Seventeen years ago, Cho Mar*, a teenager at the time, says she was completely oblivious to a planned referendum on a new, military-drafted constitution, and equally unready for the enormous storm called “Nargis” bearing down on her home country.
At the time, the country was also remote from the thoughts and concerns of most of the world. Nearly two decades of rule by former dictator Senior-General Than Shwe and the clique of generals and cronies surrounding him had largely cut Myanmar off from trade, communication, or other interaction with other parts of the world.
Infrastructure that is now taken for granted in Myanmar, such as accessible transport, electric power, and mobile phones or other telecommunications, were rare luxuries almost exclusively available to the top military brass and their families.
Understating the threat posed by the approaching storm, possibly on purpose, state-owned official media predicted on April 30 that Nargis’s wind speeds would slow to less than 45 miles per hour by the time it hit the shore. Its actual speed when it made landfall on May 2 was 130 miles per hour.
On that day, a Friday, Cho Mar was resting at her home in the Ayeyarwady River delta with her father, finishing a sewing exercise she had begun two days earlier.
Her younger brother was busying himself picking up the coconuts that had begun falling at a faster rate than usual from the wind-shaken palms near their house.
“The river swelled and flooded its banks, and in what seemed like no time, the water was knee-high,” Cho Mar said, also recalling how by then the wind was dashing coconuts off the trees fast enough to break holes in their house’s roof when they fell.
Alarmed by the sudden change in the weather, the family fled, seeking sturdier shelter or at least higher ground to escape the flood. With just a few bundled clothes, a blanket, and 50,000 kyat in cash, Cho Mar, her father, and her younger brother tried to wade through the rising water, but the currents were getting stronger.
“The current was starting to drag me away every time I lifted one of my feet,” she recalled. “My younger brother, who was stronger than me, had to catch me and pull me back.”
Seventeen years after Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar, the nation reflects on the catastrophic event that claimed over 138,000 lives and displaced approximately 2.4 million people, primarily in the Ayeyarwady Delta and Yangon regions. The cyclone remains the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s recorded history.
In the immediate aftermath, the ruling military junta, the State Peace and Development Council, faced international criticism for its handling of the crisis. Despite the widespread devastation, the junta proceeded with a national referendum on a new constitution just one week later, on May 10, 2008. The regime claimed a 92.4% approval rate with a 98% voter turnout.
The junta’s initial obstruction of international aid efforts further exacerbated the humanitarian crisis. Visas for foreign aid workers were delayed, supplies were held up at airports, and local relief efforts were restricted. International agencies, including the United Nations, called for urgent access to deliver lifesaving assistance, but many areas remained inaccessible for weeks.
A family forced apart
As masses of branches and floating debris on the floodwater slowed the family’s progress and ultimately made it impossible to go farther, they decided to seek shelter from the intensifying storm in a nearby concrete office building.
Gathering close together on a desk they found in the building, they listened to the rain lashing down in torrents in the darkness outside.
“It was freezing cold and dark. Our father wrapped us in a blanket while we huddled close to each other,” she said.
The raging wind and rain grew even more violent, carrying off the roof of the building. The family began to pray, she said.
“A flash of lightning showed a drowning crow near us. Our father saved it, putting it on the desk with us,” Cho Mar recalled.
Then, before they could realise what was happening, a wall of the building buckled and collapsed. A rush of water burst into the building, swamping Cho Mar, her brother, and her father and sending them tumbling in different directions.
Cho Mar believes the family was separated at around 10pm that evening.
Mercifully rising to the surface, Cho Mar called for her father and brother as soon as she could catch her breath.
But they were nowhere to be found. The darkness was too black to find them and it was impossible to cry out audibly over the noise of the wind and rain, no matter how much she strained to be heard.
She was still inside the building’s remaining walls, she remembered, and the floodwater kept rising. She could barely stand or breathe as it reached the height of her neck.
“It came to me that fight or flight were my only choices,” she said.
“I made up my mind to swim and find a higher building if I could. But when I picked up my feet, the current carried me away.”
