Firsthand tale of Burma relief frustrations - Tyche Hendricks

June 20, San Francisco Chronicle
Firsthand tale of Burma relief frustrations - Tyche Hendricks

Nearly two months after Cyclone Nargis slammed into Burma's Irrawaddy
Delta, humanitarian relief groups are still struggling to get government
permission to deliver life-saving aid to 2 million survivors, said Richard
Jacquot, a San Francisco resident and emergency program manager for Mercy
Corps.

In a conversation with The Chronicle, Jacquot, who returned Sunday from a
month in Burma, detailed the enormous frustrations and the modest triumphs
of helping cyclone victims recover under the watchful eye of an
authoritarian regime.

Although Burma's military leaders promised U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon a month ago that they would admit aid workers of all
nationalities, they continue to restrict aid delivery, he said.

The French-born Jacquot has spent 24 years working in some of the
hardest-hit war zones and disaster areas on the planet - from Sarajevo to
Sudan and Congo to the Kurdish area of Iraq. He managed Hurricane Katrina
recovery for Mercy Corps, an Oregon aid agency working in three dozen
countries. Trained in international relations and economic development,
Jacquot has worked for several humanitarian organizations coordinating
emergency food, shelter, water, sanitation and health care.

The risks of providing aid in the midst of a war are manageable compared
to the obstacles he confronted trying to deliver aid in Burma, said
Jacquot, 58.

"You have to make contact with all the groups ... it's dangerous but you
know the players," he said of his experiences in battle zones.

By contrast, in Burma, renamed Myanmar by the governing junta, "there's no
rhyme or reason. You don't know why you can go here today and tomorrow you
can't," said Jacquot. "It's the way an authoritarian regime works: It puts
you off balance. That's the way it controls its population."

Jacquot spent a month in Rangoon, coordinating with colleagues in the
delta town of Laputta over government-issued cell phones. He was not
permitted to leave the city and they were unable to travel out of the
delta. Satellite phones and Internet access was blocked by the government.

Mercy Corps has only been able to operate in Burma because it affiliated
itself with a British medical aid group, Merlin, which had already been
working in Burma and had a memorandum of understanding with the government
to equip health centers in the Irrawaddy Delta. Like other aid groups,
Mercy Corps and Merlin have relied heavily on Burmese staff and associates
who have been able to move more freely.

The greatest frustration, said Jacquot, was watching millions of dollars
worth of aid and hundreds of skilled relief workers stay bottled up in
Rangoon while hundreds of thousands of survivors subsist on almost nothing
after the May 3 storm, which took an estimated 134,000 lives.

"Imagine Katrina: it was already a pretty difficult challenge for the U.S.
to handle," he said. "Now imagine the government has shut the area
completely. No one is allowed inside and no aid is allowed to get in. The
result is a population that needs assistance and cannot get it."

Mercy Corps and Merlin managed to install three large barges loaded with
supplies on rivers in the delta, then used smaller boats to ferry food,
plastic sheeting and other materials from the barges to the villages.

Jacquot's team has employed Burmese health workers to serve the remote
communities along the rivers and hired local people to drain salt water
and clear corpses out of rainwater reservoirs and prepare them to catch
the monsoon rains again for drinking water.

Jacquot said he was moved by the ingenuity and initiative of Burmese
people in reaching out to their countrymen in spite of government-erected
obstacles.

"One of the side effects of a controlling government is that it triggers
human creativity," he said. "What is extraordinary there is the response
by local organizations. We have to admire them because they are taking a
lot of risk."

The United Nations, along with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
and the Burmese government, is conducting a comprehensive disaster
assessment to be complete next month. Early reports indicate that a feared
wave of disease and death has not materialized. But that doesn't mean that
all is well in the Irrawaddy Delta, where families still huddle in
shelters with their livestock and scrounge for food and fresh water, said
Jacquot.

"The fact that there isn't secondary death doesn't mean they are not
suffering," he said. "You hear people say, 'It's amazing how resilient
they are.' But what choice do they have?"

Meanwhile, aid workers like Jacquot debate how best to proceed in the face
of continuing government resistance to foreign aid.

"Some say providing a little bit of help is better than no help at all,
others say we should challenge the government further," said Jacquot, now
back in his San Francisco living room. "I don't know the answer but it's a
dilemma everybody has to deal with."


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