Aid workers still waiting to enter Myanmar’s delta

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer Sun Jun 1, 12:52 AM ET

AP Photo: The USS Essex , and the Essex Amphibious Ready Group steam in formation, Friday, May…

BANGKOK, Thailand – Myanmar needs more than food and shelter. It needs human expertise for everything from cleaning water to mental health counseling — and right now, those experts can’t get to the hard-hit delta.

Dozens of aid workers from UNICEF, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and other groups are still stuck in Yangon, the nation’s largest city, without the required travel permits to leave for the delta region.

These workers include Red Cross water quality engineers, for example, to train their local counterparts to run major drinking water treatment plants.

“The priority is drinking water,” UNICEF spokeswoman Shantha Bloemen said Friday.

For the first several weeks after Cyclone Nargis struck May 2-3, few of the more than 2 million survivors received any help. Myanmar’s government only has about 15 transport planes that cannot carry tons of food and up to 40 aging helicopters, many not working, experts say.

Foreign aid agencies are now trying to get in not just trucks and helicopters, but also workers with experience from dealing with disasters like the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 2005 Pakistani earthquake.

“It’s not about extra pairs of hands; there are special skills that are required,” said Richard Horsey, a spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian effort that is trying, like other groups, to reach the country’s flooded Irrawaddy delta.

Relief officials say they are poised to:

• Set up dozens of drinking water treatment plants in the delta and operate hand pumps and other equipment to desalinate wells and fields contaminated by the saltwater tidal surge.

• Send in health and nutrition experts to track disease and to identify acute cases of malnutrition, particularly in children, and mental health counselors.

• Join local teams to conduct emergency assessments of just what help is most needed, including food, water, shelter and medicine, and how many schools and other public facilities are required. UNICEF said Friday that more than 4,000 schools serving 1 million children were either damaged or destroyed.

Some people in Myanmar are already trained to deal with similar problems but not on such a large scale, said John Sparrow, Red Cross spokesman for the Asia-Pacific region.

“The kind of expertise you need doesn’t come overnight, and that’s why we need the expatriates in there,” he said. Those who have handled multiple disasters will be able to reach more people and work more efficiently and quickly, he said.

On Saturday, a U.N. official warned Myanmar against prematurely resettling cyclone refugees, saying those who leave relief camps may not receive the aid they need and will become even more vulnerable to disease and the elements.

Human rights groups have lambasted Myanmar’s military rulers, accusing them of kicking homeless cyclone survivors out of shelters. The U.S. defense secretary said the junta‘s blockage of international help has cost “tens of thousands of lives.”

But Myanmar‘s deputy defense minister, Maj. Gen. Aye Myint, said Sunday that his government responded promptly to the emergency by opening relief camps, providing food and water to cyclone victims, restoring electricity and clearing roads.

Relief operations are now over and the government is now concentrating on rehabilitation and rebuilding, he told a security conference in Singapore.

Few countries can deal with such a huge disaster, let alone one of the poorest nations in Asia. Senior Gen. Than Shwe and other top generals who run the country have spent most of the money on the military’s 400,000 soldiers.

But some foreign aid workers with a history of working in Myanmar say the government’s resistance to foreign assistance also has sparked an impressive grass roots effort to deliver aid.

“It’s come from the Myanmar people themselves,” said Curt Bradner, who with his wife, Cathy, has been working on a water treatment project called Thirst-Aid the past two years in Myanmar.

“They may not be responding as quickly as the international community would like to see happen,” he said of Myanmar’s people. “But in their own way, they’re really doing an excellent job. This is a country that is 300 years behind the rest of the world, in many respects. Only 7 percent of the country has electricity. It’s astounding.”

