aid workers managed to land at Rangoon but was forced to take off again without unloading any of its contents. As international emer­gency response mechanisms kicked into action, UN staff and aid workers experienced in disaster response were mobilised from around the world. Few were granted visas to enter Burma. When a UN team of four experts was finally allowed to travel there towards the end of the week, two were sent back despite having valid visas.

In addition to preventing aid workers from entering, the regime was also restricting the movement of foreigners already inside the country. It is an established procedure in Burma that foreign aid workers at international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) must apply for permits to travel outside Rangoon (a process that can take weeks, sometimes months); it was hoped that the authorities would expedite travel requests after a natural disaster. Instead they did just the opposite by slowing down the process and setting up checkpoints on exit routes out of the city. It was, by all accounts, a situation unprecedented in the annals of disaster response.

Just over a week after the cyclone my request for a tourist visa for Burma was granted. I had been there many times before and, in the early 2000s, I had spent more than a year travelling back and forth to the country researching a book on the links – both factual and fictional – between Burma and George Orwell, who had been posted there as an imperial policeman in the 1920s, when the country was part of the British Empire.

Now, in the aftermath of Nargis, I wanted to return again to see what I could do to help and to try to catalogue events from inside the country. Though I was doubtful that I would get in at a time when so many applications were being turned down, I applied for a visa. Three days later I received a call telling me that I could pick up my passport, which was now stamped with a four-week tourist visa for the Union of Myanmar (as the regime renamed the country in 1989).

After the skyscrapers of Bangkok, driving down the low-rise leafy streets of Rangoon felt to me like slipping back in time, which in some senses it was; my trips to Burma always meant relinquishing the modern-day technological gadgets I rely on at home. My mobile phone was useless there. Internet providers are heavily monitored by the regime to prevent anti-government material from getting into or out of the country, and access through the city’s cramped and crowded internet cafes was often irregular and infuriatingly slow. There was the particular smell of Rangoon rushing in through the taxi’s open windows – a familiar dank and musty odour, like a room that has been shut up for a long time and is in need of a good airing.

But this time, even during the short taxi ride, I could see that the cyclone had totally transformed the city. Enormous 100-year-old trees had been uprooted and tossed aside. Telephone and electricity poles lay across the pavement, tangled up with wires and broken branches. Parts of the roofs of old houses had blown away, leaving gaping holes.

Before my arrival I had tried to book a hotel room, but with communication systems down after the cyclone, I had been unable to get through or even to ascertain if any hotels were still operating. Foreigners visiting Burma are not allowed to stay in Burmese homes, where all guests and overnight visitors must be registered with the neighbourhood authorities, so a friend of mine had arranged for me to stay at a house temporarily vacated by an expatriate tenant. The house was a solid cement bungalow located in a well-to-do residential neighbourhood and, apart from some minor damage to the overhanging roof, it had withstood the storm.

I spent my first few days in Rangoon checking on friends and delivering the supplies of cash and medicine I had brought. Though I knew the city well, I became lost a number of times, as so many landmarks had been altered; towering trees were no longer standing and buildings once obscured by greenery now stood out in the open.

Having managed to get to Rangoon, I felt dis­oriented and useless once I was there. Being a foreigner, I wasn’t able to go down to the delta and report on events. I had few other skills applicable to a disaster zone, so for the time being I had to content myself with following events as best I could from within the city.

Finding reliable sources of information in Burma has always been difficult. The regime exerts control over the country in part by attempting to constrain the very reality in which people live. Everything that is published in Burma must first pass through a censorship board. Each day censors are hunched over their desks sifting out sensitive news articles and searching for criticism of the regime that might be disguised in an allegorical short story or hidden within the rhyming couplets of a poem. To fill the gap left behind by the removal of independent news and views, the regime produces its own version of events, energetically rewriting the news in its favour and eliminating any contrary views.

