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For the past few days I have been reading articles about the relief operation in response to Cyclone Nargis in the New Light of Myanmar, the Burmese regime's state newspaper. Photographs show cyclone refugees sitting in neat tents, surrounded by supplies and cooking pots. Soldiers are depicted loading boxes of dried noodles onto helicopters. Generals are seen handing out donations to orderly rows of survivors. In the pages of the New Light of Myanmar, at least, the
situation is under control.

Yet, when I talk to Burmese people in Rangoon, the images I see and hear couldn't be more different. A businessman, who has just returned from delivering personal donations by boat in the worst-hit reaches of the Delta south of Laputta, showed me film footage he had taken in one village over ten days after the cyclone hit. Half of the village population had been killed by the storm and there was nothing left of the wooden houses or concrete monastery but shattered planks, rubble, and debris. The images showed blank-faced and ragged survivors, who said they had not yet received aid of any kind. Bloated corpses floated in the flooded paddy fields around their makeshift shelter. Another man, trying to help survivors around Bogalay, talked about canals choked with dead bodies and survivors with horrific injuries succumbing to gangrene. Even around Kungyangon, a more accessible Delta area closer to Rangoon, private individuals driving down to deliver donations of rice and clothes report that the road is lined for 20 miles with thousands of desperate and homeless people begging for food.