Disaster: At least 145, mostly Rohingya Muslims, perish from Cyclone Mocha in Myanmar

Virendra Pandit 

New Delhi: The official death toll from Cyclone Mocha, which emerged in the Bay of Bengal last week, spared India and Bangladesh, but struck Myanmar in full force has reached 145, mostly Rohingya Muslims, late reports from Yangon said on Friday.

Unofficially, however, many more are feared killed in the natural calamity.

Cyclone Mocha made landfall near Sittwe township in Rakhine state on Sunday afternoon with winds of up to 209 kilometers (130 miles) per hour before weakening inland.

The cyclone, the nation’s most destructive in at least a decade, brought widespread flash floods and power outages, while high winds tore roofs off buildings and crumpled cellphone towers.

Of the 145 officially dead, at least 117 were members of the Muslim Rohingya minority, the media, quoting Myanmar’s state-controlled TV, said.

Friday’s report on MRTV said four soldiers and 24 local residents in Rakhine, in addition to the 117 Rohingya, had been killed, blaming the deaths on people refusing to evacuate their homes despite official warnings before the storm hit them.

Most of these deaths were reported from the western Myanmar state of Rakhine, where Cyclone Mocha inflicted the maximum damage. Deaths in other parts of the country, if any, were not known so far.

The accounting of casualties from the cyclone has been slow, in part because of the communication difficulties in the affected areas and the military government’s tight control over the dissemination of information.

The government said that unofficial death tolls surpassing 400 are false. But in the absence of independent confirmation, uncertainty remains about the actual extent of casualties and destruction.

Millions of people live in the path of the cyclone and a massive effort is now underway to clear debris and provide shelter to those whose homes have been damaged or destroyed, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Thursday.

Coastal Rakhine took the heaviest hit from the violent cyclone with severe impacts across the northwest and some damage in the state of Kachin also reported.

The authorities evacuated at least 63,302 of the 125,789 Rohingyas sheltering in 17 camps in 17 townships including Sittwe, starting last Friday, MRTV said.

It identified the Rohingyas as Bengalis, the official designation given to the minority group to suggest they are illegal immigrants.

The Rohingyas have lived in Myanmar for generations, but they are not recognized as an official minority in Myanmar and are denied citizenship and other basic rights. Those caught in the storm lived mostly in crowded displacement camps, where they were moved after losing their homes in a brutal 2017 counter-insurgency campaign led by Myanmar military junta’s forces.

A storm surge battered their ramshackle housing on low-lying land on Sunday.

More than 700,000 Rohingyas fled in 2017 to refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh, which also had damage from the cyclone but reported no deaths.

Theinn Shwe, a teacher from the Headway education center for the Rohingya community in the camps, said on Friday that the bodies of at least 116 people from 15 camps and villages, including 32 children and 46 women, had been buried.

A previous military government was discredited for delaying outside aid in 2008 when Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar and devastated populated areas around the Irrawaddy River delta. At least 138,000 people died and tens of thousands of homes and other buildings were washed away.

State media this week carried extensive coverage of domestic efforts to provide disaster relief by the current military government, which came to power in 2021 after toppling the elected government of Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

The military junta is currently engaged over much of the country in warfare against armed resistance.

Several nations, including India, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States have already earmarked monetary or material assistance to aid in recovery from Sunday’s cyclone.

Three Indian navy ships carrying relief material reached Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, on Thursday and a fourth ship was due to arrive on Friday, said India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. Yangon is southeast of the cyclone-hit area and has a major international port.

The ships are carrying emergency food items, tents, essential medicines, water pumps, portable generators, clothes, sanitary and hygiene items, Dr. Jaishankar said in a message posted on Twitter.