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French Official Urges UN to Force Aid on Myanmar •
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US Envoy Says Toll From Myanmar Cyclone Might Reach 100,000
The Associated Press
Wednesday 07 May 2008
Hungry people swarmed the few open shops and fistfights broke out over food
and water in Myanmar's swamped Irrawaddy delta Wednesday as a top U.S. diplomat
warned that the death toll from a devastating cyclone could top 100,000.
The minutes of a U.N. aid meeting obtained by The Associated Press, meanwhile,
revealed the military junta's visa restrictions were hampering international
relief efforts.
Only a handful of U.N. aid workers had been let into the impoverished Southeast
Asian country, which the government has kept isolated for five decades to maintain
its iron-fisted control. The U.S. and other countries rushed supplies to the
region, but most of it was being held outside Myanmar while awaiting the junta's
permission to deliver it.
Entire villages in the Irrawaddy delta were still submerged from Saturday's
storm, and bloated corpses could be seen stuck in the mangroves. Some survivors
stripped clothes off the dead. People wailed as they described the horror of
the torrent swept ashore by the cyclone.
"I don't know what happened to my wife and young children," said
Phan Maung, 55, who held onto a coconut tree until the water level dropped.
By then his family was gone.
A spokesman for the U.N. Children's Fund said its staff in Myanmar reported
seeing many people huddled in rude shelters and children who had lost their
parents.
"There's widespread devastation. Buildings and health centers are flattened
and bloated dead animals are floating around, which is an alarm for spreading
disease. These are massive and horrific scenes," Patrick McCormick said
at UNICEF offices in New York.
Myanmar's state media said Cyclone Nargis killed at least 22,980 people and
left 42,119 missing.
American diplomat Shari Villarosa, who heads the U.S. Embassy in Yangon, said
the number of dead could eventually exceed 100,000 because safe food and water
were scarce and unsanitary conditions widespread.
The situation is "increasingly horrendous," she said in a telephone
call to reporters. "There is a very real risk of disease outbreaks."
A few shops reopened in the Irrawaddy delta, but they were quickly overwhelmed
by desperate people, said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program
in Bangkok, Thailand, quoting his agency's workers in the area.
"Fistfights are breaking out," he said.
A Yangon resident who returned to the city from the delta area said people
were drinking coconut water because there was no safe drinking water. He said
many people were on boats using blankets as sails.
Local aid groups distributed rice porridge, which people collected in dirty
plastic shopping bags, he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he
feared getting into trouble with authorities for talking to a foreign news agency.
U.N. officials estimated some 1 million people had been left homeless in Myanmar,
which also is known as Burma.
Some aid workers said heavily flooded areas were accessible only by boat, with
helicopters unable to find dry spots for landing relief supplies.
"Basically the entire lower delta region is under water," said Richard
Horsey, the Thailand-based spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Aid.
"Teams are talking about bodies floating around in the water," he
said. This is "a major, major disaster we're dealing with."
International assistance began trickling in Wednesday with the first shipments
of medicine, clothing and food. But the junta, which normally restricts access
by foreign officials and groups, was slow to give permission for workers to
enter.
"Visas are still a problem. It is not clear when it will be sorted out,"
said the minutes of a meeting of the U.N. task force coordinating relief for
Myanmar in Bangkok.
McCormick, the UNICEF spokesman, said the agency had 130 people in Myanmar
but needed to get more in.
"We're hopeful they will start fast-tracking visas for humanitarian personnel,"
he said. "The government clearly weren't prepared and needs to step up
to the plate. We can't work in a vacuum, and we need the host government to
work with us and to eventually take over."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the junta to speed the arrival of
aid workers and relief supplies "in every way possible."
As they wrangled with Myanmar officials over visas, aid groups struggled to
deliver supplies.
"Most urgent need is food and water," said Andrew Kirkwood, head
of Save the Children in Yangon. "Many people are getting sick. The whole
place is under salt water and there is nothing to drink. They can't use tablets
to purify salt water."
