U.S. flies relief aid into Myanmar
BANGKOK, Thailand – The head of the U.S. Pacific Command flew into Myanmar on Monday aboard the first U.S. military aid flight, to press for a full-scale international relief operation for victims of Cyclone Nargis. Facing mounting international pressure to open their country’s borders, Myanmar officials promised to consider the request.
In New York, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed “immense frustration” with the pace of the relief effort, slowed by Myanmar’s secretive military government. After trying for days to get top general Than Shwe on the telephone, Ban said, he sent a letter urging him to facilitate a massive aid operation.
Adm. Timothy Keating flew in a U.S. Air Force C-130 from an air base in Thailand that is turning into a staging area for relief for Myanmar, also known as Burma. Accompanying him was Henrietta Fore, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. At the airport in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, they conferred with Myanmar’s top naval officer in the highest-level military contact between the two countries in decades.
Keating and Fore did not go beyond the airport before flying back to Thailand. Fore said she believed that “our discussions were a good first step” toward broader U.S. help.
The United States has offered to deploy as many as 4,000 Marines, six C-130 cargo planes and a large number of heavy-lift helicopters in what would be its largest disaster relief effort since the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. It will also have three naval ships, with helicopters on board, positioned off Myanmar’s southwest coast within 48 hours.
“We have a broad array of personnel and equipment, and we are ready to respond as soon as the Burmese give us permission,” Keating said.
The cargo plane on which Keating and Fore traveled delivered bottled water, blankets and mosquito nets. U.S. and Myanmar military personnel jointly unloaded the supplies, which Myanmar officials promised to send quickly to the disaster zone by helicopter.
Myanmar authorities cleared two more U.S. C-130 relief flights for today. In another sign of cooperation, U.N. officials said that Myanmar had now approved visas for 34 aid workers.
The generals who rule the country (whose name they officially changed from Burma to Myanmar) are highly wary of Western governments, especially the United States. President Bush has called Myanmar “an outpost of tyranny”; the generals accuse Washington of trying to overthrow them by supporting Myanmar dissidents.
The government raised its officially confirmed death toll to 31,938 on Monday. But Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, a coalition of 165 U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations that work abroad, said that reports from people on the ground as well as U.N. helicopter assessments increasingly indicate that the number of dead could be as high as 200,000.