Force Them To Take It!
“You have to think it through — do you want to secure an area of the country by military force? What kinds of potential security risks would that create?” says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. “I can’t imagine any humanitarian organization wanting to shoot their way in with food.”
This quote from a CNN news source points up a real sticky problem. Here’s the gist:
The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.
The military regime that runs Burma has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the U.S. to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says.
That means we are going to force them to take our aid, whether they want it or not. After all it would save lives and every life is precious. Isn’t that the same position the Church of Jesus Christ is in today. We have the “life-saving” goods and the “World” does not want it. Barely a trickle of the Good News is getting through. It’s easy to just ignore the dying when they are not on your doorstep. But just as we have a mandate to provide aid to those who have physical need, so the Church has the commission to meet the spiritual need of all by sharing the Good News far and wide. We can’t force anyone to take it, but we can find those holes (for the trickle) and get it done when and where we can.