More than a week after Typhoon Yagi made landfall in northern Vietnam and scythed westward across mainland Southeast Asia, the people of Myanmar continue to count the cost of the devastating storm.
Yagi hit northern Myanmar on September 10, three days after arriving in northern Vietnam, causing torrential rains, severe flooding, and landslides across the country. Low-lying townships in central Myanmar have been inundated, while areas of Bago and Magwe regions, and Shan, Kayin (Karen), Kayah (Karenni), and Mon states, have also seen serious impacts. These have included the destruction of homes, roads, bridges, and other critical infrastructure, and the inundation of agricultural land.
The storm has only compounded the privations of a population that has already been pushed to breaking point by the country’s ongoing civil war, and the economic paralysis that has accompanied the conflict. In July, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that “more than 3 million people are estimated to be internally displaced,” most of them since the military coup of February 2021. A total of 18.6 million people are in need of some kind of humanitarian assistance, it added.
A junta spokesperson said on Sunday that at least 113 people had been killed by the typhoon; the estimate was raised yesterday to at least 226, though the true death toll is likely much higher. The junta state media announced that nearly 240,000 people have been displaced. At Inle Lake in Shan State, according to one report, the water level of the lake has risen more than six meters, “inundating roughly 2,000 nearby homes.”
According to OCHA, around 631,000 people have been affected by flooding across Myanmar, and tens of thousands of acres of agricultural land had been flooded, particularly in Mandalay Region. It said that these populations are in urgent need of food, drinking water, medicine, clothes, and shelter.
Given the ongoing conflict in Myanmar, which has created its own massive humanitarian emergency, the distribution of humanitarian assistance is likely to become the subject of heated political contestation. In a statement yesterday, the National Unity Government (NUG) called on foreign governments to mount an international relief effort, noting that “approximately 700,000 people” had been affected by Typhoon Yagi and that there were “hundreds of casualties and missing people in the affected areas.”
The NUG, which is leading the broad resistance to military rule, also implied that foreign governments and international organizations should avoid delivering humanitarian assistance to the military State Administration Council (SAC).
It stated that international organizations should “make sure that emergency humanitarian assistance and health care support reach the flood-impacted people fairly and equally.”
The NUG called on international organizations to “ensure the humanitarian aid are not politicized or weaponized” and to deliver support directly to its own Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, as well as local civil society groups and ethnic armed organizations.
A similar, though more explicit, call was issued from the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M), which stated yesterday that “it is essential that international humanitarian actors engage with Myanmar resistance authorities and civil society to support their relief efforts.” In addition to lacking effective control over many parts of the country, it added, “the military created Myanmar’s pre-existing humanitarian crisis and will seek to use engagement with international actors on humanitarian grounds to advance its own military and political agenda at the expense of the Myanmar people.” It cited the example of Cyclone Mocha, which hit western Myanmar in May of last year, with devastating effect.
These calls pinpoint a growing tension in the way that international organizations, including U.N. agencies, are dealing with the situation in Myanmar. Despite its weakening hold on power, these groups have continued to engage formally with the SAC. The most recent example was the visit to Naypyidaw by Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross. As Maggi Quadrini argued in an article for The Diplomat last week, it would “not be surprising that the junta weaponizes these interactions for its own gain and propaganda.”
The tension is only intensifying as ethnic armed groups and other anti-regime militias gain control of larger territories, particularly around the country’s periphery, making it hard to sustain the notion that the SAC serves as the country’s de facto government. In western Myanmar, the Arakan Army is now within sight of gaining control of the whole of Rakhine State. Ethnic armed groups have also made considerable gains in northern Shan State and along the border with Thailand in Karen State, to say nothing of the leopard spots of resistance control in Sagaing and Mandalay regions, Chin and Kachin states, and other parts of the dry central plain. In this context, the decision to engage solely with the military junta in Naypyidaw begins to seem more and more abstracted from the political realities in the country.
Leaving aside the question of whether these interactions legitimize the military junta, many of the country’s neediest populations reside in areas controlled by or adjacent to ethnic resistance groups. As Quadrini argued, direct engagement with the military “undermines the agency of local organizations, which do not need to negotiate with terrorists [i.e. the military junta] to carry out a meaningful and coordinated emergency response.”
The decision to deal solely with the SAC has not been arbitrary; indeed, it stems from long-standing norms of institutional neutrality, especially for U.N. agencies, whose work depends on the consent of host states. But as time goes by, and the situation in Myanmar becomes blurrier and more contested, this status quo will become increasingly difficult to sustain.