Cyclone-displaced ponder relocation

The last of Myanmar's cyclone-displaced have expressed anxiety over a government plan to relocate them. Some 1,800 people live at the 3-mile and 5-mile camps – a reference to their distance from Labutta, the largest town at the southern tip of the Ayeyarwady Delta.

Under the plan, camp residents will be resettled in the two villages of Pain Ne Taung and Min Kone, home to more than 500 families, where authorities are now busy erecting hundreds of bamboo shelters to accommodate them.

But despite these efforts, camp residents are less than convinced.

Many remain badly traumatised by the category four storm, which swept off the Bay of Bengal in May, leaving nearly 140,000 people dead or missing and affecting 2.4 million more.

Others are landless or lost everything they had, leaving them particularly vulnerable.

"I don't want to go," Mon Htay Win, 42, who has lived at the 3-mile camp for the past four months, told IRIN.

"It's easier if I stay here," the mother-of-four said, citing access to rudimentary health and education services from the government and international aid groups operating at the camp.

"I don't want to relocate," agreed Maung Maung, a 24-year-old landless fisherman from Pue Long who lost his only child in the cyclone and remains concerned whether he will ever be able to resume his livelihood.

Pressure

"We were given two options: return to our villages or relocate," said one disgruntled woman. But with scores of villages decimated by the cyclone's wrath, there did not seem much option.

However, the UN now sees the government's resettlement effort as a step in the right direction.

"The move is promising," Dan Baker, Myanmar's humanitarian coordinator, told IRIN in Yangon.

Indeed, aid agencies who visited the two sites in mid-August found that with some improvements, relocating to the villages would be better than living in the camps or possibly even returning to their place of origin.

Observers blame the lack of consultation for camp residents' reluctance to relocate; nor have they been encouraged to visit the villages, despite being just a few kilometres away.

Pein Ne Taung is less than a kilometre from the 5-mile camp.

"It's really a question of the 'unknown'," one aid worker said. "The camp is the situation they know. Although conditions are miserable, they feel relatively safe and they know what they have here," she said.

"Everyone should have the opportunity to go and see their villages of origin, as well as the two villages the government are proposing them to relocate to," the aid worker said. "Only then will they be able to make up their minds properly."

contributor/ds/mw