ASEAN to coordinate Myanmar aid effort

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - Southeast Asian nations will take the lead in an international aid effort for cyclone-hit Myanmar, but the military junta will not give Western relief workers unfettered access to disaster areas, Singapore said on Monday.

"We will establish a mechanism so that aid from all over the world can flow into Myanmar," Foreign Minister George Yeo said.

He was speaking after hosting a regional meeting to prod the generals to accept large-scale foreign aid and expertise for up to 2.4 million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis.

The details were to be worked out with the United Nations, which announced later on Monday that a donor conference would be held in the cyclone-hit former capital, Yangon, on May 25.

Myanmar agreed to accept nearly 300 medical personnel from its neighbors in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the foreign ministers said in a statement.

A few have already sent teams two weeks after the disaster which left 134,000 dead or missing. But aid workers from outside ASEAN will only be granted visas on a case-by-case basis.

"We have to look at specific needs -- there will not be uncontrolled access," Yeo said after the meeting which named ASEAN chief Surin Pitsuwan to work with the United Nations on aid delivery.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will visit Myanmar on Wednesday, when he plans to visit the country's Irrawaddy delta area which was hit hardest by Nargis, his spokeswoman Michele Montas told reporters.

"His objective is to reinforce the ongoing aid operation, see how the international relief and rehabilitation effort can be scaled up and work with Myanmar authorities to significantly increase the amount of aid flowing through Yangon to the areas most affected by the disaster," Montas said.

"He is also (hoping) to more effectively coordinate and systematize the international community's emergency relief and longer term rehabilitation and reconstruction assistance," Montas said.

Humanitarian agencies say the death toll from Nargis, one of the most devastating cyclones to hit Asia, could soar without a massive increase of emergency food, water, shelter and medicine to the delta, the country's rice bowl.

TRICKLE OF AID

While aid has been trickling into the delta, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) says it has managed to get rice and beans to just 250,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need.

Britain's Asia minister Mark Malloch-Brown said in London on Monday after returning from Myanmar that the authorities and international humanitarian organizations had widely differing views as to immediate needs.

"Getting a needs assessment done in time for the donors' meeting is critical to get everyone on the same page," he told reporters in London. "Unless you have an agreed assessment ... you just get nowhere with the donors' meeting."