(May 2, 2009) A year after Cyclone Nargis swept away entire villages, turned fertile
rice paddies into wasteland and killed nearly 140,000, people across Myanmar marked
the anniversary Saturday with quiet remembrance and prayer. The ruling military junta,
however, planned no official ceremonies to commemorate Nargis, the worst natural disaster
Myanmar has ever seen and one of the deadliest in recorded history. The state-controlled
New Light of Myanmar newspaper did not mention the cyclone in its 16-page edition
on Saturday. The cyclone struck with fury in the middle of the night of May 2, 2008,
sending tidal surges as high as 3½ meters some 40 kilometres inland that churned for
two days. The government's official toll has never been changed from 85,000 people
dead and another 54,000 missing. Most of the dead were in the low-lying Irrawaddy
delta, the country's once-fertile rice-growing region on the south-western coast,
where tens of thousands of farm families sleeping in flimsy shacks barely above sea
level were swept to their deaths. Low-key ceremonies were held in homes, offices
and in Buddhist temples and churches around the country to mourn the victims, many
of whose bodies were never recovered or dumped in mass burial sites. A group of aid
agencies in Yangon, Myanmar's biggest city organized a photographic exhibit and invited
the public to display their own cyclone pictures. Myanmar's secretive military
regime was widely condemned for denying foreign aid agencies access to the delta in
the weeks that followed the disaster when some 800,000 survivors were homeless. The
junta also punished civilians, especially pro-democracy activists, who rushed to provide
assistance without the military's permission. (MA)