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For seven painful days, Hnin has waited for news. Her two daughters, two and seven years old, her husband and their domestic worker, were all inside a six-storey hotel in Mandalay, central Myanmar, when it collapsed.
Delays to search operations have added to her agony. Hnin rushed around the devastated city, where communication lines were barely functioning, to buy head-torches and fuel for poorly equipped teams. A hotel manager refused to allow the use of a digger, fearing the building would collapse. Days passed before Chinese and Russian rescue teams arrived.
“How can I sleep? When I wake in the middle of the night, I feel as if my tears have run out. I can’t cry any more,” said Hnin.
She stands outside the building, calling her husband’s name, hoping for his reply, and makes offerings to spirits, praying for her family’s safety.
At Mandalay general hospital, a short drive away, doctors have barely slept. Patients are being treated outside in the searing heat because several buildings are damaged. Some were suffering heatstroke, said a medic. There is a severe lack of mobile toilets, and some patients and families have developed skin infections because of the poor sanitation.
Across cities and towns in central Myanmar, people continue to sleep outdoors, either because their homes have collapsed or because they are too afraid to go indoors. Some have moved furniture outside, and sleep in tents marked with their apartment number. Aid has started to arrive, but residents, especially outside the cities, say it is not enough. Clean water, food and medicines are desperately needed. Many are still trapped beneath buildings, the smell of decaying bodies spreading.
According to the military junta which rules the country, the earthquake has killed 3,100 people. The real death toll and the true scale of destruction is yet to emerge. And across Myanmar, the immediate shock at the disaster is morphing into questions about how the country can ever rebuild.
It is expected that urban centres will have to be razed and reconstructed almost entirely. But it remains unclear how the country’s embattled and isolated military will afford to rebuild. Doing so will cost billions of dollars, and it has no access to international finance, nor the legitimacy needed to secure money from the World Bank or Asian Development Bank, say analysts.
It is also unclear how the earthquake might affect the country’s conflict and political crisis. Myanmar has been gripped by a widespread uprising against junta rule since the generals seized power in a coup in 2021. The military is widely reviled by the public and has lost control of vast areas of the country’s borders.
Desperately trying to cling to power, it continued airstrikes against its opponent for days, even after asking for international aid. The military finally agreed to pause fighting until later this month, though many fear the bombing will continue as soon as international attention has shifted.
The main cities devastated by Friday’s quake are under military control. Some have speculated that it is perhaps because Naypyidaw, the junta’s seat of power, was among the places badly affected that the military made a rare request for international assistance.
The capital, purpose-built by the paranoid and secretive generals in the 2000s, was supposed to be an impenetrable fortress. Its grandiose buildings include a presidential palace surrounded by a moat.
Friday’s quake, however, caused destruction. Government employees’ housing collapsed, trapping families. The supreme court has collapsed, ministry, parliament and hospital buildings are either totally or partly destroyed, and pagodas toppled. The palace’s spiral staircase and chandelier were destroyed.
“There’s no transparency,” said John*, a worker for the transport ministry, of the death toll in the capital, asking not to give his real name. “Most of the deaths were among family members, including elders, children and wives of government employees.”
In the aftermath of the quake, the junta chief, Min Aung Hlaing, acknowledged that some buildings had been built “carelessly”, but boasted that there was “absolutely no deviation, falling down” of the Great Maravijaya Buddha statue and its throne – a pagoda widely seen as a vanity project of the leader, who tries to represent himself as a protector of Buddhism and is known to be highly superstitious.
The extent of damage to military facilities in Naypyidaw is not known.
The quake will undoubtedly be a blow to the morale of Min Aung Hlaing’s ground troops, say analysts. Ye Myo Hein, a global fellow at the Wilson Center, said he believed many soldiers had been unable to get in touch with their family members, not just in Naypyidaw but also in other parts of the country that were heavily affected by the earthquake, because of the communication outages.
In the aftermath of the quake, the junta’s propaganda machinery had been working relentlessly to boost morale, he added, “portraying its soldiers as the nation’s saviours”.
The UN human rights office, however, accused the military on Friday of limiting critically needed aid. Volunteers, the backbone of relief efforts, report that they are being blocked by soldiers, especially when trying to enter opposition or contested areas.
Even in areas under military control, such as Mandalay, soldiers have been notably absent from relief efforts.
It is possible this is because the military simply doesn’t have the manpower. “Most of the troops are tied down, desperately defending bases and territory across the country,” said Richard Horsey, a senior adviser for Myanmar for Crisis Group. Even when the military sought to respond, its priorities were often misplaced, he added.
In Naypyidaw, John was still required to go to work to help with a train building project the day after the earthquake, even though his house had collapsed and the entire city was in a state of crisis. Min Aung Hlaing is “crazy about this train”, said John, who sleeps in his workplace.
Others are in a worse position, especially in Sagaing where international aid is still yet to reach many.
“Out of the earthquake-hit areas of the city, only about 30% of the city’s population receives assistance,” estimated U Nyo*, 64, a shopkeeper. “There is no one to help in the suburbs and other areas outside Sagaing. There is a lot of need for food, drinking water, and medical assistance.”
His two-storey family home was destroyed, he said. His brother was reading upstairs when the entire house collapsed, falling from the top floor down. Miraculously, the family survived.
In the daytime they stay in their yard, following the shadows of the trees to shelter from the intense sun. At night, they stay in a tent. “It’s like the earthquake destroyed the lives of people in my city,” U Nyo said. People were already struggling hard to survive even before the disaster.
Amid the destruction, one questions looms – who will pay for the towns to be rebuilt? At least 20 towns and cities are damaged, according to reports. China might lend money for individual projects, said Horsey, but it seemed unlikely it would trust the regime with vast sums, given that the generals could not manage an emergency response effort.
For communities, that means a prolonged state of chaos, without proper infrastructure. The trauma inflicted on families will take even longer to heal, if it ever does.
Outside the Great Wall hotel in Mandalay on Friday, rescuers carried out bodies on stretchers. Hnin still waits for news. “I can’t express this feeling. I have never had such kind of feeling. My heart aches sharply,” she said. “They are my family.”
* Names have been changed for security reasons
