Hopes for Myanmar cyclone aid rise as Asean meets

Yangon: Hopes of a deal to speed up aid to millions of Myanmar cyclone victims rose on Monday as the UN said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would visit this week and Southeast Asia kicked off its own disaster-response meeting.

Ban's trip is expected to conclude with a rare one-to-one with junta supremo Than Shwe, who has refused to answer phone calls from the United Nations boss since Cyclone Nargis struck two weeks ago, leaving 134,000 dead and missing and up to 2.5 million destitute.

Meanwhile, the UN's top aid official was in Myanmar on Monday for a first-hand look at the cyclone disaster zone, amid talks to convince the regime to take the brakes off a full-scale relief operation.

UN relief coordinator John Holmes delivered a letter to the isolationist junta from Ban. Holmes was to visit the delta, which has been largely 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.

Humanitarian agencies say the death toll from Nargis, already one of the most devastating cyclones to hit Asia, could soar without a massive increase of emergency food, shelter and medicine to the worst-hit Irrawaddy delta.

However, Britain's Asia minister, Mark Malloch-Brown, said in Yangon on Sunday that diplomats may have turned the corner in brokering a deal to get aid flowing which accommodated the generals' deep distrust of the outside world, and in particular, the West.

"Like all turning points in Burma, the corner will have a few 'S' bends in it," Malloch-Brown said after a series of meetings with top junta officials.

Little is known about the deal, although it is probably no coincidence foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), of which Myanmar is a member, were holding a cyclone response meeting on Monday in Singapore.

While aid has been trickling into Myanmar, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says it has managed to get rice and beans to just 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need.

"It's not enough. There are a very large number of people who are yet to receive any kind of assistance and that's what's keeping our teams working round the clock," WFP spokesman Marcus Prior said in Bangkok.