Burma

Myanmar Energy and Electricity Staff Pressured to End Strike

Ministry of Electricity and Energy staff on strike. / The Irrawaddy


By THE IRRAWADDY 24 March 2021

Naypyitaw — Striking Ministry of Electricity and Energy staff in Naypyitaw say they are being pressured to return to work.

Around 150 striking Electric Power Generation Enterprise (EPGE) staff said they had received phone calls threatening suspension and prosecution if they fail to return to work. They said they were also told to leave their government accommodation.

However, staff remain in their quarters because the ministry has issued no official notice on their case.

“If they dismiss us and ask us to leave the staff quarters with an official letter, we will leave. But that still would not comply with rules for civil servants,” said a ministry employee.

Most of those on strike are junior staff and the phone threats were made by managers who chose to work for the military regime, said a striking EPGE employee.

“Some ministries have issued official notices but we have received no notifications, only threats from senior officials,” said the employee.

Most of the ministry’s projects have stalled because of the civil disobedience movement against the regime which started in early February.

The Ministry of Transport and Communications, Myanma Railways and other government departments have dismissed hundreds of striking staff and are evicting them from their accommodation.

Government employees went on strike against the military in 1988, after which many were dismissed, demoted or transferred to remote areas.

Burma

Nation of Ghost Towns Defies Myanmar Junta With ‘Silent Strike’

A deserted neighborhood in downtown Yangon on Wednesday. / The Irrawaddy

“I have never experienced that kind of silence in my life, not even during the COIVD,”  said a city resident.

By THE IRRAWADDY 24 March 2021

Myanmar was a nation of ghost towns Wednesday as opponents of the military regime collectively shamed the junta’s recent claims of “normalcy” in the country by staying home and shutting down their businesses in city after city.

People across the country were on “Silent Strike” as part of their ongoing opposition against the military regime that grabbed power from Myanmar’s democratically elected government on Feb. 1 by staging a coup.

Since mid-February, major cities across the country have been reeling from chaos caused by violence and deadly crackdowns by soldiers and police on anti-regime protesters. Shops and markets have cut their business hours short due to frequent and fatal confrontations between security forces and protesters on the streets. Many closed their businesses entirely out of fear. Roads that used to be crowded with traffic are now blocked by barricades set up by protesters to deter the advancement of troops.

Beginning last week, the regime launched a serious effort to reopen businesses by force and clear roadblocks with the occasional use of forced labor, grabbing anyone they saw on the road or from their homes.

Then they trumpeted on state-owned and military-controlled media that “markets and malls at some townships in Yangon (Myanmar’s business hub) have reopened as situations returned to normalcy.”

In response to the regime’s claim of normalcy, people campaigned online to launch a one-day silent strike partly to prove that the claim was wrong and also to demonstrate another form of defiance against the junta.

On Wednesday, roads in major cities like Yangon, Mandalay, Naypyitaw, Monywa and others were mostly deserted.

A nearly empty road in Yangon as the people of Myanmar

 observed “Silent Strike” against the regime on Wednesday. 

/The Irrawaddy

Major businesses like the country’s biggest retail malls like City Mart, Ocean announced they were closed. Taxi and delivery service Grab suspended its service. Local wet markets turned dry as they only opened a few hours in the morning to let people buy necessities. Even corner stores like ABC and City Express were closed. Wholesale markets were no exception. Even protesters took a day off.

With a handful of cars on the road and few people out to shop for necessities, downtown Yangon on Wednesday was reminiscent of the COVID lockdown period that the city underwent nearly one year ago. On some shady roads of the city, stray dogs napped safely under the hot mid-day sun as there was no vehicle traffic to interrupt their freedom.

Myanmar second biggest city, Mandalay, totally plunged into silence after 8 a.m. Wednesday. The city’s busiest area near Zay Cho market was totally deserted, according to witnesses. Buddhist monks who normally went around the city in the morning to receive food and other offerings broke their ritual on Wednesday.

“I have never experienced that kind of silence in my life, not even during the COIVD,” said U Kyaw Thiha, a city resident.

The 40-year-old added that the strike on Wednesday was a testament of the people’s unity when it came to saying no to the junta.

“We have no leader telling us what to do. People just join together out of their conscience to oppose the dictatorship,” he said.