“I couldn’t really swim, I could only barely stay afloat. I was only 62 inches tall and weighed 110 pounds. I was like paper in the water, and all I could do was drift where it took me.”
Carried on the current to a partly submerged copse of bamboo, she grabbed hold and clung to it as long as she could. As the rising tide neared the top of the stalks, she had to let go and take her chances in the current again, she said.
In her pitch-black surroundings, Cho Mar could not even tell whether she was still in her village or had been carried out to sea. All she knew was that she was surrounded by water on all sides.
“I was alone, frightened, and afraid of drowning. I couldn’t see anything nearby,” she said.
“I realised I was hoping to be rescued on a ship coming to save people, like in a movie,” she added. “But there was none. I was weeping with fear but tried to hold onto some hope. I tried to swim but couldn’t control my direction and was just carried off again.”
However, the current brought her to a building where other survivors were sheltering. Lightning flashed as she floated by, casting just enough light to make her visible to them.
“They saw me in the flash. They shouted, ‘There’s someone there!’ and scooped me out of the water as I tried to grab hold of a window,” she said.
As Cho Mar recalled, there were around 100 people there, on what turned out to be the roof of a clinic. Many of them were children. She could now see a little through the storm and darkness, and saw buildings swaying in the storm winds.
By morning, the water was receding. As soon as they could, the villagers started to descend from the roof and wander out from the clinic, looking for any relatives who were unaccounted for.
Cho Mar looked over the wreckage as she set off on her own search. Her village was unrecognisable, she said, with uprooted and broken trees, bushes, and branches strewn over the ground. The cyclone, she later learned, had caused the waters to rise by 3.5 metres as much as 40 kilometres inland.
“I had trouble even being able to tell east from west in my village anymore as I started searching for our father,” she said.
That morning, she found her brother alive but also barely recognisable. He was bruised, battered, and cold after several hours in the water.
Her father was less fortunate. They found his body under a concrete wall with a torch beside him, she said. Cho Mar believed her entire family except for her younger brother was lost, including her mother and two elder brothers who had set off on a trip to another village when the storm hit.
“I buried my father with the help of some other villagers. I cried till my head hurt, and my only thought was about how my younger brother was the only one still left with me,” she told Myanmar Now.
No help and no food for days
Cho Mar’s village of Theik Pan Kone Gyi, Labutta Township is remote, located across several rivers and more than fifteen miles from Labutta, and nearly 60 miles—at the time, a journey of seven hours—south of Ayeyarwady Region’s capital, Pathein.
Around 250 of the 300 houses in the village were destroyed in the storm, and 182 of the village’s residents were confirmed to have been killed.
Located on near the northwest bank of the Pyinzalu River, a distributary branch of the Ayeyarwady in the delta, Theik Pan Kone Gyi was only accessible by boat.
In the wake of the cyclone, the dictatorship in power at the time reportedly blocked workers and international agencies trying to bring domestic and foreign aid to the village. For days, no help and no food reached the village.
The residents had to scavenge for rotting rice, animals killed in the storm, and coconuts. Lacking houses to sleep in after their homes were destroyed, they huddled under crude, makeshift roofs or lean-tos in the fields.
“There was nothing to eat except soggy, sandy rice,” Cho Mar said. “I couldn’t eat it at all but others tried.”
“All I ate for five days was coconuts,” she added. “I survived on them.”
However, as the days wore on with no sign of rescue missions or assistance, it became harder to live on the meagre food that was left, especially as the smell of putrefaction from animals and people killed in the flood grew stronger, Cho Mar remembered.
It was an indescribable relief the next week when her mother and brothers, whom she had given up for lost, returned to the village.
A Karen Christian rescue team also arrived in the village by boat shortly afterwards, but by this time, Cho Mar was in shock or depressed.
“Although I was relieved to have my mother back, I was not particularly happy about the rescue mission because I was numb to all feelings and emotions,” Cho Mar recalled.
The relief group’s boat carried the survivors of Nargis out of the village to Pathein in the second week of May.
