UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will travel to Burma this week to discuss the troubled aid operations for victims of the cyclone that devastated the country earlier this month, his spokeswoman said today.
"I can confirm he (Ban) is going to Myanmar this week," spokeswoman Michele Montas said by telephone, adding that he was expected to arrive by Wednesday or Thursday.
Earlier today, Britain's Asia minister, Mark Malloch-Brown, said a turning point in the effort to get Burma to open up to major foreign aid operations could be near.
International pressure has been intensifying on Burma's military rulers to allow more foreign aid workers and relief efforts after Cyclone Nargis left an estimated 2.5 million people destitute.
Malloch-Brown said an agreement was in the works for a UN and Asian-led operation that could solve the impasse.
"I think we're potentially at a turning point, but like all turning points in Burma, the corner will have a few S bends in it," he said. "I'm confident we've got movement here in the sense we've diplomatically found an answer to the stand-off."
Malloch-Brown said the United Nations estimates that help has reached less than 25 per cent of people in need.
"It's incredibly late in the day. I'd have liked to be where we are today two weeks ago," he said. "You've got a Burmese government that's deeply suspicious, engrained over years, of outsiders."
The reluctance of the military, which has ruled for the last 46 years, to allow an influx of foreign aid workers appears to stem from fear that it might loosen its vice-like grip on power.
The Burmese junta's official toll from the disaster stands at 77,738 dead and 55,917 missing.
Aid was trickling in today to the affected areas, as non-government aid organisations warned thousands of children could die within weeks if food does not get to them soon. Save the Children said in a statement its reseach 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."
The World Food Programme (WFP), leading the outside emergency food effort, said it had managed to get rice and beans to 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need after the May 2nd storm.
"It's not enough. There are a very large number of people who are yet to receive any kind of assistance and that's what's keeping our teams working round the clock," WFP spokesman Marcus Prior said in Bangkok.
Pressure is also mounting at the United Nations, where France has accused the junta of being on the verge of a crime against humanity. Yesterday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the generals' sluggish response as "inhuman".
The French and US navies have ships equipped with aid and helicopters hovering off Burma's waters in the Bay of Bengal, but Paris and Washington say they will not start any aid flights from the vessels until they get a green light from the generals.
UN chief humanitarian officer John Holmes is due in Yangon this evening, to meet junta number four Thein Sein, who is prime minister and Burma's military aid operations leader.
Confident they are handling the crisis properly, the generals took diplomats on a tour of the delta yesterday, where people are now clinging to survival in an area the size of Austria. They appeared to have worked hard to keep the diplomats away from the destitute.
"The purpose was to show the situation was under control. Where we were they didn't hide anything, but of course they selected the places we visited," said Bernard Delpuech, head of the European Commission Humanitarian Office in Yangon.
Three days ago, men, women and children stood for miles alongside the road near the delta town of Kunyangon, begging in the mud and rain for scraps of food or clothing from the occasional passing aid vehicle.
Thousands of other refugees are crammed into monasteries and schools, fed and watered by local volunteers and private donors who have sent in clothes, biscuits, dried noodles and rice. Buddhist monks play a major role.
In a rare acknowledgement of criticism, state television said yesterday outside media reports suggesting the government was not doing enough were inaccurate.
Tens of millions of dollars had been spent, the army, navy and air force had delivered extensive aid and 122 medical teams had been dispatched to the delta to help victims and monitor for infectious diseases such as cholera, Burmese television said.