State television said Myanmar would accept aid from any country. It also said
planes flew in Wednesday with tents from Japan, medicine and clothing from Bangladesh
and India, packets of noodles from Thailand and dried bacon from China.
The first U.N. flights, carrying 45 metric tons of high energy biscuits, were
due to arrive early Thursday.
Some aid workers told the AP that the government wanted emergency supplies
to be distributed by relief workers already in place, rather than through foreign
staff brought into Myanmar.
President Bush said the U.S. was ready to deliver aid and was prepared to use
Navy ships and aircraft to help search for the dead and missing. But it wasn't
known if the junta, which regularly accuses Washington of trying to subvert
its rule, would accept an American military operation in its territory.
Three Navy warships participating in an exercise in the Gulf of Thailand were
standing by. A U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane also landed in Thailand and
another was on the way, Air Force spokeswoman Megan Orton said at the Pentagon.
In Yangon, many angry residents complained that the military regime had given
vague and incorrect information about the approaching storm and provided no
instructions on how to cope when it struck.
Officials in India said they had warned Myanmar about the cyclone two days
before it roared into the low-lying Irrawaddy delta. B.P. Yadav, spokesman for
the Indian Meteorological Department, said the agency spotted the developing
storm on April 28 and gave regular updates to all countries in its path.
Myanmar told the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva that it warned
people in newspapers, television and radio broadcasts of the impending storm,
said Dieter Schiessl, director of the WMO's disaster risk reduction unit.
Jim Andrews, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, said satellite photos showed
flooding of similar magnitude to that of Hurricane Katrina. "It's a similar
kind of land to New Orleans ... an intricate network of tidal creeks and openings
that allow easy access for a powerful storm surge to penetrate right into populated
land," he said.
State television quoted a government official, Gen. Tha Aye, as reassuring
people the situation was "returning to normal."
But residents of Yangon faced doubled prices for rice, charcoal, bottled water
and cooking oil.
At a suburban market, a fishmonger shouted to shoppers: "Come, come the
fish is very fresh." But an angry woman snapped: "Even if the fish
is fresh, I have no water to cook it!"
Most residents of Yangon rely on wells with electric pumps for water, and power
had been restored to only a small part of the city.
The cyclone came a week before a referendum on a proposed constitution backed
by the junta. State radio said Saturday's vote would be delayed in areas affected
by the storm, but balloting would proceed elsewhere.
A top U.S. envoy to Southeast Asia said the junta should be focusing on helping
cyclone victims.
"It's a huge crisis and it just seems odd to me that the government would
go ahead with the referendum in this circumstance," said Scot Marciel,
the U.S. ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
This week, first lady Laura Bush called the referendum a sham, and she also
criticized the junta's handling of the storm. "We know already that they
are very inept," she said.
The comments drew rebukes even from some Myanmar exiles, who normally are strongly
critical of the ruling generals.
Aye Chan Naing, editor of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a Myanmar opposition
media operation based in Norway, said it wasn't the right time to be chastising
the junta.
"Everybody knows what kind of regime they are, so there is no question
about that. The question right now is how to get the aid into the country,"
he said. "So the best way is to use a diplomatic way and to have an open
dialogue and keep talking until they agree."
--------
Associated Press writers Carley Petesch and Lily Hindy in New York
contributed to this report.
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French Official Urges UN to Force Aid on Myanmar
By Steven Erlanger
The New York Times
Thursday 08 May 2008
Paris - The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said that the
United Nations should invoke its "responsibility to protect" civilians
as the basis for a resolution to force delivery of aid to Myanmar, even if over
the objections of the military government there.
International agencies and other governments have been eager to alleviate the
devastation of the weekend cyclone, which is believed to have killed at least
22,500 people, according to official figures, perhaps 40 percent of them children.
The Myanmar government has said that as many as 41,000 people are missing and
up to 1 million are homeless. A United Nations official in Bangkok, Richard
Horsey, said on Wednesday that "thousands of bodies" were floating
in nearly 2,000 square miles of the flooded delta of the Irrawaddy River, the
hardest hit area.
