EMPTY STOMACHS: Children protect their heads from the rain with empty aluminum plates, as they wait for a plate of rice, in Laputta town, Myanmar 30,000 Will Die Of Starvation Unless Food Is Rushed: Aid Agency
Yangon: Thousands of children in Myanmar will starve to death in two to three weeks unless food is rushed to them, an aid agency warned on Sunday as an increasingly angry international community pleaded for approval to mount an all-out effort to help cyclone survivors.
‘Save the Children’, a UK aid agency, said 30,000 acutely malnourished children are threatened by death from starvation.
The United Nations said Myanmar’s isolationist ruling generals were even forbidding the import of communications equipment, hampering already difficult contact among relief agencies. A UN situation report said on Saturday that emergency relief from the international community had reached an estimated 500,000 people. But the regime insists it will handle distribution to victims of Cyclone Nargis.
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, who has been unable to sway Myanmar’s leaders by telephone, said he was sending UN humanitarian chief John Holmes to Myanmar this weekend. Holmes was expected to arrive this evening in Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, said Amanda Pitt, a UN spokeswoman in Bangkok, the capital of neighbouring Thailand.
“He’s going at the request of the secretary-general to find out what’s really going on the ground, to get a much better picture of how the response is going and ... to see how much we can help them scale up this response,” Pitt said. Details of the visit, she said, were still being worked out.
Meanwhile, aid was trickling in to the 2.5 million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta as more foreign envoys tried to get the junta to admit large-scale international relief.
The World Food Programme (WFP), which is leading the outside emergency food effort, said it had managed to get rice and beans to about 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need after the May 2 storm. “It’s not enough. There are a very large number of people who are yet to receive any kind of assistance and that’s what’s keeping our teams working round the clock,” WFP spokesman Marcus Prior said.
In the last 50 years, only two Asian cyclones have exceeded Nargis in terms of human cost — a 1970 storm that killed 500,000 people in neighbouring Bangladesh, and another that killed 143,000 in 1991. With the junta still refusing to open its doors, disaster experts say Nargis’ body count could still climb dramatically. AGENCIES
Yangon: Thousands of children in Myanmar will starve to death in two to three weeks unless food is rushed to them, an aid agency warned on Sunday as an increasingly angry international community pleaded for approval to mount an all-out effort to help cyclone survivors.
‘Save the Children’, a UK aid agency, said 30,000 acutely malnourished children are threatened by death from starvation.
The United Nations said Myanmar’s isolationist ruling generals were even forbidding the import of communications equipment, hampering already difficult contact among relief agencies. A UN situation report said on Saturday that emergency relief from the international community had reached an estimated 500,000 people. But the regime insists it will handle distribution to victims of Cyclone Nargis.
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, who has been unable to sway Myanmar’s leaders by telephone, said he was sending UN humanitarian chief John Holmes to Myanmar this weekend. Holmes was expected to arrive this evening in Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, said Amanda Pitt, a UN spokeswoman in Bangkok, the capital of neighbouring Thailand.
“He’s going at the request of the secretary-general to find out what’s really going on the ground, to get a much better picture of how the response is going and ... to see how much we can help them scale up this response,” Pitt said. Details of the visit, she said, were still being worked out.
Meanwhile, aid was trickling in to the 2.5 million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta as more foreign envoys tried to get the junta to admit large-scale international relief.
The World Food Programme (WFP), which is leading the outside emergency food effort, said it had managed to get rice and beans to about 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need after the May 2 storm. “It’s not enough. There are a very large number of people who are yet to receive any kind of assistance and that’s what’s keeping our teams working round the clock,” WFP spokesman Marcus Prior said.
In the last 50 years, only two Asian cyclones have exceeded Nargis in terms of human cost — a 1970 storm that killed 500,000 people in neighbouring Bangladesh, and another that killed 143,000 in 1991. With the junta still refusing to open its doors, disaster experts say Nargis’ body count could still climb dramatically. AGENCIES
Source: The Times of India
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