The United Nations sent in three more planes and several trucks loaded with aid, though the junta took over its first two shipments. The government agreed to let a U.S. cargo plane bring in supplies Monday, but foreign disaster experts were still being barred entry.

State-run television continuously ran images of top generals — including the junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe — handing out boxes of aid to survivors at elaborate ceremonies.

One box bore the name of Lt. Gen. Myint Swe, a rising star in the government hierarchy, in bold letters that overshadowed a smaller label reading: “Aid from the Kingdom of Thailand.”

“We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was a gift from them and then distributing it in their region,” said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, which campaigns for human rights and democracy in the country.

“It is not going to areas where it is most in need,” he said in London.

State media say 23,335 people died and 37,019 are missing from Cyclone Nargis, which submerged entire villages in the Irrawaddy delta. International aid organizations say the death toll could climb to more than 100,000 as conditions worsen.

The U.N. estimates that 1.5 million to 2 million people have been severely affected and has voiced concern about the disposal of bodies.

With phone lines down, roads blocked and electricity networks destroyed, it is nearly impossible to reach isolated areas in the delta, complicated by the lack of experienced international aid workers and equipment.

But the junta has refused to grant access to foreign experts, saying it will only accept donations from foreign charities and governments, and then will deliver the aid on its own.

Farmaner said the world needs to move to deliver aid directly to victims in Myanmar, also known as Burma.

“People we are speaking to in Burma say aid must be delivered anyway even if the regime doesn’t give permission,” he said. “We have had a week to convince the regime to behave reasonably, and they are still blocking aid. So the international community needs to wake up and take bolder steps.”

However, aid providers are unlikely to pursue unilateral deliveries like airdrops because of the diplomatic firestorm that it could set off.

So far, relief workers have reached 220,000 cyclone victims, only a small fraction of the number of people affected, the Red Cross said Friday. Three Red Cross aid flights loaded with shelter kits and other emergency supplies landed Friday without incident.

But the government seized two planeloads of high-energy biscuits — enough to feed 95,000 people — sent by the U.N. World Food Program. Despite the seizure, the WFP was sending three more planes Saturday from Dubai, Cambodia and Italy, even though those could be confiscated, too.

“We are working around the clock with the authorities to ensure the kind of access that we need to ensure it goes to people that need it most,” WFP spokesman Marcus Prior said in Bangkok, Thailand.

Richard Horsey, a spokesman for U.N. humanitarian operations, said an international presence is needed in Myanmar to look at the logistics of getting boats, helicopters and trucks into the delta area.

“That’s a critical bottleneck that must be overcome at this point,” he said in Bangkok.
He warned there was a great risk of diarrhea and cholera spreading because of the lack of clean drinking water and sanitation.

“We are running out of time here. This could be a huge problem and this could lead to a second phase which could be as deadly as the cyclone,” he said.

Heavy rain forecast in the next week was certain to exacerbate the misery. Diplomats and aid groups warned the number of dead could eventually exceed 100,000 because of illnesses and said thousands of children may have been orphaned.

Survivors from one of the worst-affected areas, near the town of Bogalay, 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 wept while describing 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 have received some kind of aid since the cyclone hit May 3.

The government’s abilities are limited. It has only a few dozen helicopters, most of which are small and old. It also has 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 Farmaner, the British aid worker. “It’s already too late for many people. Every day of delays is costing thousands of lives.”

ST. PAUL, Minn. –In the days since Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar, Eh Taw Dwe has heard only snippets about the villages he left behind when he fled the country.

Zin Moe has lived with the anguish of not knowing whether his mother and five siblings are alive — and not being able to help directly.

They are among thousands of Burmese immigrants around the United States who are desperately scrambling to organize relief to their ravaged homeland. In the process, they are hearing about a bleak situation: No electricity. Dirty water. Rampant diarrhea and malaria.

“Some people here, they have their family member over there, and they lose their family member or their house was totally destroyed,” Dwe said Wednesday. One of Dwe’s friends is stranded with his family in a village that was cut off from rescue workers. Nobody knows the family’s fate.

The challenge of providing relief has been magnified by the sheer desperation of the situation in Myanmar and a ruling military regime that is hostile to U.S. citizens and supplies. The United Nations and other agencies have said they are trying to persuade the government to issue more visas to speed the aid to sites where it is most needed.

“It’s difficult, because even if we collect things, how are we going to send them?” asked Moe Chan, a Burmese New Yorker.

