World fears for plight of Myanmar cyclone victims
Pastor Dale Morgan
World fears for plight of Myanmar cyclone victims*
By Aung Hla Tun
Reuters
Tuesday, May 13, 2008; 6:21 PM
YANGON (Reuters) - International fears about the plight of 1.5 million
victims in cyclone-ravaged Myanmar deepened on Tuesday as the United
Nations and Western powers suggested helpless people could have been
robbed of food and other aid.
As if fears of shoddy aid distribution were not enough, heavy rains
pelted survivors in Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta, complicating the already
slow delivery of aid to hundreds of thousands of homeless people facing
hunger and disease.
As more foreign aid trickled into the former Burma, critics ratcheted up
the pressure on its military rulers to accelerate a relief effort that
is only delivering an estimated tenth of the supplies needed in the
devastated delta.
Speaking at a regular news conference in New York, U.N. spokeswoman
Michel Montas said the United Nations was concerned that some aid sent
to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, might be diverted to people who
were not victims of Cyclone Nargis.
And Britain's U.N. Ambassador John Sawers told reporters in New York
that Britain had also heard reports that aid was being diverted but had
no hard proof confirming them.
"If they do turn out to be true, we would be very concerned indeed," he
said. "This just underlines the necessity of the Burmese authorities
accepting that their own capacity to distribute aid to 1.5 million
people" is insufficient.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad said concerns
about aid diversion were another reason why "we want more people there
to be able to distribute the aid."
In Brussels, the European Union called on the military junta to allow
entry to aid workers to help victims avert "an even greater tragedy,"
and France urged U.N. action if the junta did not cooperate. Spain said
that failure to allow aid in could amount to a crime against humanity.
The United Nations says more than 1.5 million people are struggling to
survive and up to 100,000 are dead or missing after cyclone Nargis hit.
U.N. spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva it was also vital to
secure the means to deliver aid.
"We need a kind of air bridge or sea bridge, and huge means (just) as
the aid delivery we did in the tsunami, it is the same kind of
logistical operation," said Byrs, of the U.N. Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The junta has accepted aid from the outside world but the help has only
trickled in as the rulers have made it clear they do not want outsiders
distributing it.
FREE AND UNFETTERED ACCESS
In a statement after emergency talks on Myanmar in Brussels, EU
development ministers called on Yangon "to offer free and unfettered
access to international humanitarian experts, including the expeditious
delivery of visa and travel permits."
The EU ministers stopped short of endorsing a French call to deliver aid
if necessary without the junta's permission.
France's junior minister for human rights said it had the backing of
Britain and Germany to call on the U.N. Security Council for aid to be
taken into Myanmar without the government's green light if necessary.
"We have called for the 'responsibility to protect' to be applied in the
case of Burma," Rama Yade told reporters.
British officials said London would welcome discussion of the
'responsibility to protect,' a 2005 U.N. resolution conceived to assist
victims of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity but not
natural disasters.
But the official did not consider the proposal realistic given Russian
and Chinese objections.
An Australian air force plane landed in Yangon, Myanmar's main city,
with 31 metric tons of emergency supplies, a day after the first U.S.
military aid flight arrived in a country Washington has described as an
"outpost of tyranny."
Two more U.S. flights arrived on Tuesday as part of a
"confidence-building" effort to prod Myanmar's reclusive generals into
allowing a larger international relief operation 11 days after the disaster.
Tens of thousands of people throughout the delta are crammed into
Buddhist monasteries and schools after arriving in towns that were poor
even before the disaster.
Lacking food, water and sanitation, they face the threat of diseases.
The heavy rains added to their misery.
"Where I am now, there's over 10,000 homeless people and it's pouring
rain," Bridget Gardener of the International Red Cross said during a
rare tour of the delta by an aid official.
While a steady stream of aid flights have landed in Yangon, only a
fraction of the relief needed is getting to the delta due to flooding
and the junta's desire to keep most foreign aid and logistics experts
either out of the country or in Yangon.
Myanmar state television said six ships carrying 500 metric tons of
supplies had left Yangon for the delta on Tuesday.
International relief organizations say their local staff are stretched
to the breaking point, while Medicins Sans Frontieres said its workers
faced "increasing constraints."
In New York, the U.N. spokeswoman Montas noted that "a very small
percentage of victims have so far received the aid."
One Yangon businessman who returned from a personal aid mission to
Bogalay, a delta township where at least 10,000 people were killed, told
Reuters that soldiers were appropriating aid.
"There are still some villages in the worst-hit areas that nobody has
got to," the man said. "Around Bogalay, private donors are not allowed
to distribute their assistance to the victims themselves. We had to hand
over what we had."
(Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations Carmel
Crimmins in Bangkok; David Brunnstrom and Ingrid Melander in Brussels;
Writing by Louis Charbonneau and Peter Millership; Editing by Philip
Barbara)