The New Light of Myanmar, a newspaper published in both English and Burmese-language editions, is the regime’s de facto mouthpiece. Few people I know consider it to be anything other than pure propaganda, but I read it every day whenever I am in Burma, not so much as a source of news but as a window on to the point of view of the ruling generals. News as it is portrayed in the New Light of Myanmar represents how the generals want things to be. And, in the case of Cyclone Nargis, the New Light expressed a unique take on events.

According to the official chronology of what happened after the storm, Burma’s prime minister, General Thein Sein, who was appointed the chairman of the National Disaster Preparedness Central Committee, convened a meeting in the new capital city of Naypyidaw at 8.30am on May 3, while the storm was still raging in Rangoon. State media reported that Thein Sein travelled south immediately afterwards to begin overseeing the national relief operation. According to the New Light of Myanmar, the relief effort was already a laudable accomplishment. Private citizens and the military had banded together in the country’s hour of need and, with the help of global goodwill, this disaster would soon be overcome. In the pages of the New Light at least, everything was under control.

One evening, a friend took me to meet Chit Swe, who had just returned from travelling with a group of fellow businessmen to the southern stretches of the delta. Even before the storm, the lower regions of the delta were accessible only by boat. Hardly any news had been heard from those areas, and it was believed that villages there must have borne the brunt of the storm. The businessmen had companies in the delta – fishing operations and rice-trading firms – and they had left the city soon after the storm, heading out to the villages in a large boat loaded with rice, drinking water and tarpaulin sheets that could be used for shelter.

Though the prime minister had warned members of the business community who were organising similar donations that cameras were prohibited in the delta, Chit Swe had taken a camcorder. To see the footage, we went to Chit Swe’s house – a mansion with a sweeping teakwood staircase leading up from a high-ceilinged entrance hall. It was by far the grandest home I had ever visited in Burma, and it made me think that these men must be working closely with the regime to secure such profits. Regardless of their connections, they had gone against the prime minister’s orders to collect evidence of conditions in the delta that they now wanted to show to foreigners. We gathered around a flat-screen television. It was late at night, and Chit Swe – a bulky, overweight man whose chubby fingers were being strangled by gem-studded gold rings – had cracked open a bottle of Johnnie Walker that he drank on the rocks as we watched the grim journey they had made to the delta.

Taken about a week after the cyclone struck, the images were staggeringly bleak. Most houses in the delta are built of bamboo or wood and have palm-thatch roofs – in the event of a cyclone as powerful as Nargis, they are no better than origami huts folded out of paper. The first villages the businessmen arrived in had been completely demolished. Even the few concrete buildings in each village – small monasteries or schools – had been reduced to rubble. Blank-faced survivors wandered aimlessly amid the wreckage, occasionally bending over to pick up a soggy scrap of cloth or a bamboo pole that might be useful for rigging up a shelter.

In one village along the Pyan Mae Law River, the businessmen came across a small group of people who had made a lopsided tent out of a ragged piece of tarpaulin and some planks. Chit Swe said sombrely that at least 80 per cent of the people living in the village were now dead or missing. The flooded paddy fields surrounding the makeshift shelter were littered with corpses of people and farm animals. Those who had survived had done so mostly by holding on to trees and managing to stay above the storm surge. One survivor commented that the dead were lucky compared with the living, who now found themselves trapped in a place that looked and felt like hell itself.

Chit Swe explained that they had to ration their supplies so that they could cover more ground and assess conditions in a number of villages. As they travelled farther south, the situation grew progressively worse. It was the ill-fated villages closer to the coast and those located along the banks of large rivers that appeared to have suffered the most. Wherever the boat docked, subdued groups of men would approach the vessel and quietly offload whatever supplies the businessmen had to offer. In these areas, where the storm surge had been especially violent, there were often few women and children to be seen, because they hadn’t had the physical strength needed to hold on for the duration of the storm. When the boat left, the same men would stand in a row on the riverbank. They did not wave or smile or talk. They just stood there, silhouetted against the washed-out, monsoon sky, and watched the boat sail away.