Cho Mar described the scene: “A sea full of dead fish and the land full of dead bodies.” The bodies of the victims were bloated, with darkened, bluish skin, she said. After seeing that, “I felt nothing,” she said. “Even a threat to kill me would not have scared me at that point.”
Devastation and the challenges of relief
Nandi*, a 39-year-old monk from Labutta who now runs a social charity and rescue team, told Myanmar Now that around 2,000 survivors took shelter at his monastery after the cyclone.
The monastery was only able to provide rice, but residents who had been spared from the flood donated fermented fish and fish paste, products for which Ayeyarwady Region is well-known.
“All we had was rice saved from the summer round of alms. Rice and fish pastes were all we could give them to eat at the monastery,” he said, adding that aid was far too slow to arrive.
“In order to have enough food left for the survivors, we monks had to limit ourselves to one meal per day,” he told Myanmar Now.
During one of his missions to low-lying villages, which suffered the worst effects from the cyclone, he saw that people had died from hunger while awaiting aid.
“I saw some bodies in sitting positions, leaning against trees,” he said.
“The people had nothing to eat but the waterlogged or rotting carcasses of animals like cows, pigs, or water buffaloes because the relief could not reach them on time.”
He continued: “It was the people themselves who helped each other, but the military regime only did the work for show. Frankly speaking, the military administration was just like it is now.”
Another rescuer said he was allowed to travel to the Ayeyarwady delta only after agreeing to “very strict” rules and had to seek permission from the regime’s soldiers and officers all along the way to his destination.
“The junta soldiers waiting along the way asked for aid items, saying to leave half to them. There was no way to continue without their permission,” he said.
It was raining constantly, he recalled, with survivors taking shelter under trees when they had nowhere else to go.
“Except for the work by some social workers, there was very little in the way of rescue efforts,” he said.
The scale of the damage was enormous, he added, with fallen trees and damaged houses visible in all directions as far as the eye could see.
“You could only hear the sound of rain, but no human sound; it was eerie. And dead bodies were floating all over without anyone to bury them,” he recalled.
“At one point, I was eating lunch and a crowd of children flocked to me and watched as I tried to eat. I was so sad I couldn’t keep eating and gave it to them.”
Disaster and death under military rule
On a recent relief mission, Nandi went to the parts of central Myanmar that bore the brunt of the March earthquake’s impact. More than 3,800 people were killed in the area, most in the cities of Mandalay and Sagaing.
“The sights I saw were not much different from Nargis,” he said.
According to one United Nations (UN) report released in January, some 19.9 million people were still in need of assistance in Myanmar, an already unprecedented level of demand that has risen dramatically since the quake.
The earthquake is the second-largest natural disaster to have occurred in nearly two decades, and has left 4.3 million more people without access to basic necessities.
Nargis claimed the lives of over 138,000 people—more than 30 times the confirmed death toll from the recent quake—and displaced around 2.4 million people in 17 townships in Ayeyarwady Region.
Both occurred under military rule: the first under the dictatorship of Senior-General Than Shwe and the second under current junta chief Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, who led the military to seize power in 2021, ousting a civilian government led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
Following the 2021 coup, the country and its people have suffered through both deteriorating economic conditions and political turmoil. A bloody civil war is still raging in the country, with the Myanmar military embroiled in daily battles with anti-junta armed groups.
Conflict has displaced more than 3.3 million people from their homes since the coup and killed at least 5,350 civilians, according to a report released by the UN last September.
A more recent UN statement issued on April 7 noted that Myanmar’s military, while still fighting resistance and ethnic armed groups on multiple fronts, has been pushed to the “verge of collapse” in its capacity to provide essential services and governance for Myanmar’s people.
“Now, with needs escalating rapidly, the earthquake has pushed those already vulnerable people even deeper into crisis—while tipping many others into new and urgent needs,” the statement said.
Yet, despite declaring a temporary ceasefire after the quake, the military has not stopped its campaign of airstrikes and other attacks targeting anti-junta groups, even in civilian areas.
