This will be the first natural disaster to happen after President Donald Trump shut down America’s international aid agency with potentially devastating consequences.
The impact in the aftermath of this earthquake is likely to be severe. Trump’s decision to shut down the US Agency for International Development was already reported to have decimated US aid operations in Myanmar. Its global impact is hard to overstate. American aid had provided 40% of developmental aid worldwide.
Yesterday, Trump promised Myanmar aid for the earthquake. In reality, his administration has fired most of the people most experienced at organising that help and shut down the means to provide it.
The last of its staff were ironically only let go yesterday even as the president was making lofty promises to help.
The US State Department says it has maintained a team of experts in the country. But former USAID officials say the system is now ‘in shambles’ without the wherewithal to conduct search and rescue or transfer aid.
As they count the cost of this massive earthquake, the people of Myanmar will be hoping, though, for a silver lining, that the disaster may hasten the fall of their despised dictator.
The catastrophe comes at a very bad time for General Min Aung Hlaing, who seized power in a coup four years ago.
The Myanmar junta is losing a civil war against an array of opposition forces, ceding territory now largely kettled into the country’s big cities. And some of its worst damage has been done in its urban strongholds.
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The disaster is so bad that Hlaing has broken his government’s self-imposed isolation to appeal for help from the outside world. But the country’s inaccessibility will remain a huge obstacle to aid efforts.
Myanmar is a deeply superstitious country. The generals who have ruled it since the end of colonial rule have consulted astrologers and use talismanic objects and animals, including white elephants, to protect their grip on power.
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But earthquakes are thought to portend great change in Myanmar and sometimes the fall of leaders. That in itself may accelerate the toppling of its hated junta.
It remains powerful, supplied by ally China with advanced weaponry. It has used fighter jets to wreak havoc and carnage on opponents and civilians as the civil war has intensified.
But its enemies are gaining strength too, improvising with drones and other tactics to maintain momentum against a regime that lost all legitimacy. They will be encouraged in the belief that this disaster will bring closer their day of victory.
