23/05/2008
By Roy Wilkes, Manchester Respect

Up to 100 000 people are now feared dead after Cyclone Nargis ripped through the Irrawaddy delta of Myanmar, with winds of up to 130mph and a 12 foot tidal surge that reached 25 miles inland. Many more lives are now at risk from diseases such as malaria. But is this humanitarian catastrophe a ‘natural disaster’ or is it a symptom of climate change?

"While we can never pinpoint one disaster as the result of climate change," explains Sunita Narain, director of the Indian Center for Science and Environment, “there is enough scientific evidence that climate change will lead to intensification of tropical cyclones. Nargis is a sign of things to come. The victims of these cyclones are climate change victims and their plight should remind the rich world that it is doing too little to contain its greenhouse gas emissions."

But climate change isn’t the only environmental factor to impact on the Irrawaddy delta.

Mangrove forests have been cut down all along the coast in recent years to make way for shrimp farms and rice paddies. This deforestation has removed one of nature’s best defenses against violent storms.

Nor has anything like enough help been offered to the victims of the disaster, either by the junta itself, which fatally delayed the deployment of troops to assist in the rescue effort, or indeed by the business classes, who are the main supporters of the pro-western opposition around Aung San Suu Kyi. Indeed, businesses have raised the price of food and other essential commodities by up to 400% in order to profit from this crisis.

Myanmar’s workers and poor farmers, on the other hand, have delivered huge quantities of aid to the region, and have staged a number of successful protests against junta-imposed restrictions on them doing so.

The western media have of course completely ignored this social solidarity, preferring instead to concentrate on the junta’s refusal to allow western aid into the country. It is certainly true that a large quantity of foreign aid has been blocked at Myanmar’s borders, but this is because western countries have arrogantly insisted on their own aid agencies supervising its distribution.

The west has cynically exploited this situation to advance its own interests. French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner suggested on 6 May that western powers should invoke their ‘right and duty to protect’ in order to deploy military-civil aid missions without the consent of the Myanmar government.

This is a ploy. Once western armed forces are positioned across the country, they will undoubtedly stay there in order to impose a neo-liberal agenda, opening up Myanmar to western investment and imposing a more malleable government that would revoke recent trade agreements with China.

The big western aid agencies are far from blameless in all this, often behaving like the missionaries of the nineteenth century who paved the way for colonial domination of Asia and Africa. The only difference is that nowadays it is the World Bank that follows the NGOs into countries like Myanmar.

The last thing Myanmar needs now is an incursion by western forces under the guise of humanitarianism. Myanmar has already suffered over 120 years of British aggression and colonialism, which is the main reason the country is still mired in poverty.

We in the west should reject absolutely any military incursions. We should demand unconditional emergency aid to Myanmar, with no strings attached, and we should leave it to the people themselves to settle accounts with their own government. But most importantly, we must force the governments of the west to take seriously the problem of climate change, because if we don’t do that, disasters on a much bigger scale than Nargis will become commonplace.

Roy Wilkes is the Chair oif Manchester Respect and author of Global Emergency - the battle against climate change (This pamphlet with a foreword by George Galloway MP will be published in June 2008)