LIKE GHOULS FROM PRECINCT 13

Burma
Myanmar Security Forces Snatch the Bodies of Those They Have Slain

The funeral ceremony of 16-year-old teashop waiter is seen before the dead body was taken by force by the military regime.

By THE IRRAWADDY 24 March 2021

Security forces of Myanmar’s military regime are trying to seize the bodies of those they killed when they fired on anti-regime protesters, bystanders and pedestrians in Mandalay, the country’s second-biggest city.

A Mandalay-based charity group assisting wounded people and providing funeral services to those killed by security forces told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday that since March 5 they have had to conduct four funeral ceremonies without bodies because those killed had been cremated by the security forces themselves.

The group also said that the number of bodies taken might be higher because many of the dead and wounded were taken away by security forces after a series of recent shootings in the city.

Security forces conducted a series of raids in several wards in Chanmyathazi Township including Aung Pin Lae, Aung Tharyar and Mya Yi Nandar over three days after a confrontation between them and peaceful anti-regime protesters on March 21.

During the deadly raids, at least 20 people were killed and about a hundred were injured, according to residents and charity groups.

On Monday, security forces, claiming they need to conduct an autopsy, interrupted a funeral ceremony in Chanayethazan Township. They took the body of a 16-year-old teashop waiter slain in a Sunday night raid by force.

A video from Mandalay also shows a man who appears to be dead being loaded onto a prisoner transport vehicle by the security forces and people in plainclothes.

On March 4, security forces in Mandalay exhumed the body of a 19-year-old woman who was shot dead by soldiers and police on March 3 in a crackdown against anti-regime protest.

The next day, Myanmar’s military regime refused to admit responsibility for killing the woman, saying the lead in her skull did not match police riot-control rounds. However, media members witnessed security forces also using deadly air-guns firing lead pellets during the crackdown.

Military forces in Mandalay also refused to admit the killing of a 26-year-old man, who died at a military hospital after not getting proper treatment for wounds to his head and his leg received when security forces fired live rounds on Feb.20. Instead, the military insisted the man died of COVID-19.

Charity groups providing funeral services for those killed said that earlier in the conflict between protesters and security forces the military would transfer the bodies of those who were killed to the families after performing an autopsy.

However, they later stopped transferring the bodies back to families.

Mandalay residents believe that military forces want to avoid responsibility for their killing and reduce the death toll by manipulating autopsies.

The elder sister of a 6-year-old girl named Ma Khin Myo Chit, who was shot dead by the security forces on Tuesday afternoon, told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday that they held a funeral ceremony for the girl secretly because security forces are searching them.

The girl was shot to death at close-range during a house raid at Aung Pin Lae in Chanmyathazi Township. The frightened girl was slain while being hugged by her father.

(Initial reports were that Ma Khin Myo Chit was 7 years old. The family now confirms that she was 6.

)

The funeral of a 6-year-old girl named Ma Khin Myo Chit is held by the family in Mandalay secretly.

During the raid, a 19-old-man, the girl’s brother, was also beaten and taken away by security forces.

The family member said that security forces also searched their house again last night while they all were away from home. Now, they are hiding at another location in the city, the victim’s sister said.

“Their brutal behavior is beyond tolerance. There is no word to describe their actions,” said the elder sister of the 6-year-old girl.

Also, family members of another victim — Ko Chan Thar Htwe, 21, who was shot dead by the security forces on Tuesday’s morning — left their home in Aung Thayar ward in Chanmyathazi Township on Wednesday after security forces began enquiring in the neighborhood about their location.

At a time when there were no protests in the street, Ko Chan Thar Htwe was deliberately shot in the head by security forces from long range while he was in front of his house and attempting to get inside on Tuesday morning.

Ko Than Niang Htun, brother of the victim, told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday that security forces arrived near their home on Tuesday afternoon while they were sending his brother’s dead body to the hospital.

He said that they held the funeral ceremony for his younger brother secretly on Tuesday after moving to two locations.

“Even after my brother has been killed, all our family members had to run away of them,” said Ko Than Naing Htun.

On Tuesday, two more people aged in 36 and 27 were also killed by police and soldiers during raids against the residents at Aung Pin Lae ward in Chanmyathazi Townsip.