At the final village the businessmen went to before they ran out of supplies, they met a monk who showed them where the monastery had once stood. Though it had been made of concrete, only the foundations remained. The monk pointed to a large tree that was still standing and explained how 30 people had been saved by the tree as they clung to it while the water swirled around them. He directed the camera to a life-size Buddha statue that was miraculously untouched by the storm. With its gentle half-smile, the Buddha image looked incongruously serene and placid.

The camera panned out from the statue to take in a diabolical view of countless human corpses. In Buddhist communities, the dead would customarily be cremated, but the land was saturated from the storm and the constant drizzle that followed it, and villagers had no wood or matches to construct funeral pyres. So the bodies remained, lying on the land and floating in the waterways. The monk raised his arm and pointed into the gloom, across the flat, broken land. He indicated villages located farther south, and his voice seemed devoid of all emotion as he said, 'Down there, it is even worse.’

The footage Chit Swe showed us was from one short journey along a single river in the Irrawaddy Delta and represented only a tiny fraction of the overall picture. There are innumerable waterways in the delta, and the cyclone-affected parts amounted to some 9,000 square miles that was home to more than seven million people. During their journey, Chit Swe and his colleagues did not see any other assistance being delivered. There were no soldiers or navy boats on the water and no aid workers in the villages. Many villagers said that the help the businessmen gave them was the first they had received. Chit Swe and his colleagues wanted to continue to help but were unsure what was needed, and the conversation in the room turned to a discussion of what they could do next.

Someone in the room suggested that their footage of the delta should be taken to the US embassy, as it was hard-to-get evidence of actual conditions after the storm that should be shown outside the country. Chit Swe quickly dismissed the idea; the film contained images of the businessmen delivering aid, and they did not want it to be seen beyond their own circle of trusted viewers. They wanted to help, but they didn’t want to anger the authorities. In this uncertain climate it was not yet clear whether donating aid and recording suffering caused by a natural disaster would be perceived by the military junta as a crime.

Despite the possible dangers, everyone I knew was doing something to help. Throughout the city groups of Rangoon residents banded together to collect money and deliver much-needed supplies to the delta and the outlying areas around Rangoon. Relief missions were being coordinated by traders, doctors, schoolteachers, students, writers, actors, musicians and just about anyone who had even the slightest means. The expatriate community was also pitching in, with gutsy women whose spouses worked at foreign embassies making use of the diplomatic licence plates on their cars to storm through checkpoints with food and medicine. A couple of days after I arrived in Burma, I went to deliver some cash I had brought for a friend who ran a private school in Rangoon. All classes had been put on hold as the school’s teenage students were helping to coordinate their own small-scale emergency response. The school grounds had become the headquarters for the operation. Sacks of lentils, rice and potatoes were piled up around the yard. Mud-spattered trucks were parked in the gateway. Students were frantically sorting through boxes of medicine and counting out sheets of tarpaulin. A map indicating the path of the cyclone had been pinned to a wall and next to it was a whiteboard charting the daily movements of relief teams being sent to the outskirts of Rangoon.

On the morning I was there, a group of emergency experts had just arrived from Israel. The four-man team had travelled on tourist visas. Its members were well versed in the skills needed after a natural disaster, and the team leader had a PhD in disaster management. Trained to perform search-and-rescue missions and provide medical care in the field, these men had dealt with catastrophes across the globe in places as far afield as Turkey, Chad and El Salvador. Here in Burma, however, they were rendered almost useless; their access to the disaster zone was blocked by military checkpoints, and they could not even publicly declare that they were there to try to help. If they wanted to contribute their expertise, they had to do so in a low-key, semi-secretive way.

The monsoons arrived early in Burma, and by mid-May it was raining heavily every day. The storms were sudden and incredibly heavy. Umbrellas buckled under the daily downpours, and the roads of downtown Rangoon were transformed into dark, sludgy canals. Some parts of the city remained persistently flooded, and stones or planks were placed in areas where the water was too deep to wade through or too wide to jump across. Even when it wasn’t raining, water dripped incessantly off the plants and the eaves around the house where I was staying. Inside, the air was as hot and humid as in a greenhouse.

