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Our Thoughts Are With the Chinese and Burmese People

May 24, 2008 Editorial

During the first two months of this year, all Guyana was numbed by the terrifying massacres that left twenty-three persons dead and about a dozen others injured. Guyana has never before experienced man-made tragedies on such scale and the grief descended with a pall of gloom over the nation.
If we felt that way about these incidents just imagine the pain, grief and suffering being endured by the peoples of Burma (Myanmar) and China who this month faced the wrath of Mother Nature. Within the spate of ten days, both nations suffered calamitous consequences as a result of acts of nature.
On May 2, a cyclone in Nargis, Burma killed an estimated 78,000 persons in one of the world’s poorest and most closed nations of the world. Apart from the death toll, some 2.4 million persons were displaced by the storm and some 56,000 are missing. This is a scale of tragedy that we here in Guyana can only imagine, but never quite understand because we have never suffered a tragedy on that scale before. If the devastation in Burma is difficult to comprehend, imagine how much more difficult it is to come to grips with the devastation caused by an earthquake that rocked China on May 12. Some 50,000 Chinese were killed and estimated 300,000 injured, while some 12 million persons, more than fifteen times the population of Guyana, have been displaced. Damages are estimated in billions of United States dollars many times over the size of the Guyanese economy. In one case an entire school collapsed on its 900 plus school children. The survivors were few.

China is a great civilization, a nation steeped in history and today fast emerging as a global superpower. Despite its economic might, China recognizing the scale and intensity of the devastation caused by the earthquake opened its doors to international aid and aid workers. This is in stark contrast with the Burmese authorities who accepted international aid, but until this week’s intervention by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, has refused aid workers into the country.
The scenes of suffering and grief that have been seen on TV screens throughout the world are enough to move mountains. Yet we are surprised that the government of Guyana has not in the case of China done more in terms of sympathizing with the people of that great nation. At the least we can dedicate one day as a day of mourning with all those who have suffered as a result of the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China

We here at Kaieteur News express our profound sadness to both the people of Burma and the people of China. We are deeply pained by the suffering of the peoples of these two countries. We urge our country to express its sadness at these two cataclysmic events. Our country of course has no diplomatic relations with Burma which is ruled by military junta. The ruling junta is a callous outfit. Despite the catastrophe, it still went ahead with a national referendum which gives greater powers to the military regime. Humanitarian considerations should however force us to ignore the differences we may have with the ruling despots of that extremely poor country and to extend a hand of friendship at this time of great suffering for the Burmese people.

On the other hand, China is one of the countries with which we established relations just after independence. Guyana and China have long shared close diplomatic ties. Our link with that country goes back to the nineteenth century when many Chinese came as indentured immigrants to work on our sugar plantations after the emancipation of slaves. While the Chinese population in Guyana has decreased appreciably ever since Independence, the historic ties between the two countries have always been good with China being a very generous developmental partner, having more recently built the International Conference Centre for us.

We here at Kaieteur News join in extending our condolences to the people of China. We believe it is not too late for Guyana, which over the years has endured its fair share of human tragedy, to embrace the millions in Asia who are now reeling from the unpredictability of Mother Nature.

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