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YANGON : Cyclone disaster workers said Saturday they still had no word on when they would get the promised full access to Myanmar, which wants the world to donate 11 billion dollars to rebuild the country.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he had persuaded military leader Than Shwe to relent on accepting all foreign aid workers, but it was unclear when they would get in -- or how much they would be allowed to do once there.
Fast Facts
Some aid groups warned that the international community was unlikely to give Myanmar all the money it will request at Sunday's donor conference in the main city Yangon.
The secretive regime has kept all but a handful of foreigners out of the disaster zone in the devastated Irrawaddy Delta since Cyclone Nargis hit three weeks ago, and time is running out for 2.4 million desperate survivors.
Ban said he had confidence in the pledges he received from Than Shwe and his inner circle to let foreigners in to help with the slow-moving relief effort from the May 2-3 tragedy in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
"I believe that they will keep and honour their commitment," said Ban, who was in China on Saturday to tour the earthquake zone there before returning to Yangon on Sunday for the conference.
"They have all assured that they will fully cooperate."
World frustration has been boiling over at the Myanmar military, which has ruled the country with an iron hand for 46 years and long spurned the overtures of the outside world.
For weeks it insisted it could handle the relief effort alone, even though reporters who have reached the delta say many are still without government assistance and that the situation is grim.
Bodies of some of the estimated 133,000 people left dead or missing are rotting in canals. There is little food, rice paddies are in ruins, and there have been international warnings of a possible famine ahead.
Aid workers said there was no sign yet of changes on the ground regarding access, despite the fact that hunger and disease are stalking survivors.
"There are no clear guidelines so far," said one foreign relief worker in Yangon, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
"There have been reports that Southeast Asian aid workers have been turned back when they tried to access the delta."
The military has said that reports of dire shortages from villages across the delta are the work of "traitors," and accused foreign news organisations of misrepresenting the situation.
Ban said it was urgent to get aid staff into areas affected by the storm.
But he acknowledged the regime's reluctance to open up to the international community -- which has regularly accused the generals of severe human rights abuses and kept the leadership under a decade of stiff economic sanctions.
"For any country, when you want to enter, you should have a very genuine purpose," Ban said. "This time people are coming for a genuinely humanitarian purpose -- to provide humanitarian assistance."
The military has rejected aid from French and US naval ships loaded with relief supplies which are in nearby waters. The handful of foreign aid staff in the country are largely restricted to parts of Yangon and banned from the delta.
"We have not had enough aid workers who have experience and expertise in the areas of sanitation and water or other (necessities) for human life," Ban said.
The regime has agreed to let in the United Nations and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member, to oversee the relief effort.
The details of that arrangement remain to be worked out, one of the topics on the agenda of Sunday's donor conference -- where Myanmar is expected to ask for 10.7 billion dollars in assistance.
Penny Lawrence, the international director of Oxfam, said in neighbouring Thailand that the world was unlikely to give that much as long as the regime insisted that there were no people short of food, water and other essentials.
"I don't know how much the donors are willing to pledge, but I wouldn't imagine it's going to be in that kind of region," she said.
Residents in the disaster zones on Saturday were meanwhile being summoned to the polls to vote on a new constitution which would bar the detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from ever holding office.
The first round of the vote was held just one week after the cyclone. The military said it had won with 92 percent support of the people.
- AFP /ls
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