 MSNBC.com |
YANGON, Myanmar - Hopes of a deal to speed up aid to millions of Myanmar cyclone victims rose on Monday as the U.N. said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would visit this week and Southeast Asia kicked off its own disaster-response meeting.
In other signs that the secretive military regime may be softening its stance on foreign aid after the devastating May 2-3 storm killed at least 78,000, The Associated Press quoted an unnamed U.N. official as saying that the government had allowed the U.N.'s humanitarian chief into the Irrawaddy delta for a brief tour.
John Holmes, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, flew by helicopter into an area where hundreds of thousands of cyclone victims are suffering from hunger, disease and lack of shelter, the AP reported.
The U.N. official, who requested anonymity since he was not authorized to speak with the press, said that after a few hours in the delta Holmes would return to Yangon to meet with international aid agencies.
Humanitarian agencies say the death toll from Nargis, already one of the most devastating cyclones to hit Asia, could soar without a massive increase of emergency food, shelter and medicine to the worst-hit region, the Irrawaddy Delta.
Non-government aid organization Save the Children said in a Sunday statement its research had found some "30,000 children under the age of five in the cyclone-affected Irrawaddy Delta were already acutely malnourished before the cyclone hit".
"Of those, Save the Children believes that several thousand are at risk of death in the next two to three weeks because of a lack of food."
Secretary-General's trip
Ban's trip is expected to culminate in a rare tete-a-tete with junta supremo Than Shwe, who has refused to answer phone calls from the United Nations boss since Cyclone Nargis struck two weeks ago, leaving 134,000 dead and missing and up to 2.5 million destitute.
The United Nations also wants a conference in Bangkok on May 24 to marshal funds for the relief effort in the former Burma, where the military government has so far refused to admit large-scale foreign aid for fear it will loosen its 46-year grip on power.
Britain's Asia minister, Mark Malloch-Brown, told Reuters in Yangon on Sunday that diplomats may have turned the corner in brokering a deal to get aid flowing which accommodated the generals' deep distrust of the outside world, in particular the West.
"Like all turning points in Burma, the corner will have a few 'S' bends in it," Malloch-Brown said after a series of meetings with top junta officials.
Little is known about the deal, although it is probably no coincidence that foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member, were holding a cyclone response meeting on Monday in Singapore.
Malloch-Brown, who came to Yangon after visiting some ASEAN members, said an Asian/U.N.-led process had already begun and other countries would make contributions through this channel.
Asian nations considered friendly by Myanmar have sent in aid groups and an ASEAN assessment team that has been on the ground in the delta is due to report to the Singapore meeting.
"What is important to be discussed now is how ASEAN, as ASEAN, can give contributions to Myanmar," said Kristiarto Legowo, spokesman for Indonesia's Foreign Ministry, as senior ASEAN officials met at Singapore's Shangri-La Hotel.
Trickle of aid
While aid has been trickling into Myanmar, the U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) says it has managed to get rice and beans to just 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need.
Analysts say strong criticism of the Myanmar junta's reluctance over foreign aid is unlikely from ASEAN's Singapore meeting. ASEAN has a policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of its 10 member states.
"I think everybody has already agreed to engage Myanmar and this is a very good opportunity to show Myanmar that everybody is caring," said Clarita Carlos, political science professor at the University of the Philippines.
"By moral persuasion, the foreign ministers can ask Myanmar to provide the logistical support, the infrastructure because it's a less developed economy, to get this aid flowing."
Myanmar analysts are making much of the reclusive Than Shwe's first appearance since the disaster in Yangon, the city he deserted in 2005 for a remote new capital 250 miles to the north.
State television showed the bespectacled 74-year-old Than Shwe in Yangon on Monday meeting ministers involved in the rescue effort and touring some cyclone-hit areas.
The U.N.'s Ban was likely to land in Yangon on Wednesday evening and travel to the Irrawaddy Delta, his spokeswoman said.
Ban previously proposed a "high-level pledging conference" to deal with the crisis, as well as having a joint coordinator from the United Nations and ASEAN to oversee aid delivery.
In the last 50 years, only two Asian cyclones have exceeded the human toll of Nargis -- a 1970 storm that killed 500,000 people in neighboring Bangladesh and another that killed 143,000 people in 1991, also in Bangladesh.
At least 232,000 people were killed in December 2004 when a tsunami struck nations bordering the Indian Ocean.
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