During the recent deadly crackdowns in several Yangon’s townships, Bago, Pyay and Mandalay, bodies of victims have been taken away by security forces.

Amid the deadly crackdowns, tens of thousands of people across the country have taken to the streets to defy the military rules.

As of Tuesday, about 260 people have been killed by the security forces of military junta during their shooting against the anti-regime protesters, bystanders, pedestrians and residents.

  

John Carpenter's low, low budget ($100,000) thriller about a gun-happy attack on a police station was inspired in equal parts by Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead. After a lackluster stateside release the film gained traction in Europe and its cult status was set in stone by the early eighties (thanks in no small part to Carpenter's 1978 blockbuster, Halloween). Carpenter, whose original screenplay was titled The Anderson Alamo, was chief cook and bottle washer on the 1976 film, not only directing, writing and editing but composing its score as well (which was recorded in one day).

Neil Marshall on ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13

Burma

Myanmar Junta Fires Striking Ministry of Foreign Affairs Staff

Anti-regime protesters urge civil servants to join the civil disobedience movement. / The Irrawaddy

By THE IRRAWADDY 23 March 2021

Myanmar’s military regime has dismissed a total of 56 staff from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) who have gone on strike in protest against military rule and the junta’s Feb.1 coup.

The regime’s foreign affairs ministry notified the civil servants of their dismissal last week, claiming that they had breached the civil service code of conduct, according to leaked documents. The staff fired range from assistant directors to clerks who are refusing to work for the regime’s cabinet.

Thousands of civil servants across the country have joined the civil disobedience movement (CDM) in protest at the junta’s overthrowing of the democratically-elected civilian government.

On Monday Myanmar coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing urged civil servants to return to work saying that despite their different opinions, they need to serve dutifully no matter what government takes office.

Senior General Min Aung Hlaing said that civil servants must follow civil service rules and codes of conduct.

He warned that civil servants will have to sign confessions the first time they fail to go to work. For any subsequent violations, action will be taken against them in accordance with civil service rules.

Other MOFA staff, including over two dozen Myanmar diplomats in foreign missions, have been on strike since early March in protest at the security forces increasingly lethal crackdown on peaceful anti-regime protesters.

The junta has also recalled at least 100 staff from overseas missions in at least 19 countries, including the US and UK, after Myanmar’s United Nations (UN) envoy U Kyaw Moe Tun broke ranks with the regime to condemn their coup in front of the UN General Assembly in New York and pleaded for the international community’s help in restoring democracy to Myanmar.

In late February, nine MOFA staff in Myanmar’s capital Naypyitaw were arrested and charged for refusing to work for the military regime.

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Lawyer Helping Secure Release of Detained Protesters Beaten, Arrested by Myanmar Troops

Topics: CDM, civil disobedience movement, Coup, junta, military regime, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MOFA, Naypyitaw, Senior General Ming Aung Hlaing, U Kyaw Moe Tun, UN, United Nations

The Irrawaddy

Burma

Made Homeless by Junta, Myanmar Govt Workers Vow to Continue Strike Till Regime Falls

Hospital staff at Mandalay General Hospital vacated their government housing on March 20 rather than abandon the CDM and go back to work under the military regime.

By THE IRRAWADDY 23 March 2021

In its latest attempt to stifle workers’ protests, the military regime has given striking workers in several cities an ultimatum: return to work or face eviction from their state-provided housing.

On Saturday, the regime issued a letter warning striking railway workers in the country’s second-biggest city, Mandalay, that they would have to move out of their government housing within five days unless they resumed work on Monday.

Unbowed, thousands of railway workers moved out of their homes rather than give up their protest against the regime.

Railway employees and their families in Mandalay Region vacated their government housing on March 20 rather than abandon the CDM and go back to work under the military regime./ CJ

Myanmar government employees—including doctors, nurses, teachers, railway workers, engineers, garbage collectors, electricity workers, administrative staff, bankers and employees of a range of government ministries—have been taking part in the civil disobedience movement (CDM), a widespread protest movement against the regime, since a few days after the Feb. 1 coup, refusing to work under the men in uniform in an effort to make the country impossible for them to govern.

Furious at the collective resistance that has paralyzed the government mechanism for over a month, the regime has attempted to intimidate striking workers by, among other things, firing weapons during nighttime patrols of residential areas, arresting people, and dismissing or suspending workers from their positions. However, the eviction warnings and other threats have failed to deter the protesting workers.

