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BANGKOK - The first UN aid flight to Myanmar since the cyclone tragedy landed Thursday, but other planes of supplies and disaster experts were again kept out by the country's reclusive military rulers.
With an estimated one million people homeless and in dire need, aid groups were privately frustrated but publicly diplomatic about the secretive country's refusal to fling open its doors to the outside world's offers of help.
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"Our assumption now is that the humanitarian needs of one million people will be able to prevail over politics and bureaucracy," said Anthony Banbury of the UN's World Food Programme, shortly before its first aid flight landed.
Two more of its planes were being loaded on Thursday, he said, while the agency had previously sent seven tonnes of high-energy biscuits on an aid flight from Thailand.
But he said the WFP had not yet won approval to fetch heavy equipment including forklifts, generators and boats in the aftermath of the storm, which some estimates say has left around 100,000 dead.
There are severe shortages of food, clean water, shelter and medical supplies six days after the storm hit late Friday -- and there has been little sign of the visas the secretive country promised to give aid workers.
The United Nations and others have repeatedly said staff experienced in major catastrophes also must get in to Myanmar to coordinate the delivery of assistance under horrific conditions.
The bloated corpses of people and animals are rotting on the ground, around 5,000 square kilometres of terrain is still underwater, and time is running out for survivors at risk of starvation and disease.
"You need people to coordinate where the equipment is going, there are complicated logistics involved," said Shantha Bloemen, spokeswoman for UNICEF, the UN children's fund.
She said the agency was having to distribute the supplies it already had in Myanmar by road.
"How it will work?" Bloemen said. "This is what doesn't seem clear yet."
The UN's emergency relief division said there had been a minor breakthrough Thursday afternoon with four UN disaster experts being cleared to get in to the country.
"So that's good news," said its regional spokesman, Richard Horsey. He said three of them had won clearance because they are Asian nationals.
A humanitarian worker, based in Bangkok, who asked not to be named told AFP agencies were now scouring their offices for other Asian aid workers.
"We're all thinking: If you're British or an American, are they going to let you in over a Thai or a Filipino?" she said. "Now everyone's looking for Asian nationals."
Horsey said that without immediate assistance, the death toll -- officially at nearly 23,000 with more than 42,000 missing -- would climb.
"We have to be fearful that most of these (missing) people will be dead," he said, adding that the thousands of bodies rotting in flood waters posed a grave health risk to survivors.
"We're dealing with a situation where there could be a second round -- where people start dying from water-borne diseases."
The United States and France have both offered to send naval ships, currently on exercise in the region, but those offers were still unanswered on Thursday.
The UN refugee agency said Wednesday that 22 tonnes of supplies were stuck at the border with Thailand, waiting for a green light from Myanmar authorities.
Meanwhile, UNICEF launched an appeal Thursday for 8.2 million dollars to fund critical aid for women and children. - AFP/ir
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