Myanmar's Junta Earns 10%
10% is the Burmese junta's disaster score, the amount of cyclone survivors NGOs have assisted, according to Save the Children's Joe Lowry. Alright, maybe 25%, if UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes!
In what appeared to be a bid to get the regime to stop hindering the relief effort, the UN launched a $187m programme of emergency food and relief for Burma.
The appeal, launched in New York by Mr Holmes, said contributions by member states would be used to fund 10 UN agencies and nine charities working to relieve the suffering of the Burmese.
However, the amount of aid that has got into the country thus far has been severely limited. The UN believes that, as of last Wednesday, just 276,000 of the 1.5m cyclone survivors had received any relief supplies from UN agencies or nongovernmental organisations.
Some western governments are considering whether they can carry out humanitarian operations in the country without the consent of the Burmese regime.
«There is no substitute for the regime's consent for letting in aid,» said one British official. «But if that consent is withheld, the alternative is that tens of thousands of people are left to die.»
I would say, it's time for the USS Essex Strike Group, currently deployed for Operation Cobra Gold near Thailand, to redeploy.
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