___

On the Net:

U.N. humanitarian office:
http://ochaonline.un.org

Thirst-Aid:
http://www.thirst-aid.org

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080601/ap_on_re_as/myanmar_aid_waiting;_ylt=AgXxi5F8N2vujR58F1mNZ55w24cA

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ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကုိယ္စားျပဳ ေကာ္မတီ အစည္းအေဝး အျမန္ဆံုး က်င္းပရန္ လိုေနၿပီ

————————————————————–

ျမန္မာျပည္သူလူထု ၈၂ %ေက်ာ္ကလည္း ၁၉၉ဝ ခုႏွစ္ ပါတီစံု အေထြေထြ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားအား လြတ္လြတ္လပ္လပ္ သမာသမတ္ရွိစြာ ေရြးခ်ယ္တင္ေျမွာက္၍ လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္အာဏာ (mandate)ကို ယံုၾကည္စြာ အပ္ႏွင္းထားခဲ့ၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။

အာဏာရွင္စနစ္ဆိုးႀကီးေအာက္မွ လြတ္ေျမာက္၍ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးမ်ား အျပည့္အဝ ရရွိႏိုင္ရန္ႏွင့္ တရားဥပေဒ အမွန္တကယ္ စိုးမိုးႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ တာဝန္ရွိသူတို႔မွ ရဲဝန္႔ျပတ္သားစြာ၊ လိမၼာပါးနပ္စြာ၊ အရည္အခ်င္း ျပည့္ဝစြာ ဦးေဆာင္ပါမွ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ နစ္နာဆံုးရွံဳးေနရေသာ ျမန္မာျပည္သူလူထုႀကီးကလည္း ထပ္ခ်ပ္မကြာ လိုက္လံအားေပး ေထာက္ခံၾကမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။

ျမန္မာျပည္သူတို႔အေနျဖင့္ ဤသို႔လုပ္ေဆာင္ႏိုင္ေရးကို ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ ေစာင့္စားေနခဲ့ရသည္။ ယခုလည္း အဆင္သင့္ ရွိေနသည္။

ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကုိယ္စားျပဳ ေကာ္မတီအေနျဖင့္ လူထုက အပ္ႏွင္းထားေသာ လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္အာဏာကို အျပည့္အဝ အသံုးခ်လ်က္ အာဏာရွင္တို႔အား လည္စင္းေပးေနရေသာ လူထုဘက္မွ ရဲရဲဝန္႔ဝန္႔ ရပ္တည္ေပးသင့္သည္။

လြင္ေအာင္စိုး

၁-၆-၂ဝဝ၈

ျပည္ပအကူအညီ လက္ခံေရး ေႏွာင့္ေႏွးမႈေၾကာင့္ လူ႔အသက္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ပိုမိုဆံုးရံႈးခဲ့ရဖြယ္ရွိ

31 May 2008

Ron Corben in Burmese - အစီအစဥ္ကုိရယူရန္ (MP3)
Ron Corben in Burmese - နားဆင္ရန္ (MP3)

ေရႊေပါက္ကံၿမိဳ႔က မုန္တိုင္းဒုကၡသည္ အခ်ိဳ႕ ခိုနားစရာေနရာ ရွာေဖြေနၾကပံု (ေမ ၂၀၊ ၂၀၀၈)

ေမလဆန္းတုန္းက ဆုိင္ကလုန္းေလမုန္တုိင္း တုိက္ခတ္ ခဲ့တဲ့ေနာက္ အကူအညီေပးေရး လုပ္ငန္းေတြကို ျမန္မာ စစ္အစုိးရက လက္မခံ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့တာေၾကာင့္ လူေပါင္း ေထာင္ေသာင္းခ်ီ ေသဆုံးခဲ့ရဖြယ္ရွိတယ္လုိ႔ အေမရိကန္ ကာကြယ္ေရး ၀န္ႀကီး ေရာဘတ္ ဂိတ္စ္ (Robert Gates) က ေျပာဆုိလုိက္ပါတယ္။ စစ္အစိုးရက မုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ ခံရသူေတြကုိ ခုိလႈံရာေနရာေတြက ေမာင္းထုတ္ၿပီး သဘာ၀ေဘးဒဏ္ခံခဲ့ရတဲ့ ေဒသေတြဆီ ျပန္ၾကဖုိ႔ ဖိအားေပးမႈေတြ ရွိေနတာေၾကာင့္ စုိးရိမ္ ပူပမ္မႈေတြ ထြက္ေပၚေနခ်ိန္မွာပဲ ကာကြယ္ေရး ၀န္ႀကီးက အခုလုိ ေျပာဆုိလုိက္တာပါ။ ဒီအေၾကာင္း ဗီအုိေအ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွ ဗ်ဴ႐ုိ ကေန ရြန္ ကုိဘင္ (Ron Corben) သတင္းေပးပုိ႔ ထားတာကုိ ကုိေအာင္လြင္ဦး က တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

