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Burma Clears U.S. Aircraft To Deliver Storm Relief
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At that meeting, Burma's U.N. ambassador voiced some of the most conciliatory remarks heard from the government since the crisis began. "We are most thankful to the international community, our friends near and far, for the solidarity and generosity," Kyaw Tint Swe said, welcoming aid from "all quarters."
He also said Burma had agreed to allow a U.S. military C-130 cargo plane to land in the country as soon as Monday. It was unclear whether it would be the first of many.
But with the Burmese government prone to reversing itself, officials in Washington had discussed staging an airdrop into the country's flooded coastal regions without government permission but have now rejected that option. France announced it will dispatch toward Burma a warship loaded with 1,500 tons of humanitarian supplies.
Burma's prime minister in exile, Sein Win, added his own voice Friday to the call to China to help open up his country.
"China has more influence with Burma than India or any other country," he said in Washington. The junta's "decision to refuse the massive amounts of relief aid and expertise that is waiting offshore . . . is a death sentence for many thousands of men, women and children."
Sein said opposition figure Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who lives under house arrest in Rangoon, was safe. "The roof of her house may be blown off, and trees in her compound are uprooted, but I believe she is alive."
The United Nations estimated that 1.9 million survivors were "severely affected" and that as of Wednesday, about 276,000 of them had received any relief supplies from U.N. agencies or international nongovernmental organizations.
International aid workers continued to paint a grim picture of conditions in the Irrawaddy Delta.
"It's really horrific," said one Rangoon-based foreign aid worker, whose Burmese staffers have visited the worst-hit areas. "There are villages where everyone survived, but they have been without food and water for a week and are just on a little hill, surrounded by water, waiting for help."
Soldiers have begun evacuating victims from the submerged areas, but often just to schools or monasteries to fend for themselves, with little or no food. "The army has been out there giving out food and supplies, but it's very little," another aid worker said. "For every hour that goes by, people are dying."
State television in Burma has repeatedly aired images of military men passing out emergency supplies. "This is a regime that is extremely nationalistic -- their whole ideology is about how they are a strong government that is protecting the country and holding the country together," said one Western specialist on Burma's relations with the outside world.
"Accepting aid would be an implicit admission that they cannot deal with the problems of the country," he said. "What they are seeing here is a threat to their entire raison d'etre -- their whole house of cards falling down."