“We were in tears as we left our homes. Not because we are sad or scared of them. But because we are indignant at being bullied and abused by those armed with weapons,” a 50-year-old woman said. Her family moved out of the largest railway staff housing complex in Mandalay Region, where they lived for more than 10 years, on Sunday.

“We have nothing to fight back with—not even a toothpick. But we will fight [the junta] with the CDM until they fall,” she said.

Around 450 households in the housing complex—more than 1,000 people—moved out over the weekend. Other housing centers for railway workers in Mandalay also saw striking workers leave to continue their protest.

Railway employees and their families in the Mon State capital Mawlamyine left their government housing on March 23 rather than abandon the CDM and go back to work under the military regime./ Mawlamyine’s Voice

“All of us are poor. But we don’t care, even if we don’t have any place to relocate to, or face hunger. No matter what, we will continue the strike.”

For her, the fight against the junta is a fight for the future of her young son. She said she doesn’t want him to experience a repeat of the suffering she faced under the previous military dictatorship after the coup in 1988.

Mandalay residents and charity groups helped the workers move out, carrying furniture and other household items and providing free trucks, vans, pickup trucks, meals and temporary shelter.

A volunteer group assisting the workers said support will be required to meet the evicted workers’ basic needs, including shelter and food supplies, in the long term, adding that it is important that all who need such assistance receive it.

The evictions compound the hardship for the striking workers, who have already forgone their salaries.

A son of a 59-year-old railway worker at the Mahlwagone Railway station in Yangon Region said many families of station employees who had been evicted from staff housing were struggling to find shelter and feed themselves.

Around 1,000 workers and their families living at the station’s staff quarters fled their homes on March 10 after security forces raided their neighborhood.

Railway employees and their families at the Mahlwagone Railway Station in Yangon Region fled their government housing on March 10 rather than abandon the CDM and go back to work under the military regime./ The Irrawaddy

The son of the striking railway worker said soldiers and police told the strikers that if they returned to work, they could stay in the housing. However, more than 90 percent of the workers there fled their homes rather than return to work under the military regime.

Given only a few hours to vacate the premises, the workers were each only able to bring a few items of clothing and some food, leaving furniture and household items behind.

“My parents were only able to bring their national registration cards and a few clothes with them when they fled, as I was away at that time. My mom left her medicines behind and many other older people in the quarter did too. But at this time we can’t afford to buy pills and medicines while we are struggling to find food and shelter,” he said.

Railway employees and their families at the Mahlwagone Railway Station in Yangon Region fled their government housing on March 10 rather than abandon the CDM and go back to work under the military regime./ The Irrawaddy

The railway employee’s son added that many striking workers have no idea how to connect with the support groups and lack secure and systematic channels to do so. Regardless of the hardship, the young man believed all the striking workers and their families were determined to continue their strike until the end.

The military regime has issued arrest warrants for several well-known CDM supporters on incitement charges. Leading strike organizers, including several medics who initiated the protest movement among government staff, have also been targeted for arrest.

It is estimated that more than 60 civil servants taking part in the CDM have been arrested and charged since Feb. 1. Doctors, engineers, teachers, railway staff, directors and managers of governmental departments and administrative staff are among those who have been detained.

A doctor from a hospital in Naypyitaw who went into hiding to evade arrest said hundreds of doctors, nurses and healthcare workers now faced financial hardship as many of them are on the run.

: Railway employees and their families in the Mon State capital Mawlamyine left their government housing on March 23 rather than abandon the CDM and go back to work under the military regime./ Mawlamyine’s Voice

More than 400 employees of his hospital had to move out of their staff housing in mid-February to continue the protest, and have been hiding in temporary shelters since then. The number of healthcare workers evicted from government housing in different states and regions has been growing in recent days.

The doctor said the threats had failed to stop the CDM, and in fact it was continuing to grow. He estimated that around 90 percent of government staff across the country were now taking part in the movement.

On Tuesday morning, 140 railway workers in Mawlamyine, Mon State also moved out of their staff housing rather than return to work.

