“They don’t help, but force us to leave. Where should we go, my young man?”
“Nobody comes (to help)! But they have taken away all the donations from us.”
— survivors expressing their anger at the Burmese government
We are in trouble, help!We are hungry!
– written on the road after the storm
That average citizens can engage in the writing, production and distribution of news and opinion is not an entirely new concept. It has been rooted in many struggles for change in world history and advocated in recent years by development workers.
Thanks to many ordinary citizens who participate as both witness and storyteller of the world around them, even more people like us get to see the world from a point of view other than that of oragnised media industries. More than this, in the midst of danger and conflict, the world is given the chance to see what’s real, raw and unglamorous — reality uncut. Like the plight of Burma.
Burmese citizen journalists
The devastation of Burma in recent weeks was not really unleashed by Cyclone Nargis. It was its military junta who made a natural catastrophe an unbearable tragedy. This I learned thanks to the
Burma’s military junta, with its tightly controlled state media, paint a picture of a country quickly recovering, with mostly upbeat images of the country’s military leaders handing out aid to survivors. Photo-journalists are not allowed to take photos of the more gruesome reality: hungry survivors squatting on roadsides, stinking corpses floating in flooded waters, injured survivors waiting hopelessly for help. Local relief organisations and volunteers are threatened to not coordinate with monks, who are once have gathered in the streets not in protest, but merely to help the communities.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has claimed that as many as 127,990 people may have died as a result of the cyclone, while the UN says more than 100,000 may have perished. The UN also estimated that between 1.6 and 2.5 million people have been severely affected by the disaster.
As of this writing, the UN is still unable to mount a full-scale relief effort, because Burma has not yet granted visas to dozens of disaster relief specialists. This despite the fact that US and French ships loaded with aid are in the waters close to the country, but without clearance to port. Even Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has stood up to say that the junta has committed crimes against humanity in its handling of the catastrophe; that the regime had “effectively declared war on its own population.”
Thanks to Burmese citizen journalists, we are not kept in the dark and fed false images of recovery Hopefully, the world can repay them with supporting the Burmese people in their struggle not just to survive this natural catastrophe, but also to regain its freedom and a better quality of life.
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