Bangkok (EFE).- Between tens and hundreds of people, according to sources, could have died in the impoverished west of Burma due to the impact of Cyclone Mocha, which has left “a path of devastation”, according to the UN, after making landfall on Sunday between the southern coast of Bangladesh and neighboring Burma.
One of the strongest cyclones to hit Burma
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA) defines the cyclone in a statement as one of the strongest to ever hit Myanmar, with the city of Sittwe, capital of the western state of Rakhine, home to some 150,000 people. as the most affected.
The partial interruption of communications due to the impact of Mocha makes it difficult to know precisely the damage caused by the cyclone in an area that is particularly neglected in the country, home to hundreds of thousands of members of the Rohingya Muslim minority, persecuted by the Army Burmese.
In addition to Rakhine, around a million Rohingyas, victims of a campaign of persecution that the UN is investigating for possible genocide, reside in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh, which in principle have not been particularly affected by the cyclone.
The damage seems to be concentrated in Rakhain, where the Myanmar Now news portal reports 22 Rohingya deaths, while local media such as Western News put the figure up to 400 members of this minority not recognized by Burma, according to a comment posted on their Facebook account.
The NGO Partners Relief & Development, which operates in the area, also echoes “hundreds” of deaths on its Twitter account, but stresses that “specific details will continue to emerge as more areas recover telephone connection.”
OCHA, for its part, warns that communications with its partners in the area have been “partially restored”, but that they are still limited due to the damage caused to telecommunication towers, with generators as the only source of electricity for many people.
This UN agency indicates that Sittwe is practically destroyed, with “barely” a few houses standing, and that many of the precarious bamboo buildings where 1.2 million displaced people live have been devastated.
Even before the impact of the cyclone, OCHA assures that some 6 million people in that area were in need of humanitarian assistance.
For its part, the official newspaper The Global New Light of Myanmar, controlled by the military that carried out a coup on February 1, 2021 in Burma, plunging the country into a spiral of violence and semi-anarchy, indicates that 17 towns in Rakhine Areas affected by a natural disaster have been declared.
The newspaper, controlled by the same soldiers accused of persecuting the Rohingya, does not report deaths, and assures that the head of the military regime, Min Aung Hlaing, traveled to the devastated area on Monday to direct the rescue operations.
Mocha made landfall this Sunday
Cyclone Mocha made landfall between the southern coast of Bangladesh and western neighboring Burma on Sunday with sustained winds of more than 150 km/h, the biggest storm to hit the Bay of Bengal in more than a decade.
Before the storm made landfall, around 400,000 people were evacuated to shelters, government facilities and schools between Myanmar and Bangladesh.