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YANGON: The UN called an emergency summit on Myanmar's aid crisis on Thursday, as the junta dug in its heels two weeks after a deadly cyclone, saying it would not bow to pressure to let in foreign aid workers.
With at least 71,000 dead or missing and another two million in dire need of emergency aid, the generals again rebuffed calls to accept the foreign relief workers needed to quickly deliver food, water, shelter and medicine.
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As anger boiled over in the international community about the delays, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the United Nations would convene a summit somewhere in Asia to address the crisis.
"We will stop at nothing in trying to pressure the regime into doing what any regime should have done long ago," Brown said in London. He did not say when or where the meeting would be held.
The military - which has held a total grip on power since 1962 - earlier reiterated it would not bow to foreign demands despite the risk that many more victims could die unless help comes soon.
"We are way behind the curve compared to any other international disaster in recent memory," said Mark Malloch-Brown, a top British diplomat.
"I cannot recall a relief operation where, at least the international response, has been subjected to such delays," he said in Bangkok.
Cyclone Nargis hit overnight May 2, tearing through the rice-growing Irrawaddy Delta and wiping out entire villages with powerful winds and giant waves that turned much of the area into a disease-infested swamp.
At first, journalists returned from the area with tales of misery - corpses rotting in the water as untold thousands of survivors lined the streets begging for food.
Now the junta has sealed off the region to reporters and insists the impoverished country, once a rich British colony known as Burma, can stand on its own.
The New Light of Myanmar newspaper, a government mouthpiece, said the country's people could rebuild the devastated region without help.
"They will not rely too much on international assistance and will reconstruct the nation on (a) self-reliance basis," it said.
But all evidence is to the contrary, and aid groups want outside experts to direct the relief effort and make sure supplies get to the neediest.
John Holmes, the UN's top emergency relief official, said access to the country was "the biggest problem we have at the moment."
The secretive generals, who built a remote town from scratch two years ago and then moved the capital there almost overnight, have long spurned the outside world - and tightly controlled anything that could weaken their power.
Earlier on Thursday, they announced victory in a national referendum on a new constitution with 92.4 percent of the ballots.
It said the turnout in the vote, held last Saturday with parts of the country still underwater and tens of thousands of people unaccounted for, was 99 percent. Affected areas go to the polls later this month.
The White House dismissed the exercise, saying it had long expressed its "strong concerns" about the legitimacy of the constitution and referendum which was opposed by Myanmar's democratic opposition.
"The conduct of the referendum gave us no reason to change our position," said US national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe in Jerusalem.
The regime said the vote, the first here since 1990, was a step on the road to democracy, but critics say it will only tighten the military's grip on power.
Perhaps fearing new unrest over the storm tragedy, the government has begun pushing homeless survivors out of monasteries, which became hotbeds last year for Myanmar's biggest anti-regime protests in 20 years.
Buddhist monks are revered in this nation of 54 million, and many people fled to the closest monastery when catastrophe struck.
Monks and evacuees from the main city Yangon as well as Labutta, one of the hardest-hit delta towns, said thousands of people were being forced out of monasteries.
"Where do they want us to go?" said 30-year-old Gangamani. "We have no house any more, and it is raining."
The new rains have added to the misery for increasingly desperate people at risk of everything from snake-bites and pneumonia to outright starvation.
"Half the people displaced aren't in actual buildings," said Kathryn Rawe, spokeswoman for Save the Children, an aid group. "They're basically under plastic, and it's raining. It breaks your heart." - AFP/de
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