Residents of the Myanmar town say hundreds may have died needlessly due to a slow and inadequate response to last week’s earthquake, while centuries-old mosques and monasteries lie in ruins and the stench of dead bodies fills the streets.
By FRONTIER
The Moe Kya Jamay Mosque in Sagaing town was full of worshippers when a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck at 12:51pm on March 28, nine minutes before Friday prayers were due to start. The sudden, violent shaking sent the attendees running for the exit, even as the mosque began collapsing around them.
Not all of them managed to escape.
Ko Htoo Htoo, 30, was one of the lucky ones who made it outside.“We started pulling people out,” he said, but 10 minutes later a second earthquake, of 6.4 magnitude, shook the earth with such force that it collapsed the rest of the mosque. “People who were trying to rescue those inside were also crushed,” he told Frontier as tears filled his eyes. “I escaped because Allah saved me.”
He says he can’t forget the scene, standing outside the ruined building surrounded by worshippers’ sandals, which they had removed before entering for the prayer service. The blood of their owners was seeping from the rubble.
Htoo Htoo, who asked Frontier to withhold his real name for security reasons, said about 150 people were at the mosque, a higher number than usual because the day marked the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Only a few dozen survived.
Although the earthquake occurred on Friday, no well-trained or properly equipped rescue teams arrived at the mosque to help until four days later. Until then, the only people at the site were Muslim volunteers from nearby areas.
“We had to work on our own, using our hands, hammers and chisels. We didn’t find anyone alive, only dead bodies,” Htoo Htoo said.
By the time a rescue team from Malaysia arrived on Tuesday, volunteers had found about 50 dead bodies, with many more remaining under the mosque’s rubble. When Frontier visited the site on that day, the smell of decaying corpses in the scorching heat was making some people faint.
“The families are crying and begging us to look for their loved ones, so we keep digging up the bodies one by one,” one Muslim volunteer told Frontier.
A total of three mosques collapsed during the earthquake in Sagaing town, and Htoo Htoo estimated that at least 350 Muslims died as a result. The Spring Revolution Myanmar Muslim Network said on March 31 that the earthquake killed up to 700 Muslims in Myanmar, and damaged or destroyed about 60 mosques in Sagaing and Mandalay regions. Many mosques were in poor repair because discriminatory local authorities have for years refused permission for renovations.
The earthquake also killed many Buddhists in Sagaing town. Sagaing Hill, on the eastern side of the town overlooking the Ayeyarwady River, is famous for its monasteries, where thousands of monks and nuns live. Frontier saw that many of the monasteries had collapsed into huge piles of bricks that had not yet been cleared as of Tuesday.
According to residents, many of the monasteries were sheltering large numbers of children who had fled conflict areas in Sagaing Region, and many of them were trapped under the rubble.
One of the collapsed monasteries was the three-storey Yadanar Theingi, where about 20 girls were stuck under the debris.
“No rescuers came [to the monastery] for two days after the earthquake,” a Sagaing resident told Frontier. “During that time we could hear the children screaming for help. With the help of the monks and nuns, we dug as much as we could with our bare hands, but we couldn’t do anything. All the children died.”
‘They can only search for dead bodies now’
Mosques and monasteries were not the only sites in the town where assistance was slow to arrive. Controlled by the junta in a region where large swathes of territory are in the hands of resistance groups, Sagaing town is one of the few places where the regime had not cut off internet services. However, electricity and mobile phone service broke down for two days after the earthquake.
To make matters worse, rumours circulated that the junta was not allowing aid groups to access the town. Rescue teams were therefore hesitant to go there, and instead opted to head for Mandalay and Nay Pyi Taw, which were also badly affected by the quake.
When mobile internet lines were restored on Sunday, residents were able to get online and explain the situation to those outside the area.
“The only remaining bridge to enter the town was damaged. That’s why regime officials barred vehicles from using it freely. However, they allowed cars to cross in groups,” a Sagaing resident told Frontier. “But due to the rumours, our town suffered more losses than it should have if people had come more quickly.”
This “remaining bridge” was opened in 2008 and connects Sagaing and Mandalay regions across the Ayeyarwady River. The older, colonial-era Ava Bridge to the south was completely destroyed by the earthquake.
Once rumours were dispelled that the junta was stopping aid teams from reaching Sagaing, rescue and recovery groups started to arrive in the town on Monday. However, by that time the crucial 72-hour rescue window had already passed. When Frontier visited Sagaing on Tuesday, many volunteer groups were heading to the town, and the roads were jammed with traffic. Frontier spent more than two hours travelling from Mandalay to Sagaing town across the new bridge, a journey that normally takes less than 45 minutes.
By that time, the smell of corpses had permeated the town, and residents and the local rescue teams looked haggard and exhausted.
Frontier estimates that three quarters of the buildings in Sagaing town were badly damaged or completely destroyed. Rescue teams estimated that the earthquake killed at least 800 people out of a total population of 84,000. The regime said 3,145 people had been confirmed dead across the country as of Friday.
“There are so many deaths in this small area. The local rescue teams and firefighters in the town aren’t enough,” a resident told Frontier. “Many people who were trapped under the rubble died because no one could rescue them in time. By the time rescue teams from outside arrived, many trapped had already died. They can only search for dead bodies now.”
During the first three days after the earthquake, as Sagaing town was struggling to rescue victims on its own, regime forces were largely absent. Junta firefighter teams were seen in the town but residents say they were few and far between.
It wasn’t until Sunday that soldiers arrived to help, but they limited their work to clearing debris from monasteries.
“The military has been doing demolition and cleanup at famous monasteries, but that’s all,” one local told Frontier. “They aren’t doing anything for the town’s residents. We have to do everything ourselves.”
Another resident who witnessed about 30 soldiers clearing debris from a well-known monastery on Tuesday and Wednesday said most of them looked like conscripts who were being forced to work under the watchful eye of two armed soldiers.
“They look like prisoners doing forced labour. They were newly conscripted soldiers, and two soldiers were standing guard ready to shoot them if they tried to escape,” the resident told Frontier.
‘There just aren’t enough people’ to help
Meanwhile, as more help arrives to dig through the rubble of Sagaing’s collapsed buildings, the town’s general hospital is overwhelmed. When Frontier visited on Wednesday, more than 200 injured people occupied beds that had been set up outdoors in the hospital compound. The building itself did not appear to be badly damaged, showing just a few cracks in the walls, but there were fears that it could collapse during one of the frequent aftershocks still rattling the area.
The constant flow of injured people entering the hospital has been a severe strain on the small trained medical staff of 30 or 40, aided by another 40 or so volunteers who lack proper training. Meanwhile, the hospital also faces shortages of medicine and other supplies.
“I’ve never worked on something like this before and I’ve never learned first aid. But I’m helping here because there just aren’t enough people,” said Ko Soe, a member of a volunteer group in Sagaing who asked for his name to be withheld for his safety.
He admitted that the hospital is unable to effectively treat many patients due to the lack of expertise among the volunteers and the scale of the catastrophe.
“There was a monk who had his leg crushed by the rubble. The hospital staff couldn’t treat him immediately and when the leg was full of pus and started to rot they had to cut it off below the knee,” he told Frontier.
“The equipment is also insufficient. There was another patient who needed a steel rod in his broken arm. But all the hospital staff could do was bandage it, and then they told the patient to get treatment at another hospital.”