He is one of more than 10,000 Burmese residents of New York City. Thousands more live in nearby New Jersey and Connecticut, forming the second largest U.S. Burmese community. California has as many as 100,000 residents of Burmese descent.

Dr. Kyaw Htyte, a New York cardiologist and president of the National Burma Action Committee, said that if he could, he would go to Myanmar himself, but it’s impossible to get an entry visa.

Instead, he said his organization relies on “an underground group” of people who enter the country in ways he would not disclose, for security reasons, and bring in money, medicine and other supplies.

These are only stopgap measures against a need for massive relief.

Four days after the cyclone hit, the best way for Americans to help was still through large international organizations with access to Myanmar, such as the International Red Cross, UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee and the International Medical Corps.

Moe has been using prepaid phone cards every day, calling home during rushed breaks from his job as manager of a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

His family phones in Myanmar sound dead.

As he waits, he’s raising money among dozens of Burmese friends in New York “for the villages, where people are really poor,” said Moe, who has a friend he hopes will somehow enter Myanmar before the end of May.

Dwe (pronounced DEW-ee), 31, is one of perhaps 1,500 refugees from Myanmar who live in Minnesota, many of them from the ethnic Karen rebel group that has been fighting for autonomy in eastern Myanmar for a half-century.

He fears ethnic Karen will be left out of the aid effort.

“It’s the worst disaster in Burma and we need the assistance from the American government and we need the assistance from any country who has humanitarian support,” he said.

A local aid organization, the Minneapolis-based American Refugee Committee, has helped many Burmese in its refugee camp in Thailand, including some who now live in Minnesota. The agency hoped to get passports for two workers so they could enter the country in the next few days to evaluate what kind of help it could offer, spokeswoman Therese Gales said.

The Karen Community of Minnesota, a fraternal group of refugees like Dwe, contacted the agency to see how it could help, realizing that its contribution would be modest.

“If there’s anything we can do, even a dollar, even, you know, a piece of bread, we will do whatever we could,” Dwe said. “I can see the children and the women crying in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the storm and … it’s really sad.”

——–
Verena Dobnik contributed to this report from New York.

From the Boston Globe

Can you picture America being comprised of 50 states with no federal government and no president? This is a frightening thought, isn’t it?

Nonetheless, a similar situation exists in which nine Eastern Orthodox ethnic jurisdictions have been functioning independently in America for several decades with no American administrative leader.

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Read the Rest Here

Hungry crowds stormed the few shops that opened in the country’s stricken Irrawaddy delta, sparking fist fights, according to Paul Risley, a spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program in neighboring Thailand.

Shari Villarosa, who heads the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar, said food and water are running short in the delta area and called the situation there “increasingly horrendous.”

“There is a very real risk of disease outbreaks as long as this continues,” Villarosa told reporters.
State media in Myanmar, also known as Burma, reported that nearly 23,000 people died when Cyclone Nargis blasted the country’s western coast on Saturday and more than 42,000 others were missing.

U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said Thursday that the cyclone’s death toll may rise “very significantly.”

The military junta normally restricts the access of foreign officials and organizations to the country, and aid groups were struggling to deliver relief goods.

Internal U.N. documents obtained by The Associated Press showed growing frustrations at foot-dragging by the junta, which has kept the impoverished nation isolated for five decades to maintain its iron-fisted control.

“Visas are still a problem. It is not clear when it will be sorted out,” according to the minutes of a meeting of the U.N. task force coordinating relief for Myanmar in Bangkok, Thailand on Wednesday.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Myanmar’s government to speed up the arrival of aid workers and relief supplies “in every way possible.”

State television in military-ruled Myanmar, though, said that the government would accept aid from any country and that help had arrived Wednesday from Japan, Bangladesh, Laos, Thailand, China, India and Singapore.

Local aid workers started distributing water purification tablets, mosquito nets, plastic sheeting and basic medical supplies.

But heavily flooded areas were accessible only by boat, with helicopters unable to deliver relief supplies there, said Richard Horsey, Bangkok-based spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid.

“Most urgent need is food and water,” said Andrew Kirkwood, head of Save the Children in Yangon. “Many people are getting sick. The whole place is under salt water and there is nothing to drink. They can’t use tablets to purify salt water,” he said.

Save the Children distributed food, plastic sheeting, cooking utensils and chlorine tablets to 230,000 people in Yangon area. Trucks were sent to the delta on Wednesday, carrying rice, salt, sugar and tarpaulin.

A Yangon resident who returned home from the area said people are drinking coconut water because of lack of safe drinking water. He said many people were on boats using blankets as sails.

