UN helicopters take aid to remote cyclone villages

UN helicopters fanned out across Burma’s devastated Irrawaddy Delta for the first time today, ferrying critical supplies to villages which have been struggling to survive since the May 2-3 cyclone, an official said.

Four helicopters which arrived over the weekend got to work today, shuttling food and other emergency supplies to villages around the hardest-hit towns of Bogale and Labutta, said UN World Food Programme spokesman Paul Risley.

Until now, the UN had one helicopter operating in Burma which flew a total of six trips last week, Mr Risley said. Supplies were mainly being delivered by boats that took several hours to navigate short distances in the Delta’s network of waterways.

“Today was the first day where you really saw a multiplier effect,” Mr Risley said, adding that the helicopters reached four remote villages this morning. “These are areas that clearly have not received regular supplies of food or other relief assistance.”

Helicopters are critical to reaching isolated areas. They enable aid workers to directly deliver heavy equipment like water purification systems which can supply clean water to entire villages that have been cut off from basic necessities for more than five weeks since the cyclone hit, he said.

Four more helicopters chartered by WFP, which are currently in neighbouring Bangkok, Thailand, are expected to fly to Burma this week. It will bring the UN agency’s total number of helicopters in the country to 10, he said.

The relief effort, however, still faces a myriad of problems, including a severe shortage of housing materials that could leave hundreds of thousands of survivors exposed to heavy rains as the monsoon season begins, the WFP and other aid agencies said.

“There’s clearly a need for tarps and other roofing material, for anything that can help them rebuild their houses,” Mr Risley said, noting that monsoon rains have left many Delta villages knee-deep in mud.

The UN estimates that a total of 2.4 million people were affected by Cyclone Nargis and warns that more than 1 million of those still need help, mostly in the hard-to-reach Irrawaddy Delta. The cyclone killed more than 78,000 people in the impoverished country.

On Saturday, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warned there was an “urgent need” for tarpaulins to provide homeless survivors with temporary shelter. Otherwise, they warned, the threats of hunger and disease could intensify.

UN officials and aid groups have criticised Burma’s military regime for restricting access to the delta, saying it has prevented enough food, water and shelter from reaching desperate survivors.

Foreign relief workers still face hindrances in reaching cyclone victims, especially outside of Rangoon, aid groups said.

Burma’s ruling military junta has been criticised abroad for allegedly evicting cyclone survivors from refugee camps, supposedly without adequate provisions to survive elsewhere. The government has been sensitive to such criticism, issuing angry denials in state-run media that describe the accusations as lies meant to undermine the country’s stability.

Today, all three state-run newspapers carried bold-faced slogans which urged the people of Burma to rally behind the government’s side of the story and not trust what foreign news agencies are reporting.

Anti-government elements are feeding “the foreign news agencies stories about relief and rehabilitation that they have made up and shot on video”, all three newspapers reported.

“Storm victims are hereby warned to remain vigilant with nationalistic spirit,” the newspapers said.