Burmese Corpse Collectors Arrested: Military Junta Nabs Volunteers
Surfing the web, I was quite taken by this story about a group of Burmese volunteers who had been cleaning up corpses in Myanmar’s cyclone stricken coastal plains and river beds.
It reminded me of the post Tsunami volunteer work that I had been a part of January 2005 in Phanga province of Thailand. In contrast, Myanmar reportedly had tens of thousands of rotting and decaying corpses gradually decomposing–apparently with little government effort to do anything, let alone welcoming of external help like Thailand was fortunate to harness on Boxer day 2004 when barely 10,000 lives were sacrificed to mother nature.
For those who have ever been exposed to a rotting or decaying human corpse, or any such spoiled flesh or carcass for that matter, you’ll know it takes strong guts, stomach, and head to cope with the powerful reality of death’s delayed aroma in front of your face.
And so, a volunteer group of 26 good-intentioned folks that headed out into the disaster doomed country side to clean up, bury and give passing rights to the handfuls of scattered bodies deserves attention and recognition for the better part of human kind.
You would think after such deeds, the stars would shine bright fortune on such brave and willing individuals. Apparently, even starlight has limited reach in Myanmar where seven of the volunteers were arrested and detained on June 14 by the government when the group stopped over in the Burmese capital Yangon (Rangoon).
The ’suspects’ were detained because of connections to the All Burma Federation of Students’ Unions (ABFSU) and their involvement with the anti-junta student and monk uprisings several months back.
For full details, see the Irrawaddy report here.
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