Burma Cyclone

I just learned that Reuters has a site, AlertNet, that carries news “alerting humanitarians to emergencies.” Their top story today is on Myanmar. The lede:

<<Torrential tropical downpours lashed Myanmar’s cyclone-hit Irrawaddy delta on Friday as thousands of destitute victims took to roadsides to beg for help to supplement the meagre trickle of aid flowing in.>>

See AlertNet’s full cyclone coverage, including videos, maps, links and more.

–Karen

In a recent column in the Huffington Post, Simon Jenkins, former editor of “The Times,” asks where the saber-rattlers of the West are “as Burma’s dying cry out to be saved.”

Excerpt:

I have opposed many of the macho military interventions conducted by the west over the past decade. Their justifications have been obscure, their motives mixed and their morality situational, especially those aimed at “regime change”. Those in Afghanistan and Iraq had the additional defect of built-in failure.

On the other hand the west did intervene to try to stop humanitarian catastrophes in Bosnia from 1992, Somalia in 1993, Kosovo in 1998 and Sierra Leone in 2000. The failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and more recently in Sudan’s Darfur province was generally attributed not to timidity but to the logistical difficulty of deploying power in the African interior.>>

I disagree with that last sentence, but an interesting discussion nonetheless.

U.S. Campaign for Burma also compared Burma and Rwanda, calling on the U.S., U.K and France to send in aid without the junta’s permission and despite China’s block on a Security Council resolution to authorize such a move.

–Karen

Useful resource: Just found this list of Nargis-related news articles on the U.S. Campaign for Burma Web site.

In the campaign’s last email blast, they asked supporters to contact their Congressional representatives and push for humanitarian intervention in Burma. Excerpt:

<<Congressional leaders, Rep. Peter King (R) and Rep. Joseph Crowley (D), are organizing a letter to President Bush urging him to “work with the British, French, German, Danish and other supportive and regional governments to immediately intervene in the Irrawaddy Delta region of Burma to provide urgent life-saving humanitarian aid to the survivors of Cyclone Nargis.

Call your member of the U.S. House of Representative today and urge them to sign this letter to President Bush.>>

More info here.

–Karen