Burma state media ignore tragedy

SURVIVORS and aid workers emerge from Burma's devastated Irrawaddy delta with stories of families wiped out, bodies floating in rice paddies and starving cyclone victims begging by the roadside.
But none of that is making it into the tightly controlled state media.

Instead, it is generals in medal-covered uniforms handing out food packets, and soldiers clearing trees from the roads, who are the stars of the show.

As the world vents its fury at the junta's slow response to Cyclone Nargis, headlines declaring "Navy takes part in reconstruction'' and "Commander presents relief aid to storm victims'' appear in the New Light of Myanmar newspaper.

"The state media must not report anything bad,'' said Aung Naing Oo, a Burma analyst based in Thailand.

''(It is) a country with a totalitarian regime churning out propaganda.''

State television channel MRTV today beamed out images of grinning generals in their olive-green uniforms vigorously shaking hands with visiting US officials, welcoming a US military plane laden with relief goods.

But the scenes of storm victims being ushered by the military into neat rows of emergency tents, while happily sucking on bottles of mineral water, belie an increasingly desperate situation on the ground.

Official figures state that 62,000 people are dead or missing, but the United Nations has warned that tens of thousands more could die unless vital food, water and medicine reaches up to two million people.

The junta has delayed giving visas to foreign aid workers, and its sluggish response has provoked outrage from foreign governments, with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd attacking the regime as "absolutely callous''.

None of this has made the news in Burma, a country called a "paradise for censors'' by media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

All in-country publications are controlled by the military or subject to massive censorship, and most people do not have access to international news outlets.

Newscom