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Relief Experts Fear New Wave Of Death As Junta Seizes Aid

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The New York Times

Published: May 10, 2008

BANGKOK, Thailand - The military leaders of Myanmar seized a shipment of U.N. food aid Friday intended for victims of a devastating cyclone, declaring that they would accept donations of food and medicine but not the foreign aid workers international groups say are in equally short supply there.

The ruling junta continued to permit a small number of aid deliveries and promised to allow the first air shipment from the Pentagon on Monday.

But the refusal of the country's iron-fisted rulers to allow doctors and disaster relief experts to enter in large numbers contributed to the growing concern that starvation and epidemic diseases could end up killing people on the same scale as the winds, waves and flooding that destroyed villages across a wide swath of coastal Myanmar.

Six days after the storm, the combined effort of relief agencies and Myanmar's government had delivered aid to only 220,000 of an estimated 1.9 million people in need, the Red Cross said.

"We are simply lacking transportation. There are almost no boats and no helicopters. This is really a nightmare to make this operation run," said Anders Ladekarl, secretary-general of the Danish Red Cross.

Survivors in one of the worst-affected areas, near the town of Bogalay about 20 miles inland, were among those fighting hunger, illness and wrenching loneliness.

"All my 28 family members have died," said Thein Myint, a 68-year-old fisherman who was overcome by tears and trauma as he tried to explain how the cyclone swept away the rest of his family. "I am the only survivor."

Officials have said only one out of 10 people who are homeless, injured or threatened by disease and hunger has received some kind of aid. Survivors were sleeping amid the debris of their splintered homes in Bogalay, where more than 95 percent of the houses were destroyed.

"Nearly all homes were destroyed in the villages I assessed today and the survivors have virtually no access to clean drinking water," said Gordon Bacon, the International Rescue Committee's emergency coordinator in Yangon. "With each passing day, we come closer to a massive health disaster and a second wave of deaths that is potentially larger than the first."

The government, which wants full control of relief operations, has fewer than 40 helicopters, most of them small or old. It also has only about 15 transport planes, primarily small jets unable to carry hundreds of tons of supplies.

"Not only don't they have the capacity to deliver assistance, they don't have experience," said Mark Farmaner, director of the pro-democracy Burma Campaign UK. "It's already too late for many people. Every day of delays is costing thousands of lives."

As foreign aid groups scurried to deliver relief, the generals who run Myanmar, also called Burma, continued to focus on a separate priority: a constitutional referendum that got under way early today. "It is one of the best examples of the disregard for the people by the military," said Josef Silverstein an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University.

To date, Myanmar has allowed 11 airborne deliveries of aid, which experts say is a fraction of the relief needed if the scale of the disaster is even close to what the Myanmar government has claimed.

Much of that has come from the U.N. World Food Program, which said that the aid it had delivered - and intended to distribute to hard-hit regions along the coast - had been seized.

"All the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated," said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program in Bangkok.

After initially saying it would halt deliveries, the agency said later that flights would continue today while the issue is worked out.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Myanmar authorities to let aid into the country "without hindrance" and said the effect of further delay could be "truly catastrophic."

Myanmar's military junta said in a statement that it was willing to receive disaster relief from the outside world but would distribute supplies itself rather than allowing in relief workers. Aid agencies want to coordinate and control their own aid.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

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