Rain lashes Myanmar
YANGON (Reuters) - Heavy rains pelted homeless cyclone survivors in Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta on Tuesday, complicating the already slow delivery of aid to more than 1.5 million people facing hunger and disease.
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As more foreign aid trickled into the former Burma, critics ratcheted up the pressure on its military rulers to accelerate a relief effort that is only delivering an estimated tenth of the supplies needed in the devastated delta.
"The response of the regime in Burma to this crisis has been absolutely callous and those paying the price of this callousness have been the long-suffering Burmese people," Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told parliament.
An Australian air force plane landed in Yangon, Myanmar's main city, with 31 tonnes of emergency supplies, a day after the first U.S. military aid flight arrived in a country Washington has described as an "outpost of tyranny".
Two more U.S. flights arrived on Tuesday as part of a "confidence building" effort to prod Myanmar's reclusive generals into allowing a larger international relief operation 11 days after the disaster left up to 100,000 dead or missing.
France, Britain and Germany called on Tuesday for the world to deliver aid without the junta's agreement, using a little used U.N. principle of the "responsibility to protect".
Myanmar state television said the official death toll had risen to 34,273 from nearly 32,000 and 27,838 were missing.
DISEASES
Tens of thousands of people throughout the delta are crammed into Buddhist monasteries and schools after arriving in towns that were on the breadline even before the disaster.
Lacking food, water and sanitation, they face the threat of killer diseases such as cholera. Heavy tropical rains added to their misery.
"Where I am now there's over 10,000 homeless people and it's pouring rain," Bridget Gardener of the International Red Cross said during a rare tour of the delta by a foreign aid official.
While a steady stream of aid flights have landed in Yangon, only a fraction of the relief needed is getting to the delta due to flooding and the junta's desire to keep most foreign aid and logistics experts either out of the country or in Yangon.
The World Food Programme said it was able to deliver less than 20 percent of the 375 tonnes of food a day it wanted to move into the flooded delta.
Myanmar state television said six ships carrying 500 tonnes of supplies had left Yangon for the delta on Tuesday.
International relief organisations say their local staff are stretched to breaking point, while Medicins Sans Frontieres said its workers faced "increasing constraints".
One Yangon businessman just back from a personal aid mission to Bogalay, a delta township where at least 10,000 people were killed, said soldiers were appropriating aid.
"There are still some villages in the worst-hit areas that nobody has got to," the man, in his late 30s, told Reuters.
"Around Bogalay, private donors are not allowed to distribute their assistance to the victims themselves. We had to hand over what we had."
U.N. CRITICISM
The junta has welcomed "aid from any nation" but has made it very clear it does not want outsiders distributing it.
At the United Nations in New York, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered his most critical comments to date.
"I want to register my deep concern -- and immense frustration -- at the unacceptably slow response to this grave humanitarian crisis," he told reporters on Monday.
"We are at a critical point," he said. "Unless more aid gets into the country very quickly, we face an outbreak of infectious diseases that could dwarf today's crisis."
With three U.S. and one French warship laden with aid and helicopters steaming towards Myanmar, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana again raised the question of unauthorised aid drops into the delta -- which could be seen as an act of war.
"We have to use all the means to help those people," he said. When pressed, he replied: "Whatever is necessary to help the people who are suffering".
France's junior minister for human rights Rama Yade told reporters as EU development ministers' met to discuss emergency aid for Myanmar, that the three EU powers would propose imposing the aid to the U.N. Security Council, but acknowledged that they did not have unanimous support in the 27-nation EU.
Speaking after the first U.S. military aid flight to Myanmar on Monday, U.S. President George W. Bush condemned the junta for failing to act more quickly to accept international help, saying "either they are isolated or callous".
"It's been days and no telling how many people have lost their lives as a result of the slow response," he told CBS News.
The storm raged through an area home to nearly half of Myanmar's 53 million people, as well as its main rice-growing region. About 5,000 sq km (1,930 sq miles) of land remain under water.
Most of the casualties were killed by a 12-foot (3.5 metre) wall of water churned up by the cyclone's 190 kph (120 mph) winds.
