Police block workers; aid backs up

RANGOON, Burma (AP) — Police barred foreign aid workers from reaching cyclone survivors in hard-hit areas yesterday, while emergency food shipments backed up at the main airport for Burma’s biggest city.

Some storm survivors were reportedly being given spoiled or poor-quality food rather than nutrition-rich biscuits sent by international donors, adding to fears that the ruling military junta in the Southeast Asian country could be misappropriating assistance.

U.N. officials warned that the threat was escalating for the 2 million people facing disease and hunger in low-lying areas battered by the storm unless relief efforts increased dramatically.

Checkpoints manned by armed police were set up yesterday on roads leading to the Irrawaddy River Delta and all international aid workers and journalists were turned back.

Supplies piled up at Rangoon’s main airport.

With rain falling on Rangoon yesterday and downpours predicted later this week, aid officials said there is not enough warehouse space to protect the supplies beginning to flow in after the regime agreed to accept foreign help.

“We fear a second catastrophe [in Burma] unless we’re able to put in place quickly a maximum of aid and a major logistical effort comparable with the response to the [2004] tsunami,” said Elisabeth Byrs of the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs.

The tsunami killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen nations around the Indian Ocean.

Burma’s state television said the number of confirmed deaths from Cyclone Nargis had risen by 2,335, to 34,273, and the number of missing stood at 27,838. The United Nations estimates the actual death toll from the May 3 storm could be between 62,000 and 100,000.

A longtime foreign resident of Rangoon told the Associated Press that angry government officials were complaining that high-energy biscuits rushed in on the World Food Program’s first flights were sent to a military warehouse.

A spokesman for the military regime would not comment.

U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas said that while Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had expressed concern about food aid being diverted, so far there was no evidence that was happening.

The military, which has ruled Burma since 1962, has taken control of most supplies sent in by other countries.

Among those are the United States, which made its first aid delivery Monday and sent in another cargo plane yesterday packed with blankets, water and mosquito netting. A third shipment was en route.