Amid devastating floods that have killed hundreds in Myanmar, the military regime has accused independent media of spreading rumors in their coverage of the flooding while making light of its rescue and relief efforts.
Addressing a meeting of the National Disaster Management Committee in Naypyitaw on Saturday, junta No. 2 Soe Win said “media reports about bursting dams and reservoirs and pending floods have caused panic among local people.”
The following day, junta spokesman Major General Zaw Min Tun accused the media of fueling panic by spreading misinformation, and of glossing over the junta’s rescue and relief efforts.
The regime has failed to mount real-time responses to unfolding emergencies even in Naypyitaw, the administrative capital and the junta’s nerve center. Flood victims have asked for help on social media, but many have remained trapped for more than 24 hours until rescue teams dispatched by civil society organizations reached their villages.
Independent media have played an important part in the rescue and relief operations by extensively covering the latest disaster in the conflict-ravaged country. The junta’s newspapers, meanwhile, have yet to report about mudslides that have buried entire villages in Mandalay Region’s Yamethin or on flooded villages around Shan State’s Inle Lake.
Junta soldiers carrying out rescue operations around Naypyitaw have however appeared in photos splashed across the junta’s newspapers, though their uniforms seem quite immaculate.
Naypyitaw residents said the regime was not even ready to supply emergency rescue equipment to volunteers wishing to start rescue operations.
Far from helping flood victims, the regime has been in disarray. Soe Win and the junta’s information team cited differing numbers of flood deaths in the same issue of one junta newspaper.
The chief of the junta’s Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, the focal ministry for helping disaster victims, has supplied eggs and instant noodles at relief camps opened in Naypyitaw for flood victims, while other junta officials have provided books of Paritta (Buddhist chants believed to ward off misfortune or danger) to flood victims at relief camps.
While junta leaders are only helping flood victims for show, charity workers, members of civil society organizations, artists, and LGBT groups went to rescue and help victims in flood-hit areas that were out of the reach of the regime.
The regime said on Monday that 226 people had been killed and a further 77 were missing as a result of floods caused by remnants of Typhoon Yagi. Fifty-six townships in Naypyitaw, Karenni (Kayah), Karen and Shan states and Bago, Magwe, Mandalay and Ayeyarwady regions have been hit by deadly floods. The actual death toll is expected to be far higher, however.
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