Myanmar Holds Election Amid Stench of Death

BANGKOK, Thailand, May 10, 2008 — -- In Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta, old men lie under crushed tin roofs, flies covering their faces. Nobody has come to help them exactly one week after Cyclone Nagris arrived. Dead bodies litter the sides of rivers, bloated from neglect. The stench of death overwhelms towns.

But 70 miles to the north, in Yangon, Myanmar's largest city, two young women smile and dance on state television, a glitzy promotional campaign for a referendum that proceeded today despite the 1.5 million to 2 million Burmese who have no water, food or shelter.

"Let's go vote ... with sincere thoughts for happy days," the dancers sing, neglecting to mention the fact that for more than 12 million Burmese conditions are so bad the vote could not proceed where they live.

Myanmar's ruling generals today appeared more interested in promoting the vote that will entrench their rule than they were in the hundreds of thousands of their people who are drinking coconut milk because they have no clean water, who are sleeping under the stars because they have no homes, who haven't had electricity since the storm hit.

The United Nations today increased its estimates of the number of dead and the number of people who urgently need aid, saying that anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 people have died from the storm. "And that's not counting any future casualties," Richard Horsey, the spokesman for the UN's humanitarian affairs office in Bangkok, told ABC News.

"It's a major disaster, and relief is not getting there fast enough," Horsey said. Fewer than 500,000 people have received aid, less than a third of the number who need it, he said.

"It's a race against time," Horsey said. "There is a huge risk that diarrheal disease, cholera and so on could start to spread, because there is a lack of clean drinking water, a lack of sanitation facilities. This could be a huge problem and it could lead to a second phase which could be as deadly as the cyclone."

And yet the generals who run Myanmar spent the day posing for cameras, handing out boxes of aid stamped with their names on it and promoting a "yes" vote in the referendum.