As UN human rights office spokesperson Ravini Shamdasani noted at a press conference in Geneva on April 11, “At a moment when the sole focus should be on ensuring humanitarian aid gets to disaster zones, the military is instead launching attacks.”
The previous military regime also showed little inclination to prioritise the urgent needs of the people following the disaster.
Among other failings, they proceeded with a referendum on the 2008 Constitution that was scheduled the same month Cyclone Nargis struck, postponing it by only a fortnight—from May 10 to May 24—in the townships most severely impacted by the storm.
At the same time, it delayed or blocked the delivery of aid to those most in need.
Mark Canning, the former British ambassador to Myanmar between 2006 and 2009, said that any government would have been tested by the scale of the disaster, but described the response he saw from the regime as “incompetent and uncaring.”
Regime officials, he recalled, did not understand the outside world or the international community. They ran a repressive, inward-looking government that was not in the business of serving the public as its primary function.
“Helping people is completely alien to them,” he remarked, noting that the regime did not even keep a reliable toll of the casualties from the disaster. “I think even today, one does not really know exactly how many people perished in that terrible storm.”
He remembered how, in addition to its seeming inability to release reliable figures about the cyclone’s impact, the regime remained stubbornly reluctant to accept aid from abroad.
“All the time, the death toll was rising… between 130,000 and 140,000 people. But ships were still being turned away fully loaded from Yangon,” Canning said. “The regime wanted the money; they wanted help but they didn’t want any foreign assistance coming into the country.”
Their motive for blocking the aid, he believes, was “all about control and repression and remaining in power… They were distrustful of the outside world.”
This suspicion also extended to domestic relief teams, who were central to the emergency response. Reports emerged of local relief workers being arrested while trying to help their own communities.
The current junta is similarly wary of what the international community could discover about the country if they were granted the access needed to deliver assistance, according to Nandi.
During his own trip to Sagaing Region, Nandi remembered, he and his team were blocked from bringing aid to Min Kun, one of the worst-hit townships.
After living under two military regimes with a few years of civilian administration in between, Nandi feels a civilian government would have been more effective in responding to disaster and delivering lifesaving relief to survivors.
“I want the people to have their own civilian government soon,” he said, noting that the civilian administration under Aung San Suu Kyi had garnered international praise for its response to the earlier stages of Covid-19 pandemic. In contrast, however, hundreds had died during the second and third waves, which occurred under the coup regime.
“If the civilian government had been in power during Nargis and the recent earthquake, the conditions for receiving international aid would have been extremely different,” he added. “Facing natural disasters, the people have to suffer even more at the hands of the military.”
‘Haunted’
“People are still haunted by the Nargis even 17 years later,” said Nandi.
Despite the 17 years, the traumas of Nargis have a tenacious hold on people’s memories, especially when there are storm warnings in the forecast.
“People still carry trauma and fear from Nargis. These days, they watch the weather and take care to prepare themselves,” says Cho Mar, now aged 35 and living in Pathein with a two-year-old child.
Every second of May, she said, most people may be living their lives like any other day, but the people who lost loved ones in the cyclone are still suffering.
“It’s now been 17 years, but I always remember my father,” she said, her voice sinking.
“It does not get old, rather it’s a fresh reminder of the events of that day each time,” she added. “Since I lost my father, I feel unwell every May.”
For Cho Mar and others, the trauma from Nargis has taken deep root. However, she says she prefers to avoid talking about it, and that the account she shared with Myanmar Now was one of her first times openly reliving those awful memories.
She also avoids watching disaster films or anything that might trigger her post-traumatic stress.
“Even now, I can’t watch movies like Titanic or the Nargis documentary. I don’t watch them because I don’t want to face that ever again. All I can watch is bland, funny little movies and cartoons,” she said.
“Since the coup, I feel as though I’m back in the Nargis cyclone,” she added when asked about her reaction to the recent quake, the deadliest natural disaster yet under the reigning military regime.
“It brought back those moments when I was struggling, swimming for my life. Knowing there is no rescue and no help coming.”
*Names in this article have been changed to protect our sources’ privacy and security.