Railway employees and their family members at the Mahlwagone Railway station in Yangon Region fled their government housing on March 10 rather than abandon the CDM and go back to work under the military regime./ The Irrawaddy

Acknowledging the power of the CDM, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Thomas H. Andrews, said, “The junta knows how to fight weapons of war, but it is ill equipped to fight weapons of peace, which is what the CDM [is].”

“The CDM—and the broader opposition to the junta—will be strongest and most effective if it, and its leadership, can resist calls and any impulse to fight violence with violence,” he added.


Topics: CDM, Coup, Doctors, Eviction, government housing, homes, leave, military regime, Protests, Railways, return, strike, ultimatum, work, workers

Burma

Dissidents Fleeing Myanmar Junta Find Shelter and Support with Ethnic Armed Groups

KNU troops during a parade in 2018. / The Irrawaddy


By THE IRRAWADDY 23 March 2021

An increasing number of activists, dissidents and politicians have sought refuge in Myanmar’s eastern borderlands with ethnic armed groups, in particular the Karen National Union (KNU). But this situation is not new for the ethnic armed groups. In 1988, thousands of students and activists fled to the Thai-Myanmar border and the border with India to seek shelter and to take up the armed struggle against the then junta. Those areas were known as “liberated areas.”

Now hundreds of newly-arrived activists (including journalists fleeing the military regime) have taken refuge in insurgent-controlled areas in Karen, Kayah, Mon and Shan States along Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand.

On Monday, military-owned Myawaddy Television announced that the regime was looking into reports that many NLD members and supporters had fled to KNU-controlled areas in the country’s southeast.

Military information team leader Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun said during a press conference on Tuesday that more than 1,000 people had fled to border areas in the country’s southeast to evade arrest.

Known as ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), the ethnic groups have publicly denounced the junta’s Feb.1 coup and the rule of the military’s State Administration Council (SAC). Karen insurgents in Karen State deployed troops to protect peaceful anti-regime protesters.

The Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS) has stated publicly that it will shelter and support any victims of the SAC and the military.

Several ethnic groups, with the notable exception of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), in the north of Myanmar along the border with China are supportive of the coup and will likely focus more on signing ceasefire agreements with the military.

Most notably, a parallel government – the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH) – has formed in the areas under the control of the EAOs. The CRPH is made up of elected lawmakers from the ousted National League for Democracy-led (NLD) government.

The same thing happened in 1990 after the then military regime refused to hand over power to the elected representatives of the NLD following its 1990 election victory. Then, many MPs fled to the eastern borderlands to escape imprisonment and the junta’s crackdown. Those MPs formed the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB). That government in exile was known to be ineffective but received backing from the US and the West. The exiled government was dissolved in September 2012.

Talks between the CRPH and several ethnic groups in the south are ongoing. Sources said that without military representatives sitting in the meetings, there is a free flow of discussion between the CRPH and EAOs without fear.

There has been some talk on social media about the idea of creating a “federal army”. Just like in 1988, some young activists who have fled to areas controlled by the EAOs now want to receive military training from those ethnic armies. But it is not known how and where they will find support and resources.

A number of new EAOs, such as the Arakan Army and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) have emerged in the last 10 years, but initially they received assistance and backing from the KIA and, subsequently, from other powerful ethnic armies along the Chinese border. They have been allowed to open offices and to run businesses in China.

The SAC has warned ethnic groups not to establish contact with the CRPH. But a member of the Peace Process Steering Team along the Thai-Myanmar border said that the two sides continue to hold talks. Last week, the CRPH removed all EAOs in Myanmar from the terrorist and unlawful associations list. Several ethnic armies have had unstable relationships with the NLD government in the past.

The junta has now invited EAOs to attend the upcoming Armed Forces Day on the 27thof March in Myanmar’s capital Naypyitaw. Many have declined the invitation.


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Topics: 1988, Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, Coup, CPRH, EAOs, ethnic armed organizations, junta, Kachin Independence Army (KIA), Karen National Union, KNU, military regime, SAC, State Administration Council

Environmental groups: Discarded masks, gloves creating pollution problem

BY ZACK BUDRYK - 03/24/21 THE HILL

© getty

Discarded face masks and gloves during the coronavirus pandemic has led to a sharp increase in pollution, particularly in coastal areas, environmental groups warn.

Discarded personal protective equipment (PPE) has been on the rise on beaches, according to the Pacific Beach Coalition, which conducts cleanups near Pacifica, Calif., according to The Associated Press.

