While international aid rushes to help in the wake of a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar, the US is nowhere to be seen.
The earthquake, which hit last Friday, has killed at least 3,000 people and left thousands more injured. Chris Milligan, former director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Myanmar, spoke about how inadequate the United States response is.
Milligan arrived in Myanmar in 2012 with a mandate: Help repair diplomatic relations with the southeast Asian country by reopening its United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mission.
By that point, Milligan had worked for the USAID for more than two decades—a tenure that included working on reconstruction in Baghdad following the Iraq War and coordinating the recovery response to Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake.
Fast forward to now, and that progress has been decimated, with USAID missions shuttered around the world after the Trump administration reportedly fired all but 15 legally required positions of the agency’s global staff, throwing it into chaos.
The US Embassy in Myanmar announced that the American government would provide up to $2 million towards recovery efforts—Milligan says that is paltry compared to prior support for similar natural disasters, like the more than $2 billion USAID provided for the earthquake in Haiti.
“We have the capacity, we have the ability, and we have the assets to save lives, and the choice has been not to use it, and people are dying,” he says.
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