အာဏာရွင္မ်ားကမၻာၾကီးကိုစိန္ေခ္ၚေနျပီ

24-05-2008
Myanmar rejects U.S., Brit, French aid on military ships
မာယာပရိယာယ္မ်ားလွေသာ စစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ားက ကယ္ဆည္ေရးသမားအားလံုး၀င္ေရာက္ခြင့္ျပဳမည္ဟု ကတိေပးျပီးမွ အေမရိကန္ ၊ ျဗိတိန္ ၊ ျပင္သစ္ ကယ္ဆည္ေရးစစ္သေဘၤာမ်ား ၀င္ေရာက္ခြင့္ကို စစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ား ျငင္းဆန္ျပန္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေတြေထာက္ေသာအားျဖင့္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ား ႏိုင္ငံတကာဖိအားမ်ားကို ေလွ်ာ့သြားေအာင္လုပ္ေဆာင္ခ်က္မွတစ္ပါး တကယ့္ေစတနာအမွန္ ျပည္သူအေပၚမရွိပါဘူး။ စစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ားရဲ႕မာယာပရိယာယ္ေတြကို ႏိုင္ငံတကာသိေအာင္ ေဖၚထုတ္ၾကပါစို႔

John Heilprin
Associated Press
May. 24, 2008 12:00 AM
NAYPYITAW, Myanmar - Myanmar's ruling junta said Friday that it will let foreign-aid workers and commercial ships help survivors in the cyclone-ravaged Irrawaddy delta but refused to relent on accepting aid from U.S., French and British military ships.

The ships, almost within sight of the coast for more than a week, offer a huge potential boost to the aid effort because they can send helicopters to the hardest-to-reach spots.

The military regime told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Friday that all aid workers will be let into the country as long as it is clear what they are doing and how long they will remain.
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The Irrawaddy delta, Myanmar's key rice-producing region, was decimated by Cyclone Nargis, but the junta has kept it virtually off-limits to foreign-aid workers.

An estimated 2.5 million people remain in severe need, threatened by disease, hunger and exposure because of the loss of their homes.

The U.N. says only about 25 percent of survivors have received any kind of aid.

Official estimates put the death toll at about 78,000, with an additional 56,000 missing. Myanmar has estimated the economic damage at about $11 billion from the May 2-3 storm.

Under intense international pressure and with an aid-donors meeting scheduled for Sunday, Senior Gen. Than Shwe said he would allow in aid workers "regardless of nationality," Ban said.

The Myanmar leader "agreed that international aid could be delivered to Myanmar via civilian ships and small boats," Ban added.

The U.S., Britain and France all have warships off Myanmar ready to help.

But Myanmar's junta is nervous about any landings because it fears invasion or political interference.

It moved its capital from Yangon, the largest city, to this town in the north in 2005 in part because of such fears.

The junta is also wary of the political and psychological consequences of its people witnessing an efficient military-run aid operation by Western nations, which they have long accused of trying to undermine the country and turn it into a neo-colony.

Patience with the junta has been wearing thin.

At the United Nations in New York, France said Thursday that it would push for a U.N. resolution authorizing the delivery of aid to survivors "by all means necessary" if pressure from Ban and Myanmar's neighbors does not open the aid pipeline quickly.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Friday that 50 U.S. C-130 transport plane flights have been permitted into Yangon, carrying more than 480 tons of relief supplies. But they have not been allowed to fly directly to the delta.

He said the ships will remain for days or weeks but will not linger for months waiting for permission to bring in aid.

"If the position of the Burmese government doesn't change, we will have to make a decision to reallocate those Navy assets," Whitman said.

Ban said details on moving aid workers still need to be worked out but stressed he believed he had achieved a breakthrough.