Pressure mounts on Myanmar junta to allow in foreign aid workers

Yangon: Western powers kept up pressure on Myanmar's generals on Thursday to allow a massive aid effort as relief workers struggled to help an estimated 2.5 million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis.

Separately the junta announced an overwhelmingly favourable vote for an army-backed constitution in a referendum held after the cyclone despite calls for a delay in light of the disaster.

The European Union's top aid official has warned that the military government's restrictions on foreign aid workers and equipment were increasing the risk of starvation and disease in the country formerly known as Burma.

Nearly two weeks after the storm tore through the heavily populated Irrawaddy delta rice bowl, leaving up to 128,000 people dead, supplies of food, medicine and temporary shelter have been sent in dribs and drabs to devastated communities.

Shelter

Monasteries and schools are sheltering the homeless and refugees are clamouring to get into the privately run centres rather than government-run camps.

Meanwhile, monks from the disaster zone alleged the government is forcing homeless cyclone survivors out of the nation's monasteries even as the junta rebuffed international pressure to allow in foreign aid workers.

The regime announced overwhelming public support in its recent national vote.

In the delta town of Bogalay, where around 10,000 people are thought to have died, people complain of forced labour and low supplies of food at the state-run centres. "They have to break stones at the construction sites. They are paid 1,000 kyats (Dh3.67) per day but are not provided any food," said Ko Hla Min, who lost nine members of his family in the storm. Along the river in Bogalay rotting corpses are still tangled in the scrub. Villagers fish, wash and bathe in the same river.

The United Nations has said over half a million people may now be sheltering in temporary settlements.

New alert sounded

Meteorologists based in Delhi warned on Wednesday that a massive low pressure system was building off neighbouring Myanmar and was likely to drench thousands of homeless cyclone survivors.

The UN World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) advised Indian cyclone-warning units to track the system which currently stretches from southwest Myanmar to the Gulf of Martban in the Indian Ocean. "It takes three to four days for a low pressure to turn into a depression, a deep depression and then into a full-blown cyclone," said B.K. Bandhopadhya, chief of Northern Hemisphere Analysis Centre.