Burma agony

Rangoon - Official state media said on Tuesday the death toll from Saturday's Cyclone Nargis now has passed 22,000 - with another 41,000 missing.

The BBC, quoting state media reports, said international aid agencies are pushing to launch a massive operation in the worst-affected areas of the country.

Hundreds of thousands of people are said to be without clean water and shelter, with some areas still cut off.

State media reported on Tuesday that 22,464 people had now been confirmed as dead.

More deaths were caused by the tidal wave and surge than the cyclone itself, Minister for Relief and Resettlement Maung Maung Swe told reporters in Rangoon.

"The wave was up to 12 feet (3.5m) high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages," he said. "They did not have anywhere to flee."

Some 95 per cent of the homes in the city of Bogalay in the Irrawaddy river delta were destroyed, he added.

An earlier government estimate of the number of victims - as of late Monday - was 14,911 and 2,375 missing in Irrawaddy region and 504 in Rangoon. The death toll had been expected to rise as reports from remote districts reach Rangoon.

Hundreds of thousands have been left homeless and without basic utilities by the cyclone, which blew off the Bay of Bengal late Friday, packing winds of up to 200 kilometres per hour, wrecking much of the country's already fragile infrastructure and threatening its precarious food supply.

Rangoon, Burma's former capital, was hit hard by the storm, which uprooted trees, toppled electricity and telephone poles, and burst water pipes, leaving the city of several million without basic utilities.

Information Minister Kyaw Hsan reiterated the government's appeal for foreign aid.

"We need aid from both local and foreign sources," Kyaw Hsan said. "It is welcome."

The military junta has misled Burma to be one of the world's least developed countries, and has earned a reputation for poor macro-economic management, let alone disaster-management.

Public funds to handle the crisis are severely limited, sources said.

Cyclone Nargis has shattered the isolated country at a sensitive time politically as the ruling military junta is preparing to hold a national referendum Saturday to win the approval of a constitution that would essentially cement the military's dominance in future elected governments.

Critics of the referendum and the military-drafted constitution have called on the government to postpone the vote to better cope with the humanitarian challenge that it faces in the coming weeks.

While insisting it would go ahead with the referendum, the government announced on Tuesday that it would allow the voting to be postponed until May 24 in 47 of the hardest-hit township in Irrawaddy and Rangoon. (BangkokPost.com, dpa)
(Source- http://www.bangkokpost.com/topstories/topstories.php?id=127511)