This is a marked difference from the past 25 years, when the group said the most common litter was cigarette butts and food wrappers.

“What are we going to do? We got masks. We got gloves. We got all those hand wipes, the sani wipes. They’re everywhere. They’re in my neighborhood, in my streets. What can we do?” Lynn Adams, the coalition's president, told the AP.

The materials in question pose an environmental risk associated with plastic litter in general, such as the danger of being eaten by animals and upsetting the ocean’s ecological balance.

“Obviously, PPE is critical right now, but we know that with increased amounts of plastic and a lot of this stuff getting out into the ocean, it can be a really big threat to marine mammals and all marine life,” Adam Ratner, conservation educator for the Marine Mammal Center, told the AP.

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He added that there are steps people can take to mitigate environmental harm, such as cutting mask loops before discarding them.

Advocacy organization OceansAsia said in a 2020 report that nearly 1.6 billion masks likely ended up in the oceans over the course of the year.

“The 1.56 billion face masks that will likely enter our oceans in 2020 are just the tip of the iceberg,” says Teale Phelps Bondaroff, director of research for OceanAsia said in a statement. “The 4,680 to 6,240 metric tonnes of face masks are just a small fraction of the estimated 8 to 12 million metric tonnes of plastic that enter our oceans each year.”

Asian Americans Have Been Protesting Violence Against Their Community For Months

PHOTO ESSAY THESE ARE A FEW CLICK ABOVE FOR THE REST

Strf / STRF/STAR MAX/IPx
Posters against anti-Asian prejudice are seen in the Barclays Center subway
station in Brooklyn on Jan. 1, 2021.



People demonstrate in Los Angeles on March 13. Ringo Chiu / Getty Images



Protesters attend the American Asian Federation's Anti-Asian Hate Rally

 at Foley Square in lower Manhattan, Feb. 27, 2021.Media Punch / AP


Jason Redmond / Getty Images
Someone holds a sign featuring Vichar Ratanapakdee, 84, who was fatally
attacked in San Francisco on Jan. 28, during a Seattle rally on March 13.

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/claudiakoerner/stop-asian-hate-rallies-atlanta-victims

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/piapeterson/japanese-detention-photos-anti-asian-racism

BOOKS
I'm Still Thinking About This Book About The Worst Earthquake In US History A Year After Reading It

Jon Mooallem’s This Is Chance! tells the story of the worst earthquake in US history, but its themes of community are universal.

Arianna ReboliniBuzzFeed News Reporter


Posted on March 23, 2021

Bill Ray / The LIFE Picture Collection via
Scene showing earthquake destruction in Anchorage.

“There are moments when the world we take for granted instantaneously changes,” Jon Mooallem writes in the opening pages of his 2020 book, This Is Chance!, “when reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life. We don’t walk around thinking about that instability, but we know it’s always there: at random and without warning, a kind of terrible magic can switch on and scramble our lives.”

Mooallem is talking about the Great Alaskan earthquake — a 9.2 magnitude quake that struck on March 27, 1964, decimated Anchorage, led to over 100 deaths, and remains the most powerful earthquake in US history — but when I read the book for the first time last March, the scene felt uncomfortably familiar. At the time, I was beginning to suspect we were on the brink of our own catastrophe. My husband and I had, fortuitously, just moved to a new apartment so we no longer had to share a bedroom with our 6-month-old son, but after just three days of figuring out my new commute we were told we should probably work from home. Out on walks to explore our new neighborhood, neighbors were starting to wear masks; stores were starting to close. Soon those daily walks ended, too. But it was early enough that I believed in the brevity of this newly named pandemic’s effects. We’d all stay at home for a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two, until we got a handle on the spread.


But then my husband’s salary was cut; soon after, mine was, too. We said goodbye to our nanny. We tried to find toilet paper. I sat on the floor of the shower and sobbed. You know how this story goes; you were there, too. We, like those at the epicenter of the 1964 quake, would soon find ourselves in a “jumbled and ruthlessly unpredictable world they did not recognize.”

