BURMA: Foreigners, Cameras Banned in Cyclone-Hit Areas

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, May 13 (IPS) - Images of the dead keep trickling out of Burma. The most moving are those of children who died when Cyclone Nargis tore through their world in the populous Irrawaddy delta.

Among those e-mailed to IPS is one showing a row of six children, girls in faded dresses, a boy in shorts and an orange shirt, and another in a blue sarong. There is an image of a child, face down, stuck between branches of a bush. And there is another of a man, shock on his face, holding a dead baby in his arms.

Yet the photographer does not want to be named. He knows the risks he faces if he is identified in a country ruled by a military that has no limits to its oppression since coming to power following a 1962 coup. Even the May 3 cyclone, which has reportedly killed over 100,000 people and rendered over a million homeless, has done little to change the junta’s iron grip.

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