2008-05-21 08:40:21
United Nations chief says Myanmar to allow foreign helicopters to fly aid to cyclone-hit areas
The United Nations has received permission from Myanmar to use nine helicopters to ferry relief supplies to stranded cyclone victims, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as he warned that relief efforts are at a "critical moment."
"We have received government permission to operate nine WFP (World Food Program) helicopters, which will allow us to reach areas that have so far been largely inaccessible," Ban told reporters Tuesday in New York before departing on a trip to Myanmar.
His announcement was not immediately confirmed by officials of Myanmar's military government.
"I believe further similar moves will follow, including expediting the visas of (foreign) relief workers seeking to enter the country," Ban said. "I'm confident that emergency relief efforts can be scaled up quickly."
U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes was in Myanmar seeking to persuade the junta to let in more international assistance and paving the way for Ban's visit, which begins Thursday.
Holmes said he told Myanmar's prime minister, Lt. Gen. Thein Sein, that the U.N. wants to support aid efforts, "as we would do in any other country in any disaster of this scale, where clearly the size of the tragedy outweighs the capacity of any country to deal with it by itself."
The junta appears to be slowly relenting to foreign pressure to accept more outside help, but even foreign aid workers already in the country are still banned from the worst devastated areas. The U.N. said only a fraction of survivors had gotten any international assistance.
The official death toll stood at about 78,000, with 56,000 more people missing. Conditions in the low-lying Irrawaddy River delta remained precarious, with survivors facing disease, malnutrition and exposure to the elements.
Speaking at a news conference a day after visiting the delta, Holmes said he had suggested the junta make "better use of international expertise and assets" and ensure "all possible routes in for aid are open, whether they be by land or sea or air."
The U.S. military has several helicopters on standby on a warship off the Myanmar coast and in neighboring Thailand.
The U.S. is already flying supplies in from Thailand on C-130 cargo aircraft, at a rate of about five flights a day. But the planes go to Myanmar's biggest city, Yangon, from which it is a difficult journey to the Irrawaddy delta.
Ban is expected to visit areas devastated by Cyclone Nargis as well as talk with officials and aid workers. On Sunday, he is scheduled to attend a meeting of aid donors in Yangon. Myanmar, one of the world's poorest nations, claims losses from the disaster exceeded $10 billion.
At U.N. headquarters, Ban said he was confident aid efforts can be increased and welcomed the junta's "recent flexibility" in allowing relief workers from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations to begin distributing aid.
Myanmar's leaders began three days of mourning for the dead and missing. Flags at government offices, schools and large hotels flew at half staff, but shops opened and many people in Yangon said they had little idea what the official mourning entailed.
Others were angry.
"I don't think flying flags at half-mast is going to help. If they are sincere, they should welcome help from everyone," said Zin Moe, a 32-year-old clothes vendor. "They are not letting in aid quickly enough and people are angry."
A Myanmar doctor returning to Yangon from the delta said refugees in the bigger towns were getting some aid and medical care, but villagers were still trickling in from outlying areas that have received no aid, Tin Sein said.
"We saw one young girl yesterday. Her lips and her nails were blue. She looked like she was going to die," Tin Sein said. "People haven't eaten or drunk clean water and are completely exposed to the rains and storm."
ဣေမဟိ အ႒ီဟိ တမဂၢပုဂၢလံ၊
ေဒ၀ါတိ ေဒ၀ံ နရဒမၼ သာရထႎ ။
သမႏၲ စကၡံဳ သတပုည လကၡဏံ၊
၀ါေတဟိ ဗုဒၶံ သရဏံ ဂေတာသၼိ။
အဂၢပုဂၢလံ - ကမာၻအလံုးတြင္ အသာဆံုးပုဂၢိဳလ္တည္း ျဖစ္ေတာ္မူေပထေသာ။ ေဒ၀ါတိေဒ၀ံ - နတ္အေပါင္းတို႔၏ ဦးေခါင္းညြတ္လွ်ိဳး ခုိကုိးရာအစစ္ နတ္မင္းလင္းျဖစ္ေတာ္မူေပထေသာ။ နရဒမၼသာရထႎ - ဆံုးမရန္ႀကံဳ မ်ားဗိုလ္ပံုကုိ စံုလင္စြာ သင္ေပးလ်က္ ယဥ္ေက်းေအာင္ဆံုးမေတာ္မူေပထေသာ ။ သမႏၲစကၡံဳ - ၾကြင္းမဲ့ဥႆံု အလံုးစံုကုိ အကုန္သိျမင္ သဗၺညဳဥာဏ္ရွင္လည္း ျဖစ္ေတာ္မူေပထေသာ ။ သတပုညလကၡဏံ - ရာေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ဘုန္းသမာၻေၾကာင့္ ေကာင္းစြာျမင့္ၾကြယ္ တင့္တယ္ေသာ လကၡဏာလည္း ရွိေပထေသာ။ တံဗုဒၶံ - တု၍မႏိုင္ ၿပိဳင္၍မရ ကမာၻ႕ထိပ္ေခါင္ ထိုေနာင္ေတာ္ ျမတ္ဘုရားကုိ ။ ဣေမဟိ အ႒ီဟိ - အသားေတြေပ်ာက္ အေရေျခာက္သျဖင့္ မ်က္ေမွာက္ထင္စြာ ဤသံုးရာေသာ အ႐ိုးတို႔ျဖင့္ လည္းေကာင္း။ ဣေမဟိ ပါေဏဟိ - မၿငိမ္လွဳပ္လွက္ ခ်ဳပ္ပ်က္ခါနီးျဖစ္ေသာ ဤအသက္တို႔ျဖင့္လည္းေကာင္း ။ သရဏံ - ဦးတင္က်န ဖူးခ်င္လွလည္း မရေတာ့ပါ ။ ကုိးကြယ္ရာဟူ၍ သာလွ်င္ ။ ဂေတာသၼိ - အျပစ္ရွိသမွ် သတိရသျဖင့္ အာမ၀ႏၲံ အကုန္ခံ၍ အတန္တန္ဆည္းကပ္ပါသည္ ဘုရား။ နတ္တကာတို႔ထက္ ျမတ္ေတာ္မူထေသာ၊ လူ-နတ္-ျဗဟၼာ သတၱ၀ါအေပါင္းကုိ ယဥ္ေက်းေအာင္ ဆံုးမေတာ္မူတတ္ေသာ၊ သဗၺညဳတဥာဏ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ ျပည့္စံုေတာ္မူေသာ၊ အရာမကေသာ ကုသိုလ္ေတာ္တို႔ေၾကာင့္ ဘုန္းလကၡဏာႏွင့္ ျပည့္စံုေတာ္မူထေသာ၊ ေလာကတြင္ အျမတ္ဆံုးျဖစ္ေတာ္မူေသာ ထုိျမတ္စြာဘုရားကုိ အကြ်ႏု္ပ္သည္ ဤအရိုးတို႔ျဖင့္လည္းေကာင္း၊ ဤက်န္ရွိေနေသးေသာ အသက္တို႔ျဖင့္လည္းေကာင္း ကုိးကြယ္ရာဟူ၍ ဆည္းကပ္ပါ၏။
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