YANGON — Military helicopters dropped food and water on Wednesday to the cyclone-stricken people of Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta, where entire villages were virtually washed away in a massive storm surge.
The military government said nearly 22,500 people were killed and 41,000 missing in the most devastating cyclone in Asia since 1991 when a storm killed 143,000 in neighbouring Bangladesh.
A doctor in the delta town of Labutta said in an interview with Australian radio that villagers told him thousands died when a series of huge waves slammed into their homes. People clung to trees in a desperate fight for survival.
“All the victims were brought to the town and I asked them, ‘How many of you survived?’ and they said about 200, 300,” Aye Kyu told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.
“Then I asked them, ‘How many people in your area?’ They said about 5,000. The waves were 12, 13, 20 feet high and when the houses were covered in water, they stayed on the roof but the houses were destroyed by strong winds,” he said.
In one town alone, Bogalay, 10,000 people were killed, according to a town-by-town list of casualties and damage announced by the reclusive military government.
Political analysts and critics of 46 years of military rule say the cyclone may have long-term implications for the junta, which is even more feared and resented since last September’s bloody crackdown on Buddhist monk-led protests.
Official media reported on Wednesday that military helicopters dropped food and bottled water to villagers in the rice-growing Irrawaddy delta. More than half of Myanmar’s 53 million people live in five worst-hit states, called divisions.
As the army’s relief operations kicked up a gear four days after the cyclone struck, state-run television showed footage of bedraggled survivors lining up on banks of mud to be flown by helicopter out of some of the worst-hit villages.
With disease, hunger and thirst threatening hundreds of thousands of survivors marooned in the delta, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd begged the junta to open its doors to international humanitarian relief.
“Forget politics. Forget the military dictatorship. Let’s just get aid and assistance through to people who are suffering and dying as we speak, through a lack of support on the ground,” Rudd told reporters in Perth.
In Washington, President George W. Bush also asked the military to relax its tight grip and allow aid agencies, governments and the U.S. Navy to directly assist the victims.
Myanmar TV, the main official source for casualties and damage, on Wednesday re-broadcast Tuesday night’s news bulletin. The TV station, monitored outside Myanmar, reported 22,464 killed and 41,054 missing.
In a rare news conference on Tuesday, Information Minister Kyaw Hsan appealed for help, saying “the government needs the cooperation of the people and well-wishers from home and abroad”.
State media said the Prime Minister, Lt. Gen. Thein Sein, was chairing a natural disaster committee in Pathein, capital of Irrawaddy Division, and “closely supervising relief and resettlement work”.
There was some anger on the storm-ravaged streets of Yangon at soaring food prices and long queues for petrol, but the overall mood in the city of five million was one of resignation rather than revolution.
“There won’t be demonstrations,” one taxi driver said. “People don’t want to be shot.”
Government and private offices were unable to function with power cut off and staff absent. Some office workers just sat there in the darkness.
“We can’t do anything without electricity,” one said. “We sit around in the darkness sharing our sufferings and complaints.”
A queue of women and children holding buckets and tubs snaked around a corner in Yangon on Wednesday, past a street market where vegetables sold at three times last week’s prices despite government appeals to traders not to profit from the disaster.
The U.N.’s World Food Programme began doling out rice in Yangon. The first batch of more than $10 million of foreign aid arrived from Thailand but lack of equipment slowed distribution.
Reflecting the scale of the crisis, the junta said it would postpone by two weeks a constitutional referendum in the worst-hit areas, but go ahead elsewhere as planned on Saturday.
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