Hopes for Burma cyclone aid rise

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.

TRICKLE OF AID

While aid has been trickling into Burma, the U.N.'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.

Analysts say strong criticism of the Burma junta's reluctance over foreign aid is unlikely from ASEAN's Singapore meeting. ASEAN has a policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of its 10 member states.

"I think everybody has already agreed to engage Burma and this is a very good opportunity to show Burma that everybody is caring," said Clarita Carlos, political science professor at the University of the Philippines.

"By moral persuasion, the foreign ministers can ask Burma to provide the logistical support, the infrastructure because it's a less developed economy, to get this aid flowing."

Burma analysts are making much of the reclusive Than Shwe's first appearance since the disaster in Yangon, the city he deserted in 2005 for a remote new capital 250 miles (390 km) to the north.

State television showed the bespectacled 74-year-old Than Shwe in Yangon on Monday meeting ministers involved in the rescue effort and touring some cyclone-hit areas.

The U.N.'s Ban was likely to land in Yangon on Wednesday evening and travel to the Irrawaddy Delta, his spokeswoman said.

Meanwhile the U.N.'s chief humanitarian officer, John Holmes, began a government tour of the delta on Monday after flying in on Sunday night, officials said.

He is expected to meet Prime Minister Thein Sein on Tuesday and deliver a message from Ban to the generals.

Ban previously proposed a "high-level pledging conference" to deal with the crisis, as well as having a joint coordinator from the United Nations and ASEAN to oversee aid delivery.

In the last 50 years, only two Asian cyclones have exceeded the human toll of Nargis -- a 1970 storm that killed 500,000 people in neighbouring Bangladesh and another that killed 143,000 people in 1991, also in Bangladesh.

At least 232,000 people were killed in December 2004 when a tsunami struck nations bordering the Indian Ocean.