The official death toll from Friday’s magnitude 7.7 earthquake in Myanmar has officially passed 1,700, but humanitarian groups and United Nations officials warned on Monday that total casualties are probably much higher than the government tally.
Hundreds of people are still trapped under debris, and rescue efforts are hindered by several factors, including the state of civil war that exists in the country.
“Even before this earthquake, nearly 20 million people in Myanmar were in need of humanitarian assistance,” U.N. humanitarian coordinator Marcoluigi Corsi said Monday.
“This latest tragedy compounds an already dire crisis and risks further eroding the resilience of communities already battered by conflict, displacement, and past disasters,” Corsi said.
The U.N. hinted at the political instability in Myanmar by demanding “unimpeded humanitarian access for humanitarian convoys, medical personnel, and assessment teams to all affected regions, regardless of location or control.”
Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma, has been ruled by a military junta since February 2021. An armed insurgency against the junta began soon after the civilian government was overthrown.
As Corsi’s report indicated, Myanmar’s civilian population was already in crisis before the devastating quake struck on Friday. The U.N. estimates over three million people have been displaced by the fighting, which continued even after the earthquake. Many of those refugees had sought shelter in the areas that suffered the worst damage from the quake.
The junta conducted airstrikes against rebel positions on Sunday, for example. Insurgent leaders and human rights groups accused the junta of taking advantage of the earthquake to launch major air strikes against the rebels while they were disoriented from the tragedy.
“Reports that Myanmar’s military has continued with airstrikes after the earthquake tells you everything you need to know about the junta – obsessed with its brutal repression of civilians and desperately trying to win the war whatever the human cost,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) Asia director Elaine Pearson said on Saturday.
Pearson was responding to a BBC report that quoted U.N. Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews denouncing the junta airstrikes as “completely outrageous and unacceptable.”
Andrews said it was “nothing short of incredible” that the junta would “drop bombs when you are trying to rescue people.”
“Anyone who has influence on the military needs to step up the pressure and make it very clear that this is not acceptable. I’m calling upon the junta to just stop, stop any of its military operations,” he said.
Andrews warned the junta could limit relief efforts as a means of weakening its adversaries.
“What we know from past humanitarian disasters, natural disasters, is that the junta does not reveal the truth. It also has a habit of blocking humanitarian aid from getting to where it is most needed,” he said.
“They weaponize this aid. They send it to those areas that they have control of and they deny it to areas that they do not,” he charged.
The deposed civilian government of Myanmar, known as the National Unity Government (NUG), announced that its own forces would begin a two-week pause in “offensive military operations, except for defensive actions” on Sunday.
The BBC said the junta is desperate after “continual and humiliating defeats” that left it with control over “less than a quarter of the country.” The only real military advantage the junta has left is air power, which it tends to use with great enthusiasm and very little regard for civilian casualties.
Human rights groups blasted Russia and China for supporting the junta by providing it with the warplanes to conduct its relentless bombing campaign. These critics dismissed the humanitarian aid belatedly sent by Moscow and Beijing as far less important than the bombs and aircraft they previously sent to Myanmar.
“It’s hard to trust the sympathy now, when they’re also the same countries supplying the military junta with deadly weapons used to kill our innocent civilians,” U.K.-based activist Julie Khine told the BBC.
The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) said at least three hospitals were completely destroyed by the earthquake, and 22 more were damaged, putting further strain upon an already overwhelmed health care system.
“The earthquake’s devastation has overwhelmed health care facilities in the affected areas, which are struggling to manage the influx of injured individuals. There is an urgent need for trauma and surgical care, blood transfusion supplies, anesthetics, essential medicines, and mental health support,” W.H.O. said.
Adding to the urgency of the earthquake disaster is that monsoon season is only a month away and monsoon flooding tends to displace large numbers of people. Those refugees will have even more trouble than usual finding shelter due to the enormous damage from the quake.
Meanwhile, the government of Thailand is investigating the collapse of a Chinese-built high-rise office building during the earthquake. The entire building came down in a matter of seconds, killing at least ten people and trapping dozens of construction workers beneath tons of debris.
China sent a team to investigate the collapse, but Thai officials suggested the Chinese were more interested in securing documents from the disaster area than figuring out why the supposedly earthquake-proof structure came down like a house of cards.
The 33-story building building was still under construction when shock waves from the earthquake reached Bangkok, which is over 600 miles from the epicenter of the quake in Myanmar. The $58 million construction project began three years ago. When completed, the building was to serve as headquarters for the Thai State Audit Office (SAO).
Thai engineers immediately began asking how the building could have collapsed so quickly.
“You see all other buildings, even high-rise buildings under construction, they are safe. So either the design was wrong or construction was wrong, but it’s too soon to reach conclusions,” Thai civil engineer and politician Suchatchavee Suwansawas said.
Deputy Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who is also the interior minister of Thailand, formed a committee to investigate the destruction of the high-rise on Sunday. An inspection team from the Ministry of Industry has already visited the site to determine whether low-quality steel or poor design decisions factored into the collapse.
“The earthquake caused a seismic magnitude of 7.8 but more than 95% of buildings withstood it. Collapse happened only to the State Audit building,” Anutin said.
Anutin said he met with a Chinese earthquake expert who was dispatched by Chinese Ambassador Han Zhiqiang to the disaster area on Sunday. However, the Thai deputy prime minister made it clear that Chinese personnel would not be allowed to enter the ruins of the building.
On Sunday, Thai police detained four Chinese nationals for illegally entering the ruins of the skyscraper and attempting to retrieve a cache of 32 documents from the rubble. One of the detainees identified himself as the project manager for the construction project, and said the documents were needed to file an insurance claim.
On Monday, the head of an anti-corruption watchdog group in Thailand said dozens of irregularities in the Chinese-led construction project have been reported over the past three years.
Anti-Corruption Organization of Thailand president Mana Nimitmongkol said the tower was originally supposed to be completed by 2026, but due to inexplicable delays and worker shortages was only about 30 percent complete when the earthquake brought it down. The Thai government was so frustrated by these delays that it threatened to cancel the project earlier this year.
“Sometimes the number of workers on site were much fewer than there should be, causing delays. Potentially there was a rush to complete the project towards the end, which could cause a drop in the standard of work,” Mana said.
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