One afternoon I was caught in a rainstorm while walking along Maha Bandula Garden Street in downtown Rangoon. The rain came down in such thick torrents that I could barely see across the narrow street and had to duck into a shop for cover. The shop was a general store on the ground floor of a colonial-era shop-house with its front wall open to the street. A single fluorescent bulb dangled from the cobweb-strewn ceiling and shed a sickly light across the interior of the shop and the goods for sale – mosquito coils, packets of roasted nuts, plastic combs. The proprietor sat in the back, obscured by shadows and engrossed in animated conversation with two other men. Though the men sat close together, they had to shout to hear one another above the roar of the storm. When I heard them mentioning what had become the familiar town names of Dedaye, Bogale and Pyinzalu, I knew they were talking about Nargis.

From my perch on a low wooden stool at the entrance to the shop, I gazed at the solid wall of water gushing down. Presently the shopkeeper came over to me and, yelling above the noise of the storm, asked where I was from. When he heard I was American, he expressed surprise that I had been allowed into the country at a time like this and hurried to the back of the shop to fetch a digital camera, which he handed to me excitedly. The photograph showing on the screen was of a human corpse lying face-down in a paddy field.

The man told me that he and his friends had been to Kunyangon to hand out rice and cooking oil to cyclone survivors. Pointing at the photograph, he said simply, 'The dead are still waiting for peace.’ I asked about the living. The shopkeeper grabbed his camera back and clicked through an alarming number of dead-body photographs before coming to a picture that showed crowds of people squatting on either side of a dirt road, holding their hands up towards the camera. 'They have nothing. They have no money. They have no shirts. No shoes. Nothing. And there is no help for them. I saw no officials there to assist them. With nothing, how will they survive?’

I thought it was a rhetorical question, but the shopkeeper seemed to be waiting for an answer. I couldn’t think of a reassuring response; it didn’t seem possible that people who had nothing left could survive without help. We sat in silence for a few moments and listened to the rain.

Photographs of dead bodies had become common in the city. When I was watching footage of the delta with Chit Swe and his fellow businessmen who had taken aid there, they often paused the film on particularly gory images so that we could all take a good leisurely look. There was the body of a child protruding from beneath a dead buffalo; the toddler’s tiny feet made the beast on top of it seem abnormally large. There were arms and legs emerging from piles of rubble that had been twisted into impossible positions, and corpses in various stages of decomposition. At first I found these images and conversations deeply unsettling. But within only a week or so of arriving in Rangoon, I had seen so many pictures of dead bodies that it was hard to acknowledge each one for the individual tragedy it represented. I was disturbed to notice that I became quite comfortable discussing the details of human decay. I easily flicked through photographs of dead people in the same way I might politely look through an album of someone’s holiday snaps, asking questions and feigning interest but hoping there wouldn’t be too many more.

Bootleg DVDs featuring the destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis were available at streetside stalls and at road junctions, where boys walked between the vehicles stopped at red lights and held up the covers for viewing. Most of the DVDs had simple titles, sometimes written in English (Cyclone Nargis, Nargis, Nargis Storm), though I came across one DVD poetically entitled Gone with the Wind. The DVDs were poorly packaged, wrapped in cheap colour photocopies of photographs taken in the delta. Almost all the cover shots featured a corpse or two, a sort of gruesome teaser for the dead-body pornography on sale. There was no commentary on the DVDs, and they were often little more than compilations of mismatched footage. Most were filmed from boats sailing through the delta, and depicted an unrelenting vista of broken homes and floating corpses. The amateur footage was filmed anonymously, probably by people who had taken donations down to survivors. There was also aerial footage that must have been taken by cameramen working for the regime who were allowed on to military helicopters and had later decided to leak their material.

