Cyclone death toll nears 4,000 with 3,000 missing in Burma
A Burmese state radio station says the death toll from a devastating cyclone has risen to almost 4,000.
The radio station broadcasting from the country’s capital Naypyitaw said today that almost 3,000 more people are unaccounted for in a single town in the country’s low-lying Irrawaddy River delta area.
The government had previously put the death toll countrywide from Saturday’s Cyclone Nargis at 351.
The storm has left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and without clean drinking water, a UN official has said.
Residents in Rangoon, the country’s biggest city lit candles today, lined up to buy water and hacked their way through trees felled in the cyclone that destroyed thousands of homes and caused widespread power cuts.
Older citizens said they had never seen Rangoon, a city of around 6.5 million, so devastated in their lifetimes.
Despite the havoc wreaked by tropical cyclone Nargis across wide swathes of the south-east Asian country on Saturday, the government indicated that a referendum on the country’s draft constitution would proceed as planned on May 10.
Should the junta be seen as failing disaster victims, voters who already blame the regime for ruining the economy and squashing democracy could take out their frustrations at the ballot box.
Some in Rangoon complained that the 400,000-strong military was doing little to help victims after Saturday’s storm, only clearing streets where the ruling elite resided but leaving residents to cope on their own in most other areas.
Residents, as well as Buddhist monks from the city’s many monasteries, banded together today, wielding axes and knives to clear roads of tree trunks and branches torn off by the cyclone’s 120mph winds.
With the city’s already unstable electricity supply virtually non-functional, citizens lined up to buy candles, which doubled in price, as well as water since a lack of electricity-driven pumps left most households dry. Some walked to the city’s lakes to wash.
Hotels and richer families were using private generators but only sparingly, given the soaring price of fuel.
Public transport was almost at a standstill although airlines announced that Rangoon’s international airport had reopened for foreign and domestic flights today.
Most telephone landlines, mobile phones and Internet connections were down.
With the city plunged into almost total darkness overnight, security concerns mounted, and many shops sold their goods through partially opened doors or iron grills.
State television reported that in the Irrawaddy’s Labutta township, 75% of the buildings had collapsed.
Burma has been under military rule since 1962. Its government has been widely criticised for human rights abuses and suppression of pro-democracy parties such as the one led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for almost 12 of the past 18 years.