အေမရိကန္ကာကြယ္ေရး၀န္ႀကီး ေရာဘတ္ ဂိတ္စ္ က စကၤာပူမွာ ဒီကေန႔ စေနေန႔ က်င္းပခဲ့တဲ့ ေဒသတြင္း လုံၿခံဳေရးဆုိင္ရာ ကာကြယ္ေရး၀န္ႀကီးေတြရဲ႕ ႏွီးေႏွာဖလွယ္ပဲြမွာ အခုလုိ ခတ္ဘြင္းဘြင္း ေျပာလုိက္တာပါ။ ျပည္ပက အကူအညီေတြ ေပးဖုိ႔ေျပာေနတာကုိ ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရက မသိသလုိ မျမင္သလုိ လုပ္ေနတယ္ဆုိၿပီး ေ၀ဖန္စြပ္စဲြ လုိက္တာပါ။ ဒီလုိကပ္ဆုိးၾကေရာက္လုိ႔ ေၾကကဲြဖြယ္ရာ အေျခအေနေတြနဲ႔ ႀကံဳခဲ့ရတဲ့ တျခားႏုိင္ငံေတြနဲ႔ ႏႈိင္းယွဥ္ၾကည့္မယ္ဆုိရင္၊ အခုလုိ ႏုိင္ငံတကာနဲ႔ ေဒသတြင္းက အကူအညီေတြေပးမယ့္ကိစၥကုိ စစ္အစုိးရက ျငင္းပယ္လုိက္တာက ဆန္႔က်င္ဖက္ လုပ္ရပ္ျဖစ္ေနတယ္ဆုိၿပီး သူက ေျပာဆုိလုိက္တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္ ဆူနာမီ ေရလႈိင္းဒဏ္ ခံခဲ့တာ၊ မႏွစ္တုန္းက ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံမွာ ဒီလုိပဲ ဆုိင္ကလုန္းမုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ ခံခဲ့ရတဲ့ အေျခအေနမ်ဳိးေတြကုိ တု႔ံျပန္ ေဆာင္ရြက္တာေတြနဲ႔ ကဲြလြဲေနတယ္ဆုိၿပီး ၀န္ႀကီး ဂိတ္စ္ က ေျပာဆုိလုိက္တာပါ။

“ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လုိ႔ေတာ့ အေျခအေနက အမ်ားႀကီးကုိ ကြာျခားပါတယ္၊ အသက္ေတြ ေထာင္ေသာင္းခ်ီ ေပးဆပ္ရတာပါ။ အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုအျပင္ တျခား ႏုိင္ငံအမ်ားအျပား ဟာလည္း သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ က်ဳိးပမ္းမႈေတြမွာ အဟန္႔အတားေတြ ျဖစ္ေနတာနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လုိ႔ ခံစားခ်က္ေတြ ရွိၾကတာပါ။”

နာဂစ္ ဆုိင္ကလုန္းမုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ အဆုိးရြားဆုံး ခံလုိက္ရတဲ့ ဧရာ၀တီ ျမစ္၀ကၽြန္းေပၚ ေဒသကုိ သြားေရာက္ခြင့္ရဖုိ႔ ကိစၥေတြမွာ ဗ်ဴ႐ုိကေရစီ နည္းေတြနဲ႔ ေႏွာင့္ေႏွးမႈေတြကုိ ရင္ဆုိင္ေနဆဲ ျဖစ္တယ္ဆုိၿပီး၊ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရး လုပ္သားေတြက ေျပာဆုိေနၾကတာပါ။

