Exile aid for Nargis

About one lakh Myanmarese refugees living in India have begun efforts to help their countrymen back home.

In the national capital, the refugees today set up the “India relief fund for Cyclone Nargis survivors”.

Symbolic in collection but sending a message to Myanmar’s military rulers, the volunteers here, most of them poor, collected Rs 9,000 and another $150 (Rs 6,240) on the first day of their fundraising drive.

“We are concerned about the health of the survivors. We are collecting chlorine tablets and medicines,” said M. Kim, part of the NGO Shwe Gas Campaign, adding that the junta should have deferred the referendum today and, instead, focused on relief work.

Myanmar held a rare election to approve a new army-drafted constitution today while many of the 1.5 million survivors of the devastating cyclone waited in vain for a concerted aid effort to bring them food and medicine.

More than 60,000 people are feared dead or missing after Cyclone Nargis, packing winds of over 100kmph and tidal waves, struck the country’s delta region.

Sources said at least 20 villages in the Irrawaddy delta region have ceased to exist while tens of thousands of people are missing. The region is described as the rice bowl of the country.

Close to 80 per cent of the country’s rice supply comes from this region, said Kim, who was in Yangon before he came to New Delhi in 1998.

Sources said flow of refugees from Myanmar could increase to neighbouring countries as a fallout of the killer storm. Although the Thai border is closer to the delta region, a spillover to India is being anticipated.

“That is why India has sent two shiploads of relief,” said one refugee.

Incidentally, the region is also home to half of the total Indian population in Myanmar.

Thousands of Myanmarese Chin refugees in Mizoram and elsewhere in the Northeast have also begun raising funds to help those affected by the cyclone.

Students and NGO workers here are coordinating the fundraising campaign with that in the Northeast.

Relief material can be sent through the Indian embassy in Yangon. India, China and Thailand are the only countries allowed to s end relief by Myanmar’s military rulers.