Plague of rats devastates Burma villages
Pastor Dale Morgan
Plague of rats devastates Burma villages*
By Nick Meo
Last Updated: 3:10PM BST 21/06/2008
After the fury of Cyclone Nargis, a new disaster looms in Burma: packs
of rats that swarm through the hills once every 50 years have consumed
everything in their path, reducing thousands of poor farmers to the
verge of starvation.
Plagues of rats are decimating crops in remote areas of Burma, already
suffering from the effects of cyclone Nargis
The rat plague strikes twice a century, when the bamboo forests flower
Burma's latest human disaster is unfolding almost unseen by the outside
world in the jungle-covered mountains of Chin State, far to the north of
the Irrawaddy Delta where 134,000 people died last month.
The plague of rats happens twice a century when bamboo forests produce
flowers and seeds, then wither and die for five years in a phenomenom
locally known as mautam or bamboo death. Villagers believe the bamboo
seeds are a kind of aphrodisiac for the rodents, whose numbers explode
until all the seeds have been eaten. Then they turn on villagers' rice
stocks, stripping ripening corn and paddy in the fields and even digging
up seeds at night after farmers plant them.
The regime's generals will permit no food aid or humanitarian workers
into affected areas of the strategically important region in a repeat of
their callous refusal last month to permit emergency aid sitting in
foreign ships off Burma's coast to be distributed to cyclone survivors.
Exiled Chin leaders say that villagers who are too weak to flee over the
border with India have already begun to die. They fear that thousands
more now face a lingering death in the deep bamboo forests where most of
the state's million-strong population of Christian tribal people live
far from roads or towns.
The Chin, one of Burma's many minority ethnic groups, are under the
brutal rule of occupying soldiers from the Burma Army who terrorise
civilians and sporadically fight Chin guerrillas. The soldiers have made
the food shortage worse by stealing rice and forcing villagers to work
as conscripted labourers. Cheery Zahau, 27, from the Women's League of
Chinland, met William Hague and Gordon Brown in London this week to ask
for British help.
She said: "The reports that are trickling out to India are
heartbreaking. They tell of dehydrated children dying of diarrhoea and
the poorest and weakest being left behind as stronger villagers start to
escape over the border to where there is food. We don't really know what
is happening deep inside Chin State where there are no telephones or
roads. We fear that thousands will die if no help is made available."
Villagers roast rats they catch on sticks, but that food source rapidly
disappears when the rodents have eaten everything in the village and
move on.
In Mizoram State in India and the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh,
similar rat plagues in the last few months have also stripped fields
bare after the flowering of the Melocanna Baccifera bamboo. Unlike Burma
those governments have put work and food programmes in place to aid
villagers.
Benny Manser, 24, a photographer from Aylesbury, slipped across the
international border from Mizoram State last month to visit affected
villages.
He said: "We saw stick-thin children and old women who hardly had the
strength left to dig up roots to eat. Villagers were telling of vast
packs of rats, thousands strong, which would turn up overnight out of
the bamboo thickets and eat everything in sight."