Cyclone survivors victimized by Myanmar soldiers

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Three weeks after the storm, survivors say they are being victimized again, by a military regime that has forced some to return to flooded, collapsed homes and others to labor on reconstruction projects.

Even Myanmar volunteers making the difficult trip into the Irrawaddy delta to deliver food and supplies to survivors are being stopped and detained for hours, and the government has started impounding cars.

"Where my house used to be is still filled with water up to my waist," said Aye Shwe, pointing to fields of rice paddies in the distance, under water as far as the eye could see. "How can I build a new house there?"

The 52-year-old rice farmer's mother was killed in the cyclone that left more than 134,000 people dead or missing, and the water buffaloes that were a mainstay of his livelihood drowned in the fierce storm surges.

Still, until this week he had more than many: He managed to fashion a shelter from bamboo poles lashed together with palm fronds laid over one side as a crude roof. His wife and six children huddled together Monday on its raised bamboo floor, sheltering from the searing heat and the downpours that now come daily as monsoon season gets under way.

It's location on the roadside outside the hard-hit delta town of Pyapon, a four-hour drive from Yangon, had given his family access to the Myanmar volunteers ferrying donated food, water and other aid from the country's biggest city.

Then the soldiers came and ordered the family and the hundreds of others camped out on the roadside to leave.

Myanmar's reclusive government has opened up slightly to the world in the past week, allowing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to meet with some survivors living in tents in a refugee camp the military showed off as a model of its efficient handling of the relief effort.

But the U.N. says as many as 2.5 million people are homeless, facing hunger and potential outbreaks of disease, especially in the low-lying areas of the Irrawaddy delta close to the sea, and only a fraction of them have received any aid.

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