Local aid groups were distributing rice porridge, which people were collecting in dirty plastic shopping bags. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared getting into trouble with authorities for talking to a foreign news agency.

Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for U.N. relief efforts in Geneva, said the U.N. received permission to send nonfood supplies and that a cargo plane was being loaded in Brindisi, Italy, but it might be two days before it leaves.

The U.N. is trying to get permission for its experts to accompany the shipment, Byrs said. She said U.N. staff in Thailand were also awaiting visas so they could enter Myanmar to assess the damage.

Some aid workers have told the AP that the government wants the aid to be distributed by relief workers already in place, rather than through foreign staff brought into the country.

Relief teams and aid material are waiting to deploy from Thailand, Singapore, Italy, France, Sweden, Britain, South Korea, Australia, Israel, U.S., Poland and Japan, according to minutes from a U.N. relief meeting in Geneva that were obtained by the AP.

However, Myanmar state-run television said Wednesday that Japan had sent tents, while planes from Bangladesh and India brought medicine and clothing. China sent 1,300 pounds of dried bacon, while Thailand sent 1.2 million packets of noodles.

Britain has offered about $9.8 million to help the crisis, and the U.S. offered more than $3 million in aid. President Bush said Washington was prepared to use the U.S. Navy to help search for the dead and missing.

However, the Myanmar military, which regularly accuses the United States of trying to subvert its rule, was unlikely to accept U.S. military presence in its territory.

The U.S. military started positioning people and equipment as it awaited word from Myanmar’s government. An Air Force C-130 cargo plane landed in Thailand and another was on the way, Air Force spokeswoman Megan Orton said Wednesday morning at the Pentagon.

“When they accept, or if they accept — and we know what supplies they need — those planes will be there to transport those,” she said.

The Navy also has three ships participating in an exercise in the Gulf of Thailand that could help in any relief effort — the USS Essex, the USS Juneau and the USS Harper’s Ferry — but Navy officials said they are still in a holding pattern.

The Essex is an amphibious assault ship with 23 helicopters aboard, including 19 that are capable of lifting cargo from ship to shore, as well as more than 1,500 Marines.

Because it would take the Essex more than four days to get into position for the relief effort, the Navy is considering sending some of its helicopters ahead, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because it was still in the planning stages. The aircraft would be able to arrive in a matter of hours, and the Essex could follow, he said.

In Yangon, many angry residents say they were given vague and incorrect information about the approaching storm and no instructions on how to cope when it struck.

Officials in India said they had warned Myanmar that Cyclone Nargis was headed for the country two days before it made landfall there.

The state-run Indian Meteorological Department had been keeping a close watch on the depression in the Bay of Bengal since it was first spotted on April 28 and sent regular updates to all the countries in its path, department spokesman B. P. Yadav said.

Myanmar told the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva that it warned people in newspapers, television and radio broadcasts of the impending storm, said Dieter Schiessl, director of the WMO’s disaster risk reduction unit.

State television news quoted Yangon official Gen. Tha Aye on Wednesday as reassuring people that the situation was “returning to normal.”

But city residents faced new challenges as markets doubled prices of rice, charcoal and bottled water.

At a market in the suburb of Kyimyindaing, a fish monger shouted to shoppers: “Come, come the fish is very fresh.” But an angry woman snapped back: “Even if the fish is fresh, I have no water to cook it!”

Electricity was restored in a small portion of Yangon but most city residents, who rely on wells with electric pumps, had no water. Vendors sold bottled water at more than double the normal price. Price of rice and cooking oil also skyrocketed.

The cyclone came a week before a key referendum on a proposed constitution backed by the junta.

State radio said Saturday’s vote would be delayed until May 24 in 40 of 45 townships in the Yangon area and seven in the Irrawaddy delta. But it indicated the balloting would proceed in other areas as scheduled.
A top U.S. envoy to Southeast Asia said Wednesday that Myanmar’s military junta should be focusing all its efforts on helping victims of a devastating cyclone, not pressing forward with a planned constitutional referendum.

“It’s a huge crisis and it just seems odd to me that the government would go ahead with the referendum in this circumstance,” said Scot Marciel, who was appointed last week as the first U.S. ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Myanmar has been under military rule since 1962. Its government has been widely criticized for suppressing pro-democracy parties such as the one led by Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been under house arrest for more than 12 of the past 18 years.

At least 31 people were killed and thousands more were detained in September when the military cracked down on peaceful protests led by Buddhist monks and democracy advocates

From the AP