The Myanmar regime is frustrating international efforts to help victims of Cyclone Nargis because it has a much more sinister intent: the eviction or eradication of the non-Myanmar ethnic population from the Irrawaddy River delta region. The government sees its people as its enemy.
There is a long record to back this up. In the mountainous region of Eastern Myanmar, more than 3,000 villages have been burned or mined and tens of thousands of internally displaced persons are on the run on any given day, according to www.tbbc.org, a consortium of 11 international non-governmental organizations that provides humanitarian aid and conducts refugee research.
This is a calculated strategy of eviction and relocation of non-Burman ethnic groups from ancestral lands they’ve held for more than 2,000 years.
These hill tribe people sit on land that is incredibly rich in natural resources: gas, oil, precious gems, teak and riverine hydropower potential. (It reminds me of a scene in the movie “Blood Diamonds” in which an old man in the rubble of his village says, “Thank God, at least we don’t have oil here.”)
The government’s methodical land grab, entering its third decade, is fueled by international consumers’ thirst for Myanmar’s rich bounty.
This dark little marriage of convenience brutalizes and slowly strangles innocents, and no one around the world seems to care.
Now this veneer has been stripped away by the force of a natural disaster, revealing the regime for what it does and what it will continue to do unless it is stopped.
It poses as a legitimate government concerned about its people. The world looks on and says: “These guys can’t really be this bad, can they?”
Like the mountain region, the Irrawaddy delta has potential bounty. It is the richest agricultural region in southeast Asia. With the price of rice up more than 250 percent, this has significant implications for a dictatorship that sees all things in terms of bottom-line profit.
This region also represents China’s single hope for access to the Indian Ocean. The deep dredging of the Irrawaddy River right up to China’s border is no accident.
The Myanmar regime has no relief plan for the delta region. The plan is to drive people off this rich land and relocate them, as the regime has systematically done everywhere else in the country where profit could be made. It has three weapons: weather, time and international inaction. This plan is right on schedule.
So while we lament the military roadblocks to relief aid, we miss an even greater injustice. A thin crust of generals — no more than 20 in all — are strangling a society of 47.8 million people.
These generals are a highly fearful and fragile fraternity. They would feast on each other in a moment.
But we do nothing.
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Tim Heinemann is a retired Army Special Forces officer and head of Worldwide Impact Now, a humanitarian agency.
