Pentagon planning for long-term Myanmar aid

 

 Pentagon planning for long-term Myanmar aid

By Lisa Burgess, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Friday, May 16, 2008

ARLINGTON, Va. — U.S. military officials continued Thursday to make plans for large-scale relief operation to aid cyclone-stricken Myanmar, but the refusal of the ruling military junta there to accept more than token assistance had one official concerned about possible unrest or even widespread riots.

Joint Task Force Caring Response, as the U.S. military has dubbed the humanitarian relief operation, has established its logistics headquarters at Utapao Thai Royal Navy Air Base, Thailand.

C-130 transports belonging to the 374th Airlift Wing from Yokota Air Base, Japan, are forward-deployed to Utapao in support of the operation.

One official said he is concerned that Burma’s citizens might begin to riot if they are made to suffer unassisted for too long.

“I think what we’re going to start seeing is people will rise up,” he said. He said that there are some reports from witnesses on the ground that in some areas, “people are starting to get pissed off,” although it is not widespread, and “there are no reports of the military getting violent” in retaliation.

“At some point, you’d have to say, how much suffering are you going to allow?” he said.

But the U.S. military has not done any planning for that point, the official said, saying that the best course is to hope diplomacy and third-country intervention will help the junta change its mind and allow more assistance in.

As of Thursday, 13 flights had made it into the country, including five that flew in Thursday, according to Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

First on the priority list is bottled water, Whitman said.

Clean water is the supply most desperately needed, according to the few aid international workers allowed on the ground by the junta, according to a senior military official.

The military transports have also ferried in blankets, mosquito netting, powdered milk, biscuits, ready-to-eat packets of fish and chicken, and hygiene kits with toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, razors and other essentials, Whitman said.

Task Force officials are working on plans for more supply flights to come in Friday, but have not yet received permission from the junta to bring the aircraft in, Whitman said.

Although Tropical Cyclone Nagris hit May 2, U.S. offers to supply aid to Myanmar were largely stymied until Monday, when Navy Adm. Timothy Keating, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, flew into Myanmar’s Yangon International Airport on the first U.S. military flight that was allowed to land there.

Keating’s presence helped alleviate suspicions by the junta that the U.S. military wanted to use the storm as an excuse to get “boots on the ground,” the official said.

For now, the Myanmar government — which is taking control of all supplies delivered at the airfield — appears to be stacking many of the goods on the airfield itself, the official said, which means the goods aren’t getting to people who need them.

The official said that there were also some indications that the Myanmar military is taking labels off the U.S.-delivered goods and putting their own, but shrugged it off as immaterial in the big picture.

“We’re trying to save lives here,” he said.

What really bothered him, he said, was the refusal of Myanmar’s government to allow the U.S. to assist when people are dying. The United Nations has said that as many as 2.5 million people have been severely affected by Nargis.

“Nobody has the capacity to do what our military does,” the official said.

The U.S military is working to identify locations in Thailand to use as a forward operating base if and when the junta allows them to begin delivering a steadier stream of supplies, the official said.

On Wednesday, the task force had settled on an abandoned airstrip at Mae Sot, approximately 150 miles east of Yangon, as the location for the forward operating base. But on Thursday morning, a military official said that the plan had been discarded because of “security reasons.”

The task force is evaluating alternate locations, the official said.

The logistics base is Utapao, but the task force itself is headquartered at Khorat Royal Thai Air Base, about 157 miles northeast of Bangkok. The task force is commanded by Lt. Gen. John Goodman, commander of Marine Forces Pacific.

US pushes for helicopters to ferry Myanmar relief

By ERIC TALMADGE in BANGKOK, Thailand (AP)

In this photo released by the U.S. Marine Corps a soldier from Myanmar and a U.S. airman work together to unload food packages from a C-130 at Yangon airport Monday, May 12, 2008. The plane was carrying the first U.S. aid to be delivered to Myanmar following cyclone Nargis, which struck on May 2, 2008. (AP Photo/HO, US Marine Corps, Sgt Andres Alcaraz)

 this photo released by the U.S. Marine Corps, soldiers from Myanmar and others unload water from a U.S. Air Force C-130 Monday, May 12, 2008, at Yangon airport. The plane was carrying the first U.S. Aad to be delivered to Myanmar following cyclone Nargis, which struck on May 2, 2008. (AP Photo/HO, US Marine Corps, Sgt Andres Alcaraz)

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U.S. military soldiers load a C-130 cargo plane with supplies bound for cyclone devastated Myanmar in Utapao Air Base near the southern city of Rayong, Thailand, Monday, May 12, 2008. (AP Photo/Wally Santana)

Myanmar’s isolationist ruling junta is now allowing U.S. military cargo planes to regularly fly relief supplies into their largest city to provide aid to cyclone survivors.

But if the aid is to get out to the estimated 2 million people who need it most, Myanmar is going to have to make another big concession: letting the U.S. start flying helicopters directly into the hardest-hit areas and allowing boots on the ground.

So far, that is where the junta draws the line.

Myanmar, whose ruling military generals are intensely sensitive to what they see as outside meddling, has limited the U.S. military to the Yangon airport, where emergency supplies must be unloaded by hand.

Once the planes are unloaded, they are quickly sent back to their makeshift base in Utapao, in central Thailand east of Bangkok.

The U.S. military has flown 13 C-130 cargo planes loaded with 156.6 tons of aid into Yangon over the past four days. Five flights flew on Thursday, military officials said, and another eight were expected to take off Friday.

The C-130s have brought in much-needed supplies including water, mosquito nets, blankets, plastic sheets and hygiene kits. But aid groups say the airport soon will have more supplies than it will be able to handle, meaning bottlenecks and delays.

The U.S., which was conducting its annual Cobra Gold military exercises in the area when the cyclone hit, has 11,000 troops and a flotilla of ships ready to go. U.S. military assets from as far away as Guam and Japan are in Thailand or off its waters.

“We’ve got a lot of assets in the field,” said Lt. Col. Douglas Powell, a Marine spokesman for the relief effort, called Operation Caring Response. “We’re not limited to our C-130s.”

Largely with the use of helicopters, which have tremendous versatility, the U.S. military made a major contribution to the international relief effort after the catastrophic 2004 tsunami killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen nations around the Indian Ocean.

Helicopters to the devastated Irrawaddy Delta and some troops on the ground would be an essential part of a stepped-up relief effort in Myanmar as well.

To prepare for such an operation, the U.S. is moving several ships that can support helicopters into international waters closer to Myanmar and has scouted out possible staging sights on land, including Mae Sot, a Thai border town with an air base about 250 miles from the disaster zone.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Thursday that Navy ships from the USS Essex expeditionary strike group were moved slightly after Wednesday’s warning of another approaching storm, but they are now some 30 miles off Myanmar’s coast, also waiting to help, if asked.

“The need is still high,” Whitman said.

Thailand also has sent military flights to Yangon. The British, French and Australian militaries have diverted assets to help, but are still awaiting approval from the Myanmar leaders to actually go in.