More rain batters victims of Myanmar cyclone

New rains lashed this capital as Myanmar’s military junta was only beginning to allow in foreign aid, leaving residents to pay extortionate prices for bare essentials, bathe in the streets and stew in heavy rain pouring through holes in their roofs.

Exploiting shortages caused by damaged and destroyed roads and ports, profiteers have jacked up prices for everything from gasoline and rice to corrugated sheeting and the nails needed to attach them to damaged buildings.

Weary survivors struggling to recover from last weekend’s catastrophic cyclone got a hint of the monsoon season to come as downpours drenched leaky homes and caused minor flooding in some streets.

“For the first two or three days, people were in shock. Now anger has set in,” said a local resident working with authorities in an effort to organize privately donated aid. Like most people, he requested anonymity because the slightest hint of criticism risks the junta generals’ wrath.

After 46 years of military rule, the generals are used to brushing off or suppressing discontent. But Cyclone Nargis delivered a hard blow to the junta’s standing as well as to the rest of the country.

Neighboring India says it gave the government here two days’ warning that a powerful cyclone was bearing down on Myanmar, also known as Burma. But residents of Yangon say officials only told them to expect winds of 40 mph. Instead, the storm hammered the southern region with 120-mph winds.

Five days later, a semblance of normalcy is returning to Yangon, the country’s biggest city. More shops opened, but many remained shuttered, their owners fearful that growing despair will set off a wave of looting.

In the hardest-hit Irrawaddy River delta region, there are reports of fights over the little aid that has getting through.

The monsoon season, when heavy rain comes almost every day, will start in two to three weeks. Most homes left standing by the cyclone lost some or all of their roofs in the storm that hit late Friday and lasted long into Saturday.

But in central Yangon, building supply merchants have raised prices for corrugated metal sheets from $4 to $30, forcing many desperate people to take hundreds of dollars from meager savings just to stay dry.

Knowing that new roofing isn’t much good without special, hook-topped nails to hammer them down securely, shops are charging an even higher markup for those, complained one resident.

“The bloodsucking business people are crazy,” he said. “Sometimes people go to get some and the seller says, ‘That’s $30.’ Then people reply, ‘I have this much. Either you take my money or you take my knife.’ ”

Drivers desperate for gas have a choice: Sit for hours in lines of cars that run for blocks, hoping to get a few gallons at the official price, or pay through the nose for quicker service on the black market. Backstreet gas dealers charge at least $10 a gallon, more than double the $4-a-gallon cost before Cyclone Nargis struck.

The shortages and escalating prices are piling new pressure on the government, less than a year after protests over its decision to lift fuel subsidies and double the price of gas sparked the worst unrest in almost 20 years.

The U.N. says that at least 31 people were killed during the regime’s crackdown against what began as peaceful protests led by Buddhist monks. Several of some 3,000 people detained are still in prison, according to opposition sources in Myanmar and in exile.

Anger is building again at an especially sensitive time for the junta as it prepares to put a new constitution, which has been criticized as enshrining military rule, to a vote in a national referendum Saturday.

Even before the cyclone struck, the junta had tightened already severe visa restrictions ahead of the referendum, limiting access to foreigners. The regime is pressing ahead with the referendum in most of the country, but has postponed it in areas devastated by the storm, including Yangon.

After waiting two days for permission to fly into Myanmar, at least four flights carrying United Nations relief supplies were allowed to land in Yangon, Associated Press reported.

The aid included high-energy biscuits, medical kits and other supplies.

But with an estimated 1 million people left homeless by the storm, the emergency aid was far short of what was urgently needed to avert a new catastrophe, aid workers said.

In the Irrawaddy River delta, a storm surge of seawater at least 12 feet high wiped out whole villages, destroyed rice fields, and left hundreds of thousands of people without shelter, and little or no food or clean water.

Yet Myanmar’s military regime has just four helicopters delivering emergency relief to an enormous disaster zone that is difficult to reach in the best of times, said a businessman organizing a private relief operation supported by donations from friends in the United States.

In a rare admission of the suffering, state-run television shifted from propaganda reports about development and progress to images of troops delivering food and supplies to destroyed southern villages and towns.

But the disaster zone was flooded with vast lakes of brine, which were fast becoming caldrons of decaying bodies and human waste.

In Yangon, most residents were still without power and running water today. At one makeshift well built on a sidewalk, neighborhood women, decorously wrapped in cloth normally worn as traditional longyi sarongs, had bucket showers as the morning traffic rolled past.

Small boys and girls dipped plastic engine oil containers and buckets into a pool of fresh water pumped from underground with a portable generator.

The cyclone destroyed bridges, blocked roads with fallen trees, sank ships and caused other damage that has disrupted Yangon’s port.

As foreign aid agencies tried to cut through the tangle of red tape, ordinary people here were working hard to do what they could to relieve the suffering and clean up the mess Cyclone Nargis left behind.

A local businessman with friends in California and other parts of the U.S. responded to their pleas to find some way they could help. He went to members of the junta, which he opposes, to get approval and transportation to deliver relief supplies in the delta.

Like many here, he sided with the opposition last year when he saw monks attacked by troops, but was now twisting arms in the bureaucracy to save lives from a natural disaster.

The word-of-mouth fundraising campaign had raised $50,000, and as he maneuvered his way through the bureaucracy, the businessman also had to find a way around U.S. economic sanctions to get the money into Myanmar.

“I will have my own way to do that,” said the businessman, who added that some officials have been eager to speed up approval. “Someone who is very helpful is helping me. When you speak with the right person, you can get things done.

“We have no black and white at this moment, no argument over democracy or the military regime. We don’t care. I only want to help the people who need it.”