Where’s the Outrage!
Why is it that the leftists in the West are only outraged about human rights violations when it has to do with a mideast dictatorship? Do innocent victims of a natural catastrophe have to come crawling out of spider holes before the left will defend there rights to humane treatment? After nearly a week and a half we are finally starting to here very limited information coming out of one of the world’s poorest and most secretive countries. According to the Australian World Sun:
The Burmese Coco Islands were “the site of a major jail … sort of like Devil’s Island”.
“If the Andaman and Nicobars were badly hit, it seems likely that the Cocos islands were, too,” he said, referring to Indian-ruled islands just north of the earthquake’s epicentre where about 900 bodies have been found and about 5700 people are still missing.
And this on why the government is not keen on letting the world in to assess the destruction:
“For them (the Burmese Military Government) to admit international NGOs for surveys is to open up a discussion of the poverty in that country and the lack of infrastructure and the lack of health care. Fifty deaths or 5000 deaths is, to the military government, ‘so what?'” he said.
Burma, according to the BBC, is still reporting a total of 59 dead from the tsunami. This is unbelievable. According to the World Fact Book:
Burma is a resource-rich country that suffers from government controls and abject rural poverty. The military regime took steps in the early 1990s to liberalize the economy after decades of failure under the “Burmese Way to Socialism”, but those efforts have since stalled. Burma has been unable to achieve monetary or fiscal stability, resulting in an economy that suffers from serious macroeconomic imbalances – including a steep inflation rate and an official exchange rate.
It is unlikely that Burma with its 1930 kilometers of coastline has the infrastructure or sytems in place to survive a tsunami of this magnitude yet there are reports that:
Although, it is unlikely that the suffering Burmese population will ever get the sympathy or attention of the western leftists, and although we will never hear the outrage as we have for suffering terrorists in Iraqi jails, let us hope and pray that the people of Burma get in on some of the aid that the world is providing to the area.
(Click here for a map of the area and the projected tsunami path)