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YANGON: The Myanmar cyclone has killed more than 22,000 people, the
secretive nation said Tuesday, amid fears thousands of others are
also dead in one of Asia’s worst natural disasters.
With the military junta under fire over its
handling of the tragedy, foreign aid teams described scenes of
horror—rice fields littered with corpses, and desperate survivors
without food or shelter four days after the storm struck.
Tropical cyclone “Nargis” wiped away entire
villages in the Irrawaddy river delta when it struck overnight
Friday, wreaking havoc on a country that is already one of the
poorest on the planet.
Christian relief organization World Vision, one
of the few international agencies allowed to work inside Myanmar,
said its teams had flown over the most affected regions and
witnessed devastation on the ground below.
“They saw the dead bodies from the
helicopters,” Kyi Minn, an adviser to World Vision’s office in
Myanmar’s main city of Yangon, told Agence France-Presse in
Thailand by telephone.
“The impact of the disaster could be worse
than the [2004] tsunami because it is compounded by the limited
availability of resources on top of the transport constraints,” he
said.
Aid groups were rushing to bring food, clean
water, clothing and shelter into the country, whose military rulers
have long spurned most of the outside world and prevented many aid
groups from operating in the isolated nation.
But Foreign Minister Nyan Win acknowledged on
Monday night that his country, formerly known as Burma and ruled by
the military for the last 46 years, needed urgent help from abroad.
“We will welcome help,” he said. “Our
people are in difficulty.”
The death toll has been rising by multiples of
10 or even 30 at a time, as the true scope of the destruction from
Nargis—which barreled into Myanmar with winds at 190 kilometers
(120 miles) an hour, becomes known.
The New Light of Myanmar newspaper, which like
all media here is strictly controlled by the junta, said that in the
latest count more than 22,000 people had been killed, 10,000 in the
town of Bogalay alone.
In Yangon, formerly the capital before the
generals installed their seat of power in a remote enclave, most
phone and electricity services were still out.
The United Nations said it believed hundreds of
thousands of people had been left homeless in the Yangon region
alone, and there were fears of disease spreading in the absence of
proper shelter and drinking water.
Footage on state television showed boats washed
away and houses caved in, massive trees uprooted and tossed into the
streets like toys, and massive destruction across an area that is
the country’s primary rice-growing region.
In the meantime, governments across Asia and
around the world were offering help to Myanmar, including critics
such as Australia and even the United States, which has repeatedly
imposed tough sanctions on the junta.
“They are accepting and even requesting
international assistance,” said Richard Horsey, a spokesman for
the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in
Bangkok.
The UN’s food agency said that the destruction
also threatened rice exports which it was hoped would ease shortages
in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh amid soaring global food prices.
-- AFP
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