YANGON (Reuters)Asean to spearhead the UN donor meet
Southeast Asian nations will take the lead in an international aid effort for cyclone-hit Myanmar, but the military junta will not give Western relief workers unfettered access to disaster areas, Singapore said yesterday.
“We will establish a mechanism so that aid from all over the world can flow into Myanmar,” Foreign Minister George Yeo said.
He was speaking after hosting a regional meeting to prod the generals to accept large-scale foreign aid and expertise for up to 2.4 million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis.
The details were to be worked out with the United Nations, which announced later yesterday that a donor conference would be held in the cyclone-hit former capital, Yangon, on May 25.
Myanmar agreed to accept nearly 300 medical personnel from its neighbours in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the foreign ministers said in a statement.
A few have already sent teams two weeks after the disaster which left 134,000 dead or missing. But aid workers from outside ASEAN will only be granted visas on a case-by-case basis. “We have to look at specific needs — there will not be uncontrolled access,” Yeo said after the meeting which named Asean chief Surin Pitsuwan to work with the U.N. on aid delivery.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was expected to fly to Yangon on Wednesday to tour the worst-hit Irrawaddy delta and attend the donors’ meeting co-chaired by Asean.
Humanitarian agencies say the death toll from Nargis, one of the most devastating cyclones to hit Asia, could soar without a massive increase of emergency food, water, shelter and medicine to the delta, the country’s rice bowl.
While aid has been trickling into the delta, the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP) says it has managed to get rice and beans to just 250,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need.
In one town in the upper delta, a steady stream of refugees arrived after travelling for days from Pyinsalu, one of the worst-hit districts.
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