ninme

Times Online - Burma cyclone: junta backtracks on allowing aid flights

Burma’s military junta appeared to have backtracked today on a decision to give the US military permission to fly in relief supplies for the survivors of Cyclone Nargis and continued to block a major international effort to deliver emergency food aid.

More than 100,000 people are feared to have been killed in Saturday’s cyclone and perhaps a million left homeless, but official and non-governmental relief workers have mostly been refused entry visas by the secretive South East Asian state.

Thai officials said today that they had brokered an agreement to allow US planes to break off from joint military exercises with Thailand to kickstart the relief effort.

“They were very suspicious that the Americans would do more than just distribute relief supplies…”

It’s what we do, morons.

“This morning, we and our Thai allies thought we had a decision from the Burmese leadership to let the C-130 in. As of now, we don’t have that decision,” Eric John told a news conference in the Thai capital.

“We don’t have permission yet for the C-130 to go in but I emphasise ’yet’, Mr John said.

Honestly, at this point I’d just fly the stupid planes in. What are they gonna do, throw their epaulets at them? Anyway to do that they’d have to be somewhere near all the dead people and I doubt they’re really mingling right now.

Burma’s state media have reported that Cyclone Nargis killed at least 22,980 people and left 42,119 missing, but a top US diplomat said yesterday that more than 100,000 may have died.

Good lord.

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International said some donors were delaying aid for fear it would be siphoned off to the army.

WFP’s regional director, Anthony Banbury, indicated that the United Nations had similar concerns. “We will not just bring our supplies to an airport, dump it and take off,” he said. “This is one reason why there is a hold-up now, because we are going to bring in not just supplies but a lot of capacity to go with them to make sure the supplies get to the people.”

Wow, even the UN.

Good heavens, there’s 55 million people in Burma. Well, maybe just 48 million. At any rate, that’s .002% of the population, or 600,000 dead in this country, which is about 1.5 times the population of pre-Katrina New Orleans. That’s a big storm.