Monday, May 19, 2008

The gangsters of Myanmar

An article from the original Finland's Ovi magazine

What happens this minute in Burma is heartbreaking and the only way to put the way I feel is that I’m really angry. I’m really angry with the international community that has failed to stop once more a crime against humanity. I’m sorry, there is no other way to describe what’s going on there.

The state, this miserable gang of criminals who like to call themselves the governors of Myanmar – guilty of what they are doing to the country could not even let them keep the historic name of the country, so Burma under the military boots became Myanmar; this very state announced that the number of dead has raised to 98,000. How true the number is remains to be discovered over the next few months, since the real information will not come from the officials - if you could call them that - but from the NGOs that work under incredible difficulties in the country.

burma02_400When 98,000 people are dead it make it a global issue and not a local incident, and it is natural to raise interest from all the organizations and institutes all around the world, including governments and the United Nations but there is one question behind this increasing number, how many of them got killed from the cyclone and how many of them got killed from an irresponsible state and a gang of drug dealers in military uniform who run it?

The military junta that rules Burma for decades is nothing more than common drug dealers which use a whole nation – in this case, their very own compatriots – as slaves, they have created a nation drug cartel which is included in the biggest exports of opium, heroin and cocaine internationally most of it finding its way into the European market and they have invested millions in drug laboratories leaving a nation into illiteracy, without schools and hospitals, but the worst of all without any defense against poverty and starvation. A nation under starvation that’s the reality of Myanmar.

The cyclone didn’t come to bury hundreds of thousands of innocent people but to unveil the reality these people live. For months we watch people and monks in orange and red robes demonstrating in Burma and then when the sports news starts we forget, we forget them like they are the children of another planet, of another world. The Chief Executive of the organization Save the Children UK, Jasmine Whibread visited Myanmar a few days ago and the only thing she could say was that most of the children in the suffering areas suffer of ‘acute malnourishment’, the most serious level of hunger to be followed by death. Already over 30,000 kids in the very same area were malnourished before cyclone Nargis hit the area, the number now has increased dramatically and the majority of them are under five years old. The only thing to save these children is for them to receive urgently energy-high food, otherwise death is a case of weeks.

And that would have been possible if the gangsters of Myanmar let the organizations, the nations and the UN do their job by bringing into the country everything that already waits. But they don’t, they leave limited access and that only when they can take out any sign of a foreign help and show that they are the ones who provided it, so they can show that they care. In the meantime and while they try to do all that more kids die.

But the gangsters of Myanmar are not alone in this crime, they have confederates or at least some who wittingly close their eyes in front the reality and especially one very powerful ally, China. How dramatic ironic, China suffers the very same moment a natural disaster and has welcome help from every nation from all around the world trying to save the lives of thousands of people. China has long supported in many levels the gangsters of Myanmar and truth is that during the Cold War many countries did so, never forget how many banana dictatorships were supported from the American administrations included J.F. Kennedy period. But things have changed and nowadays the Chinese support to the Myanmar regime makes them accomplice in a crime against humanity and I presume that’s one of the problems China can live without at the moment.

But then who? The United Nations is one thing but the General Secretary Ban Ki-moon has been proven incapable of the responsibility to lead a global organization, what is left is the nations' themselves. The United Nations is an organization that includes nearly 150 nation and these nations have an individual voice as well. France has loud complained already and threatens the gangsters’ regime, what will happen if the rest of the nations follow the example forcing China to join? Wouldn’t that mean the beginning of the end for these criminals?

Last but definitely not least, I have said it before, democracy doesn’t feed people but doesn’t kill either and definitely saves lives. Burma is the best prove for that!

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