Myanmar remembers Cyclone Nargis on anniversary

(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)