But the government has let in little aid and has restricted movement in the
delta, aid agencies say. It has not granted visas to aid workers, even though
supplies are being marshaled in nearby countries like Thailand.
"We are seeing at the United Nations if we can't implement the
responsibility to protect, given that food, boats and relief teams are there,
and obtain a United Nations' resolution which authorizes the delivery
and imposes this on the Burmese government," Mr. Kouchner, who founded
the aid group Doctors Without Borders, told reporters in Paris.
In 2005, the United Nations recognized the concept of "responsibility
to protect" civilians when their governments could or would not do it,
even if this meant intervention that violated national sovereignty. But it has
been rarely applied.
Visa approvals have not been given for United Nations disaster relief specialists,
the officials said. Of the several dozen employees of United Nations agencies
waiting in Bangkok for visas, only a handful have received approval.
"We were very hopeful we would get positive responses," said Tony
Banbury, the regional director of the United Nations World Food Program. "Unfortunately,
we got no response."
The agency, one among a half-dozen with staff on standby, is flying in 45 tons
of high-energy biscuits on Thursday morning from warehouses in Bangladesh, but
has 13 personnel waiting to enter Myanmar to help with distribution.
The junta only agreed to allow the shipment after a day of discussions, Mr.
Banbury said.
"When we informed them that we wanted to transport these biscuits by
air the initial response was okay, as long as you hand them over to us,"
he said. "That's not the way we operate. That turned into an all-day
discussion. In the end they agreed that the World Food Program would be responsible
for handing them out."
The Myanmar government has told United Nations officials that it dedicated
seven helicopters and 80 ships to relief operations.
"Seven is a very small number considering the enormous logistical needs,"
said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the World Food Program's Asia operations.
The political party of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house
arrest, has called for urgent international aid. But the reclusive generals
who run Myanmar are obviously reluctant to allow large numbers of foreigners
into the country.
One reason may be that on Saturday, Burmese are supposed to vote on an important
referendum on a proposed constitution backed by the military; so far, voting
is expected to go ahead in much of the country.
Many countries are sending supplies to neighboring Thailand to await approval
to move them into Myanmar. Spain, for example, announced that it will send a
plane with 13 tons of medicine, tents and drinking water to Thailand, while
awaiting permission from Yangon to deliver the aid.
In Washington, the White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday that
Myanmar had still not responded to its offers of aid. "Everybody can understand
that there is no substitute for being there on the ground to help people directly,
and trying to do so remotely is going to be impossible," she said.
Washington's understanding, she said, is that "no one has been
granted access to go in." There is an American disaster relief team waiting
in Thailand.
In Paris, Mr. Kouchner, whose Doctors without Borders was organized to provide
emergency medical help in closed political areas, said that French, British
and Indian navies had ships directly opposite the worst-hit areas of Myanmar
and were ready to help.
"It would only take half an hour for the French boats and French helicopters
to reach the disaster area, and I imagine it's the same story for our
British friends," he said. "We are putting constant pressure on
the Burmese authorities but we haven't yet got the go ahead."
But in a possibly encouraging sign, Myanmar granted Denmark's ambassador
in Thailand, Michael Sternberg, a one-week visa to help evaluate the extent
of the damage and aid needs there, the Danish foreign ministry announced in
Copenhagen.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to try to contact the Yangon
authorities on Wednesday to urge them to meet with disaster-relief officials
and allow aid to enter.
Myanmar state television news on Wednesday quoted Gen. Tha Aye reassuring people
that the situation is "returning to normal."
The state-run Myanmar media has shown countless images of generals handing
out food and surveying damage, footage that is meant to reinforce the notion
that the military is in control, said said Win Min, a lecturer in contemporary
Burmese politics at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
"They are trying to show the people that you have to rely on us, not
foreigners, not the opposition," he said.
But even in the capital, Yangon, prices in the market were reported to be doubled
for rice, cooking oil, charcoal and bottled water. Much of Yangon is reported
to be without power, so residents could not use their pumps to obtain drinking
water from wells.
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Thomas Fuller contributed reporting from Bangkok.
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