Hopes of a deal to speed up aid to millions of Burma cyclone victims rose on Monday as the U.N. 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 culminate in a rare tete-a-tete 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.
The United Nations also wants a conference in Bangkok on May 24 to marshal funds for the relief effort in Burma, where the military government has so far refused to admit large-scale foreign aid for fear it will loosen its 46-year grip on power.
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 region, the Irrawaddy Delta.
Non-government aid organisation Save the Children said in a Sunday statement its research had found some "30,000 children under the age of five in the cyclone-affected Irrawaddy Delta were already acutely malnourished before the cyclone hit".
"Of those, Save the Children believes that several thousand are at risk of death in the next two to three weeks because of a lack of food."
However, Britain's Asia minister, Mark Malloch-Brown, told Reuters 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, 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 that foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Burma is a member, were holding a cyclone response meeting on Monday in Singapore.
Malloch-Brown, who came to Yangon after visiting some ASEAN members, said an Asian/U.N.-led process had already begun and other countries would make contributions through this channel.
Asian nations considered friendly by Burma have sent in aid groups and an ASEAN assessment team that has been on the ground in the delta is due to report to the Singapore meeting.
"What is important to be discussed now is how ASEAN, as ASEAN, can give contributions to Burma," said Kristiarto Legowo, spokesman for Indonesia's Foreign Ministry, as senior ASEAN officials met at Singapore's Shangri-La Hotel.
