Aid offers mount for Myanmar after deadly cyclone

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - Countries around the globe have promised help for Myanmar after a cyclone left at least 13,000 dead or missing, but how quickly aid could move into the country, tightly controlled by a military junta, was unclear on Tuesday.

The cyclone ripped through the Irrawaddy delta on Saturday, and, after an initial count of a few hundred dead, Myanmar announced much bigger figures late on Monday.

"The basic message was that they believe the provisional death toll was about 10,000 with 3,000 missing," a Yangon-based diplomat told Reuters in Bangkok, summarizing a briefing from Foreign Minister Nyan Win. "It's a very serious toll."

The last major storm to ravage Asia was Cyclone Sidr which killed 3,300 people in Bangladesh last November.

The scale of the disaster drew a rare acceptance of outside help from the diplomatically isolated generals, who spurned such approaches in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The U.S. Embassy in Myanmar authorized the release of $250,000 in immediate emergency aid, and U.S. first lady Laura Bush promised more would be forthcoming.

However, she urged Myanmar's military rulers to first accept a U.S. disaster response team that so far has been kept out, saying it would clear the way for broader aid.

U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said a team was "standing by and ready to go into Burma", now known as Myanmar.

The secretive military, which has ruled for 46 years, has moved even further into the shadows in the last six months due to the widespread outrage at its bloody crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in September.

The official toll on state media stands at 3,394 dead and 2,879 missing, although those figures only cover two of the five declared disaster zones, where U.N. officials say hundreds of thousands are without shelter or drinking water.

LACK OF WARNING

First Lady Bush, who rarely speaks on foreign policy but has previously been vocal on Myanmar, also criticized Yangon for failing to give its citizens adequate warning about the storm.

"Although they were aware of the threat, Burma's state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm's path," she said.

The casualty count has been rising quickly as authorities reach hard-hit islands and villages in the Irrawaddy delta, the former "rice bowl of Asia" which bore the brunt of Cyclone Nargis's 190 km (120 miles) per hour winds.

After getting a "careful green light" from the government, the United Nations said it was pulling out all the stops to send in emergency aid such as food, clean water, blankets and plastic sheeting.