Myanmar allows ASEAN aid effort
Posted by akpwld on May 19, 2008
As the junta declared three days of national mourning, the UN’s top aid official John Holmes got a first-hand look at the scale of a disaster that has left at least 133,000 people dead or missing.
The regime agreed to allow its Southeast Asian neighbours to help but stopped short of permitting a full-scale aid operation, despite warnings the most vulnerable survivors would soon start to die unless they get help soon.
Nor did it indicate any softening in its refusal to allow in foreign aid workers in anything like the numbers needed to reach an estimated 2.4 million people still in desperate need 17 days after the tragedy struck.
Instead it struck a compromise at emergency talks here for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to coordinate assistance.
”The foreign ministers have agreed to establish an ASEAN-led coordinating mechanism,” Singapore’s George Yeo said after hosting his counterparts here, including Myanmar’s Nyan Win.
He said Nyan Win told the meeting the estimated damage from the cyclone was ”well over 10 billion US dollars” and that the regime had agreed to accept the immediate despatch of medical teams from other ASEAN nations.
Thirty medical personnel from each of Myanmar’s nine fellow ASEAN members will be sent to Myanmar in addition to contingents from India, Bangladesh and China.
Yeo said ASEAN would work with the United Nations to hold an ”international pledging conference” in the impoverished country’s main city Yangon on May 25 to pool aid.
”We have to look at specific needs and specific offers of help. There will not be an uncontrolled entry of foreign personnel into Myanmar,” Yeo said.
ASEAN has been frequently criticised over its reaction to regional crises and its failure to force Myanmar’s junta to respect human rights and promote democracy, notably when last year’s pro-democracy protests were crushed.
The regional grouping warned donors that ”international assistance given to Myanmar, given through ASEAN, should not be politicised.”
”On that basis, Myanmar will accept international assistance,” Yeo said.
The May 2-3 cyclone was Southeast Asia’s worst natural disaster since the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, but the junta long suspicious of the outside world had stonewalled on offers of help.
Its reluctance to allow in all but a tiny proportion of the relief that is needed has frustrated UN and other humanitarian agencies as well as the French and US navy waiting off the coast with aid-laden ships.
The United Nations says only a fraction of the supplies needed are getting through to people in the Irrawaddy Delta, where whole villages were lost.
”This is not of the quantity or frequency required to meet the needs of the affected populations,” it said in a daily update.
The delta region has been all but closed off to reporters and most other foreigners, making it impossible to get an up-to-date independent picture of the situation on the ground.
People who have slipped through say the situation is almost unbearable - hungry people in leaking huts, stinking corpses rotting by the roadside, and most survivors still without any government aid.
Holmes, the UN’s relief coordinator, arrived on Sunday in Myanmar carrying a letter to junta leader Than Shwe from UN chief Ban Ki-moon.
Ban himself is to visit the country later in the week, after failing to get Than Shwe even to take his phone calls.
A UN spokesman in Myanmar said Holmes visited the disaster area earlier in the day but gave no details about his trip.
Thai Foreign Minister Noppadon Pattama said after the Singapore talks that the aid effort was ”better late than never,” and the ASEAN-led mechanism ”will be the driving force to mobilise resources and humanitarian assistance from countries around the world.”
Myanmar was ”more receptive” to receiving medical teams and after that, it ”might be more willing or receptive” to foreign aid workers, he added.
Nyan Win for his part insisted his government was never opposed to foreign aid, vowing that, ”If we need to issue the visas (to foreign aid workers), we will issue it.”