I’ve returned to This Is Chance! a few times since last March. I interviewed Mooallem over text message, joking about the parallels between the book and our current bewildering reality, not yet realizing how far the destruction would reach. I wrote about the book for both our best of spring and end of year lists. For a while, I wouldn’t shut up about it to friends and acquaintances who, like me, were slowly losing the ability and will to read. And now, suddenly, it’s March of 2021. I’m putting together a list of new paperbacks, and there it is. I remember what it was like to read it for the first time, and I think, God, was I ever so young?


Courtesy of Jan Blankenship
Genie Chance

This Is Chance! is about Genie Chance, a broadcast journalist and mom — diligent but often underestimated, forced to placate the egos of her male colleagues and subjects (and husband) — who experienced what’s now known as the Great Alaskan earthquake while driving with her son. She dropped him off at home and immediately ran back out to investigate. Using her transistor radio, Chance started broadcasting from her car, and then set up a station at the Public Safety Building, which became an impromptu command center. She began not even an hour after that first quake, and continued for the next thirty.

Everything that happens in Anchorage over the course of the following three days passes through her; her story is the story of her city. Anchorage, which had been incorporated as a city just 44 years earlier, was unprepared; it “had no protocol for this kind of emergency.” Chance saw the chaos around her — felled buildings, crushed cars, split roads — and decided to claim the responsibility of preventing a possible “breakdown of civil society,” to “stave off that mayhem.”

Others followed suit. A public works employee spearheaded a campaign to map out the city’s destruction and hazards, deputizing a group of city employees and volunteers using DIY armbands — strips of white bedsheets with the word “police” handwritten in lipstick. Amateur ham radio operators became ad hoc messengers, “hunkering in their radio-equipped cars to function as a kind of substitute telephone system.” An assistant professor took the lead on “organizing a systematic effort to scour the city for those still missing and to collect the dead.” Not to mention the countless people digging through rubble on the street, pulling neighbors out of trapped cars, administering first aid. Recalling the response in the immediate aftermath, one resident said, “everybody tried to help […] Clerks, bookkeepers. Everybody was trying to do a little bit of everything for everybody.”

The city’s Civil Defense bureau was theoretically in charge of the emergency response, and the morning after the first 9.2 magnitude quake, Douglas Clure, who had recently resigned as the agency’s director, returned to the Public Safety Building to announce that it was taking control. But the office was a mess of “antic ineffectualness.” Those who’d been doing the agency’s job for almost a full day “found it was faster, and less frustrating, to bypass Clure [and] just solve the problem themselves. They complained that Clure’s people moved too slowly, or in circles. Clure seemed hamstrung by finicky questions of protocol. ‘Who’s going to give me this authority?’ one Disaster Control worker remembered him asking continually, whenever some unconventional emergency action was proposed.”

The earthquake revealed the fragility of the young city’s literal and figurative foundation. It also revealed its citizens’ strength. Facing a “complete breakdown of all bureaucracy,” the community improvised its own disaster management system, comprising “volunteers … ordinary citizens, many of whom seemed no more qualified to handle such a crisis than Genie was.” But handle it they did.

Anchorage’s government failed the city largely because at the time it was “still an excruciatingly young place.” Ours had no excuse. We’ve spent over a year being failed — by state and federal politicians voting against financial relief, botching lockdowns and vaccine distribution; by banks and landlords; by employers; and, yes, by some neighbors. But in the midst of the negligence of the systems ostensibly built to protect us, community formed around those looking to support and be supported by others. What else was there to do? People turned to mutual aid funds, crowdfunded support for small businesses, fought evictions, found and distributed PPE. If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that many of us survived not because of our governments, but in spite of them.


Courtesy of Jan Blankenship
Downtown Anchorage is seen minutes after a powerful earthquake in this image by Genie Chance.

We can’t talk about This Is Chance! without talking about Our Town. Thornton Wilder’s 1938 meta play about small-town life, about the extraordinary masquerading as the ordinary and vice versa, drives Mooallem’s narrative. When the earthquake hit Anchorage, its small local theater was preparing for a production of the experimental work; in the midst of the destruction, a fallen banner reading “Our Town” lay in the rubble. It’s a detail that would read as too on-the-nose if this were fiction.

