| The easy way was to take a taxi from the Addis Ababa Hilton to Bole Airport, and hitch a ride with the RAF food-drop plane, or with a small Cessna belonging to an aid agency. That way, you could fly north to one of the feeding camps, get your story about a starving family, and be back home to file before dinner. The Hilton did a good steak, and always had Tusker beer from Kenya.
It was in the famine in Ethiopia in 1985 that I learned the lesson that came back to my mind with the growing crisis in Burma this week. For a lazy journalist, it was possible to report from the most harrowing places, without ever leaving the bubble of modern Western comfort. But it was only when travelling by bumpy Land Rover that you encountered the truth. En route to the starvation camps, you would pass warehouses of the national storage system. Each was full of grain, until you got to the famine region. Then the warehouses were empty, with just a desultory scattering of grain on the bare mud floor.
The causes of the famine were complex. But it was not just about unreliable rains and parched drought lands. It was about government distribution policies. Had I then but known it, I could have found the same answer in a book. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Armatya Sen had made a detailed study of the Great Bengal Famine in 1943.
He showed that there had been plenty of food available, but the poor had suffered a sudden dramatic reduction in their buying power. The free market therefore shipped the food away to other areas, where people had the cash that was required to buy. The market worked efficiently: the resources were automatically transferred to an area where demand was backed by the ability to pay. As a result, three million people died.
In Ethiopia, it was not the working of the free market, but the policies of the Marxist regime on the movement of people and food stocks that caused the problem. So it is today in Burma. It seems that about 30,000 people died there as a direct result of the cyclone last week, but that figure is dwarfed by the numbers who are now at risk as a result of the inaction of the Burmese military regime in the days that have crawled past since then.
More people often die in the first few days after a natural disaster than perish in the event itself. The bodies of the dead pollute the water supply, spreading infectious diseases, which worsen by the day. With no shelter or sanitation, drinking-water supplies contaminated by seawater, and not much food, Oxfam says that 1.5 million people are at risk. Disaster could turn to catastrophe. If it does, it will be the policies of the Burmese government that will be to blame.
The military regime, which has terrorised Burma since it seized power 46 years ago, is afraid. It knows that the relief effort after the tsunami in 2004 brought political change in Aceh, as the massive international presence pressed the Indonesian government and rebels to bring their long conflict to an end. Burma is ripe for change, too. The pro-democracy protests by Buddhist monks last year showed that.
The last thing the generals want now is an influx of foreign aid officials and journalists to upset the 100-per-cent vote they claim to have achieved in last weekend’s referendum on a new constitution, which bars the democratically elected leader of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi, from holding office. But that is, for a whole raft of reasons, exactly what Burma needs. If Burma’s generals, continuing their policy of malign neglect, continue to foil the relief effort, the international community should use every means at its disposal to undermine this odious regime. |
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