Speaking from Yangon, Myanmar, on April 1, Cara Bragg described a nation still reeling from the effects of a 7.7-magnitude earthquake that rocked Southeast Asia on March 28. Ms. Bragg is the country representative in Myanmar for Catholic Relief Services.
“It’s just really wide-scale destruction that has interrupted people’s lives, caused many deaths, caused many injuries,” she said. “As you can imagine, hospitals are overwhelmed, and people are sleeping out on the streets, anywhere they can, in fields and playgrounds and religious compounds.”
Hundreds have taken refuge at church and other religious compounds, she said, after losing their homes “because they’ve collapsed or they’re afraid for their safety and afraid to return…not trusting that the buildings will keep standing” as aftershocks continue.
Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s third-largest city and the nation’s capital, was especially hard hit by the earthquake, Ms. Bragg reported. Many government buildings collapsed, including ministries that are responsible for disaster response, further complicating relief efforts.
“Just the devastation of the earthquake itself has made access [to hard-hit communities] difficult in these first few days,” Ms. Bragg said. The airport control tower in Naypyidaw collapsed, and other airports also suffered significant damage. Roadways have been blocked by fallen buildings.
As many as 10,000 buildings have collapsed across central and northern Myanmar. “There’s a lot of people that are still trapped in the rubble in these collapsed buildings,” Ms. Bragg said.
The official death toll is over 2,700 people and climbing. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that as many as 10,000 were likely killed by the earthquake.
The earthquake struck a wide swath of the country, leaving many areas without power, telephone or cell connections and damaging roads and bridges, making the full extent of the devastation hard to assess. Its impact was felt as far away as Bangkok, Thailand, where at least 19 people were killed and 75 remain missing after a high-rise building under construction collapsed.
In the hours after the tremor, search and rescue efforts depended on a community response, Ms. Bragg said, “local people searching for their loved ones, for their friends, for their neighbors, and doing the best they could to try and find them and help them to get out, if that was possible.” Now professional search and rescue teams from outside Myanmar have made it to the disaster zone, but the short period when survivors might have been found is closing rapidly. The effort is transitioning to recovery as more bodies but fewer survivors are pulled out of the ruins.
C.R.S. works alongside Caritas Myanmar, the Karuna Mission Social Solidarity. K.M.S.S. team members lived through the earthquake themselves and are now busy coordinating the local response. Communication to hard-hit communities remains spotty, Ms. Bragg said, but she anticipates C.R.S. teams from Yangon will soon be assessing the damage and needs across Myanmar.
That will be a potentially dangerous effort as civil conflict continues across Myanmar. “Certainly the safety and security of our staff and our partners…is always something that’s paramount in our minds,” Ms. Bragg said, “and so we have to really do our best to navigate those situations, to be aware of the security environment and to find ways that we can safely deliver [aid] in ways that protect our staff, our partners, as well as the communities that we serve.”
Some of the key needs that are “already clear,” she said, include water, sanitation equipment and food. Many survivors, their homes destroyed or too damaged to safely inhabit again, will require emergency shelters. Markets are shut down in the hardest hit communities, so aid groups like C.R.S. will be, for at least the near term, the only source of food, clean water and other basic needs until normal commerce is restored, Ms. Bragg said.
Myanmar, enduring a gamut of political and economic crises since a coup in 2021 removed its democratically elected government, seemed to have fallen out of global headlines as other geopolitical dramas eclipsed its suffering. It is unfortunate that it took an earthquake to return Myanmar to the world’s attention, Ms. Bragg said, but “it has been heartening to see [this] outpouring of support and to be able to get the resources needed to respond.”
The epicenter of the earthquake has been located near Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city. Its force destroyed roads, buildings and religious sites.
The U Hla Thein Buddhist monastery in Mandalay was destroyed while about 270 monks were taking an exam. According to The Associated Press, some 70 monks were able to escape, however, 50 were found dead and more than 100 are still buried underneath the rubble of the monastery.
Mandalay’s Muslim community also suffered. Hundreds had been gathered in prayers at local mosques during the month of Ramadan when the tremor began. An estimated 700 Muslim worshippers were killed while dozens of mosques in the country were damaged or destroyed, AP reported.