မုန္တုိင္းဒဏ္ေၾကာင့္လည္း အနည္းဆုံး လူေပါင္း ၇၇,၀၀၀ ေသေၾကခဲ့ၾကရၿပီး၊ ၅၆,၀၀၀ ေလာက္ ေပ်ာက္ဆုံးေနခဲ့သလုိ လူေပါင္း ၂ သန္း ေက်ာ္ဟာဆုိရင္လည္း အစားအစာ၊ ခုိလႈံရာနဲ႔ ေဆး၀ါး အကူအညီေတြ ရဖုိ႔ လုိအပ္ေနဆဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အေမရိကန္၊ ၿဗိတိန္ နဲ႔ ျပင္သစ္ ႏုိင္ငံက ေရတပ္ သေဘၤာေတြဟာ ဆုိရင္လည္း အေရးေပၚ အကူအညီေတြေပးဖုိ႔ ဘဂၤလား ပင္လယ္ေအာ္ထဲမွာ ေရာက္ရွိေနခဲ့ၾကေပမယ့္၊ ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရက ဒါေတြကုိ လက္မခံ ျငင္းဆန္ခဲ့တာပါ။ ဆုိင္ကလုန္း ျဖစ္ၿပီးၿပီးခ်င္း အာရွေဒသတြင္းႏုိင္ငံေတြက အကူအညီေတြေပးဖုိ႔ စစ္တပ္သုံး ရဟတ္ယာဥ္ေတြ ေထာက္ပ့ံကူညီဖုိ႔ ကမ္းလွမ္းခဲ့တာကုိလည္း ပယ္ခ်ထားတာပါ။ အကူအညီေပးေရး လုပ္ငန္းေတြ ၾကန္႔ၾကာေနရတဲ့ ကိစၥနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လုိ႔ ၀န္ႀကီး ဂိတ္စ္ ရဲ႕ စိုးရိမ္မကင္းေျပာဆုိမႈကုိ ေဒသတြင္း ႏုိင္ငံေတြကလည္း လက္ခံခဲ့ၾကတာပါ။  တကယ္ေတာ့ ဒုကၡေရာက္ေနတဲ့ လူေပါင္း ၂ သန္းေက်ာ္ရဲ႕ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း ၃၀ ေလာက္သာ လုိအပ္တဲ့ ေထာက္ပ့ံမႈေတြ ရတယ္ ဆုိၿပီးေတာ့လည္း ႏုိင္ငံတကာ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးအဖဲြ႔ေတြက ေျပာၾကပါတယ္။ အေရးေပၚ အကူအညီေတြ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ လုိအပ္ေနသူေတြ အတြက္ လူသားခ်င္း စာနာမႈဆုိင္ရာ အကူအညီေတြ ေပးအပ္ႏုိင္ဖုိ႔ အကန္႔အသတ္မရွိ လုပ္ပုိင္ခြင့္ေတြ ရဖုိ႔လုိတယ္လုိ႔ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံဆုိင္ရာ ၾသစေၾတးလ်သံအမတ္ႀကီး ေဘလ္ ပက္တာဆန္ (Bill Paterson) က ဆုိပါတယ္။

“ေရာဂါကူးစက္ပ်ံ႕ပြားႏုိင္တဲ့ အေျခအေနဆုိးေတြေအာက္မွာ သူတုိ႔ေတြ ေနထုိင္ေနၾကရတာပါ။ အုိးအိမ္ေတြ လက္လႊတ္ ဆုံး႐ႈံးခဲ့ၾကရသလုိ၊ သူတုိ႔အေနနဲ႔ မိသားစုေတြလည္း ဆုံး႐ႈံးထားၾကတာပါ။ ဒီလုိေနရာေတြကုိ အျမန္ေရာက္ဖုိ႔ ဆုိတာက တကယ့္ကုိ အေရးႀကီးပါတယ္။ ဆုိင္ကလုန္းဒဏ္ ခံရခ်ိန္ကစၿပီး အကူအညီ အေထာက္အပ့ံေတြ ျဖန္႔ျဖဴးမေပးႏုိင္လုိ႔ အမ်ားအျပားဟာလည္း အသက္ဆုံး႐ႈံးဖြယ္ရာ ရွိပါတယ္။”

ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ရက္သတၱပတ္ကုန္ ရန္ကုန္မွာ က်င္းပခဲ့တဲ့ အလႉရွင္ ညီလာခံမွာေတာ့ ႏုိင္ငံတကာက ကယ္ဆယ္ေရး လုပ္သားေတြ လုပ္ပုိင္ခြင့္ ရဖုိ႔ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွ ႏုိင္ငံမ်ားအသင္း (အာဆီယံ) နဲ႔အတူ ကုလသမဂၢ က စစ္အစုိးရနဲ႔ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ ရခဲ့တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီအေတာအတြင္း ႏုိင္ငံတကာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေလ့လာေရးအဖဲြ႔ (Human Rights Watch) ကေတာ့ ျမန္မာအာဏာပုိင္ေတြဟာ ေထာင္ခ်ီတဲ့ မုန္တုိင္းေဘးသင့္သူေတြကုိ အေရးေပၚ ခုိလႈံရာ ေနရာေတြကေန ဖယ္ရွားၿပီး ျမစ္၀ကၽြန္းေပၚ ေဒသက မုန္တုိင္းေၾကာင့္ ပ်က္စီးမႈေတြ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ ရွိခဲ့တဲ့ ေနရပ္ရင္း ေက်းရြာေတြကုိ အတင္းအက်ပ္ ျပန္ပုိ႔ေပးေနတယ္ ဆုိၿပီး ေ၀ဖန္ေျပာဆုိ လုိက္ပါေသးတယ္။

ဤသတင္းေဆာင္းပါးကို အီးေမးလ္ပို႔ရန္။
ပုံႏွိပ္ရန္လြယ္ကူသည့္စာသား

http://www.voanews.com/burmese/2008-05-31-voa4.cfm

စစ္အစိုးရရဲ႕ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုကို အသိအမွတ္မျပဳေၾကာင္းနဲ႕ ျမန္မာအစုိးရလုပ္ရပ္မ်ားကို စိတ္ပ်က္မိေၾကာင္း အိမ္ျဖဴေတာ္ေျပာခြင့္ရပုဂၢိဳလ္ေျပာ

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ အာရွအသံ

Radio Free Asia (Burmese)

2008-05-31

မုန္တိုင္းအၿပီး ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရဟာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာကေပးမယ့္ အကူအညီေတြကို လက္ခံဖို႔ ေႏွးေကြးေနတာကို စိတ္ပ်က္မိေၾကာင္းနဲ႔ အတည္ျပဳလိုက္တဲ့ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံု အေျခခံဥပေဒကို တရားမဝင္ေၾကာင္း အိမ္ျဖဴေတာ္က ေျပာဆိုလိုက္ပါတယ္။

အိမ္ျဖဴေတာ္ေျပာခြင့္ရ အမ်ိဳးသမီး Dana Perino ကို သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲတြင္ ေတြ႔ရပံု။ (Courtesy Photo: White House)

ဒီအေၾကာင္းကို မုန္တိုင္းအၿပီးမွာ စစ္အစိုးရက ဆႏၵခံယူပြဲကို က်င္းပခဲ့ၿပီး သူတို႔ေရးဆြဲထားတဲ့ အေျခခံဥပေဒဟာ အတည္ျဖစ္သြားၿပီလို႔ ေၾကညာ လိုက္တာေတြနဲ႔ ပါတ္သက္ၿပီး အေမရိကန္ အစိုးရအေနနဲ႔ အဲဒီအေျခခံ ဥပေဒကိုေရာ၊ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့တဲ့ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ေတြကိုေရာ တရားဝင္တယ္လို႔ လက္ခံသတ္မွတ္ျခင္း မရွိဘူးလို႔ အိမ္ျဖဴေတာ္ ေျပာခြင့္ရ အမ်ိဳးသမီး Ms Dana Perinoက ေျပာၾကားလိုက္ပါတယ္။

အဲဒီဥပေဒဟာ ျမန္မာ႔ဒီမိုကေရစီေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ႏိုင္ငံေရးမွာ ပါဝင္ခြင္႔မေပးပဲ ေဘးဖယ္ထားၿပီး ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ စစ္အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး သက္ဆိုးရွည္ေအာင္သာ ေရးဆြဲထားတဲ႔ ဥပေဒမွ်သာျဖစ္ၿပီး ဘာမွ အဆီအႏွစ္မရွိပါဘူးလို႔ လည္း Ms Dana Perino က ေျပာပါတယ္။

သူမကဆက္ၿပီး ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရအေနနဲ႔ သူတို႔ျပည္သူလူထုေတြကို ဂရုစိုက္ၿပီး ဒီမိုကေရစီနဲ႔ လြတ္လပ္မႈကိုေရွးရႈတဲ႔ လမ္းေၾကာင္းေပၚ ေလွ်ာက္လွမ္းမယ္လို႔ က်မတို႔ေမွ်ာ္လင္႔ပါတယ္လို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။

