Aid workers ready for action after Myanmar promise

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - Foreign aid workers headed for the cyclone-ravaged Irrawaddy delta on Monday to see whether army-ruled Myanmar will honor a promise made by its top general to give them freedom of movement.

"We're going to head out today and test the boundaries," one official from a major Western relief agency told Reuters in Yangon shortly before his departure for a region that has been off-limits to nearly all foreigners since the May 2 cyclone.

Thousands of beggars were lined up along the roads of the delta, where the storm left 134,000 people dead or missing and another 2.4 million clinging to survival.

Droves of children shouted "Just throw something" at passing vehicles. But police told drivers and volunteer donors not to give them anything as they were "just begging".

"Go directly to where you want to go. Don't throw anything from the car. Know your own people," they shouted at the cars at one checkpoint on the way to the devastated town of Bogalay.

Three weeks after the disaster, there are still many villages that have received no outside help and waterways of the former Burma's "rice bowl" remain littered with animal carcasses and corpses, either grotesquely bloated or rotting to the bone.

The stench of death is widespread, as are the swarms of flies.

Donors pledged nearly $50 million in aid at a landmark conference on Sunday but Western countries said much of the cash would be contingent on access to the delta.

Many of the donations are destined for the U.N.'s $201 million emergency appeal, which was nearly a third full before the meeting. It is meant to provide help for three months only.

MYANMAR CHARTER SAILS THROUGH

Washington told the Yangon conference it was ready to raise its offer of $20.5 million in aid if the junta opened up, but added it was "dismayed" the generals went ahead with a constitutional referendum in the middle of the disaster.

The result -- 92.5 percent in favor on a turnout of 98.1 percent in a poll held with no neutral monitoring -- is unlikely to enhance the credibility of the generals' seven-step "roadmap to democracy", that is meant to culminate in elections in 2010.

The re-imposition, expected in the next couple of days, of a rolling, year-long house arrest order for opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is only likely to rile the junta's opponents further.

Besides denying and delaying visas to aid officials, army and police checkpoints on roads out of Yangon have prevented all but a handful leaving the former capital.

However, junta supremo Than Shwe promised visiting U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week that all aid officials and disaster assessment teams would be allowed in "regardless of nationalities".