Attempting to aid Myanmar cyclone victims
By Lynn Wolstenholme
When Cyclone Nargis hit the southeast Asian country of Myanmar on May 3, Warrenton-based Air Serv International moved into action.
“By May 5, we had an emergency response team together, and I was on my way from Kabul [Afghanistan] to Bangkok [Thailand],” said Allen Carney, vice president of the nonprofit aviation humanitarian organization's international program.
For days, Carney was in the same boat as other humanitarians, trying to get into the country – waiting in Bangkok for Myanmar's heavily military-led government to grant visas into the country.
“It was like an anthill of humanitarian assistance,” Carney said of the scene at Bangkok embassies. “In the week that I was there, only a few visas were granted worldwide.”
Carney, of Warrenton, has been with Air Serv since 2004 and had previous experience working in crisis situations with the United States Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.
When Carney left Bangkok May 15, his counterpart, Corliss Zylstra, of Minnesota, took over the mission and, as of May 20, was still waiting for a visa to enter the country. Carney did leave with some hope -- Zylstra's application had been accepted but not yet approved.
“The Myanmar government is cloistered and resistant to international intervention on any level,” Carney said. “They have even increased restrictions.”
He added, “The regime is very suspicious. They don't want people to see what is going on in the country. If they open their doors, it jeopardizes their position, but there is a lot of international pressure.”
Cyclone Nargis hit the country of 49 million May 3 and since then the Myanmar junta (or military leaders) closed the doors to the country, not allowing international humanitarians to enter. Many residents are left with no homes, food or water, while the government makes slow progress in getting aid to thousands of people who need it.
Knowing his chances of getting a visa based solely on his humanitarian status with Air Serv were not good, Carney went to the Myanmar consulate asking to make a donation to use Air Serv aircraft services to get aid to flooded areas.
“[The Myanmar government] is not interested in relief workers,” Carney said. “They want aid in the form of donations but not people. I thought I would approach it as donating our services,” which would be use of a helicopter to get aid to areas that are not accessible by ground.
The part of Myanmar that was hit hardest by the cyclone is the Irrawaddy Delta, a web of inlets that has been completely flooded.
“There is no access from dry land, and [the people] are cut off from surface relief and supplies,” Carney said.
Carney did get further than other humanitarians. He asked and was granted permission to speak with the ambassador.
“I presented a proposal to the Myanmar embassy in D.C. in the hopes that they will give it to officials at the embassy in Yangon, [the capital of Myanmar],” Carney said on May 20. “The proposal is offering three helicopters from Air Serv to assist the Myanmar government for transportation workers and goods.”
In the meantime, Carney said things are moving along, but slowly. While in Bangkok, he was involved in numerous logistics and inter-agency meetings between different humanitarian groups.
“At the moment there are warehouses established in four points, but the real challenge are the bottlenecks,” Carney said. “There is the diplomatic bottleneck in Bangkok and a bottleneck of relief supplies in Yangon because the infrastructure is damaged.”
As time goes by, many humanitarians continue to lobby for entrance because they know there will be plenty of work to be done in the near future.
“The general feeling is this is just the first wave of the impact of this disaster,” Carney said. “The homelessness, no food and water will lead to disease, which will then lead to an epidemic. Nobody knows where this is going.”
The Myanmar government on Tuesday did agree to allow neighboring countries to send medical personnel and assessment teams, including United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, into the country.
Zylstra has yet to hear back about the status of his visa. He has a scheduled meeting with embassy officials in Myanmar on Thursday.
“Once his application is accepted,” Carney said, “we can get an aircraft to him in three days.”
Contact the reporter at lwolstenholme@timespapers.com