တဆက္တည္းမွာပဲ မုန္တိုင္းဒဏ္ခံရတဲ့ ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြ ပိုမို အကူအညီရရွိဖို႔ အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုအေနနဲ႔ စိုးရိမ္ပူပန္ေနဆဲျဖစ္ၿပီး မုန္တိုင္း ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးအတြက္ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရရဲ႕ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနပံုေတြကို အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုနဲ႔ တျခားႏိုင္ငံေတြသာမက ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေစတနာ့ဝန္ထမ္း အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြကပါ အင္မတန္စိတ္ပ်က္ ေနၾကပါတယ္လို႔လည္း အိမ္ျဖဴေတာ္ ေျပာခြင္႔ရအမ်ိဳးသမီး Ms Dana Perino ကေျပာပါတယ္။

http://www.rfa.org/burmese/news/referendum_is_not_recognized_by_US-05312008141943.html

Malaysia to Burma: Allow S. Asian militaries to help

SINGAPORE (AP) — Malaysia’s deputy leader urged Burma’s junta Sunday to let Southeast Asian militaries play a bigger role in providing aid to cyclone victims, a rare plea for foreign intervention in a region where nations generally stay out of each other’s affairs.

The appeal by Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak at an international security conference came after Burma’s Deputy Defense Minister Aye Myint used to forum to claim his government acted promptly to provide relief in the aftermath of the May 2-3 Cyclone Nargis.

Najib said the tragedy is of such a huge scale that it is “something that we cannot take lightly.” More than 75,000 died from the cyclone and some 2.4 million survivors are in need of fresh water, food and medical care.

Burma has not allowed foreign militaries to deliver aid directly to cyclone victims, but Najib suggested that militaries of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations be allowed to do so.

“Certainly … we would like to see ASEAN being allowed to play a much bigger role because the situation is very, very serious in Burma,” Najib said, sitting on the stage with Aye Myint.

“The only viable organization that can really be effective is the military,” he said, because of its ability to deploy a large number of helicopters and boats.

“At the risk of offending my colleague here I would certainly speak on behalf of ASEAN that we do want to play a bigger role in the context of tragedy in Burma,” Najib said.

It was the most direct public appeal so far by a member of ASEAN for Burma’s military rulers in to give up their stubborn refusal to allow foreign intervention. ASEAN has generally followed the principle of noninterference in each other’s affairs, and Najib’s plea was unprecedented.

Najib, however, rejected the suggestion that countries should unilaterally go into Burma to provide relief if the junta does not provide help for its people quickly.

“You cannot simply override (national sovereignty) no matter how strongly you feel about the need to provide support,” he said.

Several people in the audience spoke up after Najib’s comments to lambast Burma, with one questioner calling its actions “a scandal.”

Aye Myint sat stoically through the verbal attack and he also did not respond to Najib’s plea, saying only that his government is not preventing aid workers from doing their work.

Earlier in a speech, Aye Myint claimed his government acted promptly in rescuing and providing relief the 2.4 million cyclone survivors. He also claimed that food, water and medicines have been provided to all victims, and the government has now moved to a rehabilitation phase.

Many international aid agencies and foreign governments say little government aid had reached most of the survivors.

Aye Myint said the cyclone killed 77,738 people and left 55,917 missing. At least 19,359 were injured.

Najib said that according to Malaysian aid workers in Burma, the scale of the disaster could become even bigger than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami if aid does not soon reach people.

“I don’t know if that is a correct assessment but it is one view delivered to us by people who have been on the ground,” he said.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-06-01-malaysia-burma_N.htm

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Indian Ocean | Malaysian | Cyclone Nargis | Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak

BURMA TAKES A BEATING

Photo gallery:

Cyclone wreaks havoc across the country

Nargis hits:Toll nears 78,000 , Lack of radar hampered storm warning

U.S. response: First lady criticizes crisis response Burmese community ready to help

Aid: Preventing disease outbreaks ‘race against time’ , Where to send donations

Junta: Accused of handing out spoiled food , Disaster blamed on bad karma

Global response: Aid focused on Burma as China steadily copes with quake | U.N. chief slams Burma junta

Weather blog: Death and despair rages in Burma, A ‘major disaster’ for the ages

Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak

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