Foreign aid workers headed for the cyclone-ravaged Irrawaddy delta today to see whether Burma’s military junta will honour a promise made by its top general to give them freedom of movement.
Homeless Burmese queue for food and medicine outside Rangoon
"We're going to head out today and test the boundaries," one official from a major Western relief agency said in Rangoon shortly before his departure for a region that has been off-limits to nearly all foreigners since the May 2nd cyclone.
Thousands of beggars were lined up along the roads of the delta, where the storm left 134,000 people dead or missing and another 2.4 million clinging to survival.
Three weeks after the disaster, there are still many villages that have received no outside help and waterways of Burma's "rice bowl" remain littered with animal carcasses and corpses, either grotesquely bloated or rotting to the bone. The stench of death is widespread, as are the swarms of flies.
Donors pledged nearly €32 million in aid at a landmark conference yesterday but Western countries said much of the cash would be contingent on access to the delta.
Many of the donations are destined for the UN’s €128 million emergency appeal, which was nearly a third full before the meeting. It is meant to provide help for three months only.
The junta said last Wednesday that it needed €7 billion for resettlement, reconstruction and rehabilitation.
On Friday it agreed to admit foreign aid workers to the delta region, after a top-level meeting with UN chief Ban Ki-moon. Junta leader Than Shwe promised Mr Ban that all aid officials and disaster assessment teams would be allowed in "regardless of nationalities".
The UN says three in four of those most in need have yet to receive any help - and that hunger and disease could send the death toll soaring if things do not change fast. The junta, by contrast, says the relief phase of the disaster is already over.
Besides denying and delaying visas to aid officials, army and police checkpoints on roads out of Rangoon have prevented all but a handful leaving the former capital.
Given the army's reputation for breaking its word during the 46 years it has held power, the reaction was cautious from aid agencies and countries such as the United States, which regards Burma as an "outpost of tyranny".
Increasing their frustrations, the Burmese embassy in Bangkok was closed on Monday after a fire caused extensive damage to one building in the compound. Thai police said the blaze did not appear to be suspicious.
Washington told the Rangoon conference it was ready to raise its offer of $20.5 million (€13 million) in aid if the junta opened up, but added it was "dismayed" the generals went ahead with a constitutional referendum in the middle of the disaster.
The result - 92.5 per cent in favour on a turnout of 98.1 per cent in a poll held with no neutral monitoring - is unlikely to enhance the credibility of the generals' seven-step "roadmap to democracy", that is meant to culminate in elections in 2010.
The re-imposition, expected in the next couple of days, of a rolling, year-long house arrest order for opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is only likely to rile the junta's opponents further.