May

19

Hopes for Myanmar cyclone aid rise as ASEAN meets

Filed Under Natural Disasters | Posted By Jennifer Sullivan |

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mayan.jpgHopes of a deal to expedite aid to millions of Myanmar cyclone victims rose on Monday as the U.N. stated Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would visit this week and Southeast Asia kicked off its own disaster-response meeting.

Ban’s trip is likely to conclude in a rare tete-a-tete with junta supremo Than Shwe, who has refused to respond phone calls from the United Nations boss ever since Cyclone Nargis struck two weeks ago, leaving 134,000 dead and missing and up to 2.5 million destitute.

The U.N. also needs a conference in Bangkok on May 24 to assemble funds for the relief effort in the former Burma, where the military government has so far declined to admit large-scale foreign aid for fear it will loosen its 46-year grip on power.

Humanitarian agencies say the death toll from Nargis, already one of the most devastating cyclones to hit Asia, could rise without a immense raise of emergency food, shelter and medicine to the worst-hit Irrawaddy delta.

Non-government aid organisation Save the Children stated 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 intensely malnourished prior to the cyclone hit.”

“Of those, Save the Children believes that several thousand are endangered of death in the next two to three weeks due to lack of food.”

However, 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 — and in particular the West.

“Like all turning points in Burma, the corner will have a few ‘S’ bends in it,” Malloch-Brown stated after a series of meetings with top junta officials.

Little is known about the deal, though it is probably no coincidence 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, told that an Asian/U.N.-led process had already started 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.

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.

“It’s not sufficient. There are a very large number of people who are yet to obtain any kind of assistance and that’s what’s keeping our teams working round the clock,” WFP spokesman Marcus Prior stated in Bangkok.

Myanmar analysts are making much of the reclusive Than Shwe’s first appearance since the disaster in Yangon, the city he deserted for a remote new capital 250 miles (390 km) to the north in 2005.

State television showed the bespectacled 74-year-old Than Shwe meeting in Yangon on Monday with ministers caught up in the rescue effort and touring some cyclone-hit areas.

The U.N.’s Ban is about to land in Yangon on Wednesday evening and travel to the Irrawaddy delta, his spokeswoman stated.

In the meantime, the U.N.’s chief humanitarian officer, John Holmes, started a government tour of the delta on Monday after flying in on Sunday night, officials said.

He is expected to meet Prime Minister Thein Sein on Tuesday and deliver a message from Ban to the generals.

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 manage aid delivery.

RECORD DAMAGE

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 neighbouring Bangladesh and another that killed 143,000 people in 1991, also in Bangladesh.

Around 232,000 people were killed when the tsunami struck nations bordering the Indian Ocean.

Despite his confidence on aid deal, Britain’s Malloch-Brown stated the junta’s lingering suspicions made it unlikely foreign aid workers would be admitted in numbers comparable to other latest disasters in Asia.



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