Cyclone.(The Talk of the Town)(cyclone Nargis)

The Burmese military government, which hides from its people in the splendid isolation of a jungle capital newly manufactured in the center of the country, told the public, on April 29th, to expect widespread rain and forty-five-mile-an-hour winds on the southern coast. Cyclone Nargis arrived, on the afternoon of May 2nd, with the murderous fury of winds three times as hard. A friend who lives in the former capital, Rangoon, wrote, "I was old enough not to believe stupid government's weather reports and moved my family to safer place several hours before the storm. It was the longest night. Thunderous wind and rains destroyed the whole city and I was seeing the roofs flying across the sky. My son didn't cry. Poor boy bit his lips and tried to put his face in the pillow. Building was shaking and I thought our building could be swept away at any time. The next morning, we saw a city which was totally different from ours in the past. We lost most of the big trees in our city. . . . I lost many of my relatives who lived in two twin villages in Daydaye Township."

Four days after the cyclone made landfall, with whole districts of lower Burma under water, tens of thousands of people dead, and a growing danger of mass disease and starvation, government officials announced that the situation was returning to normal and that voting on a proposed constitution would take place on May 10th as scheduled in most districts. Little in the way of international relief was making it into the country. French and British ships were floating offshore, foreign aid workers were in Bangkok waiting for visas, but the Burmese regime was caught between the undeniable need for help and an acute sense that its survival depends on keeping the truth from its people and from the world.

Last Wednesday, an expatriate living in Rangoon made a tour of the city, beginning at a Hindu temple, and wrote, "There are eight hundred people camped out with less than satisfactory sanitation, diminishing clean-water supply, and very little else than rice porridge in the last two days. We headed over to Hlaing Thaya and before we even got to the monastery stopped in an elementary school that had around three hundred homeless people with a broken water pump. Across the way, in another temple, another two hundred and fifty or so from the same village, where thatch houses had been totally smashed. We then went to the opposite side of the city--Shwebaukan--to the 11th and 12th Quarters. Up to five hundred people in one ...