In his Sunday Angelus address published on March 30, Pope Francis prayed for peace in several countries as well as for “Myanmar, which is also suffering so much because of the earthquake.”
Cardinal Charles Muang Bo of Yangon, president of the Catholic bishops’ conference of Myanmar, issued a statement acknowledging the pope’s prayers and expressing condolences “for those who perished in places of worship in pagodas and mosques.”
Assuring that the Catholic Church would “mobilize support to assist with the life-saving needs of food, medicine, and shelter,” Cardinal Bo said that a ceasefire in the country’s ongoing civil war was “imperative” to provide humanitarian relief “for those affected by both the earthquake and the prolonged conflict.”
Myanmar has been in the throes of a civil war following the 2021 military coup. After the arrest of democratic opposition and a clampdown by the military, political opponents joined ethnic armies that have been in a decades-long resistance to the central government. As the conflict escalated, the military junta has been regularly accused of violence against civilians opposed to its rule and frequent strikes against churches and other religious sites in areas controlled by ethnic resistance movements.
Myanmar’s National Unity Government, which coordinates the popular struggle against the ruling military, announced a unilateral partial ceasefire on March 30 to facilitate earthquake relief efforts. The People’s Defense Force also said it would “collaborate with the U.N. and nongovernmental organizations to ensure security, transportation, and the establishment of temporary rescue and medical camps,” in the areas it controls.
But, according to Amnesty International, the junta has continued air strikes against opposition forces, “adding to the strain of recovery efforts and the fear and anxiety of survivors.”
“Myanmar’s military, along with all other actors involved in earthquake relief efforts, must ensure that human rights principles are fully respected and that the humanitarian needs of survivors are the top priority,” Amnesty International’s Myanmar Researcher Joe Freeman said.
“You cannot ask for aid with one hand and bomb with the other. Carrying out air strikes and attacking civilians in the same region where the earthquake struck is inhumane and shows a blatant disregard for human rights.”
While the European Union, the United Kingdom, Thailand, Russia and India, quickly dispatched emergency teams and supplies to the crisis zone, the United States has not yet mobilized a response. The State Department did make a commitment of $2 million in disaster relief, and a three-person disaster assessment team from what is left of the U.S. Agency for International Development is expected to arrive on April 2. But significant assistance from the United States, once among the first on the scene in such disasters, will not occur in time, if at all, to help locate any more survivors of the disaster.
In addition to dispatching rescue teams from Hong Kong and China, a spokesperson for the China International Development Cooperation Agency said on March 29 that Beijing will provide Myanmar with 100 million yuan ($13.8 million) in emergency humanitarian aid for earthquake relief efforts.
Just days before the earthquake struck, the State Department had announced it was officially shuttering U.S.A.I.D. and taking over many of its “functions and its ongoing programming” after canceling more than 80 percent of the relief and development programs previously sponsored by U.S.A.I.D.
Phil Robertson, the director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates Consultancy, spoke with DevEx, a news site covering the relief and development sector. “The leaders are now the laggards,” Mr. Robertson said, arguing that if the United States had not made cuts to its foreign assistance program, “it would’ve been pre-positioned to move much quicker.”
“You could have had a team on the ground very quickly in Mandalay,” he said, explaining that the first 72 hours after any disaster are critical to finding survivors. “Certainly you would have seen more people being brought out of buildings [and] you would have seen more people receive lifesaving medication and assistance.”
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a press briefing on March 31 that she would “reject” the notion that the U.S. response was hampered as “a result of the U.S.A.I.D. cuts and that kind of funding.” “There are many different elements to this dynamic,” Ms. Bruce told reporters in Washington, “and we’re also certainly in the region.
“We are providing up to $2 million to existing humanitarian partners in Burma who are working right now to support the earthquake-affected communities for the emergency shelter, food, medical, and water. So people are on the ground. We have partners that we are working with to facilitate the nature of things as they’re happening at this point.”
With reporting from OSV News and The Associated Press.