With all other media in the country vetted meticulously, these DVDs were a welcome if dismal dose of reality. There are few other ways for people to get information that hasn’t first passed the censors. Many people listen to Burmese-language news broadcasts from radio channels such as the BBC and Voice of America and, in urban areas where there is access to the internet, people can go to internet cafes and use special software to get past the regime’s firewalls and blocks on news channels. Still, at a time when few reliable reports were emerging from the delta, nothing quite matched the visceral content of the DVDs, and the films served an important function by documenting the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis.

But it turned out that the DVDs were available for only a limited period. One day in mid-May state media announced that foreign news agencies and local 'destructive elements’ were trying to manipulate public opinion by broadcasting false information. It was an oblique warning, but it was enough; the very next day the DVDs were gone. The boys who sold them at road junctions went back to selling flowers or cigarettes. I went to the vendor on a busy market street where I had previously bought copies. His stall was still there, but the only DVDs on display were Chinese and Korean soap operas with Burmese subtitles. I asked if he had any Nargis DVDs left. 'DVDs of Nargis?’ he asked, laughing loudly. 'There are no such things.’

The regime has always had an intense dislike of news outlets it cannot control. During times of political tension when events in Burma make international headlines, warnings are posted in the newspapers ordering people not to believe foreign news sources and not to listen to foreign radio channels that produce what the writers of regime propaganda refer to as a 'skyful of lies’. Yet the regime’s attempt to cover up the destruction wrought by Nargis was counterproductive. The initial images were a chronicle of nature’s fury, not of the regime’s misrule or brutality. By banning them and preventing the local press from running photographs deemed to be negative, the authorities were handling the disaster as if it were something that needed to be hidden from public view. As a result, the contraband images served a different function; images of people killed by a natural disaster became atrocity pictures that portrayed the callous neglect of an already vilified regime.

People were afraid that the decaying corpses could spread disease. This is apparently a common and enduring myth in the aftermath of large-scale disasters; though people using water sources contaminated by corpses can contract gastroenteritis, it is generally acknowledged by emergency experts that bodies, especially those killed by sudden trauma, do not cause cholera or typhoid epidemics. The greater concern is the psychological toll for survivors who must live in proximity to the dead. There was no widespread, concerted effort by the authorities to collect the corpses or to try to identify them. When a brigadier-general was asked what should be done with all the bodies, he allegedly replied that there was no need to do anything: 'The fish can eat them,’ he said.

Back in the store, the shopkeeper who was sitting next to me told me that he did not believe the generals could be real human beings. 'How can they witness such suffering and be indifferent to it?’ he demanded. The rain continued to pour down, and I had to raise my voice to ask what they thought about the US government’s recent offer to send navy ships to provide assistance. They were enthusiastic about the idea, and they all agreed that it would even be a good thing if the United States were to invade.

Though it was a frequently expressed opinion, I was always slightly incredulous that people would welcome the idea of foreign troops in Burma. Do you really want to be invaded by US soldiers, I asked. Surely you don’t want Burma to become like Iraq is now… 'It would not be like that here,’ one of the men replied. 'The Tatmadaw [Burmese army] are not brave like those Iraqis. They would only have to see one American soldier on Burmese soil and they would run away.’ There was much laughter at the idea of Burma’s cowardly soldiers being chased by hulking American GIs, and our conversation became almost jolly as we talked about the possibilities of amphibious landing craft offloading soldiers on to the muddy delta shores and US helicopters air-dropping sacks of rice to hungry villagers. The talk seemed to me to be light-hearted fantasy, but the shopkeeper’s eyes had become wet with tears. 'You must authorise the invasion,’ he said to me earnestly, as if I were the admiral of the fleet and it were within my capability to issue such a command.

We stopped speaking for a while and I turned to look at the street. The floodwater had turned an ugly grey colour and the consistency had thickened – a sign that the city’s sewage pipes were overflowing. As plastic bags and other scraps of rubbish floated past, a fetid, unhealthy smell began to rise from the waters.

This is an extract from 'Everything Is Broken: The Untold Story of Disaster Under Burma’s Military Regime’ by Emma Larkin (Granta, £12.99), available for £11.99 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books