MPs encouraged by Myanmar moves on outside help

18-05-2008

LONDON (AFP) - A visit by foreign diplomats to cyclone-hit Myanmar is a sign the country's military rulers now realise they need foreign assistance to help victims of the tragedy, an MP said Sunday.

"I think it's a remarkable thing really that we have come at very short notice," junior Foreign Office minister Mark Malloch-Brown told BBC television by telephone from Myanmar's largest city, Yangon.

"It's evidence of the fact that the Burmese have accepted that indeed we come in the spirit of humanitarian assistance, that this is not about politics."

Malloch-Brown, a former UN deputy secretary-general who now has responsibility for Africa, Asia and the UN, is the first British government minister to visit the country's former colony in 15 years.

He said he handed over a letter for Myanmar's leader, senior general Than Shwe, from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who on Saturday criticised the junta for being "inhuman" in refusing foreign help for cyclone victims.

The letter insisted that "this was a humanitarian enterprise, that we put politics aside to help victims of the cyclone", Malloch-Brown said.

"I think they're responding in kind and treating this on the terms we're offering it."

Aid agencies estimated that some two million people are in dire need of food, water and shelter more than two weeks after the storm struck on May 2-3, leaving nearly 134,000 people either dead or missing.

British charity Save the Children said thousands of children could starve to death within weeks.

As foreign governments kept up the pressure on Myanmar to accept their help, Malloch-Brown said talks with the country's secretive rulers had moved on from a desire for a "classic" Western relief operation to a "middle ground".

"There is now a leadership which the Burmese can accept and we can work through to deliver our assistance," he said.

"This operation, while still running into all kinds of bottlenecks, many of them man-induced rather than natural, nevertheless is now starting to move."

Asked about the possibility of military intervention, he said that no option should be dismissed but that a negotiated diplomatic solution was more efficient than force as there were fewer "political and logistical hurdles".

"We have to negotiate as broad, ambitious an access as possible but recognise it's going to be less than everything we want and we're just going to have to see what negotiations in the coming days... achieve.

"And I think you're going to see quite dramatic steps by the Burmese to open up."