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US Navy
ships laden with relief supplies steamed away from
Myanmar’s coast Thursday, their helicopters barred by the
ruling junta even though millions of cyclone survivors
need food, shelter or medical care.
The USS
Essex group, which includes four ships, 22 helicopters and
5,000 US military personnel, had been off the
Myanmar coast for more than three weeks hoping for a green
light to deliver aid to the survivors.
“The
ruling military junta in
Burma
have done nothing to convince us that they intend to
reverse their deliberate decision to deny much needed aid
to the people of
Burma,”
Lt. Denver Applehans said in an e-mail from the flotilla.
He said he
was “both saddened and frustrated” not to be able to help
the cyclone victims.
Help from
French and British naval ships which had similarly broken
off from their missions to stand by off Myanmar was also
rejected.
Still, a
total of 1.3 million survivors have been reached with
assistance by local and international humanitarian groups,
the Red Cross and the UN, said the UN’s Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Among
those who have been able to assist in the relief effort
was Chris Weeks, the humanitarian affairs director of
logistics giant DHL.
IT was
DHL’S stockholders who wanted to help in
cyclone-devastated Myanmar, where, according to government
figures, 78,000 people were killed and another 56,000
still unaccounted for.
“But
rather than giving donations or one-off payments, they
decided to offer the company’s core competency, which is
in logistics,” Weeks told BusinessMirror via a phone patch
from DHL’s regional headquarters in Singapore.
DHL spent
some $100,000 on training local volunteers in Myanmar for
the aid effort, he said.
Weeks
returned to
Singapore
last weekend after two weeks of managing the company’s
warehouse in the Myanmar capital Yangon.
“There was
no power when we started operating that warehouse.
Telephone lines were down and cellular phones ran out of
batteries,” Weeks reported on the aftermath of Cyclone
Nargis, which swept the Southeast Asian country more than
a month ago in early May.
And the
military junta didn’t make things easier.
For
example, Weeks said they had difficulty in procuring visas
for the DHL volunteers.
“Usually
we have 80 people in our team for this magnitude of
assistance project, but we couldn’t get visas for all of
them,” he said, noting that DHL has 200 trained disaster
reaction volunteers in Singapore, Dubai and Miami to cover
regions that are impacted by natural calamities.
Although a
member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations,
Myanmar hasn’t acquiesced to the no-visa-required policy
usually given to citizens of the regional bloc.
Weeks
added that they could also have brought in better
equipment and more trainers for the locals for more
efficient management of DHL’s 3,050-square-meter warehouse
in Myanmar.
“We could
have brought in more trucks but the military wouldn’t
allow entry of vehicles with more than eight wheels,”
Weeks said.
Thus DHL
had to settle with a dozen volunteers: four from
Singapore, four from Malaysia; three from Bangladesh; and
Weeks.
Likewise,
“we had to make do with what’s available,” Weeks added,
describing their daily 12-hour work amid the absence of
power supply.
“I grew up
and lived in a farm so these things are not alien to me,”
he noted.
Still, DHL
was able to bring in generators both for the use of United
Nations volunteers as well as to power up the warehouse
during rains that hit up to three times a day in
Myanmar,
according to Weeks.
Restrictions on visa and travel permission for foreign
workers, as well as on entry of some equipment, continue
to hamper the aid effort, despite a pledge made almost two
weeks ago by junta leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe to UN
Secretary Ban Ki Moon to allow foreign aid workers free
access to devastated areas.
“The small
number of visas and the short duration of travel permits
for access” into the delta area “continue to impose
serious constraints on the effectiveness of overall
operations,” the International Federation of Red Cross and
Red Crescent Societies said.
Despite
the problems, the World Health Organization reported some
cause for optimism.
In a
report circulated Wednesday, it cited an assessment by the
UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) of conditions in hard-to-reach
areas outside of the town of Bogalay, one of the areas
worst affected by the storm.
It quoted
the assessment as saying “there were no post-cyclone
deaths in any of the villages assessed,” as well as no
signs of acute malnutrition. It also said suitable sources
were found for clean water.
The
findings appeared to contradict fears that there would be
a “second wave” of deaths after the cyclone due to the
lack of immediate large-scale assistance.
“Things
are getting back to normal there,” Weeks said, adding that
he was able to leave after their team was able to tap and
train a local contractor “to take over from us.”
He also
noted that the aid agencies have become more organized
after humanitarian aid was allowed to flow into Myanmar.
“It even
surprised me to see
Yangon, the
capital, as a very straight city,” he said. “People can
now walk the streets even at night and things are fairly
well-organized there.”
Weeks also
denied that the truck carrying their goods was hijacked.
“It’s moving within the capital for three days,” he
stressed.
DHL’s
truck was carrying nonfood items like blankets, mosquito
nets, plastic tools, engines and health kits.
“Of
course, I wouldn’t know about those distributing the goods
to other parts of Myanmar because we only focused on the
warehouse. We didn’t go into transporting the goods
ourselves,” he said.
The ones
that did that are UN agencies, according to Weeks.
What DHL
did was to provide expertise in logistics chain management
of the common warehouse located 25 minutes from the
Yangon airport. The warehouse serves as a central consolidation
point for supplies directed through various non-government
organizations in
Myanmar.
It is
there that cargo are received and sorted and reloaded onto
trucks or aircraft and be distributed quickly, according
to a DHL press material.
Weeks said
during his stay in Myanmar, some three to five flights of
between 80 and 120 tons of aid cargo were brought to the
airport in Yangon.
“I don’t
have a military experience nor was I with the Boy Scouts,”
Weeks said, “but in Myanmar, we had to be practical.”
In fact,
he said it was almost like working in a farm, but this
time, he was sowing seeds of love.
And it
seems to be bearing fruit.
“Rains
have lifted there,” Weeks said. “That may be a portent of
bright days ahead for Myanmar.” (Dennis Estopace, and AP) |