Our Town’s plot is uneventful and almost beside the point — in a small town called Grover’s Corners, two young neighbors fall in love, get married, grow old, and die. The star is the Stage Manager, a narrator with godlike omniscience who shoots into the future to describe each character’s whole life and eventual death, and zooms out to remind the audience how painfully insignificant a town and a life can seem when considered from a distance. Mooallem writes:

"The Stage Manager is saying: Remember us. Recognize us. It’s one community’s simple insistence that it mattered, made urgent by a suspicion that, ultimately, it might not matter. In other words, the overwhelming disaster everyone in Our Town is confronting is irrelevance: a creeping awareness that no matter how secure and central each of us feels within the stories of our own lives, we are, in reality, just specks of things, at the mercy of larger forces that can blot us out indifferently or by chance."

In This Is Chance!, Mooallem fills the role of the Stage Manager; by tracking those three days in Anchorage, hour by hour, he takes up the mantle of demanding these people, this town, be recognized, despite the inevitability and mundanity of disaster. In a year of universal grief and loneliness — when, so often and in so many ways, we were told our lives were expendable — this rings especially true.

What I realize now, revisiting the book, is that it didn’t stick with me because of its prescient portrayal of disaster — it was its unsentimental testimony of cooperation, its rejection of nihilism in the face of catastrophe upon catastrophe. When describing the Chance family’s refusal to separate after the earthquake, despite Genie’s parents’ insistence that she send the kids to their home in Texas, Mooallem writes, “Our force for counteracting chaos is connection.” It’s a sentiment that travels well. Nothing is unique in the grand scheme of things: how bleak, how beautiful. ●

PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS

WHO: Vaccine inequity becomes 'more grotesque every day

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF BIG PHARMA

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pleaded with rich countries on Monday to share vaccines with poorer countries if not out of morality then to do so out of their self-interest. Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/EPA-EFE


March 22 (UPI) -- World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus chastised rich nations on Monday for seeking to inoculate their entire populations against COVID-19 at the expense of lives in poorer countries, describing the inequitable distribution of vaccines as "becoming more grotesque every day."

"Countries that are now vaccinating younger, healthier people at low risk of disease are doing so at the cost of the lives of health workers, older people and other at-risk groups in other countries," he said during a press conference on Monday. "The world's poorest countries wonder whether rich countries really mean what they say when the talk about solidarity."

In mid-January, Tedros warned the world is on "the brink of a catastrophic moral failure," the price for which would be the lives and livelihoods in the world's poorest countries.

At the time, more than 39 million doses of vaccine had been administered to some 49 richer countries while one poorer nation had only administered 25, he said.

According to Oxford University's Our World In Data project, some 500 million doses have been administered, with the United States at 124 million doses and China at 75 million compared to Nigeria and the Bahamas who as of last week had administered 8,000 doses and 110, respectively.

By doses per 100 people, Israel led the world with 112.52. Nigeria, with a population of more than 200 million, was at zero and the Bahamas and Vietnam were at 0.03 doses.

COVAX, the WHO-led initiative to provide equitable access to vaccines, as of Monday has shipped some 31 million doses to 57 participating nations, including Ghana, Brazil, Uganda, Mali, Malawi and others.

Tedros warned Monday that this inequitable distribution was not simply a moral failure but was also misguided, with rich nations attempting to buy "a false sense of security" through rushing to inoculate their entire populations.

"The more transmission, the more variants and the more variants that emerge the more likely it is they will evade vaccines," he said. "And as long as the virus continues to circulate everywhere, anywhere, people will continue to die."

Trade and travel will continue to be disrupted, he said, and it will also undo economic recoveries.

Without naming any nation, Tedros appealed to them that if they weren't going share vaccines for "the right reasons" then do it "out of self-interest."

He praised South Korea, a wealthier nation that could have secured doses through deals inked directly with countries, for having "waited its turn" for those supplied through COVAX.

He also named pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca as being the only COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer to commit to not profiting off of its medicine and for licensing its technology to other companies that have produced more than 90% of the vaccines distributed through COVAX.

"We nee more vaccine producers to follow this example," he said.

Since being inaugurated in January, U.S. President Joe Biden has committed $2 billion to COVAX.

In December, the People's Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of health and humanitarian organizations, accused richer nations of having "hoarded" vaccines, stating while dozens of poorer nations were for doses, the richest countries secured enough to inoculate their populations three-fold.

According to data curated by Johns Hopkins University, more than 123.6 million people have been sickened by the virus, including 2.7 million who lost their lives.